Writer, critic, historian, editor etc Editor: @the-breakdown.bsky.social johnphilipmerrick@gmail.com / john.merrick@break-down.org https://www.johnmerrick.co.uk/
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I’m shocked that appeasement is proving to be about as effective in the domestic as it was in the international arena but I look forward to being nonetheless hectored to vote for the fuckwits pursuing this genius strategy that was lobbed endlessly at the last Labour leader as disqualifying.
If anyone in London has an old frame or bike they are selling for cheap let me know. I am very skint :-(
tbf my own fault – left it last night outside the front door to my flat unlocked, thinking that being on the 15th floor, with only 5 other flats, in a locked building, it'd be safe. pretty stupid with hindsight
... and it's been stolen 🙃
I do love to do my weekly twitter check in – here's a sitting member of parliament racially abusing a black Tory MP
Also a man who got just 185 votes in the Dover and Deal constituency when standing at the last general election
Elon Musk here replying to Steve Laws, a violent ethnonationalist and antisemite and a man so extreme he was kicked out of the Homeland Party
*reprinting, obviously
Looks like they just did Wolf Solent too www.amazon.co.uk/Wolf-Solent-...
Good to see Penguin Classics reprinted John Cowper Powys's mammoth novel, A Glastonbury Romance, next year!
Very proud this week to be publishing this terrific essay by @rsmythfreelance.bsky.social on the long and complex history of far right involvement in the British countryside in this week's @the-breakdown.bsky.social newsletter
Me, on fascism and the countryside.
Polling from @Moreincommon_ on Lucy Connolly More than half think her sentence was too lenient or about right. Only a third that it was too harsh. Only 18% think politicians should associate themselves her, while 51% think they should actively distance themselves from her.
Yeah, i've read too much Tom Nairn to ever think that patriotism, even English, is always racist. Doesn't not make me feel a bit icky still, but then i've been on the left my entire adult life
We can’t just call them fascists and hope it turns people away. We need to attack, root and branch, the bogus statistics they use to drive hate
Fantastic piece by my Islington comrade @davidkr.bsky.social. The old tactics won’t work when the entire media and political class are on the side of the anti-migrant protesters www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
I’m not so sure if that is so clear to everyone, tbh. It’s definitely not necessarily so, and that’s my point
For better or worse I’ve never had any feeling for patriotic Englishness (although I’m a proud son of the Cheshire soil, and will be til I die), but it don’t think it is always racist or problematic to be patriotic either
This seems like a bit of an own goal. Surely the question should not be: is flying the england flag racist (obviously context dependent) but is an orchestrated campaign by far right groups to use the flag to signal strength racist (clearly it is)
Another softly softly interview with two racists, one who insinuates the navy should attack people in small boats and the other who runs a vigilante group harassing probably anyone who is Black or Asian and whose Facebook page has only hundreds of followers. Witness the emboldenment of the racists
This is how politics appears if you ignore economics, law, mass media, geography and demography
Congrats! Excited to read it!
China is making massive investments in electrification to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels and the US dollar. @katemac.bsky.social and @70sbachchan.bsky.social join @parismarx.com to discuss the geopolitics and how other countries are getting on board. Full ep: techwontsave.us/episode/291_...
The far right has long portrayed itself as the defender of a pristine nature against urban corruption, but its history in the British countryside tells a far more complex story about nationalism and rural life. 'Blut und Boden' by @rsmythfreelance.bsky.social. Read now 👇
Collapse of critical Atlantic current is no longer low likelihood, study finds
the authentic voice of moronic academia responds lol
The Daily Mail feeling it has to step in to correct the latest hate story being screamed at the public by the idiot Nazis of X The Everything App feels like an interesting development: the British press perhaps now realising they’ve lost control of the monster they very deliberately created, maybe.
We've only got a couple of tokens left on our summer sale. The code is ICECREAM20 at the checkout. Move quickly! www.the-fence.com/shop/
actually no, that's a lie. there were a good few, i just always hated them
Lol oh sure – always a hobby! Same as it ever was (although in the crusty stuff i was around there were v few posh kids)
Yeah, this sounds right to me! I met an old acquaintance from the hardcore scene recently and we spent the whole time reminiscing, wistfully, about how territorial all the old heads used to be. You had to work to get in with them/share their knowledge.
Begging Americans, please stop writing about Britain
Also included are details about our forthcoming print issue – which is off to the printers later today!!
Back on my bullshit (and very pleased to be writing for @the-breakdown.bsky.social).
