The unaffordability of Trump www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2025/11... From the gaudy of Gatsby to a Trump slump? Hope the elections this week are harbingers of justice coming. But for now MAGA US is a foul spectacle of tasteless waste amidst widespread squalor and deprivation.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre... Review of evidence showing how the issue of the massive inequality of wealth and income are kept off the menu of ‘reasonable’ political discussion. And yet it’s the key to where our major problems come from and what can be done. But money talks, gold rules

www.cambridge.org/core/journal... Any time the value of academic social science work is questioned this powerful work provides a refutation.

www.theguardian.com/politics/202... Nothing exemplifies the selfishness that now rules Anglo American governments more than the cuts to the foreign aid budgets. Gold rules is their Golden Rule

edition.independent.co.uk/edition/uk.c... Right wing politicians and press regularly lambast BBC for left wing and anti Israel bias. Yet systematic analysis of its governance structure and its output finds exactly the opposite, as this valuable article shows.

Taps sign

edition.independent.co.uk/edition/uk.c... Fascinating disturbing probe of universities’ dependence on Chinese finance. Is it a Trojan horse bearing destruction behind a lucrative allure? Raises profound issues about the post Enlightenment Western assumption about the value of critical thought

This would be a more convincing argument if Keir Starmer had not himself made a whole series of promises which he then declared completely undeliverable as soon as he became leader www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

The richest 1 percent own more wealth than 95 percent of humanity. And the solution is not taxing them.

www.theguardian.com/us-news/comm... Wonderful victories for justice and hope in the elections this week. Freedland reviews just how tough it will be for the Democrats to regain control of Congress in the 2026 midterms or the Presidency in 2028. Trump has the money, military and will fight dirty

The Sociopath-In-Chief couldn't be bothered to even turn his head in the direction of a man in the midst of a medical emergency who collapsed in his office. Completely incapable of empathy, the EPSTEIN Files can't be released soon enough. 25/47

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre... saying out loud vicious hateful things that were once taboo is not just generation x fear and shock. As a baby boomer I experienced it in the late 70s when the make love not war generation morphed into Maggie’s possessive individualism. Now is yet more frightening

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025... Let them eat cake! But without SNAP

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre... Spot on analysis of how debate about the budget rattles round a small set of unacceptable options. This fails to see that the menu’s are designed to protect a small number of wealthy interests. Inequality poisons the whole system and attacked for us all.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre... Thoughtful survey of party politics in a fragmenting system. Makes prediction guesswork between a mosaic of alternatives. Yes reminiscent of the 1970s, but unlikely that the outcome will be right wing Conservative stabilisation. Could be better - or worse…

edition.independent.co.uk/edition/uk.c... The end cannot justify the means because dirty means sully clean ends. Mamdani seems to grasp this so let’s hope he continues to defy the billionaires who employ dirty tricks for selfish ends

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre... If only people voted regularly where their economic interests lie and supposedly left of centre politicians catered to that.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre... Ban the billionaires Say it out loud and proud

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre... Brilliant evisceration of centre left failure. You can’t cosily compromise with vampire capitalism. Win people over by attacking their core bread and butter insecurity head on. Put the blame where it lies - voracious billionaires- not the wretched of the earth

www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025... A classic moral panic article. Scary headline prediction. But much less substance. No indication how 6 percent is arrived at. And most concrete fear is domestic violence yet Philp frets about crime on the streets.

www.theguardian.com/society/2025... This story is being frontlined as a failure of individual staff or worse still of liberalism. It’s a failure to adequately fund public services. The beneficiaries? The billionaires who benefit from low public expenditure. Tax them till the pips squeek

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre... Thorough demolition of Farage economic policy. Print headlines utterly misleading thought. Trumpenomics hasn’t worked in the USA for anyone except the mega rich. It would be even worse here because UK economy more exposed to bond markets. But also disaster for US.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre... Groucho Marx playing conman asked: Who you gonna believe? ME or your own eyes? This is the real terrorism: media moguls grovelling before the purveyor in chief of fake news. Soon we won’t know whether to believe our own eyes

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre... The ‘shadow economy’ of services avoiding tax is not a migrant issue contrary to right wing press and political mythology. It flourishes mainly amongst UK citizens under economic pressure - that is most of us

magazine.newstatesman.com/2025/11/04/k... The evidence cited here suggests that the right wing press and political focus on crime (including knife attacks) as a race or migration issue is misplaced scapegoating. The root causes are inequality and deprivation driven by right wing economics

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre... Financialisation of the global economy with neoliberalism hit the UK especially hard. The collapse of the Bretton Woods quasi Keynesian consensus, allowing decades of shared growth, was driven by financial speculation often illegal undermining it from within

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre... Insightful analysis of how cities especially London have become nightmare infernos in the right wing imaginary. The false claims are impervious to refutation by facts or figures. They are riddled with racism. And imbued with half jealous half scared FOMO fantasy

This should not be radical!

