Season's greetings, Karl (and to you, my esteemed reader). There’s just something about self-verifying utopianism that doesn’t quite hit the spot the rest of the year , but it’s Christmas, so let’s cut Marx some seasonal slack. This isn’t solely an assault on the long-since-dead ideologue, but rather a repository of festive feedback, reflecting not only on Marx’s conceptualisation of surplus value and capitalism, but our conceptualisation of Christmas, too. Though undoubtedly

On 24 October 2025, the pro-reunification, Turkish Cypriot candidate Tufan Erhurman won the elections in Northern Cyprus. He won convincingly, with a whopping 62.8% of the vote. For the past 51 years, the island has been divided between the Republic of Cyprus in the south and a Turkish-occupied zone in the north - the self-proclaimed Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC). Many attempts to reunite Cyprus have failed due to disagreements between regional actors, primarily

As hosts of the largest  political podcast in the UK, Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart hold considerable sway over the British political consensus. They consistently interview  political figures of the same gravitas that one would expect on the BBC and Channel 4, and sometimes pose them challenging questions. They sometimes do live shows, but mostly provide analysis of current affairs from their cleanly-decorated studio, wearing expensive suits, and speaking with an air of

Never has time felt more like a construct than in the jurors waiting room at Wolverhampton Crown Court – once inside, you’d be hard pushed to guess the decade let alone how long you’d be kept waiting. There are three clocks dotted along the pale blue walls and no television; the Wi-Fi works (just about). Fifties-style dinner ladies are arbitrarily summoned by a bell to dish out fish fingers, chips, and beans whilst queues spring up at the vending machines for hot drinks that

This past September, the Trump Administration began conducting airstrikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea as part of the President’s agenda to fight the flow of drugs from Latin America into the U.S. The Washington Post first reported  that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave the verbal order to Seal Team Six to “leave no survivors” during a September 2 strike off the coast of Venezuela. As the two survivors were subsequently killed in a second strike, his order would be deem

Siniša Karan has been declared the winner of the recent snap elections  in Republika Srpska, after long-standing leader Milorad Dodik was removed from office back in August. Dodik attempted to seriously undermine the Dayton Accords by denying rulings  from the High Representative, Christian Schmidt, which is a direct violation of the negotiated peace. Under a dual agreement ,   Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) has enjoyed its autonomy  alongside Republika Srpska, until recently t

With the 2027 midterm elections fast approaching, Mexico’s political landscape is already shifting. The National Action Party ( PAN ), the main opposition force and the only visible representative of the Mexican centre-right, has decided to reinvent itself, both in image and structure . The “blue and white” party now seeks to break with the approach that defined it between 2016 and 2024 — a period marked by alliances with former rivals , first with the now-defunct Party of th

Ah, the annual budget - that glorious spectacle of political theatre through which pompous chancellors attempt to justify their political survival. Tax cuts, spending commitments for public services, and the odd solemn promise to lift the burden off working people have all been used to extend the life of a chancellor's political career, or if a budget goes well enough, propel them next door into Number 10. Yet, this time seems to be different. Instead of championing taxpayers

Drama in Northern Ireland’s devolved legislature reached a fever pitch in recent weeks. Minister for Education, Paul Givan, lost a symbolic vote of no confidence  in the wake of a “fact-finding mission” to Israel, using his department’s social media to share photos from a school in annexed West Bank territory.  The visit to Israel raises many questions, perhaps chiefly, was it necessary for the Minister of a devolved regional government to go on a so-called fact-finding missi

The presidential election in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) on October 19th, 2025, has introduced a potentially transformative figure into the island’s long-stalled peace process. Tufan Erhurman, the centre-left lawyer and leader of the Republican Turkish Party (CTP), defeated incumbent president Ersin Tatar with 62.76% of the vote,  signalling a decisive shift in the Turkish Cypriot political landscape. For the first time in five years, the Turkish Cypriot el

Donald Trump has a complicated relationship with the media. That fact shouldn’t particularly shock anyone, as he seems to have a fairly complicated relationship with everything – Elon Musk and Jeffrey Epstein must certainly have thought so, at the very least. His relationship with the news media, however, has always stuck out. Beginning all the way back during his campaign for presidency in 2016, Trump has fought tooth and nail against what he designates as “fake news”, culmi

With one fell swing, Donald Trump has ideologically axed the American political establishment. The recent government shutdown in the United States bigly highlighted the growing fracture in our political system, whether through attacks on SNAP benefits or simply flight safety. Although the shutdown has ceased, its effects are certainly to be felt by Americans  going into the holiday season. We are at a crucial juncture in the United States’ national story. Populism has surged

We’re in a political epoch where no principle, institution, or authority is sacred. Everything is questioned, debated, and assessed within an inch of its life. Sometimes, it's unclear if there’s anything we all universally agree upon – if there is anything hallowed, permitted to go unquestioned. Political change is undoubtedly essential as an agent of progress, but sometimes we broaden debate so much that we lose focus on what matters. I recently spent a lecture entertaining

The official narrative  behind data-driven surveillance technology promises a new era of “impartial”, “scientific”, “evidence-based” policing, sewn together by the techno-futurist allure of automated algorithms and their supposed apolitical neutrality. The reality of the vast upsurge in UK surveillance since 2020  is one of alarming privacy invasion and intense racialisation, especially against racial and ethnic minorities. Tools like the now-defunct Metropolitan Police's Gan

How many Ukrainian soldiers have died in the last three years of war? You probably haven’t heard because, newsworthy as the figure should be, western media outlets rarely report it. The latest authoritative calculation  suggests that both sides have lost roughly the same number of men: that is, approximately 200,000 to 220,000 dead. Staggeringly, this is more soldiers than the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa combined lost in the First World War. The sad tr

When a conflict is in its twilight hours, its final death throes often manifest as an exponentially rapid alteration in at least one of its combatant’s positions, be they military or diplomatic. In the case of the largest and bloodiest war continental Europe has seen since the Second World War, we can now see clear evidence of the latter - and not from the Ukrainian camp. The culminating peace proposals from a weekend of breakneck cross-Atlantic detente-by-press-communique wi

When searching for local classical shows, I came across a section in a Mozart concert’s description entitled “Your Brain on Art.” The section references studies that argue listening to Mozart enhances “spatial reasoning,” “cognitive performance,” and “ brain wave activity associated with relaxation and mental clarity.” The framing of music as a vehicle for self-betterment, a technology for improvement, speaks to the growing instrumentalization of aesthetics. Art no longer sei

Macron’s France offers a political mirror which Starmer’s Labour ignores at its peril. After years of cautious positioning, Labour has stumbled through the opening phase of government, seemingly unaware of a public exhausted by decline and impatient for visible change. Macron began his project with similar ambitions – technocratic renewal through post-tribal politics – but it has collapsed under a failure to deliver significant structural reform, fracturing the political land

The catalyst for the collapse of establishment MAGA began on October 7th. However, the ingredients necessary for its fracture have been stewing in the Republican political machine for the better part of a decade. MAGA, their vitriolic ideology, and their destructive attachment to the state of Israel, I argue, now only have themselves to blame.  A little over a month ago, Politico dropped an exclusive report  that focused on leaked messages from a Young Republicans Telegram gr

Two peace proposals now frame the future of Ukraine . Washington's draft plan focuses on concessions and neutrality, while Brussels has unveiled a new framework built around the principle that "borders cannot be changed by force" . At first glance, they seem to represent different strategies. In reality, they reflect two competing ways the world has thought about security for nearly a century. The first is universalism, the idea that every state, large or small, enjoys the sa