The rest of the blog
Gary Smith says Britain’s net zero policy has exported jobs and imported virtue. But what he’s really defending isn’t working-class power, this is fossil capital in a hard hat. Decarbonisation without class politics is a gift to Farage. But the answer isn’t more oil. It’s public ownership, planning, and a transition built by workers, not against them.
Live Aid was forty years ago. Today, we are haunted once again by the images of starving children (and now, starving adults) in Gaza. But this time, it doesn’t seem to register. No concerts. No campaigns. No national reckoning. Why? Because the system can only process suffering when it’s stripped of politics. Ethiopia’s famine was framed as fate. Gaza’s is a siege, and Britain is complicit. That’s the difference.
Alexander Dugin has declared the Istanbul peace talks “meaningless theatre” and announced the arrival of “total war.” He wants Russia (not just its army, but its soul) put on a permanent war footing.
Frank Furedi claims the public has been silenced, while shouting from the pages of the Daily Mail. What he’s really mourning is the loss of uncontested dominance: the fantasy of a Britain where dissent means agreeing with him. This isn’t analysis, it’s a staged panic, designed to justify repression and launder far-right talking points as common sense. Britain isn’t a tinderbox. But pieces like this are trying hard to make it one.
Kemi Badenoch wants to be Britain’s Javier Milei. Let that sink in.
The protests outside migrant hotels aren’t spontaneous. They are engineered. Stoked by far-right groups, amplified by the right-wing press, and legitimised by political cowardice, what we’re witnessing is a strategic campaign to turn fear into power. When the police protect anti-racists, it’s called provocation. When the far right throws bottles, it’s “community concern.” The hotels are just the excuse. The real target is the idea that Britain could ever belong to all of us.
They tell us the crisis is caused by desperate people in dinghies, not decades of housing policy that turned homes into investment vehicles. But the truth is, Britain is not short of houses, its just full of landlords, speculators, and empty properties waiting to make someone rich.
While far right mobs are framed as “concerned locals”, anti-fascists are treated as the threat. The police escort becomes the scandal, not the fact that far-right demonstrators are being allowed to dominate England’s streets with near impunity. When the media sides with the mob, resistance is rebranded as provocation.
Starmer’s weapons pipeline is less about deterring war and more about embedding militarism into the heart of Britain’s economic model.
With Elbridge Colby whispering war into Pete Hegseth’s ear, the Trump administration has replaced strategic ambiguity with a doctrine of confrontation.
Britain is rearming, not to defend its people, but to discipline them.
For years, we were told there was no money, no money for schools, no money for hospitals, no money for the poor, but as Europe rushes to rearm, the old fiscal rules have been quietly torn up.
Trumpism and Putinism are reshaping the global order, through a new brand of reactionary nationalism. As the world looks more unstable, the left cannot afford to rely on old slogans or abstract theory, because when bombs fall and occupations expand, resistance is not a thought experiment.
In a world where Trump’s transactional imperialism jeopardises peace, NATO’s legitimacy is in crisis, and Britain’s dominant class chooses arms over welfare, can workers forge a genuine alternative? This article explores why confronting militarism demands international solidarity and socialist transformation.