My column on how capital becomes a death cult. Faced with a choice between profit and human life, the radical right chooses profit. Then it tries to persuade us that mass death is what we want. It's the new phase of climate denial: accept your fate, earthlings. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Murderous heat, an endangered food supply, decimated landscapes: embrace the Mediterranean life | George Monbiot

As climate disaster stares us in the face, the radical right says ‘Embrace the Mediterranean life’. Embrace death, more like it, says Guardian columnist George Monbiot

theguardian.com

The Tice conundrum - Pollution was masking the heating effect of global warming, that must mean clean air is the cause of higher temperatures not CO2. God this man is stupid.

This is US Trumpian politics polluting our discourse.

Under a Binface government, anyone who doesn’t accept human-made climate change as fact will be sent back to school, from Year 1 right the way to A Levels, to see if anything goes in the second time round. #VoteBinface

Jonathan Sumption says Britain faces a £4 trillion climate liability. The law says something very different. This piece traces how a hypothetical academic model became a media panic and why that matters.

Sumption, Policy Exchange and the Four Trillion Pound Scare

Four trillion pounds. That is the figure carrying Jonathan Sumption’s latest Telegraph column.

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Borrowed Analysis

A young nationalist’s tweet about capitalism reveals something more important than another Clacton candidacy. Parts of Marx’s critique of capitalism are finding a second life on the far right.

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Let Other People Tell Us What It Is

Trump’s UFO files reveal less than they pretend.

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From @anticapitalistmusings.com "Lowe wants the state small when it taxes wealth, ... funds welfare, ... or protects minorities through law. He wants it enormous when it detains, deports, excludes, disciplines... Less state for capital. More state for everyone else."

The Small-State Man and the Deportation Machine

Rupert Lowe went on Joe Rogan to denounce the British state. What he described was something larger, harder and more frightening.

simonpearson1.substack.com

From @anticapitalistmusings.com "It requires an extraordinary innocence to believe that anyone gives a politician millions of pounds expecting nothing in return ... Whether the favour has been cashed in is beside the point. The relationship itself is what voters are entitled to judge."

The Uses of the Establishment

The word no longer identifies where power lies. It identifies whoever is trying to hold power to account.

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From @anticapitalistmusings.com "The by-election will happen and Farage will almost certainly win. The more revealing figure will be the turnout ... That figure will tell us more about the state of representation in England than anything said from the podium at Millbank."

The Uses of Clacton

Two by-elections in two months, both called for the convenience of a national leader, neither about the place that holds it.

simonpearson1.substack.com

From @anticapitalistmusings.com "Farage, of all people, reached for the Leveson Inquiry and wished aloud for a press held to account. The man whose whole movement runs on tearing down journalists wants the press leashed when it turns towards him and loose when it works for him."

A Great Distraction

Farage’s phrase for the reporting on his money. A better description of the by-election he called to bury it.

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@anticapitalistmusings.com "Set one crypto billionaire’s five million pounds beside ... a man in Jaywick who votes Reform because he wants something to change ... Ask who holds the most influence over the change Reform promises, and the honest answer is not the voter in Jaywick." #clactonByElection

A By-Election to Avoid an Answer

Farage resigned rather than answer for the crypto billionaire and the convicted fraudster who pay his bills.

simonpearson1.substack.com

From @anticapitalistmusings.com "Sack [Infantino] tomorrow and the man who replaces him inherits the same arrangement on his first morning: FIFA needs governments to fund its tournaments, governments want the prestige a tournament brings, and the job rewards closeness to power."

Power Play

Trump's intervention may have restored Folarin Balogun to the team sheet, but it could not stop Belgium exposing a far bigger weakness: football's willingness to bend when power comes calling.

simonpearson1.substack.com

No mandate, no membership vote, no questions from the press. Andy Burnham’s Manchester speech was serious. So are the problems waiting for him.

The Machine Stays Put

Thanks for reading Anti-Capitalist Musings.

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First the National Portrait Gallery. Now the Quentin Blake Centre. Different exhibitions, different accusations, the same underlying argument: that Britain's cultural institutions have been ideologically captured and must be brought back into line.

Encoding the Moral Panic

The Telegraph's coverage of a gallery exhibition does more than report a controversy. It reorganises familiar concerns about children and public space into a wider argument about queer culture.

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peopleandnature.wordpress.com/2026/06/26/i...

In Mexico, people fear one imperialist aggressor. In Estonia, it’s a different one

At a Green Left zoom discussion on 23 June about “the Green party and NATO”, I argued that we can support resistance to Russian imperialism while opposing NATO. I was on a panel along with Paul Ing…

peopleandnature.wordpress.com

peopleandnature.wordpress.com/2026/06/26/h...

