The future of justice in the UK hangs in the balance this week. This comes against a backdrop of the long custodial sentences and disproportionate use of remand to detain anti-genocide and climate protestors in the UK, and the increasing restrictions on peaceful protest in legislation and the conduct of trials—as outlined in the recent […]
A violent attack. A short video. A name, ideally. A few big accounts willing to post before they know anything. Then thousands more people repeating it as if the facts are already settled. That’s how fear pollutes our politics. We’ve seen it in real-time after the horrific knife attack in Belfast. A man was seriously […]
I am feeling nervous. I am standing in the town centre of Newton Abbot with fellow community activists from a group called Common Ground. We’re all powerfully concerned with democracy and with how it is working (or not working) in our local communities. As a group we have no allegiance to any of the political […]
The US is seven times wealthier than Britain by GDP, but it spends 115 times more on elections. Their deluge is coming our way. Having lived in the States and written about American politics for years, the amount of money involved in British donation scandals can sometimes feel surprisingly small. The hard reality for us […]
A lot of people have asked me, after my last few posts: “All right Claudia — what do we DO about it?” Honestly? There is no magic answer. But here is what works, and what doesn’t. Plain English, no fancy words. ✅ What actually works:
A few days before an election, Reform are backtracking on their promise that they will be able to turn away all refugees immediately at the border, and have instead decided that they will be put into concentration camps in areas that Reform don’t run. (Presumably Reform UK have failed to consider the cost or logistics […]
I’ve lived in the same part of the world in the south west of England for all of my life. I am rooted into this place, and its familiarity is comforting and has always sheltered me in tumultuous times. This little corner of Devon has always felt like a safe haven. And yet I am […]
Reform UK claims to speak up for downtrodden workers. Apparently that includes mega-rich crypto billionaires. Westminster is ripe with scandals these days, but The Guardian just uncovered a whopper. Cryptocurrency billionaire Christopher Harborne reportedly gave Farage an undisclosed £5m personal gift just before he announced he’d run for his seat in Clacton in 2024. That tax-free gift […]
Peter Thiel’s company now admits they want to govern for us. Will we let them? Peter Thiel’s Palantir drew a lot of attention last weekend for a tweet that reads like the monologue of a cartoon villain. In a long post, they endorse the arguments made in The Technological Republic, a 2025 book written by the company’s […]
As politicians put on a patriotic pantomime, a whole generation feels alienated from a country that no longer seems to work for them. St George’s day (April 23) generally marks the start of a peculiar season in British politics. Debates over English identity and patriotism are re-ignited and rehashed anew. Politicians play tug-of-war with a […]
Péter Magyar is inheriting the ruins of a democracy Orbán spent sixteen years hollowing out. Will Britain learn Hungary’s lesson the easy way or learn our own the hard way? Viktor Orbán conceded defeat on Sunday 12 April after sixteen years, after four consecutive supermajorities, after rewriting the constitution and redrawing the maps and packing […]
The scene: Exeter’s Hampton by Hilton hotel, which accommodates asylum seekers: a Saturday afternoon during the second half of 2025. There’s a small gathering of people nearby, some draped in Union Jacks, one waving the flag of the neo-fascist, anti-Muslim Britain First movement. A woman is bawling ‘Stop the Boats’, and a man in a […]
With the government of the United States currently in the care of a vulnerable adult, open to manipulation by those around him, we need to consider what happens when he is allowed to die. Throughout the current Trump presidency, we are seeing many of the signs displayed in Brezhnev’s final years as leader of the […]
The UK Labour government was elected with a perfectly reasonable diagnosis that the country was in urgent need of national renewal, and that this could not be delivered overnight. They nevertheless promised to start the job of delivering the change the country needs. We are now almost two years into the term of the government, […]
Kier Starmer, we are told, is no Winston Churchill – although, one may ask, why would he want to be one? Equally, Donald Trump is no Eisenhower. With Eisenhower as Supreme Allied Commander, the planning of Operation Torch, the invasion of North Africa, and of Overlord, the invasion of Europe, centred not just on getting […]
