1. The New Road to Serfdom
2. What Was the Point?
3. On Rearranging Deckchairs
4. Tinashe - Melatonin
5. Local Council By-Elections August 2026
Taking the top this month was my review of Jodi Dean's latest book on class dynamics. It looks at how capitalist relations of production are not just producing a new oligarchy, but are beginning to undermine themselves and give birth to new forms of power that resemble feudal class relations. I'm still not sold on the term feudal or neo-feudal getting thrown around to describe this process, but the relationships she describes and their trajectories sound compelling. In at second was Nigel Farage's unnecessary by-election. He won, of course, but not the kind of utterly overwhelming mandate he expected. Especially from a field littered with joke candidates. The episode demonstrates how now having to play politics on a higher difficulty setting is something he's not very good at. In at third was last night's offering: my look at the events this weekend in the Conservative Party. No one cares apart from the politics anorak brigade, really, and its news has got swept away by Keir Starmer pettily resigning before Andy Burnham's first Commons address as PM. Of which more tomorrow, perhaps. But yeah, I'm not entirely done watching and writing about the Tories yet. In fourth is Tinashe's latest release, which is in the running for my tune of the year. Listen to it. And lastly are August's council election results - the first time Reform has only managed to break even for well over a year, and in which they were outdone in seat tally terms by the Liberal Democrats and Greens. Are we going to see more like this as we head into the Autumn?1
Next month there might be a bit more blogging. I think the burnout corner has been turned and, hopefully, we're now accelerating into the straight.
