The pressure on mental health services under late capitalism and how art therapy can help in the fight against the far-right: A conversation with activist and art psychotherapist Cat MacGregor

On a winter call, activist and art psychotherapist Cat MacGregor talks about building “third spaces” for collective care; from The Post Bar sessions that blur support group and art workshop, to a worker-led art therapy co-op trying to survive in London despite funding droughts, and an increasingly rigid mental health system.

Alastair: How did the art therapy open group on processing the rise of the far-right at The Post Bar go?

Cat: “Yeah, it was really interesting session. It’s different from ways I’ve worked previously, which was really engaging. We were doing one of these groups that blur the lines between an art therapy group or a support space. That’s something I’ve been thinking about in terms of the work I do, and how we navigate these different spaces and communities utilizing these third spaces and what comes up through that.

“We had a nice small group. It was a workable size. It was about 10 of us, in the end, it was quite fluid. It was great to have a mix of members, mix of backgrounds, mix of experiences, in terms of people who weren’t brought up in the UK. People who have immigrated here, and people from the UK.”

What themes surfaced in the room? 

“I’m thinking about how to hold the confidentiality of the space, but still speaking to the kind of theme we had. There was quite a bit of sharing of experiences of navigating these conversations around xenophobia and racism, and what comes up in terms of microaggressions, or experiences of being othered, particularly by those who are not from the UK, and thinking about how that’s managed, or engaged with, the frustrations around that and the specific way that hits with British culture, as with wellbeing this very polite or backhanded culture with meaning not being overtly said, or things being alluded to.”

You mentioned anti-fascist organising came up too. What did that look like?

“It was interesting. Some of the participants were talking about having those kind of explorative conversations with people who maybe are on the far-right, and they were talking about that experience of engaging them. We got to think about the different positions people are in within our anti-Fascist movement. About who gets those kind of privileges to safely have certain conversations. That was quite an important conversation as well. It was very focused on how do we engage and how do we bring empathy.”

Can you give an overview of your practice and how you got here? 

“I began training as an art psychotherapist about eight years ago, coming up to nine years ago. I came from an art background, went to art school and did the usual thing of, what on earth do I do with this? And where do I take this? I don’t know anyone in the arts. I don’t know how to navigate this, but I really wanted to be doing something that had social value.

“I was looking at a way of marrying those things, and for me, interestingly, the way it came together was I did some activism in the West Bank about 10 years ago, just before I moved to London, and I met a couple of art therapists there, who I ran some projects.”

What shaped your political approach to therapy as you trained?

“I got really lucky. I got to do one of my placements at a therapeutic community called Studio Upstairs, which is in Dalston, and it’s been going since the 30s. It was really born out of the anti-psychiatry movement, and thinking about mental ill health through a social lens, rather than the medical model. I found that to be a formative experience, and it really aligned with my politics and thinking.”

You’ve been outspoken about how the system pushes art therapy into rigid models. What did you see in public services?

“After I qualified, I found myself in these jobs in the public sector that were just utterly gruelling and really disempowering. A lot of art therapy work, particularly in CAMHS, which is the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services, where most of the jobs are, have been bastardised into becoming these CBT roles, and in some jobs they’re now making art therapists do mandatory CBT training.

“So they’re really trying to turn all of the mental health services into this homogenous block. It just was a way of working that I couldn’t really comply with for very long.”

And in the charity sector, did it feel different?

“So I went to work in the violence against women sector. I got to practice in a way that was much more aligned with myself as a practitioner, but also with my politics, but the scarcity of resources meant that there was so much of what I felt as exploitation, a lot of poor management and really very toxic work environments. I think a lot of people I know who work in charities experience the same things.”

You’ve worked with grassroots organisations too. What’s that work, and what are the barriers?

“It’s a community run charity started in response to the Grenfell Fire disaster, that’s like a very small charity. The problem we have there is a complete lack of funding and an ongoing, complicated dynamic with the local authority.”

Is that what pushed you toward founding a workers’ co-op?

“I guess all these experiences were what led to thinking about setting up a workers cooperative and trying to find a new way of doing things. To attempt to create a new way of working. I was looking for a way of working outside of exploitation, because I couldn’t find any models where that [exploitation] doesn’t become a part of it, where you’re not having to really sacrifice a big part of who you are as a practitioner and as a worker.”

Tell me more about TAT, what it is, and what you’ve built so far.

“The co-op that I set up with two other art therapists, we call it TAT, but it’s The Art Therapy co-op. We set that up a bit over four years ago now. We set up our own space where we’re doing a mixture of private practice work and voluntary work. It feels like we’re very much on a journey. Literally, I’ve had a meeting with someone for a space so I think it might be finally becoming a reality.”

You shifted the co-op’s model toward worker support. What does that look like in practice?

“So we started setting up these sessions called ‘not a workshop’ and that was just to have an afternoon of open art making and being together, and they’re open to anyone who works in the charity sector or public sector, education, care, paid or unpaid. We call it people supporting others in unsupportive environments.”

You also ran an alternative art therapy conference. What were you responding to?

“The British Association of art therapists have a conference, but it’s like £200 to £250 pounds to go for a day and sit in the Wellcome Collection. It's just so unattainable. So we decided to set up our own one. We did that this year. We had about 50 attendees, which was our max. We were sold out. We did an open call out, with lots of responses to facilitate different sessions using the unconference model. It was great and so empowering.”

Your work is explicitly political, and you argue that art keeps the “mystery” intact. Can you explain that?

“All things are political, and hold politics within them, whether we engage with it or notice it. It’s always there and we are unable to remove it.

“Thinking about the brain as some sort of computer system that you just need to enter the right codes into, which is a really unmagical and a kind of depressing way to be with the sheer complexity and mystery of what it is to be human.”

How does that link to the anti-far-right work you’re developing?

“My thinking about that group in particular came out from my own personal experience as an activist. The experience that I had on the anti-Unite the Kingdom demonstration. I was really feeling this experience of being at this tipping point where they [the far-right] were in control of London that day.

“It did ignite these responses in me about the experience of fear and needing a space to process the emotional impact of this. What happens to the emotional life of all of us as individuals who are having to carry this burden? There’s so much to despair about, and it can feel so relentless. How do we keep that fight going and that longevity that’s needed.”

Finally: what’s on the horizon for you and the co-op?

“Next year we will keep going with our unconference and developing that to be a bigger one. Also, hopefully finding a space to become our home. I’m also looking at setting up a workers’ assembly.

“The system doesn’t want us to exist, and it’s pushing us down and trying to morph us into something else. How do we create work outside of that system? Because we know the need is there. We are just going to have to do it ourselves. Community is the only way. Trying to build a secure base, because we need to get to the point of having a secure base so that we can steady ourselves and brace for the storm.”

Why does Trump get away with this unhinged foreign policy?

I have now tried to write this column several times. Each attempt has failed for the same reason: every time I open the document, Donald Trump has done something new, deranged and geopolitically flammable, forcing me to scroll back to the top and insert another bullet point labelled “You will not believe this but…” 

So, let’s start, again, at the top: Donald Trump wants Greenland.

Greenland. The world’s largest island, a NATO member via Denmark, and not, as far as anyone can tell, a branch of Monopoly where you can just slap down a suitcase of cash and yell “mine”. Trump wants it in the same way a toddler wants someone else’s toy: loudly, vaguely, and with the full expectation that an adult will eventually hand it over to stop the screaming.

Ill-advised nationalist posturing

This is madness. Not “controversial policy choice” madness. Not even “ill-advised nationalist posturing” madness. This is ‘if America invaded Greenland, NATO would be over’ madness. You cannot have a military alliance whose central premise is collective defence, while its biggest member casually eyes up another member’s territory like it’s browsing Rightmove.

Yet here we are, watching this unfold with the strange passivity normally reserved for a man shouting at pigeons.

What’s particularly impressive is how neatly this inverts about a decade of British political hysteria. We were told, endlessly, that the real threat to NATO was the left. Jeremy Corbyn not liking nuclear weapons was apparently one hummus short of global catastrophe. There were serious people, with serious faces, warning that a handful of blue-haired vegans in Haringey might accidentally dismantle the post-war security order between oat lattes.

Protecting NATO and national security

Crushing the left, we were assured, was essential for national security.

Fast-forward, and the person openly threatening NATO is a right-wing nationalist billionaire with the impulse control of a wasp trapped in a Coke can. And suddenly no one is willing to say, out loud, that he absolutely cannot be allowed to do this.

What if he asks for Scotland next? Do we give him Edinburgh Castle and a shortbread tin as a souvenir? Is there a punch card system? Buy one autonomous territory, get one free?

Trump’s peace board

Then there’s Trump’s new “peace board”, a concept already doing heavy lifting for the word peace. It features Vladimir Putin, Tony Blair, and a noticeable absence of anyone Palestinian. Which is less “balanced diplomatic initiative” and more “group chat that should never exist”. It’s like assembling a fire safety panel and filling it exclusively with people holding matches.

This is the same Trump who recently insulted NATO troops who died fighting in America’s war in Afghanistan. Actual dead soldiers. The kind we’re usually told must be treated with reverence bordering on the theological. Somehow, this too barely registers.

Why does Trump get away with it?

This is the bit I genuinely don’t understand: why does he get away with it?

Ripping up international agreements. Mocking allied troops. Threatening the territorial integrity of allies. This is exactly what we were all supposed to be shitting bricks over Jeremy Corbyn doing, except Corbyn never did any of it. He mostly wanted to talk about the NHS and not killing people.

Back then, there was talk of NATO as a fragile thing, constantly on the brink, vulnerable to being undermined by anyone insufficiently enthusiastic about Trident. This threat was treated as so extreme it had to be stamped out from every angle of public life.

The biggest threat to global stability

Now the biggest threat to global stability is a man everyone knows is unhinged, and the response from liberals is a kind of strained politeness, as if they’re worried he’ll leave a bad review.

There’s chatter about NATO being a paper tiger. But it’s not Putin exposing that. It’s not even Trump, really. It’s liberals, particularly American liberals, who refuse to stand up to him. Who won’t shout “this is insane” at the volume required.

Why won’t anyone shout about common sense? About the boring but vital system that has, for all its flaws, created relative peace and stability since the Second World War?

Why is no one yelling from the rafters?

Why is no one yelling from the rafters about how appalling all of this is?

Maybe it’s because might makes right. Because Trump can write his own cheque. Because power, once again, excuses behaviour that would have triggered a global moral panic if it came from the left.

Do centrists and liberals actually want to live in a world where might makes right? I don’t think they do. But if they don’t, they’re going to need to locate their spines and stop blaming someone in a craft beer bar in Walthamstow for undermining NATO.

The real threat

The people undermining NATO aren’t the Greens. They aren’t the left. They’re the ones politely nodding while Trump takes a wrecking ball to the post-war order.

Do we really want a world where strength is all that matters?

If not, why are we all letting him get away with it?

It’s a new year so here are some things that give me hope right now

It’s January, which is the month traditionally reserved for regrets, new starts and staring into the political abyss while whispering, was it always this stupid? I’ve been doing a little start-of-the-year reckoning, and frankly the vibes for the left have not been immaculate. 

Last year we had Donald Trump’s inauguration surrounded by billionaires, Nigel Farage popping up in the polls like mould in a student bathroom, Keir Starmer purging socialists from Labour with the quiet efficiency of a middle manager deleting an incriminating email chain, and the planet continuing to warm like it’s trying to prove a point. The rich, meanwhile, are richer than ever, floating gently above the rest of us in a cloud of asset growth and moral vacancy.

So yes: it’s been a rough year if you believe society should be fair, habitable, and not run exclusively for hedge funds. Which is exactly why I’ve decided, against all instincts and medical advice, to talk about hope, because, annoyingly, it keeps popping up.

Zohran Mamdani standing up for socialism in New York

Take New York. Capital of global finance, spiritual home of the banker bonus, city so allergic to socialism it is trying as hard as possible to make renting completely unaffordable.

Yet: Zohran Mamdani, an actual socialist, is now mayor. Not a “we must be realistic” centrist who flinches every time Trump clears his throat, but someone who calls Trump what he is instead of nervously asking focus groups how loudly they’re allowed to disagree with fascism.

Mamdani didn’t win by pretending he could only manage decline more politely. He won by offering things, housing, dignity, public services, and saying them out loud without apologising. Which turns out not to be electoral cyanide after all. Who knew? Certainly not the Democratic establishment, currently hiding behind the sofa muttering about electability.

Your Party pushing back against Reform

Over here, Britain has given us Your Party, Jeremy Corbyn’s latest attempt to prove that socialism is harder to kill than Labour HQ thinks. Thousands of people joined. Thousands. That’s not nothing. It suggests that despite years of being told socialism is over, finished, dead, buried, and frankly a bit embarrassing, there is still a large chunk of the country quietly thinking: no actually, this system is broken.

Yes, the party itself is currently descending into a sort of endearing chaos: infighting, arguments, too much social media discourse, but there is something heartening about grassroots members having an actual say. Democracy: messy, loud, occasionally farcical, but still preferable to being managed into silence.

Crucially, there are people pushing back, properly, against Reform’s migration panic and the ongoing attempt to turn net zero into a culture-war swear word. Making the case that stopping climate catastrophe is, in fact, good, and that migrants are not the final boss of British decline.

First Past the Post woes

Of course, the electoral maths remains cursed. We learned this in 2017: you can rack up votes in London like loyalty points and still end up under-represented, because First Past the Post kicks insurgent movements in the head. Starmer’s vote may be uninspiring, but it’s devastatingly efficient. New parties? Not so much.

It’s a rubbish system, everyone agrees, but it is the system we’re stuck with for now. Which is why maybe the best outcome isn’t immediate victory, but pressure. Noise. A constant thorn in Labour’s side from the left. After all, this tactic worked beautifully for Farage, who has spent a decade shouting from the sidelines until the Conservatives accidentally absorbed his entire vibe.

Zack Polanski says that things could actually be better

Then there’s Zack Polanski and the Greens. Honestly? This is where my hope spikes. A Green leader who understands that politics now lives on social media, who actually talks to people online instead of treating video as a something only for TikTok brain mush addled Zoomers. Sign-ups are up. The message is clear. Eco-socialism. Not just everything is doomed, but things could actually be better.

Targeting London’s local elections next year feels smart. Tangible. Achievable. Hope with a postcode.