We are very happy to share information on two events that form part of a global grassroots rejection of authoritarian, kleptocratic and fascistic regimes. BRISTOL EVENT: What’s your beef? Stop Trump and defend democracy On Saturday, March 28, 2026, the grassroots group Americans for Action (‘AfA’) and Indivisible SW UK will jointly hold a peaceful […]
I don’t know about you, but I am sick of the political narrative being dominated by the far right and I am sick of this government allowing Reform UK to colour or even, seemingly, dictate policy. The Overton window has been pushed so far to the right by the client media and the (historically) main […]
Former Labour MP Tom Watson wrote a detailed analysis of the result of the February 26, 2026 by-election in Gorton and Denton, titled ‘A Party can lose and still learn nothing’, which really needed a reply. I agree with Watson that letting Andy Burnham stand would have risked Labour losing the by-election and then losing […]
Politically speaking, I am an uncomfortable hybrid, something between an ostrich and an idiot savant. I don’t watch the news for daily, hourly tidbits of frustration and terror. I don’t know each incident comprising the ongoing catastrophe that is Trump’s madness, but I know what’s going on. I don’t need endless examples: in fact, I’d […]
Dear Anna [Gelderd] The Gorton and Denton by-election results clearly show that the current Labour stance of trying to ape Reform is not wanted by the electorate. Labour needs to change course, start taxing the rich, massively invest in public services and bring previously privatised aspects of public utilities back into public ownership. We don’t […]
One of the most memorable American films I have seen, albeit many years ago, was Mississippi Burning (1988). Its producer was Frederick Zollo, and no, he is no relative of mine, so far as I know, but was married to Barbara Broccoli, famous for some of the Bond films. Mississippi Burning is based loosely on […]
Let me tell you what’s happening in Germany right now – and why the UK should be paying very close attention. In Germany: The AfD is under heavy surveillance. In May 2025, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency – the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV) – officially classified the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) as a “confirmed right-wing extremist […]
A pedestrianised small-town high street in the southwest of England on a Friday or Saturday morning. Each of our group begins our conversations in different ways, but mine usually go something like this. Me: Would you like to stop for a quick chat? Passer-by: What’s it about? Is this a political party? (Why is this […]
It’s no secret that the political right in Britain largely takes its cues from Donald Trump. They regurgitate MAGA’s culture-war talking points, recycle the same influencers and Roman-statue ‘X’ accounts, and – in Reform UK’s case – directly import disastrous schemes like Elon Musk’s DOGE. Trump says jump; they ask how high. So it’s not […]
Dear Editor, Trump’s every word, every garbled utterance is catapulted round the globe as though he were the oracle, he the saviour of the world. How did it come to be that this orange man-child can spew such hatred, instil such fear, and everyone stops to listen? I hope that we will be able to […]
My grandparents on my mother’s side were Geordies from the North East of England, born and bred, but on my father’s side were born in the Austro-Hungarian empire. My grandfather from Hungary and my grandmother from Austria, just off the Danube – Rembrandtstrasse – just a short walk from the University. Cultured and deeply integrated. […]
…and quicker than most of us thought it would. Trump wants Greenland. And he is prepared to blackmail any country that stands in his way. Of course, the claim that the USA needs Greenland for national security is nonsense. Under the 1951 Greenland Defence Treaty – which allowed the USA to have its base at […]
A journalist, without completing the checks, nor indeed any of the paperwork, was, to their astonishment, approved online for a job as an ICE agent anyway – intentionally demonstrating for their magazine that literally any unvetted person could be appointed. By implication also demonstrating any kind of racist, rapist, felon with a grudge or an […]
The Nazis relied on a set of post-hoc rationalisations after casual, sanctioned murders, that combined elements of legal manipulation, propaganda, and let’s call it, moral inversion. The aim wasn’t just to excuse violence, but to redefine it as lawful, necessary and virtuous. For the Night of the Long Knives, Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt argued that […]
On Tuesday Jan 6 2026, seven European leaders issued a joint statement on Greenland that reads like a masterclass in how democracies should respond to authoritarian overreach. Clear principles. Unified front. No hedging. But within hours, the White House responded by raising the prospect of military force to get their way. So much for bullies […]