
Rachel Reeves and the 2p Trap
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.
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.
Farage isn’t offering a plan, this is performance. His “law and order” blitz isn’t costed, credible, or connected to reality. It’s the politics of punishment as spectacle: build more prisons, shout louder, deport faster, sentence longer. No thought to the broken justice system, no answers on prevention or rehabilitation. Just another culture war front for a party with no economic programme and no interest in governing.
Farage isn’t here to fix Britain. He’s here to make you hate your neighbour while his mates keep getting rich.
Farage says migrants are draining £12bn in benefits. The government’s own data says the real figure is closer to £3bn, and those he targets are more likely to be sanctioned and underpaid. This isn’t savings. It’s scapegoating.
Labour won power by promising stability, but what it offers now is paralysis. It has no strategy to counter Farage, no defence against a Tory right fightback, and no imagination to confront the ecological and economic shocks coming fast over the horizon. While Reform sets the agenda and the left reorganises, Starmer retreats into technocratic caution. The government is not leading Britain—it’s managing decline, and doing it badly. Unless Labour finds the courage to confront the forces tearing the country apart, it risks becoming the caretaker of its own collapse.
Rachel Reeves’s Spending Review and the Political Economy of Placation
Let’s not pretend there’s a serious policy debate here. The call to ban the burqa wasn’t a contribution to some Enlightenment café of ideas; it was a dog whistle blasted at full volume, a panic-button press designed to provoke.
Nigel Farage isn’t the voice of the working class—he’s their grifter-in-chief, selling tax cuts to the comfortable while Labour trails behind him, too timid to name the real enemy.
Reform UK’s fake environmentalism and Labour’s cautious housebuilding plan reveal a deeper crisis: a housing system built on profit, not need, where even progress is hostage to the politics of property.
Britain doesn’t need a labour shortage to punish the poor.
Let’s not pretend this is clever politics. It’s cowardice. The real danger is not that Labour contines to lose votes to Reform. It’s that it becomes Reform, in language, in policy, and in the cruel calculus of who gets to belong.