
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.
With Elbridge Colby whispering war into Pete Hegseth’s ear, the Trump administration has replaced strategic ambiguity with a doctrine of confrontation.
Trump’s new tariffs aren’t a return to protectionism so much as a sign that capital, cornered and decadent, is turning inward, more coercive, more nationalist, and more dangerous.
Capitalism hasn’t repented by bringing the jobs back; it’s rearmed, turning screws at home under the banner of patriotic sacrifice.
The Trump administration’s latest tariff proposal assumes that other countries will quietly absorb the cost of import duties. But tariffs don’t work like that. They never have.
On Tariffs, Crypto, and the Class Logic of Trump’s Economic Nationalism
In trading tax cuts for Trump’s tariff relief, Starmer hasn’t negotiated, he’s capitulated, handing the keys of British economic policy to Big Tech and calling it diplomacy.
Tariffs have always been sold as a lifeline for workers, a way to safeguard industry and preserve jobs from the encroachment of cheaper imports. But this is a con, a well-rehearsed performance that disguises yet another means of protecting capital at the expense of labour.