
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.
If Reaganism found its myths on the big screen, Trumpism built its own spectacle—and may now be searching for its Riefenstahl.
JD Vance went to Greenland to play imperialist. He left rebuked, ridiculed, and unwelcome, a fitting emissary for a decaying superpower.
Kristi Noem’s visit to El Salvador’s mega-prison wasn’t about enforcing policy, it was about staging power for the camera in a theatre of authoritarian realism.
Pete Hegseth’s rise to Defence Secretary marks the moment Christian nationalism stopped playing insurgent and started running the world’s most powerful war machine.
Trump doesn’t defeat his opponents; he casts them, turning liberal conscience into spectacle, and transforming critique into the very script that keeps him centre stage.
While Trump governs and the Democratic Party fragments, Sanders and AOC offer mass therapy disguised as mobilisation, nostalgia in place of a plan.
Michael Lewis has always been at his best when writing about finance, exposing the absurdities and myths of capital. Who Is Government? is a departure, an obituary for the administrative state, told through a series of essays by various writers.
Twenty-two years ago, millions marched against the invasion of Iraq. I was one of them. We were right; the war was wrong. And yet it happened anyway. That was the moment I realised: marching doesn’t cut through when empire’s at stake.
Trump’s second presidency isn’t just an assault on democracy; it’s the moment the dominant class decided elections were no longer necessary.
If Joe Biden was condemned as “Genocide Joe” for arming Israel during its war on Gaza, what do we call the man who not only restocked its weapons but signed off on the latest assault?