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Gary Smith says Britain’s net zero policy has exported jobs and imported virtue. But what he’s really defending isn’t working-class power, this is fossil capital in a hard hat. Decarbonisation without class politics is a gift to Farage. But the answer isn’t more oil. It’s public ownership, planning, and a transition built by workers, not against them.
Live Aid was forty years ago. Today, we are haunted once again by the images of starving children (and now, starving adults) in Gaza. But this time, it doesn’t seem to register. No concerts. No campaigns. No national reckoning. Why? Because the system can only process suffering when it’s stripped of politics. Ethiopia’s famine was framed as fate. Gaza’s is a siege, and Britain is complicit. That’s the difference.
Alexander Dugin has declared the Istanbul peace talks “meaningless theatre” and announced the arrival of “total war.” He wants Russia (not just its army, but its soul) put on a permanent war footing.
Frank Furedi claims the public has been silenced, while shouting from the pages of the Daily Mail. What he’s really mourning is the loss of uncontested dominance: the fantasy of a Britain where dissent means agreeing with him. This isn’t analysis, it’s a staged panic, designed to justify repression and launder far-right talking points as common sense. Britain isn’t a tinderbox. But pieces like this are trying hard to make it one.
Kemi Badenoch wants to be Britain’s Javier Milei. Let that sink in.
The protests outside migrant hotels aren’t spontaneous. They are engineered. Stoked by far-right groups, amplified by the right-wing press, and legitimised by political cowardice, what we’re witnessing is a strategic campaign to turn fear into power. When the police protect anti-racists, it’s called provocation. When the far right throws bottles, it’s “community concern.” The hotels are just the excuse. The real target is the idea that Britain could ever belong to all of us.
They tell us the crisis is caused by desperate people in dinghies, not decades of housing policy that turned homes into investment vehicles. But the truth is, Britain is not short of houses, its just full of landlords, speculators, and empty properties waiting to make someone rich.
While far right mobs are framed as “concerned locals”, anti-fascists are treated as the threat. The police escort becomes the scandal, not the fact that far-right demonstrators are being allowed to dominate England’s streets with near impunity. When the media sides with the mob, resistance is rebranded as provocation.
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.
The President has weaponised billion-dollar lawsuits to silence reporting, chill satire, and punish dissent. After ABC and CBS paid out millions, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert was cancelled days after mocking a Trump settlement. Now he’s suing Murdoch and the Wall Street Journal over a sketch linked to Epstein. This isn’t about truth. It’s about fear, and who’s allowed to speak.
Trump isn’t reopening Alcatraz. He’s pointing at the ruins and saying: this is what we’ll do to them. It’s not
Gaza isn’t a failure. It’s strategy. Empire burns what it can’t control. Mélenchon and Ali don’t moralise. They name it. Oil, siege, war with China. Read it if you’re done with delusion.
Butler isn’t really about politics. It’s about belief. The bullet didn’t just graze him; it made him sacred. The messy contradictions of 2016 are gone. What’s left is atmosphere, myth, and the story of a man who bled on stage and got up again. The faithful took it as a sign. This isn’t reporting. It’s scripture. A gospel for a leader who survives everything, and so, must rule.
Trump promised to protect the safety net. Instead, he signed a law that slashes Medicaid, imposes work requirements, and purges the rolls by design. His supporters still cheer, not because the cuts help them, but because the performance does. The cap says “Make America Great Again.” The policy says: you’re on your own.
They say the Games are about unity, but what’s happening in LA tells a different story
On James Pogue’s Chosen Country: A Rebellion in the West
The ICE raid at Home Depot isn’t law enforcement. This is performance of sovereignty. Armed agents posing in camo and Kevlar to detain migrant day labourers is not about public safety, but about staging dominance. It’s capitalism enforcing its border through spectacle: a theatre of control, broadcast from a retail car park, where labour is criminalised and militarism is aestheticised. This isn’t about stopping migration. It’s about punishing poverty and reassuring power.
Trump didn’t just return to NATO; he returned as “Daddy”—a role not earned through diplomacy, but conjured through spectacle. Baudrillard warned that when image overtakes reality, politics becomes performance. The bombs may have hit Iran, but the real strike was rhetorical. What mattered wasn’t destruction, it was the appearance of obliteration, the meme of authority, the myth of restored order. In the empire of simulation, the sovereign returns not with treaties, but with merch.