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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.
Water isn’t just drying up, it’s being sold back to us in bottles, summits, and charity hashtags. Filippo Menga’s Thirst shows how crisis becomes currency, how scarcity is manufactured, managed, and monetised. This isn’t about saving water, it’s about saving meaning.
I picked up A Colossal Wreck because the 1990s and early 2000s feel more relevant by the day. There’s a
Paul W. Schroeder was no Marxist, but in an age of collapsing empires and revived realpolitik, his cold-eyed history of diplomacy offers the left a theory of ruin we can use
Dan Edelstein’s The Revolution to Come: A History of an Idea from Thucydides to Lenin and Enzo Traverso’s Revolution: An Intellectual History
Tony Benn was not a relic of a lost left but a constitutional insurrectionist whose writings—on the Crown, industry, war, and tradition—still offer a blueprint for democratic rebellion in a Britain built to resist it.
In Capital’s Grave, Jodi Dean argues that capitalism isn’t simply in crisis, it’s decomposing into a new neofeudal order of rent, servitude and fragmented power.
In Mythocracy, Yves Citton argues that the left must learn to fight not just with facts or programmes, but with stories that shape the atmosphere of power itself.
Believe Nothing Until It Is Officially Denied: Claud Cockburn and the Invention of Guerrilla Journalism by Patrick Cockburn (Verso, 2024)
This review explores how Richard Beck’s Homeland and Lewis Lapham’s Age of Folly reveal the profound domestic and global consequences of America’s response to 9/11, from creeping authoritarianism at home to declining influence abroad.