Some Changes

A few days ago, on the the previous post someone anonymously asked if I was still alive. Hopefully, this will be evidence enough.

The truth of the matter is that I've hit burn out. Part of this is personal. Last year, my mother-in-law unexpectedly and suddenly passed away, and since Christmas my mum has been seriously ill and in and out of hospital. Her recovery has been long and complicated.

Then there is work. Over the last couple of years I've been preoccupied with what Lenin called the purely administrative side of things, and that has allowed for little time to think about scholarly activity and reading new stuff. And then this summer our place announced a raft of redudancies, which included the deletion of my post. Thankfully, following redeployment I've been able to survive but securing this was stressful, tiring, and demanded a lot of work.

And now we come to the politics. It is equally astonishing and unsurprising that this government has overseen the normalisation of the BNP's language from 15 years ago, has heralded anti-asylum seeker protests organised and led by fascist micro-sects as expressing "legitimate concerns", and even today refused to criticise Nigel Farage's plan to seek deals with the Taliban to deport Afghans. This isn't a "they know not what they do" moment, rather Keir Starmer, Morgan McSweeney, and Yvette Cooper have contrived this situation. They've unlocked the cage and stupidly believe they can ride the racist tiger to their own advantage.

This comes on top of what you might call post-hegemonic politics. This government is transparently venal, and the few crumbs it has brushed off its freebie-strewn table - watered down improvements to workers' rights, children's breakfast clubs, reduced NHS waiting times - does nothing to hide the cabinet's chummy relationships with America tech oligarchs and the City. Starmer and friends actually pride themselves on these relationships. And there is the arming an ongoing genocide and providing the Israeli military aerial surveillance from flights out of Cyprus. This is bourgeois politics at its most naked, and requires little in the way of additional comment.

And lastly, there are long-term tendencies in media consumption. Since 2020, audiences here have been in steady decline while, ironically, the popualar appetite for political content has grown. Did people get bored of my banging on about the decline of the Tories? Perhaps. But more likely is the ongoing crowding out of written material by YouTube, TikTok, and podcasting. This wouldn't be as bad if I could track views, but thanks to LLMs continually picking over thousands of blog posts the stats package has become completely unreliable.

Those are your reasons why posts have become rarer than a political principle on the government's front bench. But I don't plan throwing the towel in entirely. The 'some changes' advertised atop this post will, I hope, mean a change from long periods of silence to more frequent posts. But certainly not at the level of recent years.

Yet I don't want to finish this on a downer. Despite the complete moral collapse of mainstream politics, there are reasons to be cheerful. As the consequences of immaterial labour work their way through culture, the establishment and their political retainers in Labour, Reform, and the Tories are increasingly out of step with the lives and outlook of everyday folk. And the most recent manifestation of this disconnect are the huge numbers the Jeremy Corbyn/Zarah Sultana Your Party project has attracted - a potentially mammoth formation that could upend British politics and threaten to undo the class settlement of the last 50 years. With such an historic opportunity knocking, it's not like there's a shortage of things to write about.