I’ve had hope before. I’ve watched it get dashed against the rocks of reality like a reusable coffee cup thrown at an armoured riot cop, but it still matters that hope exists at all. Especially now.

Hope against the odds

All of these movements, Mamdani, Corbyn, Polanski, are growing for the same reason. They challenge the status quo. They reject the dead-eyed politics of “this is just how things are.” Labour and the Democrats keep offering managed stagnation. The far right offers change, just violently worse.

If people are desperate for change, and they are, then offering change that actually improves lives might be a decent strategy. Radical thought, I know.

That’s why, against all odds, I have hope. Not because things are good, but because enough people are finally saying they don’t have to stay this bad.

2025: The year of “stability”

2025 has been the first year since 2010 that has had a British government with a large stable majority and what do we have to show for it? Not much, to be brutally honest. The centre-left/centrists (delete depending on how charitable you are feeling) are back in charge for the first time in 15 years and things feel so shitty that Weetabix are running adverts themed around our national decline and a canal just gave up on life and collapsed.

In 2024, Tom McTague wrote in UnHerd, that Keir Starmer’s serious-minded Labour will now ditch all that student politics virtue signalling of the Jeremy Corbyn era and get on with helping people Well, it’s over a year later and I can’t find any evidence of Starmer’s Labour helping anyone despite a huge majority, support from his parliamentary colleagues and an opposition in disarray.

Yes, there are things that Starmer has nominally improved that I’m sure that the Tories would have made worse had they been in power (such as a new animal welfare bill that does go some way to recognising the care we owe other living creatures) but these are largely technical pieces of legislation making changes at the margins. The radical soft-left golden age, promised by the likes of Andrew Marr when Starmer was in opposition, has failed to materialise.

Threatening to nationalise the nation’s nans

Labour seems unwilling to spend money or stick their neck out for anything, which is stupid because everything is getting worse and the shallowness of Starmer’s vote means that his huge majority will evaporate faster than a puddle in one of those super-hot summers we are now having.

Here is where I do have to be a bit charitable to Labour. The economic conditions have been less than ideal, growth is slow, stagnation is the order of the day, and Donald Trump is ripping up the global trade order, while the right-wing press treat every Starmer decision as if he had dressed up as Stalin and threatened to nationalise the nation’s nans.

Still, no one said taking over the country in a crisis would be easy and if the problems of the nation could be fixed by tinkering around the edges in a way that upset no one then Rishi Sunak would have done it. Radicalism is called for if we’re going to reach the halcyon heights of growing real wages for most people. At least Tony Blair did serious work in power, from the minimum wage to education reforms to more money for the NHS.

Unforced errors and growth targets

Starmer’s Labour are more interested in making unforced errors, such as Deputy Prime Minister Rayner having to resign over a tax arrangement that had a bad whiff. This would have been brushed off had it been a Tory politician, and Labour play politics on hard mode (as opposed to insane mode for socialists), but surely these competent experienced career politicians knew that anything that looked even remotely like tax fiddling was going to explode in their face? Still Rayner did it anyway. Grown-ups back in charge my arse.

Aside from that, Labour are obsessed with a GDP growth target that is as outmoded as adopting Harold Wilson’s industrial strategy. Even if Labour can squeeze some growth out of the economy, then it won’t go towards helping anyone as the benefits will be gobbled up by the uber-rich who are already doing alright and won’t be voting Labour any time soon. Time for Labour to wise up about the bold steps needed to make things better for average voters.

Then again, all they seem interested in are welfare cuts, spending more on the military (as usual, there is always money for this but never for child welfare, social care or the NHS) and making tough but empty sound bites. Now Labour are in the undignified position of raising taxes (which they said they wouldn’t) to raise some money to actually do something. All of this pain could have been avoided if they had actually committed to doing something in the first place.

The radical position of making things better for people

Whilst Labour continues to be about as inspiring and proactive as an aging labrador napping by an open wood fire, the Greens have stolen a march in the polls with the radical position of making things better for people. Zack Polanski is getting attention in both new and traditional media with effective messaging and his charming personality. The messaging being “things would be better if we were just a bit nicer to each other” with an added side of “tax the rich” and “trans people aren’t monsters and deserve rights”.

Unsurprisingly, this sort of thing has gone well in Labour strong holds like London and Bristol but it is actually doing well across the board, showing that people can be inspired by a positive message and that voters outside the M25 aren’t all foaming at the mouth to vote for a politician who wants to use The Royal Navy to stop the small boats. Turns out, quelle surprise, that voters actually like hope and do feel that the rich should make more of an effort to improve society. We’re not all as selfish and cynical as centrist politicians would have us think.

On the downside, the far-right is surging in Britain with Nigel Farage’s Reform UK topping the polls. Currently, if there were a general election next Thursday then Farage would be PM with a large majority, but as the election is most likely in 2029 this is all theoretical and as likely to collapse on contact with reality as my chances of meeting Florence Pugh and her saying she likes my shoes.

The dangers of the far-right

Although, I shouldn’t be flippant about the degree to which the far right is on the march and how scared my LGBTQ+ and POC friends are. Hell, I’m scared that writing this blog and having a Tate membership will land me in one of Reform's re-education camps, and I’m as white as the driven snow. It is alarming how fast the far-right’s strongly anti-immigration, anti-woke, anti-trans, anti-mainstream political agenda has gained ground, largely as it has been laundered by the mainstream media into an acceptable position, whereas most of what Farage says now would have gotten you thrown out of Conservative Soc when I was at uni.

There are many things about politics and the future that scare me, but some of my most vivid nightmares involve Farage and his knuckle dragging cronies getting their hands on actual power, and centrist politicians and media commentators shrugging and saying “that’s just how things go” while hoping that they are the last people whose rights get trampled over. Let me make this clear: they are coming for you and your home and your friends, so we have to stop them.

Appealing to Graham

This warning will largely fall on deaf ears as the centrists are too busy hating on Muslims and trans people, thus fuelling the far-right’s support, so that they can win the vote of some mythical person called Graham from Workington who is apparently both filled with hatred and considering voting Labour.

As a craft beer drinking metropolitan liberal I have never met Graham and my views on patriotism are apparently toxic to him, but supposedly he does exist and all mainstream politics must be geared towards him no matter how much it leads to non-binary people being scared to go into the bathroom at Pizza Express and anyone with a vague tan getting yelled at in the streets about grooming gangs.

War and climate change

Speaking of things getting worse in the streets, the Labour government is engaging in a draconian clamp down on the right to protest, especially for climate protesters and supporters of Palestine. In regards to the latter, there are currently four Palestine Action members on hunger strike for being imprisoned without charge. I didn’t expect “centre left government has political prisoners” to be on the 2025 bingo card, but here we are.

The war in Gaza rumbles on with no end to the carnage in sight. The UN’s pleas that it really does look like Israel is doing genocide and certainly breaking all the standards for war that we have set, is getting increasingly desperate but still the moderate governments of Britain, France and Germany are able to ignore them. Much like the UN’s warnings on climate change, we are discovering just how ineffective standing on a chair and shouting “stop this horrendous insanity” is when it’s more politically convenient for people to pretend that there isn’t a problem. All I can say is that I really do hope that there is some peace for Gazans in 2026. That seems about all we can hope for.

Speaking of peace, the war in Ukraine has come to a gritty stalemate as human life continues to be fed into the meat grinder for way longer than anyone thought could be morally or realistically sustainable. Again, it seems that it’s impossible to get the powerful people of the world to stop being awful even when it’s in their best interests. I look forward to the historians and psychologists of the future writing a new version of “The banality of evil” explaining all this, if we don’t die in a nuclear war first.

Fear and hope in American politics

Of course, Trump is doing his part to make the histories of the 2020s more depressing reading. Everyone seems to have stopped paying attention to how corrupt, incompetent and unpleasant he is, which is only allowing him to get away with it. Meanwhile, the Republicans continue to indulge his every insane whim out of fear of his supporters, and the Democrats scratch their heads while trying to figure a way out of this that doesn’t involve taking any kind of risk.

At least Zohran Mamdani gave me some hope this year, by again standing on the radical “let’s actually do something to make things better” platform and winning, whilst also criticising Trump. Again, a less dystopian vision of the future is appealing to voters. Or at least a utopia for all rather than a utopia for a certain type of angry white man, which is a dystopia for LGBTQ+ people and POC.

Whilst America leads the way in being awful, someone actually decided to pick up a gun and shut up Charlie Kirk, one of the cold-hearted people who woke up every day and thought “how can I be awful to trans people on social media to get more attention.” As I said before, I don’t think we should do politics with guns but I have little sympathy for someone who said that school shootings are the price of having guns and then got shot in a school. He also said that empathy is weakness, so I am following his example and not being empathic for him or his friends and family.

One nation under tech companies

At the same time America continues to be “one nation under tech companies.” As the unstoppable march of tech companies to colonise and commercialise every aspect of life continues. Now it’s imagination, creative expression and the future with a host of AI products that are accelerating climate change and wiping out jobs faster than productivity YouTubers can create content of how you stay ahead of the rising AI tide.

In the perfect metaphor for modern America, the tech billionaires were in the rotunda when Trump was being inaugurated, and his supporters were left freezing in the January cold. If you voted for Trump to stick it to the Californians, then I have some bad news about where your new masters’ companies have their headquarters.

Trump may be Mussolini crossed with a reality TV show muppet, but it's the tech giants that have their hand up his arse making the mouth move and all everyone else is doing is handing them more power. While we’re here, please follow me on TikTok or Red Note, at least that’s giving power to China not Mark Zuckerberg.

Elections in 2026

I could write something about the climate here but you already know what I am going to say. It’s bad. It’s getting worse. No one is doing anything about it. This is all really dumb and shortsighted, I think as I throw all the Christmas craft beer cans into the recycling.

Well, I joined the Green Party this year and they might do well in the London council elections next year. Hopefully, that will make Labour pay attention, but I fully expect to be labelled an extremist and have to sit through vox pop shit in the middle of the day (when everyone other than Boomers are at work) going on about how all this Green voting is actually madness and we all have a god given right to drive a car to the shop around the corner 16 times a day to buy a huge beef steak, and to say anything otherwise is communism.

In 2026 we have US mid-terms, which will be interesting in a “may you all live in interesting times sort of way” as well as Scottish Parliament and Senedd elections, a serious test for Starmer, as well as elections in Denmark (the model for a left-wing party saying “tax the rich and kick out the refugees” - let’s see if that stops the far-right or not) and Israel.

Hope for the future

I won’t finish with saying something dark and cynical (too easy) so I will say that this year I got involved in a local co-op of artists and activists, and never have I met a group of people who work so tirelessly to make the world a better place. These are ordinary people, with jobs and families and all the rest (not rich nepo-babies on a poverty safari) who do everything from using surplus food to create a plant based kitchen that gives free meals to the needy, to craft sessions for families in school holidays, to instructions for small charities on the best ways to raise funds via grants, whilst also hosting informative talks on everything from modern trade unions to queer ecology.

There are people working hard to make the world a better place, despite being frequently demonised by the mainstream media for our views on Gaza or dismissed as hippies, communist or just plain mad, but to be honest we don’t care.

If you’re too cynical to get involved in the solutions to our problems, then you deserve to wake up to Fuhrer Farage one day. I know where I will be. It will be in the local community centre trying to raise funds for a space for underprivileged kids to hang out. If you think that’s communism then tattoo a hammer and sickle on my arm, and I will see you in the front line of the war against the Facebook killbots.

Better content moderation for better discourse: A conversation with Madhuri Rahman of WeLivedIt.Ai

Online discourse has been soured by extremism and hate speech. This is especially the case for marginalised people who experience more abuse online and whose content gets moderated more severely. 

Surely there is a way to improve how we debate online? Maybe AI and large language models could be useful in detecting hate speech? Especially if the communities most at risk from toxic online content were able to use their lived experience to help train the AI models.

That’s what WeLivedIt.Ai aims to do, to use marginalised peoples’ lived experience to improve content moderation. I chatted to Madhuri Rahman, co-founder of WeLivedIt.Ai, to talk about their work, big tech, the current ‘one size fits all’ approach to moderation and The Online Safety Act 2023.

Alastair: What prompted the creation of WeLivedIt.ai, and what gap in moderation and online safety were you aiming to fill?

Madhuri: “My co-founder and I met in the token engineering space. We were looking at voting mechanisms and that led us to think about lived experience in technology development in general. Hate speech and online toxicity being one of those crucial areas within which having lived experience of the problem gives you a unique perspective in designing a solution, because if you've experienced certain marginalisation then you're more likely to receive a backlash and hate in a particular area, and you're more likely to recognise it when it's more subtle. That is what led us to then look at solutions that are AI-driven.”

What distinguishes WeLivedIt.ai from the existing moderation tools platforms already use?

“At the moment, one size fits all moderation only really benefits big tech platforms, and then with servers like Discord, there's a lot of human moderation going on.

“The first thing [WeLivedIt.ai offers] is entering your context to tailor the search. The second thing is being able to collaboratively define what toxicity looks like in your space by voting on real data examples, and then seeing what the consensus has been on different types of comments and speech. The third thing is using [this data] to train the model. What we also want to do then is to have the model training be as transparent as possible.

“What we're trying to do, which is different, is to make it all friendly for the individual user, because all content moderation tools out there now are like: ‘Okay, we'll do more context aware moderation,’ but they're still consultancy firms [where] you have to go through an individual who asks your needs, and the data already comes labelled. So, [there are] biases that exist in these big tech models. We're working towards moving away from that once a community puts in the work to labelling the training data that is filtered out from their online space. So, it's not random data. It's their lived experience, which is why we called it WeLivedIt.ai because we're trying to connect lived experience to this development of a big tech solution that could help lots of people.”

How does the lived experience of marginalised people online inform the tool?

“We’re trying to focus on people that experience hate speech directly to start with. So, you've got death threats, violence, demonising and dehumanising language, like negative character; rhetoric that just calls people crazy, for example, or aggressive. These are the different intensity levels, and we're starting with that first one, death threats, the kind of hate speech that's about online safety.

“This is hate speech identification. We're not stopping anyone from posting anything or saying anything, but the person that has lived experience of the problem has a choice as to whether or not they want to see that.

“Then you've got things like: “make me a sandwich.” Which of these categories would this fit into? The connotations around that kind of thing, these large language models in general won't pick up, because that's really nuanced, it's a trending piece of hate speech, but if you're aware of Andrew Tate and the misogynist rhetoric that is going around online, then you can submit that [and] the community can vote on whether they want that there or not.”

