Football
When Is a Contract Not a Contract?
When star forwards can down tools before the season starts and still win the move, a “contract” is just a polite fiction. Isak and Igamane are the canaries in the coal mine.
The rest of the blog
When star forwards can down tools before the season starts and still win the move, a “contract” is just a polite fiction. Isak and Igamane are the canaries in the coal mine.
Planes will never take off, but every promise of mass deportation erodes rights, normalises cruelty, and casts the mob as the voice of the nation.
The English “revolution” under the St George’s Cross is no revolution at all, but a counter-revolution, a politics of scapegoating that shields the dominant class from blame.
Scapegoating migrants is just the start. When politics legitimises fear and blame, the mob never stops, and neither does the cycle of persecution.
Keir Starmer’s law-and-order theatrics have handed the far right its new saint: a self-styled free speech Joan of Arc—except this saint didn’t want to be burned, she wanted others to be.
Paul Bristow cites the Epping Forest ruling to demand hotel closures for asylum seekers, but offers no plan for what follows. The Conservatives built the hotel system; Labour inherits it; local politicians weaponise planning law while migrants disappear from view.
The arrest of a part-time cleaner for sharing Facebook posts backing Palestine Action shows how Britain’s response to Gaza has drifted from foreign policy into domestic repression.
Farage brings the noise, Starmer brings the law. The country falls apart to the sound of flags snapping and doors slamming while capital quietly clears the till.
Dan Hodges’s Mail column denouncing Palestine Action as “terrorists” is not journalism but ideological policing, an attempt to criminalise dissent while excusing the real violence: Britain’s complicity in Gaza’s destruction.
The Telegraph calls it “the full story” but it’s really the Home Office’s bedtime story – a script of shadowy threats, secret evidence we can’t see, and the quiet redefinition of protest as terrorism. Today it’s Palestine Action. Tomorrow it could be any movement that crosses a minister’s red lines.
The crimes of Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki were supposed to teach the world “never again.” Huckabee’s defence of Gaza’s destruction turns that into “do it again” — not moral clarity, but moral collapse.
Israel killed Anas al-Sharif because it feared what he could still show the world.
Gilbert Achcar’s The Gaza Catastrophe is not a plea for sympathy. It is a political weapon. Written in the midst of genocide, it strips away the euphemisms, the diplomatic theatre, and the moral fog. This war, he argues, is a settler-colonial project. Accelerated to its most brutal form, with the full backing of the Western powers who claim to uphold human rights. Achcar names the system, maps its historical scaffolding, and indicts not only Israel but the global order that enables it. This is not a book of mourning. It is a call to act.
“Palestine is not a digression from the climate movement. It is its centre.” That’s the force of Andreas Malm’s pamphlet, The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth. It doesn’t ask for reflection. It demands action. This isn’t a balanced account of Gaza or a theory of climate collapse. Instead it’s a weaponised intervention against the politics of impunity. What Malm offers is a raw and necessary link: between the bombs that fall on Jabaliya and the storms that drown Derna, between settler colonialism and fossil capital, between the rubble of Akka in 1840 and the rubble of Gaza in 2024. The pamphlet is furious, and entirely justified. It should be read, and used.
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.
Moral capital was never just sympathy, it was a strategy. It allowed Israel to present itself as victim and victor, past sufferer and present enforcer. But capital is not infinite. What was once a shield has become a smokescreen. And in Gaza, that smokescreen has lifted.
The world is watching a nuclear-backed state starve and bomb a captive population, and still we are told this is security. But what happens when the story no longer convinces? What remains when the history runs out? Only the force. Only the ruin. Only the lie that it was ever anything else.
The bombs may fall from jets, but the targeting, the supply chains, the surveillance, all of it is corporate. Gaza isn’t just a warzone. It’s a testing ground. A lab. A marketplace. The killing is done with precision. The profits are logged in real time.
The phrase “rules-based international order” has become a punchline. When Russia bombs a maternity hospital, it’s a war crime. When Israel flattens a refugee camp, it’s self-defence. The ICC pursues African warlords and Balkan generals with zeal—but stalls or retreats when the accused are allies of Washington or clients of London. The problem isn’t that international law exists. It’s that it doesn’t apply to everyone. War crimes are prosecuted not on the basis of what’s done, but who does it, and who they do it for.