The UK is an authoritarian country

Britain is often portrayed as a champion of “freedom” and “democracy” both by our government and its faithful servants in the media, as well as anyone else who clearly does not know any better. Mostly we are told that we are a free and democratic country because we “stand up” to dictatorships, a point bolstered…

The hypocritical crusade against Mermaids

Whenever the Tories are in trouble—and indeed it looks clear that they in fact are in deep trouble—the first thing they do is look for a convenient scapegoat to try and distract the public from their real problems. While they have been doing this throughout their twelve years in power, I believe this particularly ugly…

On the triumph of Starmerism and the tragedy of the Labour left

Labour’s recent party conference has a noticeably different mood about it compared to last year. It was far more confident, and so was Starmer himself. While there is still a notable sense of caution, justified since this isn’t the first time it looked like Labour was about to win, the confidence exuded from the 2022…

On the function and future of the British monarchy

Queen Elizabeth II, the longest reigning monarch in British history, has passed on, having died peacefully in her summer home in Balmoral and surrounded by loved ones. Her eldest son is now King Charles III, and his reign ushers in the end of what has been called the “Elizabethan era”, that is to say the…

Life after Boris and the prospect of a Labour government

The old cruelty of Boris Johnson has passed. Let a whole new wave of cruelty wash over the land, courtesy of the new Prime Minister Liz Truss and her cadre of reactionary ideologues. Having trounced leadership rival and reluctant realist Rishi Sunak by about 20,000 votes, Truss has begun the task of building a government…

The reformist urge to romanticise the Corbyn years

As the cost of living crisis becomes ever more severe, civil and democratic rights come increasingly under attack, relations with the EU strain, and the corruption, cruelty and incompetence of the Tories is increasingly apparent, one of the more persistent responses online is people making post after post saying “Corbyn was right”, “,we should have…

On the last days of Boris Johnson

A long nightmare appears to be coming to an end. On Thursday, following a wave of ministerial resignations, Boris Johnson, hitherto the Prime Minister of Britain, has unceremoniously decided to resign his post, clinging on like an ulcer until a new leader is elected. Much of the party, however, would prefer to oust him straight…

The national mythology of Brexit Britain

Introduction: The True Meaning of Brexit Six years ago, I voted Leave in the EU referendum, and was at that time a vocal critic of the Remain camp. Disillusioned with the left as misrepresented by people like Owen Jones and Jess Phillips, I could already feel myself drifting to the right back then, and yet…

What the gun control discourse is missing

Introduction: On the Grim Banality of American Tragedy The scene at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas was a depressingly familiar one. Another crazed young gunman, 18-year-old Salvador Rolando Ramos, storms his school armed with an AR-15, kills some of his fellow students and winds up dead himself (this time the cops killed him), the…

Our morbid obsession with discipline

At a lecture given to the Socialist Students of Austria in 1967, the philosopher and social critic Theodor Adorno warned of a dangerous tendency that lurked in the bourgeois democratic societies. This lecture was transcribed and posthumously released as a short book called Aspects of the New Right-Wing Extremism, and in it he had a…