How are you making sure you are getting a broad representation of lived experience of all different areas of hate speech?

“That's an ongoing challenge, but our approach differs significantly from existing moderation tools. We're not trying to create one-size-fits-all solutions, which inevitably struggle to represent everyone. That means we don't face the same pressure to build a single, universal dataset that works everywhere. The question isn't 'have you represented everyone perfectly?' - that's impossible. The question is: 'When a collective representing a marginalised community joins your platform, can they teach the system about their toxicity patterns better than they could teach Twitter or Meta?’

“We think yes, because:

• They control the configuration directly

• They provide examples from their lived experience

• They can correct the AI when it's wrong

• They're not competing with billions of other users for the platform's attention

“We're also realistic: This requires communities to have the capacity to onboard, configure, and maintain their models. That's a significant ask, especially for already-marginalised groups. That's why it's important for us to ensure that we acknowledge and centre mental wellbeing and digital agency in the work we're doing. People aren't just involved to take on the labour of fixing a system that works against them. They're accessing community and people-power to reclaim online spaces from the toxic minority.

“We're trying to build a system where representation can happen bottom-up rather than top-down. We'd rather launch with transparency about limitations and improve through partnership with communities than claim we've solved a problem we haven't.”

Minority content is often over-moderated. How do you deal with that challenge?

“There's a lot of research which still shows that marginalised communities get over moderated, which is crazy because they're the ones that are experiencing a lot more of the online toxicity, but because, for example, LGBT content is more likely to be historically seen as sexual and adult, there's been a lot of over purging of that content online.

“We're starting at the safety level, but when I talk to a lot of people and we talk about hate speech, they will then talk about politicians [and] hate speech in terms of divisive speech in the way people talk about others, like specific identities or communities. It's similar rhetoric when a new kind of identity becomes the target for the divide and rule political strategy that uses the same kind of language. It's always ‘they're inherently violent’ ‘they're unnatural’ ‘they are a danger to children, to women’. All the same kinds of narratives come out and that is something that I'm exploring. What [we’re doing] right now is we're looking at filtering out pure hate to keep people safe.”

Are you seeing new forms of hate speech with generative AI, such as deepfakes or bots?

“We haven’t focused on that yet, but I am having a call with the LGBT Foundation because they recently ran a national campaign called ‘This is what a woman looks like’ and it was a trans positive campaign, and it ended up being derailed. They [the derailers] used certain pictures that were nasty and then were posting them to disrupt the campaign entirely. It was definitely bots. 

“I want to talk to them and understand what specific patterns they saw during the campaign, and what they did, how they responded to it, and whether that's something that content moderation can do more to catch and deal with.

“In fact, I think it would be easier if you know what your campaign is and what you're going to post, having the context, being able to engage in data training for the model earlier, would be easier. It's just about whether the organization wants to engage in doing it or not.

“That's definitely a big, I was going to say, upcoming risk factor, but it's already really quite nasty for some of the deep fake videos that's coming out. It's something that content moderation definitely should be flagging.”

The UK’s Online Safety Act has just come into effect. How do you see regulation shaping your work?

“Tech companies will now have to assess the risk their platforms pose of disseminating the kind of racist misinformation that fuelled last year’s summer riots. The fact that there is something that now says that tech companies have to do that is good, it just doesn't really solve the issue that these content moderation tools don't work.”

Looking ahead, what’s your vision for the future of WeLivedIt.ai?

“At the moment we're working with journalists, but we want to expand to people who are visible online. That is because people who historically have faced a lot of toxicity are really good at identifying it.

“[We’re] also trying to capture more research and data around what the problem of online toxicity looks like, but also how we can improve the way AI is trained to solve that problem as well. We want to do a lot more.

“With the Online Safety Act, by 2027 the part of it that will come into effect is the part where platforms will have to report on disinformation. At the moment, the part that's come into effect is in relation to child safety, but in 2027 they'll be reporting on the risk that their platforms pose in disseminating misinformation. So, we would like to be able to contribute to that conversation, whilst also helping people that have lived experience of the problem.”

“Also, we will lay data to train the model on catching [hate speech] better. That's something that then we can also work with platforms and organizations, so they can see what the level of misogyny is on their platform by accessing that data. We want to create an ecosystem and try and contribute to improving regulation. It's a whole new minefield anyway, with tech regulation, but what would be the ideal is completely shifting the way tech platforms are regulated while keeping people safe online.”

You can find out more about WeLivedIt.ai by visiting their website or following them on LinkedIn to keep up to date with their mission to protect marginalised communities from hate speech online.

Farage’s new immigration plan is cruelty as a governing principle

Ah, Nigel Farage is back, like athlete’s foot for the body politic. Just when you thought we’d scraped him off the heel of national life, he reappears to announce that, if elected, he’ll remove the right to remain from migrants, because nothing says “taking back control” like taking away the basic human rights of people who already live, work, and pay taxes here.

It’s not even policy, really. It’s performative sadism with a filing fee. Imagine the red tape. Entire new departments of grim bureaucrats hired to unpick paperwork, deport breadwinners, and send “Sorry, you no longer exist” letters to NHS nurses.

It would cost billions, cause chaos, and leave migrants in constant fear that tomorrow might be the day they’re told to pack up their lives and go. Which, incidentally, is already happening, the fear bit, not the efficient paperwork bit. Britain hasn’t done efficiency since about 2010. I guess the fear is the point of it all.

 Migrants not ex-pats

It’s the Donald Trump playbook, of course: create a crisis, hurt vulnerable people, call it strength. Tough on the people who aren’t British. Bind a flailing nation together by hating the guy who delivers your Deliveroo. The irony is, Farage’s own French girlfriend will probably be exempt, white migrants, after all, are always “expats.”

At its core, this isn’t policy. It’s philosophy, the kind that belongs in the school of “might makes right.” The powerful can do what they like to the powerless, and if you object, you’re a woke snowflake who hates the flag. It’s the worldview of the pub bore who thinks “bullying” is just another word for “leadership”. Thanks to years of the mainstream press presenting Farage as a lovable rogue rather than the political equivalent of a wasp in your pint, this outlook has gone national.

Double standards

Of course, the press has thoroughly laundered Farage’s far-right views into common sense. Remember when Simon Jenkins called Farage’s opinions on Russia “not outlandish”? Or when The Spectator published a soft-focus ode to his “red-blooded romantic charm”? A certain section of society finds Farage endlessly appealing, partly because he won’t turn on them until it’s far too late, partly because they hate the people he hates, and partly because they like the idea that their rage hardon has come to life and is polling well to be the next Prime Minister.

Imagine a journalist writing something like the above about Jeremy Corbyn or Zack Polanski’s love life. There’d be rolling news coverage, three emergency COBRA meetings, and Piers Morgan live-tweeting his aneurysm. Or it would simply never get published.

Yet here we are, with Farage, the eternal pub bellend of British politics, shaping the national agenda. He’s been normalised by columnists who mistake cruelty for leadership and “plain speaking” for being prejudiced. His brand of politics has always been about punching down and calling it patriotism.

A playground ruled by bullies

Keir Starmer, bless him, did call Reform’s plan “racist and immoral”, which it absolutely is, but then Labour goes and tweets about how many people they’re deporting, hoping that cruelty is a vote winner in Nuneaton. You can’t out-tough Farage on immigration. You can only dignify his game by playing it. This is both morally and tactically the wrong call from Labour.

If you think this ends with migrants, think again. Authoritarianism never does. Today it’s your neighbour from Poland. Tomorrow it’s your teacher, your nurse, your journalist, or you, when you post something Nigel doesn’t like. The day after that its newspapers printing the government line and universities being shut down. Just look at Hungary.

Farage’s Britain isn’t a country. It’s a playground ruled by bullies, where decency is weakness and empathy is for losers. The only thing more terrifying than that vision is how many people seem ready to cheer it on.

Dr. Strangelove goes to Tehran: The hottest new war nobody ordered

You’d be forgiven for thinking the last 20 years didn’t happen. That the Iraq War wasn’t a billion-dollar choose-your-own-disaster. That hundreds of thousands didn’t die. That we didn’t smear dissenters as Ba’athist fanboys before the whole thing exploded into a yeas-long reminder that maybe, just maybe, shock and awe is a terrible way to do diplomacy.

Yet here we are again. Middle East on fire? Check. Benjamin Netanyahu cracking on like the villain of a Bond film no one asked for? Check. Hawkish consensus being manufactured faster than you can say “weapons of mass destruction that may or may not exist in a theoretical future in a country we’re not currently at war with”? Check.

The West, apparently suffering from a terminal case of “just one more war, I swear it’ll be different this time,” is now flirting with the idea of war with Iran. A country with a population of 88 million and a military that doesn’t need to be bribed to show up.

Feeling extremely 2003

It’s all feeling extremely 2003, except this time we’ve replaced the PowerPoint slides with grim, unsourced Twitter threads and the sense of unease is accompanied by the chilling knowledge that Donald Trump, that great statesman, has reportedly bombed nuclear sites in Iran like a man trying to fast-track the Book of Revelation for a live-action reboot.

Naturally, opposition voices are already being handily framed as stooges of Tehran. “Why do you support the mullahs?” people ask, as if the only possible reason you might not want to flatten another sovereign nation is because you personally long to be Ayatollah Khamenei’s little spoon.

Owen Jones made a fair point this week: there’s been a lot of talk about Israel’s security, but not nearly enough about the Palestinians still being airstriked into dust. He neglected to mention Hezbollah, true, and yes, Iran has its tentacles in the chaos of the region, but let’s be clear: that doesn’t make pre-emptive war any less catastrophically stupid.

Lobbing missiles at nuclear infrastructure

Do I want Iran to have nukes? No. Of course not. I don’t want anyone to have them. Am I meant to pretend Israel doesn’t already have them? That the Netanyahu government, seemingly on a speedrun to global oblivion, isn’t doing its level best to drag the world into a three-front war to save his own skin.

Centrists are starting to warm up their “it’s complicated” takes. Any day now, I fully expect a breathless Atlantic cover story titled “Why Bombing Iran is the Only Way to Save Peace”. Maybe there’ll be a podcast. Maybe Tony Blair will emerge from whatever billionaire’s dungeon he’s been hiding in to gently suggest that a war might be a “difficult but necessary intervention.”

Here’s the one big difference between now and Iraq: Iran won’t be the pushover Iraq was. Iran is larger, more militarised, more unified by external threats. Invading Iran would make Iraq look like a minor bar brawl. Trump is already lobbing missiles at nuclear infrastructure without any regard for what happens next.

The lesson we never seem to learn

The lesson of Iraq, which we never seem to learn, is that pre-emptive war is a crime. It’s a crime when Russia does it. It’s a crime when we do it. It’s a crime when Israel does it. The only thing we’re pre-empting here is reason; and maybe survival.

So let’s all take a deep breath. A war with Iran isn’t foreign policy. It’s a disaster waiting to happen.

Donald Trump picture taken by Gage Skidmore and used under creative commons.

The right finally discovers that life sucks for Millennials, but guess who they still blame

Well, well, well, if it isn’t The Right suddenly noticing that millennials aren’t all avocado-stuffed snowflakes swanning about in oat flat whites and moral certainties. According to The Critic – a publication so right-wing it makes Jacob Rees-Mogg look like a performance artist in drag – young people are struggling. Struggling, I tell you. Nicolas, 30 ans, is in a flatshare. Drinking tepid £7 IPAs. Paying taxes and not seeing the benefit. Who could have caused such a tragedy?

In a piece that reads like Domminic Cummings doing stand-up at a Clerkenwell supper club, The Critic introduces us to poor Nick, a white-collar London professional earning just enough to pay for everyone else’s lifestyles.

This includes Karim, the Somali drug-dealing rapper (yes, really, they went there, with the heavily racially coded name and all); Simon and Linda, those parasitic pensioners with triple-locked cruises and four BTLs in Tooting; and, naturally, the Great British Aid Budget, which apparently is single-handedly hoovering up Nick’s salary and funnelling it to interpretive dance workshops in Mogadishu.

Empathy for millennials

Now, let’s be fair: the piece does at least acknowledge that Nick’s woes are not the result of laziness, fecklessness, or spending too much time making beaded bracelets in Ibiza. No, the article actually suggests he’s being shafted. Not by bad decisions or excessive brunch, but by a rigged social contract that’s got him trapped between spiralling rent, student loan repayments, and high marginal taxes.

This, from The Critic! A magazine that usually reacts to empathy for millennials like Dracula to garlic bread.

This being The Critic, once the violin solo ends, the real agenda kicks in. The villains of the piece aren’t just Simon and Linda, whose decade-long property binge now entitles them to life off the wages of others whilst calling them lazy. No – the real enemy is Karim, who smokes weed, sends money to Somalia, and – worst of all – has not read Jordan Peterson.

Is a shift coming?

It’s all very neat. The narrative, not unlike the inside of Simon and Linda’s rental property, is carefully staged: boomers are gently chided, but never truly blamed. Immigrants, benefit claimants and the international development budget are trotted out as easy scapegoats. You know, the usual suspects. It’s less Rawlsian philosophy and more a Daily Mail comments section pretending to be a hard look at the problems facing young people.

Still, this sort of article is interesting, not because it’s right (it isn’t right about aid and benefits being the source of Nick’s problems, although it has some surprisingly valid points about buy to let landlords), but because it shows something is shifting.

The right is waking up to the fact that their future electoral prospects die with the next hip replacement. They’re starting to realise they’ve spent a decade alienating the very generations who, one day, will hold the balance of power.

Who is to blame?

That should be ringing alarm bells over at Labour HQ. Assuming anyone can hear them over the sound of Keir Starmer earnestly repeating “economic stability” and “tough choices” into a mirror.

While the left dithers, the right is laying the groundwork for a new, seductive narrative: Yes, young person, you are screwed, but don’t worry, we know exactly who to blame. Immigrants. Wokery. Overseas aid. Never, ever Simon and Linda’s untaxed housing empire.

It’s emotionally satisfying, narratively clean, and politically potent. In other words, it’s the Reform Party’s raison d’être.

