JD Vance called for “righteous anger.” Nigel Farage demanded “pure, cold rage.” Elon Musk reiterated what he said to anti-migrant marchers last year: “you either fight back or you die.” They seem to have got what they wanted in Belfast yesterday. Masked men pulled migrants and non-white residents onto the street and set their homes […]
The future of justice in the UK hangs in the balance this week. This comes against a backdrop of the long custodial sentences and disproportionate use of remand to detain anti-genocide and climate protestors in the UK, and the increasing restrictions on peaceful protest in legislation and the conduct of trials—as outlined in the recent […]
A violent attack. A short video. A name, ideally. A few big accounts willing to post before they know anything. Then thousands more people repeating it as if the facts are already settled. That’s how fear pollutes our politics. We’ve seen it in real-time after the horrific knife attack in Belfast. A man was seriously […]
I am feeling nervous. I am standing in the town centre of Newton Abbot with fellow community activists from a group called Common Ground. We’re all powerfully concerned with democracy and with how it is working (or not working) in our local communities. As a group we have no allegiance to any of the political […]
The US is seven times wealthier than Britain by GDP, but it spends 115 times more on elections. Their deluge is coming our way. Having lived in the States and written about American politics for years, the amount of money involved in British donation scandals can sometimes feel surprisingly small. The hard reality for us […]
As misleading headlines go, this Express headline has to be one of the worst. The figures show almost the exact opposite, so how did the Express get it so wrong? To be fair to the Express, the “shocking new study” they refer to in the subheading was a study released by the Centre for Social Justice, which also […]
An invitation from the Totnes Make Votes Matter team! Totnes Make Votes Matter (MVM) group are participating in the national MVM’s action day ‘Wake up, Westminster!’ on Saturday June 13. We will be meeting at 11:00 at Vire Island, by the old bridge very close to The Plains (TQ9 5DW). Our plan is to do a banner drop […]
In June 2026, it will be a full ten years since that fateful referendum led to Brexit! National Rejoin March (NRM) plans to mark the occasion in two ways. First, a team plans to walk from London to Brussels, where they will hand a book of messages from supporters to the EU Parliament. Second, the […]
A lot of people have asked me, after my last few posts: “All right Claudia — what do we DO about it?” Honestly? There is no magic answer. But here is what works, and what doesn’t. Plain English, no fancy words. ✅ What actually works:
I wrote about how Reform UK’s rhetoric is being written, theme by theme, in the same key as the speeches my country spent eighty years apologising for. I did not expect to be back this quickly with another instalment — but here we are. Last Sunday — May 3rd, 2026 — Reform UK’s home affairs […]
I grew up in a country where every history lesson, every memorial, every awkward family dinner eventually circles back to the same uncomfortable question: how did ordinary, decent people let it happen? How did a respectable European democracy slide, in barely a decade, into something that ended with six million Jewish lives extinguished, millions of […]
A few days before an election, Reform are backtracking on their promise that they will be able to turn away all refugees immediately at the border, and have instead decided that they will be put into concentration camps in areas that Reform don’t run. (Presumably Reform UK have failed to consider the cost or logistics […]
I’ve lived in the same part of the world in the south west of England for all of my life. I am rooted into this place, and its familiarity is comforting and has always sheltered me in tumultuous times. This little corner of Devon has always felt like a safe haven. And yet I am […]
Reform UK claims to speak up for downtrodden workers. Apparently that includes mega-rich crypto billionaires. Westminster is ripe with scandals these days, but The Guardian just uncovered a whopper. Cryptocurrency billionaire Christopher Harborne reportedly gave Farage an undisclosed £5m personal gift just before he announced he’d run for his seat in Clacton in 2024. That tax-free gift […]
Peter Thiel’s company now admits they want to govern for us. Will we let them? Peter Thiel’s Palantir drew a lot of attention last weekend for a tweet that reads like the monologue of a cartoon villain. In a long post, they endorse the arguments made in The Technological Republic, a 2025 book written by the company’s […]
