
Rachel Reeves and the 2p Trap
The chancellor’s proposed income tax shuffle is clever accountancy but toxic politics — a pledge-break disguised as fiscal discipline, and proof that Labour has trapped itself in rules it cannot escape.
The rest of the blog
The chancellor’s proposed income tax shuffle is clever accountancy but toxic politics — a pledge-break disguised as fiscal discipline, and proof that Labour has trapped itself in rules it cannot escape.
More than 200,000 young men aren’t “signed off for life”—they are the reserve army of labour, conscripted into the Telegraph’s morality tale to prepare the ground for austerity.
David Frost calls it a new “Red Terror.” The truth is plainer: it’s the Right’s wars, coups and crackdowns that have spilt the deepest blood in politics.
Trump’s latest “kinetic strike” killed three unknown Venezuelans he labelled “narco-terrorists.” The phrase is not law but incantation, a word that strips away humanity and legitimises killing. From Vietnam body counts to Obama’s “signature strikes,” America has always named its enemies into existence, and into death.
To call Robinson’s rally “populist” or “right-wing” is to miss the point. Fascism doesn’t require every marcher to be a coherent ideologue; it requires a mass, a scapegoat, and leaders prepared to turn grievance into violence. That is what we saw in London.
The events of Saturday (13/09) prove that Britain can go fascist. Musk calls for violence, the Telegraph and Times launder his words, and Starmer clings to the flag. We must name the danger or watch it grow.
Camilla Tominey’s sainthood act for Charlie Kirk trades politics for piety. The Right already owns the machinery (press, finance, courts, police) and Kirk was part of the drive shaft. A death certificate doesn’t wash clean a career built on making violence respectable.
The ONS reports zero growth in July. The papers call it “grim news” for Rachel Reeves. In reality, it is the latest entry in a long obituary for British capitalism — a system now sustained only by euphemism, stagnation, and decline.
Trump doesn’t defeat his opponents; he casts them, turning liberal conscience into spectacle, and transforming critique into the very script that keeps him centre stage.
Alienation is the defining condition of modern politics. The gap between power and the people has never felt wider; work is increasingly precarious and meaningless; and the sense of community that once bound societies together has frayed. In this vacuum, neo-fascism has flourished, not by resolving alienation, but by weaponising it. Trumpism, Reform UK, and their European counterparts do not seek to challenge the economic structures that produce this disaffection; they thrive on it, repackaging frustration as grievance and grievance as political identity.
Trump’s second presidency isn’t just an assault on democracy; it’s the moment the dominant class decided elections were no longer necessary.
If Joe Biden was condemned as “Genocide Joe” for arming Israel during its war on Gaza, what do we call the man who not only restocked its weapons but signed off on the latest assault?
The presidency was already a sideshow in Trump’s first term, but his second has stripped it of any remaining dignity, turning the White House into just another stage for his brand of gaudy, transactional spectacle.
A masterful dissection of power, corruption, and the making of modern America, The Apprentice deserved to sweep the Oscars, but the Academy, as always, chose safety over truth.
The consolidation of reactionary power in the United States is not accidental or chaotic but the result of a long-term, well-funded strategy to entrench minority rule, an argument laid bare in Owned by Eoin Higgins and Money, Lies, and God Behind the Movement to Destroy American Democracy by Katherine Stewart.
Few books have shaped the conspiratorial mind like Behold a Pale Horse, and in Pale Horse Rider: William Cooper, the Rise of Conspiracy, and the Fall of Trust in America, Mark Jacobson unpacks the strange, sprawling legacy of its author, William Cooper, a man who saw the deep state before it had a name, predicted 9/11, and died in a shootout with police. But was he a prophet, a fraud, or just another victim of his own paranoia?
Reform UK has never run so much as a parish council, yet it styles itself as a government-in-waiting. Now, amid internal purges and power struggles, the contradictions of Faragism are laid bare.
Donald Trump’s second presidency is turning the U.S. government into the world’s biggest bagholder, legitimising a crypto Ponzi scheme in exchange for the cash that put him back in the White House.