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This month, the British state made its position on violence unambiguous: while ex-generals and loyal newspapers led the charge, Parliament followed. The result was clear: Impunity for its own, criminalisation for its critics. In the same month it moved to quash investigations into war crimes in Northern Ireland, it voted to proscribe Palestine Action under terrorism law.
Trump is no longer a politician in Dugin’s hands. He is a prophet who fell short. But the prophecy lives on. That’s how Dugin works: he turns failure into myth, betrayal into destiny. Putinism becomes the sacred, Trumpism the fallen. Everything is wrapped in theology, because the politics (when you look closely) aren’t up to much. It’s not tradition he’s defending. It’s accelerationism with a whiff of incense.
The state demands loyalty from its killers, and contempt for those who ask why. To question the SAS is treated as heresy. To investigate them, as betrayal. But no one is above the law. Not even the men with night-vision goggles and state-sanctioned impunity. If the victims of British state violence are to be denied justice so that the myth of military virtue can remain intact, then we are not a democracy. We continue to be an empire that refuses to admit it.
You don’t have to like the tactics. But if protest that disrupts power is treated as terrorism, then the state has rewritten the definition to suit itself.
The Labour Party under Starmer has become a machine for silencing dissent. Abbott, Shaheen, Driscoll, and others have been smeared, blocked, or expelled. The party has moved right on immigration, welfare, protest, and Palestine — and done so proudly. Sultana’s resignation wasn’t a betrayal of Labour values. It was a defence of them. And if a new left party is to be more than symbolic, it needs more than moral clarity. It needs leadership. Corbyn remains the figurehead, but John McDonnell (articulate, disciplined, and trusted) is the one who could anchor this project. He may not want the crown. But that is exactly what makes him the right person to hold it.
Labour’s problem isn’t just that it inherited a broken economy. It’s that it refuses to say so. The party acts like governing is a performance for bond markets and newspaper editors, rather than an act of political leadership. Hard choices are made without explanation. Rollbacks happen without apology. And the public is left wondering: if even Labour doesn’t believe in what it’s doing, why should anyone else?
Murray calls the IDF a “citizen army”, as if it were Dad’s Army with drones. In truth, Gaza is a laboratory, where missiles are tested, faces scanned, and children used to perfect the next export.
Adam Curtis’s latest series attempts to diagnose the collapse of public trust in Britain—but without his voice, a clear argument, or fresh material, Shifty drifts through the ruins of the neoliberal age, recycling fragments and offering atmosphere where once there was clarity.
On Andor, Class Struggle, and Watching Rebellion Under Trumpism
Why were we laughing? From the crumbling walls of Rising Damp to the locked gates of Porridge, from the clenched class tension of The Likely Lads to the surreal paranoia of Reggie Perrin, the golden age of the British sitcom was never just about gags. It was about containment. These were shows about men—white, working class, often thwarted, trapped in rooms they didn’t build but could never leave. They weren’t sitcoms so much as comedies of decline.
Watching Severance, I couldn’t help wondering if we’re already living it, split between the person we are at work and who we are the rest of the time, with capitalism quietly stealing the best parts of us.
Full of unflinching realism, Adolescence is a harrowing exploration of justice, masculinity, and radicalisation, told in relentless real time. This review contains spoilers.
The ruins Owen Hatherley documented over a decade ago, of modernist ambition, of public housing, of a Britain that once believed in itself, have only deepened, and with a new New Labour government poised to repeat the same failed housing policies, the cycle of speculation, privatisation, and social cleansing shows no sign of ending.
The Manson murders have long been framed as the dark collapse of the 1960s dream, but Errol Morris’s Chaos: The Manson Murders suggests a more unsettling possibility, that the violence was not the product of countercultural excess, but of a deeper, hidden war waged by the state against the radical potential of the era.
Apple TV+’s “Severance” uses Marxist theory and hauntology to reveal capitalism’s relentless assault on worker consciousness and human dignity.
A review of the recently shown BBC Scotland documentary series ‘The Hunt for Bible John’.