The left’s natural ally

Meanwhile, Labour continues to court the ghost of Peter Mandelson’s swing voter: a mythical 68-year-old homeowner in Nuneaton who’s worried about Labour hiking his taxes and still undecided on Brexit. In doing so, they’re leaving behind people like Nick or Maddy (someone I have written about before). Maddy is young, educated, working hard in the capital, and still one bad paycheque away from having to move back in with her parents in Market Harborough.

Maddy isn’t on benefits. She isn’t a landlord. She’s not asking for much. But her rent is 65% of her salary, her pension is a joke, and her Hinge date last week ended with a £58 tab and the realisation she’ll never afford a one-bed flat.

She’s the left’s natural ally, socially liberal and economically left, and they’re ignoring her. Labour would rather win the votes of angry former Tory voters in Essex than young people (by which I mean anyone under 45) in London.

A new social contract

The right has started to notice and if the Tories or Reform ever work out how to weaponise Nick’s discontent without touching Simon and Linda’s cruise fund, then the left is in for a very rude awakening.

The social contract is breaking and the only ones writing new terms are the people who lit the match in the first place, but sure, tell us again how tuition fees are a distraction.

Rayner’s resignation is another unforced error from Labour

Ah, so Angela Rayner’s gone. Resigned. Over her tax affairs. A pity, really; I always liked her more than most of the government, although that’s the political equivalent of saying you prefer the taste of cardboard to asbestos. 

Still, she had that blunt, straight-talking thing going on, which made her one of the few who occasionally sounded like a real human being rather than a malfunctioning Siri. If I’m honest, I can’t quite square the image of Rayner as the People’s Champ with the reality of Rayner as Landlord #2, enjoying the spoils of a second home while presiding over a country in the grip of a housing crisis. Then, tax-dodging on top of it? Sorry love, that’s Tory cosplay.

The most frustrating part

Which is the most frustrating part: she was one of the alright ones. Yet here we are, watching Labour torch themselves with what is surely the most unforced error since Liz Truss asked if she could be trusted with the economy. I thought Starmer’s New Improved Labour™ was supposed to be boringly professional, a sort of human beige wall whose only point was that they wouldn’t spectacularly immolate themselves. Apparently not. Turns out beige burns.

Now, let’s not pretend sexism hasn’t played its predictable cameo. Spray-painting “bitch” across her home is hardly a nuanced critique of capital gains. When Tory grandees play property Jenga with their taxes, most of the outrage is confined to a stiff tut in the New Statesman letters page. But Labour keep insisting they’re different. They say, with the straight face of a man trying to sell you an “ethical vape,” that they’re held to a higher moral standard. Then they immediately trip on the shoelaces of their own hypocrisy.

Rising cynicism

This isn’t just about Rayner. It’s about what this does to the voters Labour spent the last few years desperately wooing with their centrist chardonnay-and-church-hall routine. People already think politics is a con; this just sprinkles artisanal sea salt on the cynicism. Why bother voting for Labour-lite when you can get the full-fat corruption experience from the Tories, or, for the really disillusioned, a pint of bitter and Nigel Farage’s “common sense” at Reform?

It’s not unthinkable that Labour could be cooked. History has form here: remember the French Socialists? No? Exactly. They managed to implode so completely they made Blockbuster Video look like a resilient business model. Labour could go the same way, losing votes to the left, centre, and far-right until the only people left are the ones who show up for constituency evenings where Stephen Bush addresses the members.

If that happens, I honestly think Rayner’s tax avoidance and Starmer’s freebie scandals will be part of the wreckage. People really, really hate this stuff. They smell hypocrisy faster than you can say “expenses claim,” and they’re not wrong. It’s precisely the fuel that keeps Reform ticking along nicely, rebranded racism in a Union Jack tie.

Playing into the hands of Reform

Which brings us to Starmer, who, according to senior Labour figures, has now been told to “stop making mistakes.” That’s right. After five years of leading the opposition, someone has finally cracked the code: maybe don’t deliberately set your own shoes on fire. One wonders what he was being told before this: “lean into the pratfalls, Keir, pratfalls poll well”?

The bigger truth here is that Starmer’s Labour isn’t offering anything to fix this country. No big ideas, no transformative vision. Just empty posturing with all the sincerity of a LinkedIn influencer telling you to “embrace your morning routine.” And now they can’t even manage competence or the moral high ground. It’s all farce and no future.

So yes, I’ll laugh at the shitshow. It is funny, in that bleak, end-of-empire kind of way. But while Labour are busy performing self-immolation-as-performance-art, Reform are quietly setting up the buffet for the truly disenchanted. And that’s the part where the laughter dies.

Who really holds power? The cultural illusion of middle-class dominance

Class conflict is back on the agenda. Not that it ever really went away, but now it’s front and centre in polite political discourse again, thanks in part to rising inequality, the housing crisis, and the ongoing aftershocks of Brexit and 14 years of Tory rule.

Yet the conversation has taken a turn: we are no longer just talking about the economic elite versus the rest, but about a supposed cultural dominance by the metropolitan, liberal middle-class, a managerial overclass who sip flat whites, tweet their outrage, and supposedly set the boundaries of public debate.

Here’s the thing: when we talk about the “upper class” today, what do we actually mean? Dukes and Duchesses are no longer running the show, at least not explicitly. Nor are they the target of most contemporary political ire. The cultural anxiety and political anger that defines our moment is aimed squarely at the so-called “liberal elite”, aka middle-class professionals with degrees, living in “hub cities” like London, New York or Paris.

A wide spectrum of values

Of course, the large buckets we dub “working-class” or “middle-class” aren’t monolithic. There are plenty of middle-class people who share the supposedly working-class values of being opposed to immigration or ideas like critical race theory. Some of them I went to university with and live in big cities.

The values gap between these two broad archetypes of middle-class people can be described as the difference between young and old, or centrists and lefties, or liberals and socialists. Let’s go with liberals and socialists so that we don’t get bogged down in political science definitions.

Liberals vs socialists

The socialists are more likely to have supported Jeremy Corbyn, be more vocal about migrants and trans rights, and have strong views on Gaza. The liberals are more likely to be hostile to the above and prefer technocratic solutions based around public private partnerships. Probably the biggest divide between the two is what they think of Keir Starmer.

Both groups are opposed to the Donald Trumps and Nigel Farages of the world. Both tend to be Remainers and live in cities. The middle-class values that are supposedly dominant in culture and public institutions are more likely to come from the liberal side of the divide. Yes, there was a trans character playing a limited role in Dr Who, and yes, fringe theatres in London are making noise about Palestinian rights, but this is not the cultural mainstream that’s supposedly dominated by the woke. That’s the domain of the liberals.

Old and young working-class

The working-class also varies a lot. There’s the young Amazon worker in Bradford struggling on a zero hours contract and living in a damp infested flat, and there’s the retired Boomer who bought a council house with right-to-buy in the 80s, sold it on and now lives in a leafy suburb. Neither went to university or lives in a big city.

These two people live very different lives and have very different values. There’s also a wide spectrum of different circumstances and values in between them.

When we talk about working-class values (or middle-class values) they can’t possibly capture these huge differences. To avoid confusing definitions, like ‘Instagram Progressives’, which require a lot of describing and only make sense if you want to target precise political messages at precise groups of voters, we use middle-class and working-class values as shorthand for certain political beliefs. However, what are those beliefs?

Championing “working-class values”

The middle-class values self-actualisation, liberalism, progress, multiculturalism, and globalism. The working-class often values community, stability, belonging, and a strong national identity. These are not inherently better or worse, they are just different.

This creates strange political contortions. Many politicians now compete to champion “working-class values”, whether said politician grew up in a council flat or went to private school. By championing “working-class values” they mean being patriotic, hating immigrants and trans people and slamming the middle-class left. Except, some middle-class and quite well-off people hold these exact same values.

Problems with political solutions

Who speaks for the metropolitan liberals who are suffering? They’re dealing with low wage growth, spiralling rent, raising children when childcare is astronomically expensive, while watching their jobs become more precarious by the year.

They moved to cities for work and, yes, like an occasional craft beer and for migrants to have dignity. These people are not working-class enough for right-wing columnists to stand up for.

In the scramble to represent “real” Britain, whatever that is, we risk leaving behind people who are struggling. They’re not struggling as much as an unemployed single parent in a cockroach infested flat in Whitehaven, obviously, but they’re still struggling with problems that have political solutions. If someone will act.

Class conflict

This is where the whole “debate” starts to unravel. Class conflict isn’t just a naturally occurring phenomenon. It’s structured. Designed. Encouraged. It serves a purpose; and that purpose is division.

When working-class voters are told the middle-class is sneering at them, and when middle-class liberals are told the working-class is reactionary and dangerous, we all forget who actually has the real power: the ultra-wealthy. The asset-owning, hedge-funding, landlord elite. The people who don’t just own property, but shape policy. The ones who benefit when we fight over culture while they offshore their wealth.

This is not to say class doesn’t matter, but we must be precise. Today, class is less about income and more about education, values, and where you live. A system that allows wealthy small business owners to be called “authentic” and struggling graduates to be labelled “elite” is not a system designed for justice. It’s a system designed for distraction.

Vibes based social class

We must also make sure that the arbiters of class are not conservative political commentators who will define working-class as people who hold a set of right-wing values, such as an opposition to immigration, net zero, anything considered “woke” and being nice to anyone at all. Funnily enough these commentators don’t consider raising taxes on the wealthy to improve public services a working-class value, despite the polling showing that it is.

Given half the chance these commentators will define working-class as a general conservative vibe that has nothing to do with wealth, property ownership or political influence. Alan Sugar is working-class because he didn’t go to uni and doesn’t like Corbyn. A graduate on minimum wage in a Shoreditch coffee shop isn’t because they have a friend from Poland who once visited an art gallery, which makes them part of the cosmopolitan global elite.

Whose views get listened to?

The debate over class is important because it determines whose views are listened to or get coverage in news or political debates. It’s easy to dismiss someone as out of touch when they say they’re in favour of open borders and easy to say someone should be listened to due to their humble life experience when they oppose immigration.

That isn’t to say that working-class views are well represented in political debates and the news. Certainly, working-class people are not represented well in politics or the news. Their views are only aired when they agree with the right-wing establishment, from Brexit to trans rights to the environment. When a working-class person calls for higher taxes to pay for better public services, that is dismissed as not practical. The right-wing media is good at elevating stories and voices that represent the working-class only when they’re making traditionally right-wing arguments.

The people who get listened to the most are swing voters in the seats that change hands from Tories to Labour at a general election. These are the people who Starmer has staked everything on appealing to. These were the people alienated by Corbyn. They tend to be socially conservative, homeowning, relatively comfortable, non-university educated and many claim to be working-class. Whether you are working-class if you own a four-bedroom detached house, have a management level job (or run your own business) and don’t live pay cheque to pay cheque is a big question, but defining these people as working-class based on their socially conservative views is vibes-based class.

Who has power?

So no, the middle-class isn’t the dominant class. No, having a Black, gay Doctor Who doesn’t mean liberal values are hegemonic. Not when the government is throwing trans people under the bus to win tabloid headlines to get the votes of people who didn’t go to uni but do own their own home.

We don’t need to play the game of “who is the most oppressed.” We need to remember that class conflict, at its heart, is about power; and the biggest divide remains between those who have it, and those who don’t. For almost all of us, middle-class or working-class, we don’t have power. The billionaire class does.

What would Max Weber make of our politicians?

Max Weber, that stern-browed German sociologist with a moustache worthy of Nietzsche and a mind like a surgical scalpel, once gave a lecture called Politics as a Vocation. It is one of those pieces of political writing, like The Communist Manifesto or Democracy in America, that seems to understand its moment even better than the moment understood itself.

Delivered originally as a lecture in 1919, in the stunned and shell-shocked aftermath of the First World War, then later published, it isn’t about how to fix the world. It’s about what politics is, what it demands, and why it is, when done properly, so crushingly difficult.

Weber was trying to understand how modern politics works: not as a spectacle, not as an ideology, but as a profession. A thing people do, with rules and consequences. His argument (and probably the most famous point in the lecture) was that the state, in its modern form, was defined by its monopoly on legitimate violence, and politics, therefore, was the slow, grubby, bureaucratic, and often soul-destroying work of deciding how that power should be used. That work, he thought, was best done by professionals.

The machinery of politics

Weber saw clearly how politics had become institutionalised. The era of the noble landowner dabbling in Westminster was over. The rise of political parties, what Weber called “machines,” had changed the game. These machines were not sentimental. They produced candidates the way factories produce cars. However, occasionally, out of the grinding metal and belching smoke, one of them spat out a genuine leader.

A democratic dictator, Weber called them. Men like William Gladstone, who came from inside the machine but used its power to project a political vision onto the nation. The charisma of the outsider, wielded by the insider.

Insiders and outsiders

That distinction, between insiders and outsiders, is the key to understanding Weber’s model. He believed great politicians came from inside the system but stood apart from it.

Abraham Lincoln. Otto von Bismarck. Gladstone. They knew how to work the levers of power, but they also had vision, and the psychological strength to live with contradiction. Not just contradictions between ideals and reality, but contradictions within themselves. Lincoln, he wrote, was “haunted” by the burden of leadership, but he did it anyway.

Trump, Truss and the fantasy of the outsider

By these standards, modern politics is a nightmare. Weber would have loathed Donald Trump, not because of his policies but because of his origin story. Trump didn’t emerge from a party machine; he broke in with a crowbar. He wasn’t shaped by the system. He hijacked it. For Weber, that made him dangerous, not just in a moral sense, but in a functional one. Outsiders don’t know how the machine works. So, when they start pushing buttons and pulling levers, things go bang. Usually, in the worst way.

The British conundrum

Britain offers a different conundrum. Here we have insiders, products of the machine, who behave like outsiders. Boris Johnson and Liz Truss are not anti-establishment. They are the establishment. Johnson has been a Tory for decades; Truss worked her way up through student politics and the wonk-industrial complex. Yet, when power came, they governed like amateurs.

So, what went wrong? Why, if Weber was right that party machines produce capable leaders, do our party machines keep producing duds?

The professional without substance

The answer may be that the machine itself is broken. Weber thought parties could still generate greatness, but only if they were places where political skill, compromise, and endurance were developed over time. The grind mattered. Parliament mattered. The whole dreary, infuriating business of legislating and coalition-building mattered.

What happens when Parliament becomes a theatre? A place that only boosts politicians standing as media personalities and not the place where the messy compromise of governing is worked out? When MPs are selected for loyalty, not talent? When ambition is rewarded more than ideas?

