Football
When Is a Contract Not a Contract?
When star forwards can down tools before the season starts and still win the move, a “contract” is just a polite fiction. Isak and Igamane are the canaries in the coal mine.
The rest of the blog
When star forwards can down tools before the season starts and still win the move, a “contract” is just a polite fiction. Isak and Igamane are the canaries in the coal mine.
Planes will never take off, but every promise of mass deportation erodes rights, normalises cruelty, and casts the mob as the voice of the nation.
The English “revolution” under the St George’s Cross is no revolution at all, but a counter-revolution, a politics of scapegoating that shields the dominant class from blame.
Scapegoating migrants is just the start. When politics legitimises fear and blame, the mob never stops, and neither does the cycle of persecution.
Keir Starmer’s law-and-order theatrics have handed the far right its new saint: a self-styled free speech Joan of Arc—except this saint didn’t want to be burned, she wanted others to be.
Paul Bristow cites the Epping Forest ruling to demand hotel closures for asylum seekers, but offers no plan for what follows. The Conservatives built the hotel system; Labour inherits it; local politicians weaponise planning law while migrants disappear from view.
The arrest of a part-time cleaner for sharing Facebook posts backing Palestine Action shows how Britain’s response to Gaza has drifted from foreign policy into domestic repression.
Farage brings the noise, Starmer brings the law. The country falls apart to the sound of flags snapping and doors slamming while capital quietly clears the till.
Farage says migrants are draining £12bn in benefits. The government’s own data says the real figure is closer to £3bn, and those he targets are more likely to be sanctioned and underpaid. This isn’t savings. It’s scapegoating.
Labour are not offering opportunity, they are outsourcing austerity. Liz Kendall’s call for unemployed young people to join the Armed Forces isn’t a jobs programme, it’s conscription by stealth. The message is clear: pick up a rifle or face the full force of a benefits crackdown. We’ve gone from “levelling up” to shipping out. And if the government can’t promise you housing, dignity or decent pay, it will instead offer you a uniform and a war.
As Labour signs off on bombers and benefit cuts, Britain is being reshaped—not by necessity, but by choice. Welfare is being gutted while defence sails on untouched. This isn’t fiscal realism. It’s a war budget in peacetime.
Labour promises growth, but all it really offers is cuts, because in the end, that is the only thing it knows how to do.
Keir Starmer’s Labour seems intent on quietly abandoning principle, both at home and abroad, for short-sighted political expediency.
Labour’s plan to cut £5 billion from disability benefits isn’t just a betrayal of its supposed principles, it’s a grim rerun of austerity, dressed up in the language of tough but fair reform.
Governments like to frame their cruellest policies as pragmatic necessities, but what they call ‘efficiency’ is always someone else’s suffering.
The idea that work is a moral duty rather than a means of survival is so deeply ingrained we rarely question it. But as technology advances and work becomes more precarious, exhausting, and intrusive, it is worth asking why productivity remains the measure of a person’s worth.
Labour’s latest signal that it intends to impose sweeping cuts to welfare represents a stark betrayal of working-class interests and a capitulation to the logic of capital.