Very true. Left masochism is unhelpful.

‘Why do progressives, who justifiably insist on the power of money, media, history and structural forces, often seem to believe it should be easy to overcome these things?’ @geoffmann.bsky.social on how we should tackle the end times. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

one of the most demented things any columnist has willingly put their name to www.thetimes.com/business/tec...

The only question that matters now, I think: are you going to sit quietly in your seats while the exact same people smash the bus into oncoming traffic twice within a decade? The cost last time was Boris Johnson and diamond-hard Brexit. It’ll be much worse, this time.

‘Xi Jinping has no clear deputy, no predecessor looking over his shoulder and no obvious rivals. He is, in the historian Geremie Barmé’s phrase, “chairman of everything”.’ @tomstevenson.bsky.social on the rise of Xi Jinping. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Very important issues raised here. British nationalism was dependent on Fordist Modernity. Once movement is stalled, victimhood becomes the articulation of Englishness. Popular Modernity was real, its origins lie in the interwar period, it peaked under Fordism. 1/2

Here at last is the 3+ hours recorded by myself and @profafinlayson.bsky.social on nationalism and the future of Britain. Subscribe in any podcast app to Culture, Power, Politics. Yes, Burnham-block emergency pod, other guests, more solos, all coming soon. culturepowerpolitics.org/2026/01/26/n...

Looking forward to talking to John Clarke about The Battle for Britain! This is the book I’ve quoted more than any others over the past 2 years. Reviewed it for Soundings here too, p101 journals.lwbooks.co.uk/soundings/vo...

Coates is always worth reading. apple.news/AEP72W5oLQW6...

Re-watching S1 of True Detective.

Listening to veterans of the Wapping Dispute today and it's a tragic story of economism and scabbing with John fucking Spellar's shower playing a leading role.

Not sure liberals giggling at Trump is particularly helpful.its precisely what fuels Trump and his followers. podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/o...

In the same way that Britain can’t have a proper national outrage scandal based on e.g. Boris Johnson killed your gran. We can’t have people thinking the state fed your granny into the wood chipper for coins. It makes everyone look bad.

Of course Joan Didion wrote for Bill Buckley’s National Review, of course she did.

This is very good. All I’d say is that One Battle forms part of a longer cultural canon including Parasite, Andor, The Gold and Osterlund. Good on middle class liberals finally experiencing what the working class experienced in the 70s and 80s: the twats!

If you want to understand the 'crisis' of the 1970s, best to read Aglietta: 'Regimes of accumulation... involved modes of surplus-value extraction through the labour process, under constant pressure from inter-capitalist competition to increase.' newleftreview.org/issues/ii156...

Good this, but I’d dispute the decline of Wool production: there are loads of wools on here.

Oh God, I've started getting self aggrandising Gen X posts/memes on Insta as if we're not part of the fucking problem.

My kink is kinkshaming. What now?

The pseudopatriotic British right has always worshipped established power for its own sake, and this now reaches its absurd endpoint in the pages of the Telegraph

Leftists: the USA is fundamentally an imperialist power. Liberals: that's not what America is all about! Conservatives: fuck yeah we're doing imperialism!

Neil Kinnocks, folks. Vauxhall Constituency Labour Party had wanted Martha Osamor, vice-chair of the Labour Party Black Sections, as the Party's candidate. Osamor did secure the most nominations, eighty in total, with Hoey only having one... Hoey was imposed by the NEC as the Labour candidate.

The spectre of the 1970s.

'Children of a long counterrevolution, many of us were taught by the defeated.' Which is why the spectre of the 1970s looms so large in the present, a time before defeat colonised the lifeworld. www.e-flux.com/notes/678343...

Liberalism's raison d'etre is defence/restoration of the status quo ante.

Liberals have been putting off any kind of change to the system for decades now. The longer that goes on, the greater the saturation, the tension in the wire, the more dramatic the rupture is going to be.

A lovely good news story here. Writers festival in Adelaide cancelled the booking of a Palestinian author. Most of the other bookings then pulled out, now the festival has been cancelled and the entire board has resigned 👍 www.theguardian.com/culture/2026...

This gets at a real limitation of the Gen X Left (guilty as charged) and the 2010s Left which is an unhealthy obsession with form over content. A legacy of modernism which reflects the long retreat from politics to culture.

Ellen Meiksins Wood passed away 10 years ago today. From her classic The Origin of Capitalism, to The Retreat from Class, she made major contributions to history, sociology, and theory. To celebrate her life, we're offering 30% off all of her titles.

Memory check: does Hayden White consider capitalism as informing narratives?

Can’t think of a better encapsulation of the downstream effects of neoliberalism as an ideology than powerlessness of the state to penalise a billionaire-owned child pornography generator, substituted with a reflexive will to crack down on individual consumers who engage with said generator.

Standard public choice theory says politicians respond to the incentive to get re-elected; that was why I voted Labour. But maybe I was wrong and for some/many their incentive instead is to get a job in tech or finance after a short time in politics. This might better explain UK politics.

Joshua Rozenberg utterly embarrassing himself in public here, good grief

This is obviously the right decision. It should spark a wider conversation about social media platforms. We clearly can't - and shouldn't - just rely on the responsibility of the owners. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

1st band blues.

Who is judging the Exposing Britain's Social Evils Prize? That’s right, it’s Amber Rudd: the woman all the hacks were right behind when she got fired for facilitating the Windrush Scandal, because that was PM Theresa May’s fault, then there was no effort to make Theresa May pay for it.

I am delighted to tell you that Michael Gove is one of the 2026 judges for the Reporting Homelessness Prize.

Yeah that'll do it.

On #GMB this morning Michael Gove opines on people living a party lifestyle.

The other big problem, and not just for Britain, is how capitalism - a system premised on infinite growth - can manage with a shrinking population. And the answer for that too is ... it can't.

It’s very awkward, because Trump is demonstrating that British support for almost anything America does - once presented as optional, done by democratic consent - is plainly mandatory and non-negotiable, no matter what they’re doing. Which casts at least our recent history in a different light.

“Marco Rubio as a teenager made extra cash working for his late brother-in-law Orlando Cicilia. The business imported and sold exotic animals as a front for moving nearly a half million pounds of cocaine and marijuana.”

🎶Knowing me, knowing you🎶

Do we really need our nation's most senior political correspondent talking about the Prime Minister's "chums"?

Important to note that the only official response to the SpyCops scandal has been to pass a law that makes it legal for not only the police but employees of agencies as varied as the Environment Agency and Gambling Commission to commit most crimes while undercover. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covert_...

Oh, that is 😘 👌

It is awesome how - after decades of roaring denunciations, relentless lying and shitehousing about our craven ball-sucking to the White House and various Presidents’ wars - we have finally arrived at the truth of the matter: We are spineless worms, and we will fuck up anyone who says that is bad.

For nonlawyers, it’s worth noting that statements like this have—as a formal matter—important legal effects as a matter of international law. If such statements are *not* made, and in volume, future arguments that Trump’s invasion sets a legal precedent will stand on much firmer legal ground.

"Trump's international piracy ... typifies a wider trend across the West: the assertion of authoritarianism and, with that, the open and unquestioned dictatorship of capital."