Few of the challenges to progressive politics are really new. But the massive change in the means of communication, and what that does to politics (which has to be conducted through it), really is new and difficult.
www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/se...

‘One of the questions that has hung over this whole conversation is about the void at the centre of the Labour party.’

— James Butler (@piercepenniless.bsky.social) on his new On Politics podcast.

Listen and subscribe on Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/o...

‘It took the Tories ten years to reach this degree of perpetual crisis; Labour has managed it in fourteen months.’

James Butler (@piercepenniless.bsky.social) on Labour’s problems, from the blog: www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/se...

the dream gig! Couldn't hack the impartiality + gag rules though. After the revolution!

After the revolution, comrades, James Butler will present 'In Our Time'. This will do for now

‘Keir Starmer is in trouble.’

New on the blog: James Butler (@piercepenniless.bsky.social) on Labour’s problems.

www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/se...

Really cool to be on the first episode of this new series, talking about the (unfortunately, sad) state of the Labour government:

Launching today: James Butler’s (@piercepenniless.bsky.social) new podcast series ‘On Politics’ goes beyond the headlines and push notifications to get at the real forces transforming our politics here and abroad.

Listen and subscribe now.

Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/o...

I admit to being tickled at the thought of my BIG HEAD appearing on your phones as you listen

That piece also inaugurates a new strand of the @lrb.co.uk podcast, ON POLITICS.
The first episode features Chris Mullin, Andy Beckett and @morganj0nes.bsky.social on just these problems -- hosted by me. Get yours here! www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and...

Wrote about the implosion of 'phase two' Starmer's government: the Mandelson affair (volume 3), the cratering numbers, the changing political system, the spectre of Farage and the resurgent right. @lrb.co.uk
www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/se...

'Welcome to my last four years.' A search for accountability and a full, detailed explanation for Martha's death . . . www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

should a brown man be mayor? We asked a eugenicist

Oh I would love to see that!! It's an astonishing place. You see it and think, yes, of course you built a Poseidon temple here.

Yeah! He's an interesting guy. Genuine liberal progressive but mostly prominent in my memory for being disappointing on Iraq (which he admits was a catastrophe now). V glad he stood up yesterday

Truly wonderful, numinous place.

Qs about NYT running Nazi-sourced smear of Mamdani:

- why agree to Nazi pseudonym? (he's been named elsewhere)
- college application was unsuccessful: what's the relevance?
- Mamdani obviously tried to fit Ugandan Asian into US-style checkbox list (inc write-in): where's the scandal?

“…anyone who is young and foolish enough to say that … the government should listen to them, is committing a very serious offence for which they could be prosecuted, convicted and imprisoned as a terrorist. It's not their right to protest that is the issue here. It's the right of freedom of speech.”

I'm sure I saw Nun With a Drum Machine play a Horse Hospital gig in the mid-'00s

In other words, I hope we haven't set our usual Brewery Piss-Up Organising Team on the task, and hope we've all learned a thing or two. Initial auguries are somewhat mixed on that front.

Speaking personally, I'm glad bits of the British left have woken up from their despairing slumber, but relitigating the end of Corbynism or attempting to cargo-cult its beginnings would both be disasters. As would a figurehead who's been bounced into the role.

I did not think I would find myself being thankful for the existence of Peter Hain, but life is strange. He calls proscription "intellectually bankrupt, politically unprincipled and morally wrong."

China Mieville coined the term "social sadism" to describe the combination of voyeurism and punitive glee which characterised the UK's anti-welfare cultural feeding frenzy post-'08. It applies here, too.

(& I really enjoyed both book and event, though Patricia Lockwood absolutely *hated* the book in her review of it...)