Well, you get people who’ve clocked the hours, worn the rosettes, climbed the ladder, but don’t know how to govern. They know how to win, but not how to do it. You get Johnson.

A modern paradox

Weber would have recognised this mutation. He wrote that politicians must be able to hold “the strong and slow boring of hard boards” not flashy slogans or viral speeches, but patient compromise.

Here we hit a modern paradox: we demand authenticity from our politicians, but we punish them for honesty. We demand conviction, but not contradiction. We want them to be brave, but also bland. Social media has intensified this tension: every vote, every hesitation, every fudge is recorded, memed, and weaponised. So politicians retreat into performance.

Why we don’t want what Weber wanted

Maybe, deep down, we don’t even want what Weber wanted. He believed in the professionalisation of politics, but modern voters don’t. They want disruption. They want mavericks. They’ve seen what the professionals have delivered: a financial crash, a lost decade of wage growth, creaking public services, housing crises, climate drift. They’ve seen how insulated those professionals are from the consequences.

So we get the politics of rage. Of spectacle. Of nihilistic hope. A rolling carousel of outsider messiahs and insider clowns. Still, the machine keeps churning.

Would Weber like Starmer?

This brings us to Keir Starmer. On paper, he’s Weber’s ideal: an insider with competence, caution, and a very serious haircut. He’s spent his life inside institutions, legal ones, political ones, party ones. He believes in rules, in process, in making things work. However, where’s the vision? Where’s the haunted inner struggle? Where’s the Gladstone?

Starmer won a big majority, he may even hold on to some of it, but where is greatness in government? That seems off the table. Weber wanted politicians to combine the vocation of responsibility with the spirit of vision. Starmer, like so many of today’s leaders, offers only management.

The final puzzle

Here’s one final question: if Weber thought Parliament could produce great leaders, why does it now produce mediocrities?

Well, because Parliament has changed. Once, it was a proving ground. Now it’s a theatre for politicians to elevate their status as a celebrity or media personality, a prelude to them going on Strictly (or starting a podcast if they have intellectual pretensions).

Weber believed politics was the calling of those who could carry the weight of the world, who could live with contradiction, who could endure failure and persist. In our time, politics has become the calling of those who can weaponise Twitter rage, and the House of Commons is just a platform to get their angry message onto TV. A tool for those who want to monopolise our attention.

The machine still runs, but it no longer builds leaders, it builds celebrities, and that, Max Weber would say, is not the same thing at all.

Why social media platforms spread the worst political messages

There’s a quote I keep coming back to whenever I think about online political discourse: “All the world’s a stage,” wrote William Shakespeare. What the Bard didn’t foresee is that the stage would one day be run by venture capitalists in Silicon Valley and littered with algorithmically selected hot takes, clickbait headlines, and QAnon memes.

Today the theatre of politics isn't Westminster or Washington, it’s TikTok, YouTube, and X (formerly Twitter, still tragically named). This is where the stories get told and politicians’ actions in legislators exist only to trend on social media platforms and raise their profile. This is where most of our attention is focused, however “focused” we are when we doom scroll.

Theatre of retention

Technology platforms don’t just facilitate the spread of political narratives; they shape them. These are not neutral tools. The medium is not just the message, it’s the producer, the casting director, and the lighting technician. When we debate policy, news or conspiracy online, we are performing inside a theatre whose architecture was built not for reasoned argument, but for retention metrics.

If you’re crafting a narrative in 2025 and you’re not thinking about how it will play - how it will be clipped, quoted, memed, dunked on, or algorithmically elevated - then you’re not in the political conversation. This leads me to ask: is the way we consume politics shaping the politics we get? Also, are the wrong narratives winning?

Take QAnon. Or the idea that vaccines are a secret form of population control. Or the increasingly popular belief that central banks are a satanic cabal in disguise. Or scepticism about climate change. These narratives didn’t go mainstream because they were true. They went viral because they were sticky. Catchy. Shareable. Especially amongst bored Boomers spending hours on Facebook on their smartphones. Facebook, and other social media platforms elevate the sticky over the true.

Down the rabbit hole

We’re all living on the timeline now, and most of us aren’t choosing the stories we see. We’re being fed them, passively, in the gaps between emails, while queuing for coffee, or waiting for sleep to arrive. The hardware and software feeding them to us are not neutral broadcasters either. They are dopamine slot machines, calibrated to hijack attention and convert it into advertising gold. They’re not here to inform you. They’re here to keep you looking.

So, what happens when these systems encounter politics? You go down a rabbit hole without much of a say in where you end up.

Recommendation engines, particularly YouTube’s, don’t just give you what you asked for. They give you what will keep you watching. Sometimes, that’s another Mitchel and Webb Look sketch, sometimes it’s a video about distant galaxies, sometimes an interview with Florence Pugh. However, sometimes it’s “The TRUTH About the Deep State (They Don’t Want You to Know)” given the same level of prominence as legit news reporting and trailers for Marvel films. From there, it’s just a few clicks to flat Earth, climate change denial, or white genocide.

Fear works

The kicker? You didn’t even search for this stuff. You didn’t have to. The system knew you’d bite, because someone like you - same age, same job, same fears - already did.

This isn’t a system that pushes everyone into their own bespoke dystopia. It’s worse. It amplifies the most engaging narratives - the ones with moral panic, emotional simplicity, and good enemies - and after the most attention grabbing narrative of all has been found it’s fired at everyone. It turns out the same things hold most people’s attention, and that’s fascism. It turns out fear works. Anger works. “They’re coming for your kids” always works.

It’s bad for business

So, if narratives shape politics, and platforms shape narratives, then who shapes the platforms? Capital. That’s who.

These systems are designed to maximise ad revenue. That’s the logic of surveillance capitalism: capture attention, model behaviour, feed stimuli, and then sell that attention - that’s your attention - to advertisers.

Truth, nuance, and boring-but-important policy details don’t trend, so they don’t get a look in. It’s bad for business. The tech billionaires and the Wall Street types who fund their projects might nominally care about abstract things like truth and democracy, but they care about concrete things like revenue, market share and time on site much more. This means they will continue to aid the spread of narratives that are false or enrage people until they vote for reactionary politicians. Now tech billionaires must bend the knee to the monster they created.

Changing the record

Can we change this?

Yes, but that’s political. It would take a movement, an electoral coalition, which is hard to assemble. The people most harmed by this system are too fragmented, too polarised, or too doom-scrolled to organise. Real change would mean confronting the wealth and power of tech billionaires.

We have done it before. We regulated cigarettes. We demanded seatbelts. We could ban certain algorithmic features, restrict attention-hacking designs, or break up tech monopolies. We could treat tech platforms like we once treated cars: useful, but too dangerous to go unregulated.

There is still time

To do this we have to be honest. Social media didn’t invent the business model of using outrage to get attention and then selling that attention to advertisers. Fox News and tabloids like The Sun have been at it for years. The difference is now it’s in your pocket, and it never turns off.

So yes, technology matters. Yes, narrative matters. However, it’s the design of technology platforms, optimised for surveillance capitalism, which determines the political narratives we are exposed to. If democracy is a battle of stories, then it matters who controls the stage of this world. The good news is that there is still time to change it.

Elon Musk and Donald Trump: The Beavis and Butt-Head of right-wing edge lords

Well, well, well. Look who’s not besties anymore. Elon and Don, two of the world’s richest, loudest, and least self-aware men, have had a bit of a tiff. Or in the words of AOC: “The girls are fighting.”

It was always going to end like this. The tech libertarian and the tangerine authoritarian, two egos orbiting the same black hole of delusion, finally collided in what can only be described as a the pettiest falling out ever that might lead to the start of an actual war as a means of blowing off frustration.

Trump the chaos agent

Trump, ever the chaos agent, has been busy doing what he does best: acting on whatever errant neuron fires off in his skull at 3am while he’s trying to force out a turd and letting the rest of the world deal with the fallout.

Recent hits include banning asylum seekers at the southern border with the nuance of a boot stamping on a human face, picking a fight with Harvard like it’s a local Starbucks that got his coffee order wrong, and floating plans to ban citizens from a dozen countries because he doesn’t like their vibes. Classic strongman cosplay, straight from the Viktor Orbán playbook.

Trump can’t be trusted to look after his pals

Enter Elon, fresh from tweeting ketamine-fuelled memes on a platform he accidentally purchased for the price of a mid-sized European country. Musk’s latest drama? Realising that the man he has been following around like a groupie is now threatening the very subsidies his electric car empire depends on. Turns out, Trump can’t be trusted to look after his pals. Who knew?

Elon has discovered that his particular brand of performative right-wing edge lordism won’t help him when an aspiring dictator wants to bulldoze his industry because he’s in a mood. These two aren’t falling out over principle. They don’t have principles. They’re falling out because they can’t both be the main guy in the executive booth for the apocalypse show.

Musk tried to come for Trump with that Epstein jab, which is rich coming from a man whose idea of social responsibility is letting fascist meme accounts run wild on Twitter (sorry, X, a name that sounds like a porn site from 2003 and functions like one designed for neo-Nazis where the people getting fucked are minorities, people who like democracy and anyone with a sense of decency). The Epstein jab is doubly stupid when you remember Musk spent a fortune getting a supposed paedophile elected.

A wrecking ball dipped in gold paint

Trump, in return, has all the subtlety of a wrecking ball dipped in gold paint, and is spouting bile about Musk on his own social media platform Truth Social. Trump doesn’t forget slights, and if he can’t take down Musk’s businesses, he’ll happily take down the entire EV sector. Nothing screams “America First” like handing the car industry to China due to a personal vendetta. Considering electric vehicles is an industry America is actually good at. That and toxic political discourse, which the country is a net exporter of.

Meanwhile, the Venn diagram between Elon’s cult of tech bros - with weird views about women - and Trump’s angry flag-humping base - who are seconds away from burning down their local Taco Bell for being insufficiently American - is now just two circles slowly edging away from each other, to be two entirely distinct types of weirdos you don’t want in your mentions or cornering you in the supermarket.

Libertarians and authoritarian nationalists are natural enemies, like a hedge fund and the band of feral ferrets living in the walls of their Mayfair building. Both consider the other a pest to exterminate but due to the insanity of the modern age, end up cohabiting. Or like the foxes living on the roof of Google’s new £1bn building in King’s Cross: no one wanted any of this, but it’s somehow taken over everything because no one can come up with an alternative.

Terrifying power

The libertarians want to be left alone to invent new ways to avoid paying tax; the latter want to force you to say the Pledge of Allegiance before brushing your teeth. The only thing they agree on is that women have too many opinions.

It would be hilarious if it weren’t also terrifying. The sheer amount of power these two men wield - over infrastructure, over platforms, over minds - is staggering. When they fall out, it’s not just a Twitter spat. It’s markets shaking, civil rights eroding, and the vague threat of military deployment hanging in the air like a fart in a press conference. Just ask the people of California, how funny all this is.

It blows my mind that a certain number of supposedly sane people wanted all this - which was inevitably going to happen - over having Kamala Harris in The White House. I’m no Harris stan, but choosing Trump and Musk over her is like rejecting a slightly overcooked meal in favour of setting your kitchen on fire because you like the colour orange.

You’re next

You can say it doesn’t matter. You can say it’s an American problem. However, when the US has the nukes, the platforms, and the global reserve currency, their chaos is your chaos. The same way a butterfly flapping its wings in Florida might cause a hurricane in Essex, except the butterfly is a bloated narcissist and the hurricane is fascism.

What starts in LA - censorship, book bans, National Guard deployments - does not stay in LA. These people test their authoritarian wet dreams on the marginalised first, but you in Lincolnshire with your pension in S&P 500 ETFs? You’re next. Like I said, America is a net exporter of right-wing authoritarianism, and don’t think you’re safe because you also hate young lefties with blue hair protesting about Gaza.

The left needs to seize this moment

Trump and Musk are not outliers. They are the logical endpoint of a system that lets egomaniacs buy their way into control. They are the best argument we’ve ever had for taking power away from billionaires, expropriating their wealth, not giving them cabinet positions or letting them rebrand social collapse as “innovation.”

The left needs to seize this moment, not with sanctimony, but with strategy. These men are not gods. They are profoundly unserious people playing with serious things. They cannot be trusted with a spoon, let alone nukes, data, or democracy.

So yes, watch them fight. Enjoy it. Popcorn is fine. Just remember: the house is still on fire, and these two are pissing on it, then selling the livestream as an NFT.

Donald Trump picture taken by Gage Skidmore and used under creative commons.

“That’s Your GDP”: Labour’s big growth delusion

By now, you’ve probably heard the rumour that Labour has a plan. I know. It shocked me too. The plan in question is to ride a noble steed named economic growth to the top of the polls and then use it to magically fix everything from NHS waiting lists to sprucing up the haunted remnants of our school buildings. It’s a beguiling fantasy: we don’t need to tax the rich, we don’t need to challenge inequality, we don’t even need to argue about Europe anymore, we just need growth.

Growth is the one thing Labour’s broad - and increasingly divided - electoral coalition can agree on. Wealthy centrists love growth because it makes them feel grown-up and serious in front of their hedge fund mates. Trade unionists want growth because maybe it means a pay rise that isn’t immediately outpaced by the price of a multipack of crisps. Voters across the spectrum want more jobs, higher wages, better services, stuff that economic growth theoretically delivers.

The benefits of growth

To be fair, if the economy ever decided to get off its arse and grow, it would help. Growth increases tax revenue without having to actually raise taxes - which is, partly, how Tony Blair improved the public realm after the miserable state the Tories left it in. This is politically convenient for a party desperately clinging to the idea that it can achieve its political goals without social conservative swing voters making any of the sacrifices that will send them running into the arms of Nigel Farage and Reform.

More money sloshing around could theoretically fund all the nice things politicians take photos with when they’re trying to look like they care: nurses, teachers, maybe even a railway that gets you from Manchester to London in less than a week.

Punching the country in the kidneys

The problem is: if growing the economy was easy, the last lot would have done it. The Tories have spent the last 14 years trying to make GDP rise by repeatedly punching the country in the kidneys and hoping the pain would build character. What we got instead was austerity, collapsing infrastructure, and a workforce so demoralised you can practically see their productivity curve spiralling into a sinkhole.