As politicians put on a patriotic pantomime, a whole generation feels alienated from a country that no longer seems to work for them. St George’s day (April 23) generally marks the start of a peculiar season in British politics. Debates over English identity and patriotism are re-ignited and rehashed anew. Politicians play tug-of-war with a […]
Péter Magyar is inheriting the ruins of a democracy Orbán spent sixteen years hollowing out. Will Britain learn Hungary’s lesson the easy way or learn our own the hard way? Viktor Orbán conceded defeat on Sunday 12 April after sixteen years, after four consecutive supermajorities, after rewriting the constitution and redrawing the maps and packing […]
I was in a chemist in Grantham the other day, and got talking to the pharmacist dispensing my prescription. It is one of the blessings of my Irish stock that I am predisposed to strike up conversations with strangers – something I have always done and something I always will. Why? Because I have lost […]
Who shoulders the burden in the end? Not those profiting from the needs of ordinary people. Last week I was given an update on my long-awaited shoulder replacement (originally planned for last August, then December, then possibly January, and then March): at my ‘consent’ appointment with my surgeon I was given the bad news that, […]
The scene: Exeter’s Hampton by Hilton hotel, which accommodates asylum seekers: a Saturday afternoon during the second half of 2025. There’s a small gathering of people nearby, some draped in Union Jacks, one waving the flag of the neo-fascist, anti-Muslim Britain First movement. A woman is bawling ‘Stop the Boats’, and a man in a […]
With the government of the United States currently in the care of a vulnerable adult, open to manipulation by those around him, we need to consider what happens when he is allowed to die. Throughout the current Trump presidency, we are seeing many of the signs displayed in Brezhnev’s final years as leader of the […]
The UK Labour government was elected with a perfectly reasonable diagnosis that the country was in urgent need of national renewal, and that this could not be delivered overnight. They nevertheless promised to start the job of delivering the change the country needs. We are now almost two years into the term of the government, […]
Kier Starmer, we are told, is no Winston Churchill – although, one may ask, why would he want to be one? Equally, Donald Trump is no Eisenhower. With Eisenhower as Supreme Allied Commander, the planning of Operation Torch, the invasion of North Africa, and of Overlord, the invasion of Europe, centred not just on getting […]
We are very happy to share information on two events that form part of a global grassroots rejection of authoritarian, kleptocratic and fascistic regimes. BRISTOL EVENT: What’s your beef? Stop Trump and defend democracy On Saturday, March 28, 2026, the grassroots group Americans for Action (‘AfA’) and Indivisible SW UK will jointly hold a peaceful […]
I don’t know about you, but I am sick of the political narrative being dominated by the far right and I am sick of this government allowing Reform UK to colour or even, seemingly, dictate policy. The Overton window has been pushed so far to the right by the client media and the (historically) main […]
Former Labour MP Tom Watson wrote a detailed analysis of the result of the February 26, 2026 by-election in Gorton and Denton, titled ‘A Party can lose and still learn nothing’, which really needed a reply. I agree with Watson that letting Andy Burnham stand would have risked Labour losing the by-election and then losing […]
This is no longer a distant conflict. It is at Europe’s door. On March 4, everything escalated again — and this time it hit a NATO member state. IRAN FIRES A BALLISTIC MISSILE TOWARD TURKEY Wednesday March 4 2026, Iran fired a ballistic missile that travelled through the airspace of Iraq and Syria before heading […]
Dear Anna I have long been disgusted by the indisputable fact that South West Water wilfully and regularly dumps sewage as a profitable policy. I was again reminded of this as I watched the TV drama ‘Dirty Business’, and the scale of it is even worse than I ever imagined. SWW are not only committing […]
Politically speaking, I am an uncomfortable hybrid, something between an ostrich and an idiot savant. I don’t watch the news for daily, hourly tidbits of frustration and terror. I don’t know each incident comprising the ongoing catastrophe that is Trump’s madness, but I know what’s going on. I don’t need endless examples: in fact, I’d […]
The government’s Representation of the People Bill, introduced on 12 February, has been hailed as the biggest expansion of democratic participation in a generation. Cleaner political finance rules and automated voter registration are welcome reforms which will strengthen election integrity and make participation in elections easier. But we should be honest about what this Bill […]