anti capitalist musings

The rest of the blog

Britain

The Provincial Mussolinis

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.

Robert Jenrick stands on a ladder attached to a lamppost, giving a thumbs-up while raising a Union Jack flag. The background shows a cloudy sky, rooftops, road signs, and a quiet road stretching into the distance.
Conservative Government

Provincial Mussolini on a Ladder

Robert Jenrick’s Union Jack pantomime isn’t patriotism; it’s a confession of weakness. A dying political class turns to flags and ladders because it has nothing left to offer but theatre.

The International Criminal Court in The Hague, with the blue ICC sign in front of a modern glass building complex.
International Criminal Court

The Court in the Dock: Washington and Tel Aviv vs International Law

By sanctioning International Criminal Court judges and prosecutors, Trump’s America has openly declared that empire stands above the law. Europe and Britain now face a stark choice: defend the court’s independence, or accept a world where justice stops at Washington’s door.

Labour Councils

Planning Permission for Exclusion

The High Court’s ruling in Epping shows how Britain has turned planning law into a border regime, feeding jealous politics of scarcity and erasing the very category of the refugee. Now with Labour councils as willing collaborators.

A satirical illustration of a grand Gothic-style university building with a large sign out front that reads: “CLOSED TO THE LIKES OF YOU,” highlighting the exclusion of ordinary people from higher education.

Universities Were Never Meant for You

Every August, the right reheats its old contempt for higher education. Their complaint is not about debt or “Mickey Mouse” degrees, it is about closing the gates of knowledge, keeping universities for the dominant class and consigning everyone else to warehouses and call centres.

Stencil-style protest image in red and black showing a close-up of a man’s face with eyes closed. A cloth gag covers his mouth, printed with the words “CRITICISM OF ISRAEL IS NOT ALLOWED” in bold, black, uppercase letters.

The New Heresy: When Criticising Israel Becomes a Thought Crime

What’s being rolled out at Northwestern and other campuses is not a programme to protect Jewish students from abuse. It’s a mechanism to discipline campus speech, to teach students that anti-Zionism is taboo and that political critique must defer to geopolitical orthodoxy. It doesn’t mention the Nakba. It doesn’t mention the occupation. It doesn’t mention that many Jews oppose Zionism. These trainings don’t fight antisemitism, they flatten it into a tool of state ideology.

The cover of this weeks New Statesman

The New Statesman: A Weekly Read Worth the Wait

A sit-down with this week’s New Statesman magazine reveals John Gray’s analysis on technocratic language, Adrian Pabst’s commentary on higher education, Andrew Marr and Wolfgang Münchau’s insights on bourgeois politics, and a warning on trans hate from a recent podcast on the CPAC conference in the US.