Austerity turned Britain into a country that can’t even patch potholes without crowdfunding, and now Labour wants to dig us out of the hole without, crucially, spending any actual money or annoying any Daily Mail readers. Keir Starmer’s bold plan to reignite the economy includes deregulating the planning system. That’s right folks, the future belongs to whoever builds the most chicken coop size flats on the site of a former garage in East London.

Even if Labour somehow summons growth through the sheer power of committee meetings, it’ll take time. Years, probably. Long enough that it might be the next government, possibly Kemi Badenoch, who gets to claim credit. In the meantime, we’re left squinting at PowerPoint slides while the current Labour front bench insists that growth is basically the cure for cancer, climate change and bad vibes.

Growth isn’t a panacea

Here’s the catch, and it’s a big one: growth isn’t a panacea. Growth can happen while people get poorer. It can happen while wages stagnate, while rents soar, and while billionaires guzzle the GDP gains like it’s a Disney themed bottomless prosecco brunch (don’t ask).

This isn’t a hypothetical. It literally happened. In 2016, the British economy was growing. It was growing anaemically but even that tepid growth would be manna from heaven in today’s economy. However, real wages were falling, inequality was rising, and communities were told to be grateful that the City of London was doing great, thanks, despite local high streets being devastated like Chernobyl had just happened two postcodes over.

The halcyon days of growth

Then 52% of the country voted for Brexit, while the Remain camp said: “But GDP! Think of the GDP!” To which one Brexiteer in a focus group quite famously replied: “That’s your GDP.”

Okay, the focus group was before the referendum. I moved my timelines around for the sake of a good sentence. The point being that growth doesn’t automatically make people feel better off or vote against dodgy nationalist politicians and their ill-conceived pet projects, even though the early 2000s had growth and we now look back on that time as halcyon days. Turn up Mr Brightside.

So many inequalities to tackle

The comment about “your GDP” might be the most cutting piece of political analysis in modern British history. It captures something most politicians refuse to grasp, when ordinary people don’t feel the benefits of growth, they start voting like it’s all a joke; because to them, it is.

If Labour genuinely wants its growth agenda to succeed, it needs to deal with inequality. Not in a mealy-mouthed, “we’ll look at regional investment zones” way. Properly. Inequality isn’t just a line on a graph; it’s the thing that makes you work harder every year and still feel like you’re falling behind. Then you start hearing the siren call of the far-right.

There are so many inequalities to tackle, it’s like a greatest hits album of bad policy: the gap between rich and poor, the North-South divide, London and everywhere else, young and old. Particularly that last one. My generation gets blamed for everything - from economic stagnation to the decline of the handshake - and now, apparently, we’re not working hard enough.

A convenient excuse

That’s why Labour is tightening benefits. To flush out supposedly the lazy young people claiming mental illness incapacity. The ones who’ve been softened by participation trophies, avocado toast, talking about feelings and the idea that maybe work shouldn’t destroy your soul.

Boomers, especially the media commentators, love to blame my generation and younger people for being coddled. They claim this is the source of our economic malaise.

It’s a convenient excuse, so that they don’t have to think too hard about how the austerity, inequality and neoliberalism that they preach has failed to make us all wealthy and happy. Instead, it blighted us with poor growth, high cost of living, a ravaged environment, disease, a mental health crisis, a care crisis, a public services crisis and a lack of grandchildren for Boomers to play with.

Work doesn’t pay

Here’s the thing: I am working hard. I have two jobs, and neither of them are writing this blog. That’s a public service I provide for free. I’m not alone in this. Most of us are working to the point of exhaustion. Millennials and Gen Zs are grinding in a system designed by people who still think that working a 9 to 5 is all that’s needed to afford a home. Boomers didn’t have side hustles, because they didn’t need them. Millennials don’t have side hustles because we can’t concentrate on our jobs due to ADHD, but because we need them to survive.

On top of this hard work is the fact that every gain we make is devoured by a cost-of-living crisis, rising rents, and the recent torrent of inflation. There is no point flogging us with productivity mantras if the whole system is designed to funnel our effort upwards into shareholder dividends. Millennials and Zoomers see all our hard work enriching the already extremely wealthy where we’re left to snap up the crumbs. Then older people accuse us of being lazy and entitled because we don’t want our working lives to be one endless slog that leaves us too poor to retire at the end.

If Labour wants our support, it needs to talk about fairness, not just growth. A fair shake for Millennials and Zoomers would mean housing that isn’t a Hunger Games arena, jobs that pay more than survival wages, and a government that doesn’t ignore us at best and performatively flog us for the approval of Daily Mail reading Boomers at worse.

Big on buzzwords

Unfortunately for us, that’s not what Labour wants to talk about. It wants to win over conservative Boomers who think rising inequality is fine if they can still park for free at B&Q. So, we’re stuck with a Labour Party that wants our votes, but not our future.

In the end, Labour’s growth agenda feels a lot like a startup pitch from someone who’s never actually run a business. Big on buzzwords, light on results, and when it inevitably flops, the people who sold us the dream will already have moved on, leaving us to clean up the mess.

Again.

Nigel Farage is seriously uncool

We need to talk about Nigel Farage being seriously uncool. No, this isn’t the most pressing issue in British politics, but it is important. The man is a political fixture, we’ve ended up in a bizarre world where he’s on TV constantly and somehow supposedly respectable outlets publish fawning articles about how great he is. Yet he’s less cool than my gran. This situation is unacceptable. 

Now, you might think this is just my left-wing bias speaking. Of course I think Farage is uncool, he’s a right-wing nationalist, a flag-waving Brexit-obsessed conservative outrage generator that is impossible to shut up. However, his uncoolness is deeper than politics. This is about the fact that, at a fundamental level, Nigel Farage is the human embodiment of a wet Monday afternoon at a service station Wetherspoons.

Entitled rudeness

First, let’s talk about his aesthetic. He wears suits and ties, but not in a suave, Bond villain kinda way. Not even in a nostalgic, well-tailored, Peaky Blinders kind of way. No, Nigel Farage wears a suit like a man who also wears that same suit to eat a fry-up in the morning. You just know he drinks tea by slurping it and aggressively clears his throat before speaking. 

Then there’s his general demeanour. Farage has the energy of a man who gets impatient at a bar when the staff are dealing with another customer. The kind of bloke who taps his watch while muttering about how things used to be better. The sort of person you’re embarrassed to stand next to because you know his entitled rudeness will mean you all get served last.

Being impatient with bar staff

Despite all this, certain media circles remain infatuated with him. The Knowledge, The Spectator, and other bastions of tweed-clad “sensibles” breathlessly report on him as though he’s some kind of rakish anti-hero. We’re constantly told he’s an outsider kicking against the establishment, this despite the fact that he went to Dulwich College - an expensive private school - has more access to the media than most sitting MPs and has spent years playing footsie with powerful press barons. He couldn’t be more inside the establishment club if he crawled up their collective bum-holes.

He tries so hard to project the boring, snobby, conventional, tasteless type of wealth that is endearing to people who have (or aspire to have) a “country pile” but who haven’t encountered popular culture since the late 70s.

Man of the people, my arse

He swannes around in tweed like a rejected character from a PG Wodehouse novel, whilst giving off the air that he was pleased that he got a waitress fired for getting his wine order wrong. He has the grumpy, entitled, “call the manager” vibe, and by “manager” he means his mates in the right-wing press; such as when he started a political forumpf when it was revealed that he wasn’t actually wealthy enough to have an account at the elite bank where his oligarch pals park their ill gotten gains. Man of the people, my arse.

Then there’s his attitude towards young people. If something is popular with anyone under 40, you can bet your life savings that Farage hates it. He’s against immigration, against climate action, against progressive social change. Essentially, if young people support something, he wants it gone.

This is a man who looks like he calls the police on teenagers for playing music too loudly, and yet we’re supposed to believe he’s a maverick. What makes him a maverick is that he flies in the face of the soft liberal consensus that we should at least pretend to be nice to people. If wanting to be openly cruel to people less fortunate, less British and less white then himself makes Farage a man of the people, then “the people” should be offended by association.

What Boomers think is cool

Brexit was, among other things, a generational wedge issue, and Farage led the charge in telling young people that their future was less important than pensioners’ getting their empire nostalgia fix. Boomers may think Farage is cool, but that’s because their sense of cool as well as their sense of social responsibility died at whatever point after 1979 that they started voting Tory.

Farage’s politics appeal to the kind of people who think pop culture peaked in the 70s, worry incessantly about house prices, and have a visceral hatred of wind farms. The sort of people who get irrationally angry at the mere concept of an electric car (that isn’t a Tessler). These are people who live in a state of perpetual grievance, furiously opposed to progress in any form, and their bitterness needs an outlet, Farage is more than happy to provide one. In a word: Boomers.

His cultural taste must be diabolical. If Keir Starmer, perhaps the second least cool man in Britain, likes Coldplay, then what does Farage listen to? You just know it’s some dreary, middle-of-the-road, blues-rock nonsense, the kind of music that plays over the PA in a garden centre. Either that or he listens to the Zulu soundtrack on repeat while wanking over a picture of himself.

Smelling faintly of cigars and damp upholstery

Somehow, none of this stops certain publications from fawning over him. Take, for instance, the from The Guardian, where they actually tried to paint Farage as in touch with the common man on foreign policy. Never mind that when Jeremy Corbyn said similar things, he was branded a traitorous Vladmir Putin sympathiser. When Farage does it, it’s merely a robust debate.

Let’s not forget the absolutely deranged attempt to paint him as some sort of roguish sex symbol. The Spectator ran a piece on his supposed “rip-roaring romantic success,” breathlessly detailing his various affairs as though he were a protagonist in a 1950s spy novel, rather than a bloke who looks like he smells faintly of cigars and damp upholstery.

Our more tolerant reality

The right-wing - and a good proportion of the centrist - media still fawns over Farage like he is the Sex Pistols freaking out the establishment with swearing and nihilism. Worshipping Farage shows how uncool and out of touch the mainstream media is. I have tattered underwear that is more appealing than he is, yet he’s still found in newspapers and on panel shows. This shows how we’ve lost our collective minds.

How have we gotten to the point where people who like The Last Dinner Party or Fontains DC are in an out-of-touch bubble, but people spitting blood about small boats are in touch with reality? Mainlining right-wing bullshit all day on Facebook, instead of going to a gig or the theatre is apparently how to stay in touch with the national zeitgeist. At least, according to the people who generate the Facebook bullshit everyone is mainlining. Well, loving Farage and the rubbish he’s selling doesn’t put you in touch with reality. It puts you in a bubble being left behind by our more tolerant reality.

A figurehead for the people who enjoy yelling at cyclists

There’s a desperate nostalgia at play here. A longing for the days when men could down a pint, say something vaguely racist, and still be considered charming rather than insufferable. The media’s treatment of Farage is the political equivalent of people who think #MeToo has gone too far because they miss the days when being a lecherous old man was seen as an endearing quirk rather than a social liability.

So no, Nigel Farage is not cool. He is, at best, a pub bore who lucked into political relevance by stoking the worst instincts of the electorate. Yet, against all logic and reason, sections of the British press continue to treat him like he’s some kind of folk hero.

It’s time we put an end to this nonsense. Farage is not a rockstar, he's a figurehead for the people who enjoy yelling at cyclists and complaining about vegans. By picking on what young people like, he may think he’s kicking against the liberal establishment, but he’s just a stool of the conservative hegemony and really quite pathetic.

Labour’s plan to defeat Farage by becoming him

I can’t believe I’m writing this again, and not just because this piece is, spiritually, the 73rd draft of the same post I’ve written every six months since the ghost of Enoch Powell first slithered back into Westminster in a Nigel Farage mask and Union Jack socks. I am writing this again because here we are, a Labour government - a LABOUR government - has decided that what this country really needs is fewer migrants. Apparently, we’ve just got too many carers. 

Yes, carers. Those shift-working, underpaid saints of the adult social care sector. The ones who keep your nan alive through a combination of Lidl shortbread and sheer moral force. Keir Starmer has looked at them and thought, “Bit much, actually. Let’s trim the fat.”

At last, a bold vision of post-Brexit Britain: a land of proudly neglected pensioners and heroic bed sores. You’ll be wheeled into the great hereafter by a polite note taped to a mobility scooter that says, “Sorry, we couldn’t get the staff.”

Migration is actually good

Why is Starmer doing this? Well, because Farage did well in the local elections. A couple of pensioners in Staines waved their walking sticks at a Reform UK leaflet, and the Labour Party lost its nerve like a fainting goat at a fireworks display. In response, Starmer has bravely announced that he will be ending Britain’s oppressive reign as a tolerant society and joining the global vanguard of countries that mistake being nasty to foreigners for national pride.

Let’s pause, briefly, to remember that migration is actually good. I know it’s gauche to cite facts in British political commentary, but here we are.

Migrants contribute more to the economy than they take out. They support an aging population. They enrich our culture. They serve our food, drive our buses, clean our hospitals, teach our children, build our buildings, perform surgery and vital research. You get the idea.

What happened to Remainer Starmer?

Yet Labour’s big idea seems to be: what if we just stopped all that and instead doubled down on the dream of an all-native workforce of beetroot-faced Abbot Ale drinkers nostalgically reminiscing about the days when they could shout at women in the street without getting their Deliveroo account suspended.

What happened to Starmer the pro-European, pro-fact, pro-sanity politician? The one who thought aligning with liberal values was something other than an electoral death wish? The one who, once upon a Remoaner time, might have said something like “we’re better when we’re open”?

Now he’s one Reform UK polling bump away from rebranding himself as Sir Keir of Kent, Defender of the Border, enemy of the sandwich shop that uses too much coriander.

The battle over the question

Here’s the thing about politics, Keir, if you’re still taking notes: it’s not just about giving the right answers, it’s about the voters choosing the right question. Or more accurately, politics is about what politicians do to make sure voters choose the question that benefits them. Politics is a battle over which question voters ask.

If you let Farage and Reform make the question “how do we stop immigration?” then congratulations, Kier, you’ve already lost. Reform will always answer it with more bile, more conviction, and more Union Jack waistcoats than you ever could. You’re not going to out-patriot a man who could launch a pub chain called “Brexit Bar” (now available in your nightmares and select Essex industrial estates).

Labour used to know this. Or at least they pretended to. Now they’re playing the right’s tune note for note, like a wedding band covering “Angry White Man in D Minor” and wondering why no one’s dancing. It’s the same old song, and it’s got a hell of a chorus: “Cut immigration, flog hope, and blame the Romanians.”

