Robert Paxton’s seminal The Anatomy of Fascism conceptualises it not as a category but a political process: “all that is required… is polarisation, deadlock, mass mobilisation against internal and external enemies, and complicity by existing elites.” Nearly all are present in the UK. The collapse in electoral support for the Conservative Party and rise in support for Reform UK, the Green Party, the SNP, and Plaid Cymru are the most obvious political signs of polarisation. Ma

On July 14th 2026, under the scorching Parisian sun, French military troops marched down the historical Champs Elysées. Unusually, this year the military parade was opened by the thirty five countries making up the Coalition of the Willing, flying over and marching down the avenue in front of their respective leaders. What followed was one the biggest parades ever witnessed on Bastille Day, with 6.700 troops, 98 aircrafts, 31 helicopters and 315 vehicles mobilised, simultaneo

One of Donald Trump’s many pledges to the American electorate was to end United States involvement in what he coined ‘forever wars’. And yet, weeks past have seen further strikes on Iran by the US – a response to attacks on vessels in the Straits of Hormuz, despite a 60 day interim agreement between the two countries being signed in June. Does this conflict reflect the waning geo-political power of America, rather than the tyranny of the regime in Iran? The relationship betwe

Where just a few months ago Nigel Farage seemed invincible, his political position has grown increasingly precarious in recent months. Nigel Farage’s decision to not declare a £5 million ‘gift’ from the Thailand-based crypto-billionaire Christopher Harborne remains the biggest threat to his momentum. The Reform leader claims to have “done nothing wrong”, but his failure to declare the money he received from Harborne, per rule 5 of the House of Commons code of conduct, prompte

The Democratic National Committee’s (DNC) so-called 2024 Presidential Campaign "autopsy" analyses the decisions and actions that led to Kamala Harris's defeat. It is far from a serious analysis of what went wrong in 2024, and who was truly responsible for that defeat. The report discloses five key points demonstrating the disconnect between the Democratic leadership and the political reality they faced. The first consists of blaming then-President Joe Biden (2021-2025) for no

Andy Burnham is about to become Prime Minister. His ambition has never been a secret. Unlike generations of politicians who insisted that leadership had somehow found them, Burnham has openly wanted the job. In another era, that kind of ambition might have been regarded as slightly distasteful. In 2026, it feels almost refreshing. That may be one of the defining political lessons of the past decade. We have entered an era in which voters appear less concerned with whether pol

The inevitable has happened. On 22nd June, Sir Keir Starmer stepped up to the podium outside No.10 and delivered a speech much of the country had been anticipating for months. Once again, the familiar image of a crestfallen prime minister appeared before the assembled press corps and television cameras. Starmer accepted “with good grace” that Labour MPs no longer wanted him to lead the party into the next general election, continuing Britain's recent revolving door of prime m

“FRONT TOWARDS ENEMY”, a marking found on the M18AI Claymore, a Vietnam era mine, reads the shirt of team USA star catcher Cal Raleigh. Robert O’Neil, the Seal Team leader who claims to have killed Osama Bin Laden, was called in to give a motivational speech. This was the United States at the 2026 World Baseball Classic – a sporting event recast as a military operation. Team USA was now exporting the same hard power at the WBC that had led to the kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro

In Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice, the film’s titular subject, Donald Trump, has his political mythology, by turns, dissected and distilled into a brutal education in winning; attack first, concede nothing, and, above all, declare victory even when facts may indicate the opposite. The film’s dramatisation of Trump’s rise under the impervious tutelage of McCarthy-allied lawyer Roy Cohn presents deal brokering as more a matter of domination than negotiation. Cohn’s lessons are in

May 28 marked the passing of the Iran war from its third into its fourth, and possibly final, month. From early April to June a fragile ceasefire had remained, somewhat improbably, intact, before a flurry of missiles exchanged between Israel and Iran, Tehran’s downing of a US Apache helicopter, and a swift series of US retaliatory strikes against Iran marked an end to this period of relative quiet. Yet days later, on June 14, US President Trump announced that Washington and T

