anti capitalist musings

The rest of the blog

Britain

Labour’s War on Dissent

Keir Starmer’s government has turned protest into a criminal offence, wielding counter-terror laws against pensioners, vicars, and schoolteachers while arms dealers cash in. This isn’t public safety, it’s the criminalisation of conscience.

Britain

Jenrick’s Gutter Politics

Jenrick’s “medieval attitudes” line isn’t about protecting women — it’s about importing the far right’s script into the Tory mainstream. From Powell to Farage, the cast has changed but the grammar is the same: the outsider as danger, the nation as victim, the politician as saviour.

Britain

Starmer’s Labour and the Machinery of Repression

Keir Starmer’s proscription of Palestine Action marks a new stage in Britain’s authoritarian turn, retooling counter-terrorism laws to criminalise dissent, define solidarity as “terrorism”, and dress up political repression as public safety.

The Gaza Catastrophe cover Cover of Gilbert Achcar’s book "The Gaza Catastrophe: The Genocide in World-Historical Perspective". A young man carries a child through a devastated landscape, with other displaced Palestinians walking behind him and a column of smoke rising in the background.
Book Review

The Catastrophe Was the Point: Gilbert Achcar’s Dialectic of Gaza

Gilbert Achcar’s The Gaza Catastrophe is not a plea for sympathy. It is a political weapon. Written in the midst of genocide, it strips away the euphemisms, the diplomatic theatre, and the moral fog. This war, he argues, is a settler-colonial project. Accelerated to its most brutal form, with the full backing of the Western powers who claim to uphold human rights. Achcar names the system, maps its historical scaffolding, and indicts not only Israel but the global order that enables it. This is not a book of mourning. It is a call to act.

Britain

Theft by Design: How Right to Buy Looted the Public Realm

Right to Buy was never just a housing policy. It was a weapon. It stripped councils of their power, turned tenants into property owners, and recast collective provision as individual gain. The result wasn’t freedom but fragmentation: social housing gutted, rents soaring, and the right to strike undermined by the threat of eviction. Thatcher didn’t just sell homes. She sold a new class alignment, and we’re still living in its ruins.

Labour’s War on Dissent

Keir Starmer’s government has turned protest into a criminal offence, wielding counter-terror laws against pensioners, vicars, and schoolteachers while arms dealers cash in. This isn’t public safety, it’s the criminalisation of conscience.

A vintage-style protest poster features the Palestinian flag centred on a textured beige background. Bold, black block text above the flag reads: “THIS FLAG CAN GET YOU ARRESTED*”. Beneath the flag, in smaller text, it says: “*HOWEVER GENOCIDE CAN’T”. The design uses distressed fonts and grainy textures in the style of protest posters, drawing attention to the criminalisation of Palestinian solidarity in contrast to the impunity for state violence.

Criminalising Solidarity

The Labour government has not criminalised violence, it has criminalised resistance. Holding a flag, wearing a slogan, even whispering “Palestine” is now suspect. But dropping bombs on children? That’s fine. If that sounds like justice to you, you’re already lost.

A graphic representation of the Palestinian flag featuring a grainy, textured aesthetic. The design includes a red triangle on the left and three horizontal stripes—black at the top, white in the middle, and green at the bottom—each with a distressed, vintage look evocative of mid-20th century radical printmaking.

Is the Home Secretary Embarrassed Yet?

While Israel levels Gaza, the Labour government arrests pensioners in Liverpool for carrying a leaflet. Yvette Cooper calls it national security. But what we are witnessing is the suppression of solidarity, the silencing of dissent, and the transformation of protest into a punishable offence. A government that will not name a genocide is quick to jail those who do.

Graphic in distressed orange, black, and olive green. The image shows ruined buildings silhouetted against a stark sky, with jagged barbed wire stretching across the foreground. The word “GAZA” appears in large, block letters at the top, evoking a sense of confinement, devastation, and resistance.

This Is Ethnic Cleansing—Call It What It Is

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.

A grainy, vintage-style image depicting a dense urban skyline with mid-rise buildings. A large, dark plume of smoke rises ominously from the city centre, suggesting a recent explosion. The image is rendered in a washed-out, sepia-orange tone, evoking a 1968 protest poster aesthetic with high contrast and nostalgic texture. A mosque minaret is visible among the buildings, hinting at the city's Middle Eastern setting.

A Requiem for Human Rights

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.

A cylindrical metal tin filled with bright red paint, sitting on a neutral grey surface. The paint is smooth and glossy, with the tin slightly scuffed, giving a utilitarian appearance.

Red Paint Is Not Terrorism

This is what it comes down to: the Labour government wants to put a group of activists who threw red paint at arms factories in the same legal category as ISIS.

A graphic that shows a bullet proof vest with the writing Press IDF spokesperson

Sympathy for the Occupier

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.

Front cover of Capital’s Grave

Beyond the Cloud, the Castle

In Capital’s Grave, Jodi Dean argues that capitalism isn’t simply in crisis, it’s decomposing into a new neofeudal order of rent, servitude and fragmented power.