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.
Nigel Farage’s TikTok wunderkind wants us to imagine a Britain that never fought Hitler, kept its colonies, and models itself on Bukele’s prison state. This is not contrarianism; it is fascist nostalgia dressed up as common sense.
The right’s talk of a “coming civil war” is not a forecast as such, but a repeated political script. From the Ulster gun-runners of 1914 to Powell’s “rivers of blood” and today’s viral predictions of ungovernable cities, the plot is always the same: declare an existential threat, build the apparatus to counter it, and keep the threat just far enough away that the apparatus becomes permanent. The danger is not that Britain will descend into the racial-ethnic conflict of their imagination, but that we will sleepwalk into the authoritarian Britain they need to “prevent” it.
A liberal order built on extraction and exclusion now mourns its own unravelling—calling collapse what was always contradiction.
The Second World War, as Scorched Earth recounts it, was colonial in its origins, genocidal in its prosecution, and imperial in its aftermath.
Dan Edelstein’s The Revolution to Come: A History of an Idea from Thucydides to Lenin and Enzo Traverso’s Revolution: An Intellectual History
In The Revolutionary Self, Lynn Hunt traces the emergence of the modern individual through civility, sentiment and social change, but beneath the porcelain surface lies the machinery of capital, empire and class discipline.
The long 20th century has ended, not with a transition to something new, but with the collapse of what once was, neoliberalism has failed, but nothing has yet replaced it, and in the absence of a left alternative, the far right alone moves to seize the ruins.
Andrew Hindmoor’s Haywire offers a quietly devastating account of Britain’s long crisis, from Blair’s stage-managed optimism to Truss’s market-induced implosion, tracing how New Labour’s betrayals laid the foundations for a state that can no longer govern itself.
I knew the late Neil Faulkner, and I have always meant to review his last book; he was a storyteller, a fighter, and one of the great Marxist historians, someone who could hold a room and remind you that history is not past but struggle.
David Peace’s Munichs is not just a novel about the Munich air disaster, it is a novel about how tragedy lingers, how history is shaped in grief and uncertainty, and how disaster, in the absence of instant news, once unfolded in echoes and silence.