Red Metropolis is a strange book, largely because, somewhat by its own admission, it’s not really a book at all: it’s somewhere between an overgrown essay and a coping mechanism. This is not to say that it is bad (quite the contrary: it is good) but to say that it is somewhat hard to pin down, accordingly, somewhat hard to write about.…
One of mine and my friend Beth’s favourite pastimes is talking about all the weird, ill conceived and forgotten novels, primarily fantasy and dystopia, that we read as children and young teenagers. We were both extremely bookish in the way that only adolescents can be, reading indiscriminately and without coming up for air, plundering book shops, school and local libraries. Born two…
In contemporary Britain, political leaders are sewn into our cultural fabric and their attempts to don a guise of demotic accessibility seem commonplace and expected. Perhaps most explicitly, and contradictorily, Boris Johnson has used this strategy of appearing as ‘one of us’ to gain the trust of large swathes of his electorate, claiming to represent the apathetic sentiment of anti-Establishment politics which…
How does a bastard, orphan, son of a… you get the gist. Jasper sits down with Christian Parenti, author of ‘Radical Hamilton: Economic Lessons From a Misunderstood Founder’ (Verso, 2020) to discuss the political and economic legacy of the ten-dollar founding father. Was Hamilton really a free-trading capitalist, or a statist radical? How do Hamiltonianism and Jeffersonianism continue to influence socio-economic development…
Until quite recently I rarely thought about the noughties. It was just a warehouse decade for my childhood, an apolitical sink hole of low rise jeans and foreign wars on terrestrial television. Nothing happened then- or, more correctly, nothing happened to me, which, when you’re 13, is the same thing. Of late, however, I have begun to think about the decade in…
Honey, time to break international law! Jasper catches up again with Shadow Minister for International Trade, Bill Esterson, about the government’s plan to breach their Withdrawal Agreement, whether Tony Abbott’s appointment as trade advisor is just to whip up the culture war, and much more. iTunes
Morgan and Pete found a way to connect to the internet, and take a deep dive, helped by Annie Kelly (UK Correspondent, QAnon Anonymous), into the world of the QAnon conspiracy theory. How proliferate is it? How do well-meaning individuals become radicalised? How can they be de-radicalised? And what’s the world’s first conspiracy theory, and what does it have to do with…
Photo Credit: Kevin Walsh As night follows day and as summer ebbs away into autumn, one facet of human existence remains unaffected by the challenges of the novel Coronavirus. I am speaking, of course, about Scottish Labour’s ability to mire itself in yet another leadership crisis. James Kelly kicked off proceedings by resigning as a justice spokesperson on the evening of the…
