A Nation of Strawmen: On Lee Anderson, the Politics of Cruelty, and the Theatre of Border Panic
Lee Anderson doesn’t want a solution—he wants a stage, and the small boats crisis is just the latest prop in Britain’s long-running theatre of cruelty
The rest of the blog
Lee Anderson doesn’t want a solution—he wants a stage, and the small boats crisis is just the latest prop in Britain’s long-running theatre of cruelty
Starmer’s weapons pipeline is less about deterring war and more about embedding militarism into the heart of Britain’s economic model.
Ryan’s Second Strike is a taut, post-Brexit techno-thriller in which privatised warfare meets Cold War ghosts, and the real enemy is the story you’re told to believe.
Geoff Dyer’s Homework shows childhood not as innocence, but as class training—plastic toys, unwritten rules, and a welfare state already fraying at the edges.
Britain doesn’t need a softer Starmer or a greener liberalism—it needs a new party of revolutionary ecosocialism, built by those brave enough to walk out and fight for class power, not manage its decline.
They say prisons are overcrowded, as if the cages are too small. As if the problem is spatial. As if all we need is a few more acres of razor wire and reinforced concrete and the crisis will vanish. But prisons aren’t full because we lack space. They’re full because we lack imagination.
Ryan’s Second Strike is a taut, post-Brexit techno-thriller in which privatised warfare meets Cold War ghosts, and the real enemy is the story you’re told to believe.
This book is about the fens. I live on the edge of the fens, a flat place. When the wind blows it stops for no one. But the fens are not about wind. They are about earth and water. Black earth.
What if the greatest threat to your freedom wasn’t a government decree, a criminal act, or even a political ideology, but an algorithm? The Dream Hotel, Laila Lalami’s chilling new novel, imagines a world in which surveillance capitalism governs not only what we do, but who we are allowed to be.