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Gary Smith says Britain’s net zero policy has exported jobs and imported virtue. But what he’s really defending isn’t working-class power, this is fossil capital in a hard hat. Decarbonisation without class politics is a gift to Farage. But the answer isn’t more oil. It’s public ownership, planning, and a transition built by workers, not against them.
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.
Alexander Dugin has declared the Istanbul peace talks “meaningless theatre” and announced the arrival of “total war.” He wants Russia (not just its army, but its soul) put on a permanent war footing.
Frank Furedi claims the public has been silenced, while shouting from the pages of the Daily Mail. What he’s really mourning is the loss of uncontested dominance: the fantasy of a Britain where dissent means agreeing with him. This isn’t analysis, it’s a staged panic, designed to justify repression and launder far-right talking points as common sense. Britain isn’t a tinderbox. But pieces like this are trying hard to make it one.
Kemi Badenoch wants to be Britain’s Javier Milei. Let that sink in.
The protests outside migrant hotels aren’t spontaneous. They are engineered. Stoked by far-right groups, amplified by the right-wing press, and legitimised by political cowardice, what we’re witnessing is a strategic campaign to turn fear into power. When the police protect anti-racists, it’s called provocation. When the far right throws bottles, it’s “community concern.” The hotels are just the excuse. The real target is the idea that Britain could ever belong to all of us.
They tell us the crisis is caused by desperate people in dinghies, not decades of housing policy that turned homes into investment vehicles. But the truth is, Britain is not short of houses, its just full of landlords, speculators, and empty properties waiting to make someone rich.
While far right mobs are framed as “concerned locals”, anti-fascists are treated as the threat. The police escort becomes the scandal, not the fact that far-right demonstrators are being allowed to dominate England’s streets with near impunity. When the media sides with the mob, resistance is rebranded as provocation.
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.
Peterborough lies on the edge of the Fens, a city without hills, shaped by wind that moves unhindered across the flatlands. It is a place that resists definition, constantly reshaped, rebuilt, and erased, where history lingers in fragments and memory holds more permanence than the streets themselves.
In this post, I look at Althusser’s theory of history, why it’s still important and how it can help us understand the complicated social structures of today. By looking at modern examples like the rise of tech giants, the debate over climate change, and the rise of populism, we can see how Althusser’s ideas still give us important insights into how economic, political, and ideological forces work together to shape our world.