‘The only thing stopping Trump from monetising Greenland is that you can’t put it on a mug. Yet’ Donald Trump has never been a man who does things quietly, or particularly logically. Chaos is the policy. Disruption is the strategy. By the time he had set his sights on Greenland, most of the world had long stopped being surprised by what came out of his mouth; and yet, for the 56,000 people who live there, this particular fixation landed differently. At some point in 2019, Nuu

Artificial intelligence has ushered in a new age of geopolitics. The unveiling of Anthropic's Mythos AI model in April may one day be remembered as a historic turning point. But this is not a technology story. It is a geopolitical one. How the technology is being distributed, and how Washington has responded to its unveiling, tells us a great deal about the world that is emerging. New geopolitical lines are being drawn, and Mythos may prove to be the ink. What is it exactly?

Tony Blair’s unabashed tendency to offer his unsolicited opinion on the decline of the Labour party has unfortunately become a rather exhausting feature of British politics. Refusing to comply with his fate of exiting stage left and disappearing into irrelevancy, the former Prime Minister and Labour party leader has maintained an irritating desire to be heard. His latest intervention comes in the form of a rambling essay posted to the Tony Blair Institute’s so-called ‘insight

Donald Trump did not engineer the decline of American soft power, though he would probably trademark it if he could. Instead, he is one of its clearest consequences and biggest brands. Long before he entered the White House, faith in the American model was already eroding at home and abroad. Trump emerged from this decline and has spent his presidency accelerating it. After failing to secure a Nobel Peace Prize last year, Trump petulantly wrote to Norwegian Prime Minister Jon

Boards of Canada, a Scottish electronic music duo, are soon to release their first LP in 13 years. ‘Inferno’, will be available through Warp Records and conventional streaming from the 29th of May. The duo released their first full length LP, ‘Music Has the Right to Children’, in 1997, an album which has since been described by Simon Reynolds as ‘the greatest psychedelic album of the ‘90s’. ‘Music Has the Right to Children’ represented a crystallisation of what is now recogn

It feels like only a short while ago that everyone watched Kamala Harris attempt what many saw as an impossible balancing act: to defend an increasingly unpopular president while somehow preparing to inherit the party. Now, JD Vance may be realising his vice presidency comes with the same trap; the parallels have become difficult to ignore as we approach 2028. Both Harris and Vance have served under unpopular presidents. Both are expected to publicly defend every administrati

“Damn Daniel! Back at it again with the white vans!” Says the narrator in a viral Internet meme from roughly a decade ago. You probably associate this meme with reactions of laughter or derision in the school corridor. Regardless, the meme remains in your mind years later. Internet memes – colourful static photos, gifs, or short videos – are easy to recall. Constant repetition helps to reinforce the meme in the memory – your friend may have laughed at “Damn Daniel!”, repeatin

America’s authoritarian tilt is visible just about anywhere you look. You can see it in the institutions Trump has bent to his will, and the way he has pushed his presidential powers well beyond the limits of his office. Yet, I think if you really want to understand the unique authoritarian turn developing in America, you should look no further than Washington DC. Today, the beating heart of America’s federal government is a vision of the country Trump wants to build, and the

Elon Musk seemed to be omnipresent a year ago. 2025 was swathed in a succession of Musk's political undertakings, his name part of the furniture of the headlines. January saw him salute in a way akin to the Nazis at the inauguration of Donald Trump, February his awkward wielding of a chainsaw at CPAC and the painful declaration that he had, quote, “become meme”. His role as leader of DOGE resulted in immense pitfalls for federal agencies and slashing of government jobs, as we

Reminiscent of the UK’s 2003 Stop The War demonstrations , where hundreds of thousands gathered to (unsuccessfully) oppose the Iraq War, the most recent wave of ‘No Kings’ rallies in the US saw demonstrations attended by over eight million Americans . Loudly and proudly criticising the administration of President Trump, there were several incredible photos (available here ). Focusing heavily on ICE, democratic freedom, and US republicanism, it was that last feature from which