Always be wary of politicians insisting that the only way to truly “take back control” is to remove our rights and freedoms. We lose our protection from abuses of power while our country loses trust and influence on the world stage. That’s not control. It’s weakness. www.bbc.com/news/article...

Farage says leaving the ECHR is the “unfinished business" of Brexit and that the UK is "not sovereign” while we are in it. But Farage lies. And Brexit is a shitshow. So, “finishing” it should fill us all with dread. Sovereignty without rights is dictatorship. www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/poli...

Partly because so many formerly leftwing parties have turned to the right, there's a lot of confusion about what right and left mean in politics. I hope this helps: The right defends economic power. The left resists economic power.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre... Powerful advocacy of the European Convention on Human Rights, currently a number one target of Britain’s Right and far Right. Sadly hardly defended by a government led by a human rights lawyer. Rights have become demonised as standing for ‘them’ not all of us

www.theguardian.com/world/2025/n... God bless her (belated) heroic whistle blowing. The right wing ministers and mobsters are in a fascist quicksand

socialistproject.ca/2025/11/a-wo... Optimism of the intellect?

www.theguardian.com/stage/2025/n... Priestley the persuasive advocate of ethical socialism. What would he make of Labour’s current betrayal? I guess he’d send for an inspector.

jacobin.com/2024/10/coun... Excellent review of Left debates about how to understand the state we are in. What are the causes and consequences of the 2008 global financial crisis? Has it transformed neoliberal capitalism or reproduced its basic logic?

jacobin.com/2025/10/us-p... Brilliant analysis of current abysmal state of policing and punishment in the US. Like all David Garland’s books it’s state of the art. But I do wish he hadn’t relegated political economy quite so much in favour of immediately possible reforms. There was once a New Deal.

jacobin.com/2025/10/libe... The Iron Fist in the Velvet Glove was a common analysis in the 1970s of the respective roles of the repressive and the ideological state apparatus

The futility of our politics/media ecosystem means Farage can just spew out widely debunked claims about millionaire flight, spending cuts, the safety of London, immigrants etc and it will get streamed right to your TV screen with no analysis, correction or debate. Scary

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre... The nightmare prospect of MAGA Mini-mes. Democrats please get it together!

www.theguardian.com/technology/2... Adds new technological twists to age old questions what is truth? What is knowledge? And confounding issues of bias as new technologies in the hands of billionaires

www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025... Sad story illustrates the minefield police have to traverse in the politicised area of the ethnicity of victims and perpetrators of violent attacks. The far Right supposed supporters of law and order seriously undermine police operations by their racism

Holding govts to ransom. Goldman Sachs warns Rachel Reeves against tax rises on banks. Banks happy to be bailed out, take QE, mis-sell products, not to be prosecuted for frauds, hike charges, pay lousy rates on savings. Need windfall taxes. Raise top rate of income tax.

observer.co.uk/news/columni... Why not raise income tax together with further specific taxes on wealthy? Most people would see a degree of fairness in it. Especially as it’s the financial speculating ‘community’ that landed us in the post 2008 mess. And the privations of the neoliberal half century

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025... Simple question. Why on earth aren’t the Democrats making hay of this? How can this blatantly obscene and widening wealth gap be tolerated by MAGA supporters?

observer.co.uk/news/nationa... Hanging over this lucid review of the technical financial issues facing the Budget is an implicit assumption that we are being blackmailed by the bond markets. Can’t be fixed in time of course if at all. But it’s an issue facing most countries and should be confronted

observer.co.uk/news/columni... Exposes the disastrous consequences for most people of the private good public bad mantra of the neoliberal half century. The destruction of the Keynesian welfare state was spearheaded by wealthy speculators and they’ve done very well. Hate billionaires not migrants