The same old scapegoats

Here’s the kicker. Starmer’s Labour doesn’t have any other ideas. That’s the tragedy. There’s no New Deal. No sweeping plan for public housing. No redistributive economic miracle, just a vague hope that if they hum the same tune as Farage quietly enough, no one will notice that the orchestra’s on fire. The problem with stealing the right’s playlist is that eventually the right headlines Glastonbury, and all Labour gets is a slot at 10am on the Kidz Bop stage. Just look at the French Socialist Party.

So, here we are again, friends. The same old scapegoats, the same old cowardice, and me, your faithful blogger, having to write the same bloody defence of migration like it’s Groundhog Day but with more dog-whistle politics and less Bill Murray.

Welcome to Starmer’s Britain. Bring your own carer. Or don’t. We’re phasing them out.

How should the left view the porn industry?

Can I start with an overshare? I like porn. There, I said it. Now, before you clutch your pearls, let’s acknowledge something: porn, like bars, restaurants, and the music industry, can be an exploitative business. Yet, I frequent all of the above. As do most of us. The world runs on industries that are often deeply problematic, and my moral purity would be far better preserved if I lived in a yurt off the grid. But I don’t. And neither do you.

You’re not the worst person on the left ever if you listen to music from a major label, or occasionally eat at a chain restaurant, or once in a while fire up a tube site to release some tension. However, you should be aware of the practices of the most exploitative companies, such as Tim Martin from Wetherspoon telling all his employees to get jobs at Tesco during the pandemic.

The same applies to porn, an industry that used to have many small publishers but has been taken over by big tech companies and big brands. This has created a power relationship between (sex) workers and employers that anyone who knows anything about neoliberalism will be familiar with.

Critiquing the power of big business

On the left we critique the power of big business. We critique banks, we critique Amazon, we critique Uber. But PornHub? Not so much. Why?

Maybe, it’s because many fear that criticising the porn industry makes them sound like a conservative prude. The left has long prided itself on being the defenders of sexual freedom, the crusaders against repression, the champions of liberal expression. This is all well and good, but does our laissez-faire attitude extend to giant corporations profiting from our collective horniness?

Big tech’s long tentacles

The rise of massive tech platforms has fundamentally reshaped the porn industry, just as it has reshaped journalism, music, and, if you listen to any Millennial or Zoomer, the ability to afford a home. Gone are the days of furtively finding a magazine in a disused railway siding and stuffing it under your mattress.

Now, it’s an all-you-can-stream buffet, algorithmically tailored to your desires (or, more accurately, the desires it has cultivated in you). However, just like Facebook radicalizing your uncle into believing that trans people are coming to abuse the kids his ex-wife won’t let him see, porn platforms use the attention economy to keep users engaged for longer. The results? Extreme or illegal content getting pushed to the forefront.

Shaping desires

PornHub, and other tube sites, don’t just reflect people’s desires; they shape them. As feminist writer Helen Lewis put it:

“Pornhub pushes featured videos and recommendations, optimized to build user loyalty and increase revenue, which carry the implicit message that this is what everyone else finds arousing—that this is the norm. Compare porn with polarized journalism, or even fast food: How can we untangle what people ‘really want’ from what they are offered, over and over, and from what everyone else is being offered too? No one’s sexual desires exist in a vacuum, immune to outside pressures driven by capitalism. (Call it the invisible hand job of the market.)”

So when PornHub’s algorithms nudge users toward extreme or illegal content, it isn’t just fulfilling a demand, it’s manufacturing one. This raises the question: are we defending people’s sexual freedoms, or are we defending the right of surveillance-capitalist platforms to dictate what our desires should be?

 Porn’s not special, it’s just another exploitative industry

Here’s a fun game: take any of the following problems: lack of job security, overpowered big business and the rise of unregulated gig work, and apply them to any other industry. Sounds familiar, right? That’s because these are the exact same problems the left rages against in every other sector. The fact that porn involves sex shouldn’t distract us from the fact that it’s, fundamentally, another industry being warped by the pressures of unchecked capitalism. 

We do hold other tech platforms to account. Facebook and YouTube have faced serious scrutiny over their role in radicalization, misinformation, and content moderation failures. Or they did until they decided they didn’t like this scrutiny and got rid of it by buying a nationalist former president turned presidential candidate. All it cost was allowing the far-right free reign over these company’s ability to shape public discourse, bending the knee to an authoritarian bully and boatloads of cash.

PornHub has somehow escaped the same level of criticism, despite running on the same exploitative business model. It’s almost as if the left, in its eagerness to defend sexual freedom, has forgotten to apply the same scrutiny to the corporations profiting from it.

The PornHub problem

Enter The Children of PornHub, written by Nicholas Kristof and published by the New York Times. It’s a piece of investigative journalism that sparked a moral panic. The article detailed harrowing cases of underage and non-consensual videos being uploaded and monetized on the platform.

No one, absolutely no one, would argue that this is acceptable and certainly PornHub, like most big businesses, have been slow to respond to problems that could hit their bottom line. Increased scrutiny of the vast amount of content that gets uploaded is just not cost-effective. Facebook and Twitter had the same issues, before they decided to embrace far-right propaganda.

However, the problem of these images isn’t just limited to PornHub. In Sheelah Kolhatkar’s article, The Fight to Hold PornHub Accountable, following up on Kristof’s, Mike Stabile, of the Free Speech Coalition, said: “This isn’t a Pornhub-specific problem or an issue where Pornhub is particularly negligent. If you look at the vast majority of child-sex-abuse material being shared, it is not on porn sites, it’s on sites like Snapchat and Facebook. This is about stopping pornography.” Yet so far the outrage has focused on PornHub and not bigger tech platforms whose main stock in trade isn’t sex videos.

Is the problem the internet?

This does raise a thorny question: is this a problem with PornHub, or a problem with the internet? After all, revenge porn circulates on WhatsApp. Crimes happen on platforms across the web, from copyright infringement to drug dealing. Hell, you can order a hitman to kill someone on the dark web. Allegedly. I didn’t look.

So, is the issue here the medium, or the crime itself? PornHub, like YouTube, makes money off its content, and in the attention economy anything that keeps users watching is good for business. Including, as we’ve seen, horrific racism, violence and illegal content.

The same logic that leads YouTube’s algorithm to push people toward far-right conspiracy theories is what drives PornHub’s algorithm to push porn that contains images of underaged girls or content that was ascertained or shared non-consensually. Platforms don’t care about ethics; they care about engagement.

Is this a political issue or a criminal issue?

No one - not even the most sex-postive feminist or pro big business doing whatever the fuck it wants libertarian - would argue that what happened to these women and girls is fine. This one some level means this isn’t a political issue.

I don’t want to dismiss or trivialise the abuse these women and girls suffered by saying there isn’t a power dynamic at work, but everyone is anti-rape and child sex videos. The faults highlighted in Kristof’s article are the result of criminals breaking PornHub’s rules. Surely, this is a matter for the police, not the platform. A crime has been committed.

The worse stories in Kristof’s article are about suicides due to people sharing videos without consent. This could be done on any platform, WhatsApp or SnapChat or PornHub. These are of course tragedies, but is this a problem that PornHub is wholly responsible for?

Making it easier

Yes, on some level. PornHub is responsible because the platform does make it easy (or easier) to commit these crimes due to allowing vast quantities of unmoderated content from unverified users onto the platform. I suppose owning a car makes it easier to commit some crimes, such as bank robbery, but we do make cars harder to access than adding content to a tube site.

PornHub also makes money off these videos, so it has an incentive to keep them out there. In the attention economy, platforms need content that holds users' attention. If extreme or illegal content does this better than normal porn, then the platforms need it to keep people watching the ads they make money from. This is the same problem that YouTube has with the far-right.

Although these are people abusing the system and breaking the platform/company rules, the business models (and power) of big companies and tech platforms make the problem worse. This is what makes this a left-wing political issue.

The moral panic machine

Of course, once a scandal like the one that Kristof’s article caused breaks, it’s immediately co-opted by the usual suspects, groups that have been anti-porn from the get-go. For example, Exodus Cry, who helped Kristof meet some of the sources in his Children of PornHub article. Kolhatkar wrote a detail description of Exodus Cry in the follow-up to Kristof’s article:

“Exodus Cry was founded around 2008 by Benjamin Nolot, a filmmaker and an activist who grew up in Southern California … Exodus Cry has taken aim not only at nonconsensual pornography but more broadly at what it calls ‘porn culture,’ which, it argues, leads to the hypersexualization and objectification of women and makes sex trafficking and other crimes more likely to occur. The group’s tax filings state that it is ‘committed to abolishing sex trafficking and the commercial sex industry,’ which would include legal activities such as producing pornography and performing in strip clubs.”

Exodus Cry wants to abolish the porn industry in its entirety. That includes those nice independent producers of sex-positive and kinky porn that I like. The small batch craft brewery of the sex streaming world. Also, as the name suggests, they're religiously motivated to do this. This suggests that their interest in the victims is more a tool to achieve their goals of censoring the porn industry.

Anti-liberal narrative

Exodus Cry, and other groups like it, are not only against the non-consensual and underaged content highlighted in Kristof’’s article, which PornHub has been slow to take down. They claim that all porn is coercive, objectifies women, and normalises misogyny. These arguments have been echoed by anti-porn feminists like Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon for decades.

Exodus Cry isn’t the only Christian right-wing organisation using this narrative to attack the porn industry and get attention in the attention economy via “think of the children” outrage. These groups are using this case to advance their anti-liberal narrative that is anti-LGBTQ+ rights, anti-sex work and anti-porn. That’s all porn.

Again, a problem with big business

While it’s easy to dismiss these groups as pearl-clutching reactionaries, they do muddy the waters of this debate. If you frame the issue as “PornHub is bad,” suddenly you’re playing into the hands of people who want to shut down all porn. That’s not what most of us on the left want. Even the survivors of PornHub’s worst failures aren’t anti-porn. As one survivor told Kristof in his article: “I don’t want people to hear ‘No porn!’ It’s more like, ‘Stop hurting kids.’”

My counter is that mainstream porn does the bad things highlighted in Kristof’s article, just like Stella tastes like shit and makes people violent and the MCU is thinly veiled propaganda for the US military. That doesn’t mean all film and beer is bad. Just the stuff made by big business to cater to the whims of normies.

The uncomfortable middle ground

So, where does that leave us? In a deeply unsatisfying place, frankly. Like your WiFi giving out as soon as you fire up a tube site. Porn, like all industries, can be good and bad. We should absolutely defend people’s right to explore their sexuality or to monetize it.

There’s a right to be a sex worker if you want to. No one should be forced into sex work, obviously, but no one should be forced to work in an Amazon warehouse either. If someone does choose to do sex work, or warehouse work, then they are entitled to the same rights and guarantees of a decent wage and conditions as any other worker. Sex work is work.

The left should recognize that massive corporations are exploiting sexy freedom for profit, often at great cost. The reality is, PornHub isn’t incentivised to protect its workers or its users, it’s incentivised to make money: even if that means looking the other way when illegal content spreads on its platform. 

Sex is good, but unchecked capitalism is bad

Personally, as a porn-consuming denizen of the internet, I feel the left should support the right to make porn as people are allowed to be free and explore their sexuality, but we need to remember these platforms and big businesses are not incentivised to look after their workers or protect the public from dangerous content.

The pressures of big tech, surveillance capitalism, algorithms deciding what we see and aggressive market competition is distorting what is seen as natural sexuality and is creating a situation where large companies are exploiting people.

There were some suggestions to improve PornHub and the industry in Kristof’s article. He wrote: “I don’t see any neat solution. But aside from limiting immunity so that companies are incentivized to behave better, here are three steps that would help: 1.) Allow only verified users to post videos. 2.) Prohibit downloads. 3.) Increase moderation.” None of these will fix everything, but they’d be a start. The problem isn’t porn. The problem is big business, and the solution isn’t to abolish porn it’s to hold it to the same standards we demand from every other industry.

So let’s have some nuance. Let’s criticize exploitative business practices without feeding into anti-sex narratives. Let’s acknowledge that sex is good, but unchecked capitalism is bad. Most of all, let’s remember: just because we like something doesn’t mean we shouldn’t critique it.

With welfare cuts Starmer’s Labour is grabbing the Tory spade and digging deeper

Ah, spring. A time for daffodils, delusion, and yet another chancellor trying to sell austerity with a smile. Yes, it’s the week of the Spring Statement, where the government takes a long, hard look at the state of the nation and decides, with trademark compassion, that the real problem is disabled people getting £8.25 a day to survive.

This time, the cruelty isn't coming from the usual suspects. It's not the Tories sharpening their budget axe, it’s Keir Starmer’s Labour. The "not-as-bad-as-the-Tories-but-still-weirdly-keen-on-acting-like-them" Labour. The party formerly known for representing workers and the vulnerable is now laser-focused on freezing Personal Independence Payments (PIP). Presumably because the real crisis is that people who rely on the state for support aren’t suffering enough.

The Prime Minister, still clinging to the idea that he’s a centrist technocrat and not just a cut-price David Cameron tribute act, has declared that welfare costs are “unsustainable, indefensible and unfair.” Spoken like a man whose entire understanding of fairness begins and ends with a balance sheet.

Doing what the Tories only dreamed of

Yes, Labour. The same Labour that once gave us the NHS, the minimum wage, and child poverty reduction is now delivering soundbites so Thatcherite they may as well be scratched into a bust of Ayn Rand. Rachel Reeves, whose economic strategy appears to be “whatever Tory swing voters in Nuneaton would like,” has declared that it "can’t be right" to write off a generation who are out of work and gasp using PIP. She claims they are using it improperly. Not unlike the way MPs improperly use second home allowances to buy duck ponds and Louis Vuitton laundry baskets.

Then there’s Wes Streeting, seemingly auditioning to win the award of least caring frontline politician - a competitive field - who recently said to Tory MPs that Labour was “doing the things they only ever talked about.” One shudders to imagine what he’ll do next. Deportations by catapult? Means-testing air?

Politically, this isn’t “sensible centrism.” This is George Osborne in a Keir Starmer mask. Osborne once invoked the image of a hard-working person waking up at dawn while their scrounging neighbour slept in and enjoyed lounging on benefits. Starmer’s Labour have taken that metaphor, added a few more contemptuous flourishes, and started broadcasting it on every available frequency.

