Black Earth, Still Water
This book is about the fens. I live on the edge of the fens, a flat place. When the wind blows it stops for no one. But the fens are not about wind. They are about earth and water. Black earth.
The rest of the blog
This book is about the fens. I live on the edge of the fens, a flat place. When the wind blows it stops for no one. But the fens are not about wind. They are about earth and water. Black earth.
Whipple’s Uncharted is less a chronicle of Trump’s comeback than an unflinching autopsy of a decaying liberal order that mistook gerontocracy for stability and denial for strategy
On the Supreme Court ruling in For Women Scotland v. Scottish Ministers
A ruling on the definition of “woman” risks codifying exclusion into law, leaving trans women even more vulnerable in the name of protection.
The Trump–Starmer trade deal and the culture war as foreign policy
Farage’s tanks aren’t new, they’re the tanks of the 1970s, steered by mad generals and aimed squarely at working-class power.
Alienation is the defining condition of modern politics. The gap between power and the people has never felt wider; work is increasingly precarious and meaningless; and the sense of community that once bound societies together has frayed. In this vacuum, neo-fascism has flourished, not by resolving alienation, but by weaponising it. Trumpism, Reform UK, and their European counterparts do not seek to challenge the economic structures that produce this disaffection; they thrive on it, repackaging frustration as grievance and grievance as political identity.
Nigel Farage has never needed to hold power to wield it, his true influence lies in his ability to warp the political landscape, forcing the mainstream ever closer to his vision of permanent insurgency.