Hong Kong protesters: “Oppose Russian hegemonic aggression! No Peace without Justice!”

This statement by HK Anti-War Mobilisation was published on facebook on the fourth anniversary of Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine, in February. It deserves to be shared widely – please copy an…

peopleandnature.wordpress.com

Burnham could do much worse than taking the Gordon Brown devolution document Starmer endorsed and then binned as a road map to decentralising the state.

Jim Pickard@pickardje.bsky.social · last mo.

Andy Burnham is looking to set up a “Number 10 in the north”, moving part of his prime ministerial operation to Manchester, in a radical attempt to shift power beyond Westminster. www.ft.com/content/f304...

Nick Griffin has published an open instruction to the far right: join Restore Britain, keep quiet about your views, and organise from within. He named the target, described the method, and put his name on it. This is what the pressure on Restore actually looks like, in Griffin's own words.

In Plain Sight

Nick Griffin published his entryism call yesterday. He published it, named the target, described the method, and asked his readers to spread it. Entryism is supposed to work the other way.

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Yep

Ten years after the referendum, Brexit’s defenders are still selling sovereignty as a recovered object: something stolen by Brussels and handed back to Britain. But what was restored was not power. It was exposure. 🧵 1/3

Disgraceful decision by the National Portrait Gallery: bullied by old men into removing an art installation that dared to challenge the Churchill myth.

National Portrait Gallery display withdrawn after Churchill row

The video installation prompted a row over its claims about Churchill's role in the Bengal famine.

bbc.com

Farage's greatest political achievement may not be Brexit. It may be persuading millions of people that a man who has spent twenty-seven years in elected office is somehow an outsider. A short essay on Britain's most successful anti-politician.

Signs His Name to the Rubble

Farage's politics depends on a simple illusion: that one of Britain's longest-serving politicians is somehow not a politician at all.

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Rupert Lowe rejected ethnonationalism. Within hours, supporters were explaining why nothing important had changed. Harrison Pitt translated. Orla Minihane reassured. Vauban Books amplified. Alek Yerbury declared it "racialised liberalism". Luke Jahn declared himself a National Socialist.

The Thing Being Translated

The argument over ethnonationalism was never really about a word. It was about how far Restore Britain can moderate its language without losing the movement it hopes to lead.

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Restore Britain got 3,111 votes in Makerfield. The more important result was what happened afterwards. Momentum claims. Vote aggregation. Reform’s sacrifice operation. Tory distraction. And, running through it all, a BBC clip of Rupert Lowe refusing to condemn Tommy Robinson.

Not the Voters He Is Talking To

Restore Britain flopped in Makerfield. But Rupert Lowe’s refusal to condemn Tommy Robinson shows how defeat at the ballot box can still become useful material for the far-right relay.

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Independent journalism runs on reader support, not institutional backing. If this piece is useful to you, share it. The buy me a coffee link is in every post.

The Levellers Did Not Fight at Putney for This

June 23 is four days away. The architects of Brexit are already reaching for English radical history to redeem a decade of damage. The tradition David Frost claims does not belong to him.

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The UK’s economic relations with Israel make it complicit in the illegal occupation of Palestinian land. The impunity must end. Join me and back the call for sanctions on Israel’s war economy: act.globaljustice.org.uk/petition-tel...

Petition: Tell the UK to put sanctions on Israel

Israel’s genocide in Gaza and regime of oppression across the occupied Palestinian territory are possible because countries like the UK have allowed it to act with impunity. Targeted economic sanction...

act.globaljustice.org.uk

Two by-election defeats in winnable seats expose a problem Farage has not solved: he cannot find candidates who do not become the issue. Both losses came down to personality, not politics.

For further, excellent analysis of Restore, Reform and other political phenomena read @anticapitalistmusings.com substack.

Which Side Are You Really On?

A website appeared overnight. Fifteen questions. Reform on one side, Restore Britain on the other. By mid-morning hundreds of activists were in Makerfield with a paper version in hand.

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This will be great fun, drawing on interviews stretching from 1952 to 2024. What was it like to be blind, gay or a pioneering woman in Parliament? What really happens in the bars & smoking rooms? How does the building shape our politics, & how has "modernisation" changed Parliament? All welcome!

Robert Saunders@robertsaunders.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Come & hear about @histparl.bsky.social's Oral History of Parliament on 24 June @19:00. With clips from David Blunkett, Malcolm Rifkind, Gisela Stuart & others,the session explores who makes it to Westminster, how Parliament has changed & who challenged its ways www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/westminste...