Speeding up the burying of our collective morality

It’s not just the rhetoric, it’s the policy. Making PIP harder to claim? Even after years of Tory rule have already turned the benefit system into a bureaucratic maze of medical assessments designed to stop help getting to the needy? At this point, Labour isn’t just digging the same hole as the Tories, they’ve brought in an industrial drill and hired contractors to speed up the burying of our collective morality.

Here’s a thought: most people claiming benefits are in work. Most people who are homeless also have jobs. The problem isn’t laziness or fraud, it’s that our economy is a dystopian farce where work doesn’t pay, rent is daylight robbery, and a food shop requires the tactical precision of a military operation.

Yet here comes Labour, crowing about benefit cuts to show they’re tough, and hopefully salvage their plunging poll ratings. Have they noticed that food bank usage has exploded? That scurvy, actual Dickensian scurvy, is back? That people are choosing between heating and eating, and increasingly achieving neither?

Reheated austerity

This is what so many warned about during last year’s election campaign. That behind the fluff of “change” and “renewal,” Starmer’s Labour was quietly committed to a reheated version of austerity. They refused to commit to scrapping the two-child benefit cap. They mumbled sweet nothings about fiscal responsibility. Meanwhile liberal commentators beamed approvingly, reassuring us that this was all just pragmatic politics.

Remember this Polly Toynbee article? The one from last summer, confidently asserting that Starmer’s Labour would lift the two-child cap and rescue the poor from the Tories’ cruelty? A comforting bedtime story for people who think "radical" means a new white paper looking at the issue. Yet here we are: benefits slashed, defence spending up, and not a crumb of radicalism to be found; unless you count radical indifference.

Labour members aren’t happy

The party faithful? Not so faithful anymore. Nearly half of Labour members - Labour members who haven’t quit yet - think the party’s heading in the wrong direction. Which is frankly optimistic, because it assumes the party is heading anywhere at all. They’re just following Tory voters around with a clipboard, asking what they’d like to see next.

Labour isn’t for Labour members. It’s not for liberals. It’s not for the poor. It’s not for people who believe in social justice, dignity, or the wild notion that disabled people shouldn’t have to prove they’re not faking it every six months. It’s for the mythical swing voter in a Home Counties semi who gets a little red-faced when someone mentions trans rights and thinks anyone on benefits should be forced to clean motorway laybys with a toothbrush.

Labour don’t care

That’s the only plan Starmer’s Labour has: be Tory, but with better diction. Pretend there's no alternative. Hope everyone on the left just holds their nose and votes for them anyway.

The truth is, poverty got worse under the Tories because they didn’t care. Now it’s going to get worse under Labour because they don’t either. That’s not pragmatism. That’s moral cowardice, dressed up in a red rosette.

GBP image created by Joegoauk Goa and is used under creative commons.

Behold the smartest people in the room: The Waterstones Dads

Oh, Waterstones Dads. The khaki-clad infantry of intellectual self-satisfaction. You know the type: armed with a stack of Very Serious Non-Fiction about geopolitics, economics, and, naturally, the failures of socialism, they march into pub chats and social media threads alike, convinced that they’re the only ones who see the world as it truly is, because if there’s one thing these midlife epistemic warriors hate more than emotional arguments, it’s fiction.

To be clear, there’s nothing inherently wrong with reading non-fiction. In fact, it’s quite useful if you’re interested in learning about the world. Some of my favourite books are non-fiction. I can strongly recommend Leon Neyfakh’s The Next Next Level, or No Less Than Mystic by John Medhurst, or Dictatorland by Paul Kenyon. They’re great reads and opened my mind in one way or another. 

The problem is that Waterstones Dads don’t just read non-fiction; they treat it like a divine revelation. To them, the truth is simple, obvious, and discernible by anyone willing to sit down with the right books (usually written by authors who are from some kind of think tank who have absorbed the entire cannon of conventional wisdom and have no flair to their prose).

Who are Waterstones Dads?

So, you may be wondering what a Waterstones Dad is. The thing is, you already know. They’re the sort of guy who reads a lot of books with names like The Rise of China and then feels like they are an expert on all things related to the rising superpower, because they have the facts. They are quick to criticise others for having an ideological worldview because what they believe doesn’t end with an ism, but are completely blind to the fact that they are as doctrinal - in a neoliberal way - as an angry early twenty something on campus cosplaying Citizen Smith.

This mindset, that they alone are armed with unfiltered reality while others are blinded by ideology, is one of the most subtly dangerous forces in politics. It leads to easily dismissing anyone who disagrees with you. Why engage with those pesky lefties who want to discuss inequality, capitalism, gender equality, or anything more emotional than interest rates? They’re just *feeling* their way through the world, after all. Unlike you, the intellectual who sees reality for what it really is.

The thing is, everyone thinks they see the world clearly. It’s a comforting delusion shared by conspiracy theorists who believe the Queen is/was an alien lizard and by smug centrists who believe that anyone to the left of Keir Starmer is a Marxist. The difference is that the Queen-is-a-lizard crowd can usually be found ranting on obscure forums, whereas Waterstones Dads are often found in board rooms, current events panel discussion shows and in the profile of “hero voters” who politicians are desperate to pander to.

Open to ideas

Speaking of debate, isn’t it funny how these self-proclaimed champions of open-mindedness are always more open to ideas from the right than from the left? They’ll gladly entertain a nuanced discussion about, say, the merits of free-market deregulation, or why we can’t do anything about climate change (or occasionally why the gender pay gap isn’t real) but suggest that perhaps capitalism has some inherent flaws, and suddenly they’re less open-minded. “Let’s have a debate”, they say, but they don’t listen and never change their minds. Why would they? They already know all the facts.

Their disdain for fiction is where things get truly fascinating. Fiction, to the Waterstones Dad, is nothing more than emotional nonsense. Real learning, they believe, comes from non-fiction, or more accurately the specific type of non-fiction they read. It’s easy to dismiss novels when your bedside table is stacked with titles like The Economist’s Guide to Saving the World with Graphs, or How to Think Like a Very Clever Person Without Actually Trying, or Sapiens, but here’s the thing: fiction teaches you to connect with other people. Whether from the past, the future, or other cultures. It helps you realise that there are more perspectives than just your own.

Empathy isn’t emotional fluff

In a world increasingly defined by division and misunderstanding, empathy isn’t emotional fluff, it's a survival skill. Reading non-fiction might teach you about the mechanics of the economy, but fiction helps you understand the lived experience of what a 9% rise in inflation is like.

It’s one thing to know the statistics about refugee crises; it’s another to read a novel that brings you into the life of someone fleeing their home and facing hostility everywhere they go, like Exit West by Mohsin Hamid. Waterstones dads could use a little more of that perspective. Less Why Nations Fail, more How People Feel.

The smartest guys in the room

Let me be serious for a moment. The title above references the film Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. It’s a great, non-fiction, film that is really worth a watch. There are two main things that stand out to me about the film.

First, all these people who thought they were smarter than everyone else - and they had a lot of credentials to prove it, Princeton and all that - made a company that collapsed in contact with reality. Secondly, although many of them made huge amounts of money out of being the smartest men in the room, they were ultimately the stooges of capitalism in that all their efforts made more money for people with even more wealth and power than them.

Understanding the world

Waterstones Dads may think that they’re super smart because they know that if we tax the wealth on billionaires we might also tax the pensions of ordinary workers saving for their retirement - valid point that bears more debate - but ultimately Waterstones Dads, in their semi-detached houses in Leicester, full of books, are far closer in terms of power to students marching for a free Palestine than they are to billionaires like Elon Musk - whose politics they claim to detest but who they ultimately end up on the same side of against the woke socialists.

So, dear Waterstones dads, by all means, keep reading your Very Important Books, but maybe slip a novel in there once in a while, because if there’s one truth worth embracing, it’s that understanding the world requires more than just knowing how it works. It requires knowing how it feels, and for that, you’ll need more than just facts, you’ll need a little bit of fiction.

Austerity, military spending and Trump’s temper: the war in Ukraine continues

After months of the West distracting itself with elections, Ukraine is back in the headlines. Three years of fighting, tens of thousands dead, and Donald Trump insists he can end it all. So long as he doesn’t completely fall out with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, storm off in a huff and leave all of Europe to Russia. 

The great dealmaker will strike again, he says, if only the world will listen and give America access to Ukraine’s mineral resources, and show appropriate gratitude for being treated like a piece in Trump’s Make America Great Again game.

We’re on our own

Ukraine’s independence or territorial integrity doesn’t matter to Trump. Already, he has begun laying the groundwork for a potential sellout. He accused Zelenskyy of being a dictator, echoing the talking points of those who see Ukraine’s resistance as an inconvenience rather than a cause worth defending, and then had a very public falling out with Zelenskyy on TV.

Trump and the MAGA crowd at best don’t really care what happens in Ukraine and at worst are selling Ukraine out to Vladimir Putin because Trump never could resist the charms of a strongman. Trump’s willingness to undercut Ukraine is an alarming sign of what could come next for the rest of Europe. We’re on our own against Putin’s violent imperialism. 

Justice for Ukraine

In Britain, the establishment line remains firm: support Ukraine, back NATO, stand against Russian aggression. It’s easy to claim that Trump is disrupting that consensus. He may present his approach as the populist will of the people, like his stances on immigration or trans rights, but this time, I don't think he’s channelling a popular sentiment. Certainly not in the UK. I want justice for Ukraine, and I believe most people do too. I see Putin as the aggressor and so do most other Brits.

Although Britain and Europe’s support for Ukraine comes at a cost. Not as high as the cost to Ukraine itself for fighting the war, but in these lean times the cost to Britain cannot be dismissed out of hand. Even by those of us who believe Ukraine has a right to self-determination.

Austerity is the order of the day 

As Keir Starmer’s Labour government scramble to fund military aid, austerity is the order of the day. Especially as tax rises and borrowing are still off the table. I don't agree with increasing defence spending while public services suffer. The UK is now cutting foreign aid to redirect funds to the military, a move that former Development Secretary Clare Short did not hesitate to criticise.

What annoys me more is the suggestion from a Labour aide that only the “middle-class, educated London-type voter” would care about such cuts. As if the working class people of Middlesbrough are really pleased that their local schools and hospitals are being sacrificed so that we can have a bigger army. How blatant does Starmer’s Labour have to be that they don’t want my vote?

An impossible situation

I am deeply sceptical of how much we are spending on this war and whether increasing defence budgets is the right answer. I’m not the only one. Scottish Labour MP Brian Leishman, has circulated a letter that calls for defence budget increases to be funded by a wealth tax instead of Labour “turning its back on communities facing poverty, conflict and insecurity".

However, I also want Ukraine to survive this conflict and not lose its identity or a chunk of itself to an invading army. I know that the war should end with a negotiated settlement, not violence, but how do you negotiate with Putin; a war criminal who cannot be trusted for a second. It’s an impossible situation.

I understand that there is a contradiction here. I want Ukraine to be a free and independent state, but I am hesitant about sending British troops and weapons to Ukraine. I don’t have a problem with arming Ukraine, I just don’t want more austerity in the UK to pay for it when taxes could be raised. Supporting Ukraine is popular in Britain. I find it hard to believe that people, especially the wealthy, would be mortally opposed to paying more tax to help Ukraine. More austerity for more defence spending is not in our best interests

Hypocrisy and cruelty

Everyone has an opinion on the war in Ukraine, and most reveal glaring hypocrisy. The establishment preaches about sovereignty and war crimes in Ukraine, but turns a blind eye when it comes to Israel and Gaza. Another country lies in ruins, more collective punishment is meted out. Yet the outrage is selective.

I agree with Judith N. Shklar that hypocrisy is overly criticised amongst politicians and that cruelty is much worse. Trump is cruel, but he’s let off because he’s no hypocrite. Well, there’s enough cruelty to go around right now. The attacks on Ukraine and Gaza are both cruel, and I oppose them both.

Why Ukraine matters

I don’t believe that Putin wants to conquer all of Europe, like a modern Napoleon, but he should still be opposed. If Putin is allowed to succeed in Ukraine he will next turn to states like Poland and Hungary, bullying them out of NATO and the EU, and under closer Russian control. Putin will then be in a stronger position to further destabilise liberal democracies all around the world by pushing disinformation online and supporting far-right parties in the West.

Putin’s victory would also embolden any other state that wants to use military power to achieve political ends. China would invade Taiwan. Israel would be even more willing to attack its neighbours. All because the idea that every state, no matter its size or strength, has the right to self-determination would have been thrown in the dust bin of history.

This is why it’s important that Ukraine triumphs over Russia. Not just for the future of Ukraine, but for the ongoing fight against authoritarianism that will define the 21st century.

Flirting with Putin

Meanwhile, the right flirts with Putin, drawn to his hardline stance against the so-called “woke agenda” and the fact that he is the toughest chimp in the cage and the right can’t resist the appeal of a big tough might-makes-right-guy.

Then there’s the centrists, who never met a foreign conflict they didn’t want to throw our army and someone else’s children into. Their rush to escalate is concerning, and Starmer’s suggestion that British troops could be sent to Ukraine is mainly his chance to look tougher on the world stage, recently convening world leaders in London to show support for Ukraine.

Then again, supporting Ukraine seems to be something that Starmer actually believes in. It’s the one issue where he doesn’t flip-flop to the opinion that tests best in focus groups. Ironically, this show of passion is actually fixing the death spiral in his poll ratings. Will he break his tax pledges over Ukraine, but not for the NHS, the economy, or the environment? It could happen.

Morally wrong and ineffective

I don't like Trump’s willingness to sell out Ukraine because he can’t magically resolve the conflict in 5 minutes; the length of Trump’s attention span. Not only because it’s morally wrong, but because it won’t work.

If Putin is allowed to consolidate his gains, he will simply regroup and attack again when it suits him. Putin held to the 30-day ceasefire agreed recently for only a few hours. Ukraine knows that Putin can’t be trusted, which is why they won’t accept peace on unfavourable terms. Trump doesn’t care about justice, only about ending the war and taking credit, regardless of the long-term consequences.

So the war will continue. Costs will mount. Trump may disrupt the status quo, and even pull American support for Ukraine, but Europe will press on without him, justifying ever more spending and sacrifice. However, how can I say I support Ukraine, without being willing to do anything? This is why I feel weapons should be sent to the fight, but that austerity isn’t the way to pay for it.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay