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Braverman’s plan to leave the ECHR isn’t legal reform, it’s preparation for rule without restraint. Like the ERG before her, she wraps authoritarian ambition in the language of sovereignty. Strip away the rhetoric and what’s left is a state unbound, a state that punishes, not protects. If she jumps to Reform UK, this plan becomes reality.
Reading this made me feel sick. It brought back the images from Abu Ghraib, its black hoods, outstretched arms, the grotesque theatre of domination. Only this time, it’s not Baghdad in 2003 but Miami in 2025. Don’t look away: this is what America does to the unwanted. And Britain’s not far behind.
Farage wants you to believe he can fix the country. But he broke it. From Brexit to “civil disobedience,” his politics turned crisis into currency. Now he wants to cash in. Don’t buy it.
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.
They gutted final salary schemes. They tied your future to the stock market. Now they want to gamble what’s left on the promise of growth that never comes. Rachel Reeves calls it “unlocking capital.” What it really means is handing over your pension to the very firms that gutted the economy in the first place.
There’s no housing to fall back on. No council flat, no affordable rent, no hope of owning. Just a threadbare pension pot and a government asking you to work longer, save more, and expect less.
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.
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.
Using Guy Debord’s concept of the spectacle to examine imperialism.
As Zero Books reissues Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, I explore its key ideas .
