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.
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.
Behind the talk of “humanitarian cities” and postwar development lies a brutal truth: this is a plan to herd Palestinians into ghettos, fence them in, and call it aid. When Blair’s thinktank is on calls about a “Trump Riviera” in Gaza, you know the project isn’t reconstruction—it’s removal.
What separates Hedges’s account from the usual war reporting is his refusal to speak in the language of balance. There are no “both sides” here. Gaza is not a tragedy. It is a crime. And history, in his telling, is not analogy but repetition. The Nakba never ended. The airstrikes are new; the logic is old. “We progress backwards,” someone has scrawled on a UN school wall. That line could be the book’s thesis.
You don’t have to like the tactics. But if protest that disrupts power is treated as terrorism, then the state has rewritten the definition to suit itself.
Pankaj Mishra’s The World After Gaza is a searing indictment of Western complicity in Israeli aggression, exposing the ideological, economic, and political forces that have enabled the destruction of Palestine.
Douglas Murray’s On Democracies and Death Cults isn’t journalism, it’s propaganda, where settler colonialism is recast as civilisation and Palestinian resistance is pathologised as a death cult. He doesn’t analyse October 7; he sanctifies it.
Twenty-two years ago, millions marched against the invasion of Iraq. I was one of them. We were right; the war was wrong. And yet it happened anyway. That was the moment I realised: marching doesn’t cut through when empire’s at stake.
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?
Keir Starmer’s Labour seems intent on quietly abandoning principle, both at home and abroad, for short-sighted political expediency.
Donald Trump’s latest scheme—expelling Gaza’s population to neighbouring countries and transforming the strip into a capitalist playground, exposes the brutal logic of imperialism. With threats to withhold aid from Egypt and Jordan unless they absorb millions of displaced Palestinians, this plan is not just a violation of international law but a blueprint for ethnic cleansing.