Worth it for his account of Viscount Lymington's predictions of immanent 'revolution and wholesale bloodshed' against 'the subhuman “scum” of the cities, most of whom are “alien”, the “people of the ghetto and the bazaar”' – sounding not unlike a GBNews talking head
Very proud this week to be publishing this terrific essay by @rsmythfreelance.bsky.social on the long and complex history of far right involvement in the British countryside in this week's @the-breakdown.bsky.social newsletter
Landlords shouldn't be taxed less than workers. But there's a key policy missing that would ensure the costs of such a measure aren't just passed on to renters. @sachahilhorst.bsky.social on why rent controls are the policy this Government urgently needs 👇 www.common-wealth.org/perspectives...
It’s weird how all these New Labour skeletons who successfully recaptured control of the party in 2020 are now crawling out of the woodwork to suggest Labour continue with the project of cracking down on minorities, backsliding on civil liberties, and unconditionally supporting the war US machine.
57k likes!
The funny thing is she doesn't even do it well. All so very tedious
Oh man, i have so much work to do today :-(
Isaac Chotiner interviewed Biden's close friend and last ambassador to Israel, Jack Lew, and in the interview Jack Lew explicitly defends Israel killing children. Lew's defense of this is so offensive that Isaac Chotiner interrupts him twice and then says outright that he's wrong.
Then again, i was never much of a proper philosopher, certainly not compared to the other students. I went cos they let me spend two years reading Marx, Benjamin and the Romantics. But i was always more of an intellectual historian
But there's probably something in this. I often used to say that a good 50% of those who studied continental philosophy were looking for Big Answers to Big Questions – could just as easily taken them to god or a cult as philosophy (one i know went from CRMEP straight to a cult, in fact)
Who are the Warwick folk you are thinking of, other than Nick Land? There's only really two i can think of from CRMEP who have done that – luckily one way after my time there.
Joking aside, beyond a couple of obvious loons, most of the people who came through CRMEP have remained committed to the left in one form or another. I can't say much about the other places/people
I hope not!!!
Awful.
Call for help! @katemac.bsky.social & I are writing about Insurance in the Polycrisis. Send us reading material, interesting things happening in the world, your takes 🙏 www.phenomenalworld.org/series/the-p...
But maybe by actually talking to blutundboden88 we could convince him of the errors of his ways?
knife crime: bad when done by black and brown teens; good (?) when done by white teens (?)
Oh really? What's your read on this? The chatter on the right from the few critical of how this is being used is that she's from a notorious local family, maybe something to do with drugs. Dubious sources though, obviously
I genuinely wish/hope that that in fact happens to every single one of them
One thing you'll noticed about all of these accounts is the blue check. Not only are they allowed to post this hateful nonsense, but they are being paid to do so – the more inflammatory the better!
The person they are celebrating here is a 14 year old girl who threatened someone who they claimed was an immigrant with those two weapons. She has since been charged. Right twitter have extrapolated from that and are now claiming she is an ethnic warrior, defending her people.
The real problem with Nigel Farage's plan for mass deportations is that he hasn't planned it out properly, suggests Labour
There are many obvious shallow grifters lik her, but she feels worse partly because i used to look up to her. She was a PhD student in the same dept when i was doing my MA, and her activist work on police violence was at the time important. Obviously, she was also a errr divisive figure, even then
Whatever new nonsense comes out about Power (the latest being her appearance at Scyldings yearly white nationalist event, Witan, alongside skull measurers like Ed Dutton and Carl Benjamin) she seems to get ever more mainstream. The latest i saw was thanks in Tory MP Danny Kruger's latest screed
My favourite piece from the latest issue of @thefence.bsky.social is up online now – John Phipps's scoop on the Russian Trade Delegation in Highgate www.the-fence.com/moscow-on-th...
If you were to bet consistently on Labour exceeding your worst expectations, in ways that are somehow always *surprisingly* horrible, you'd do pretty well wouldn't you
And the reason is simple: Solutions for the cost of living crisis require fundamentally altering both the architecture of capitalism internal to Britain *and* relations to external, global capital flows, while immigration is nebulous and can be performatively addressed through spectacular violence.
It depresses me that our political and media elite have seemingly decided to pre-emptively capitulate this, on the basis of a folk-myth of the British public as essentially Farageist at heart
Begun 1983. Published 1992. Out again today.
Tbf id rather this boring Mail hack than whatever racist anon some British publications are using for this crap.
Oh fuck off
The Dispatch has been one of the most interesting new publications to emerge for years. This, on how they rumbled an AI generated journalist who has been published by many larger magazines, is excellent and shows how valuable publications like this are dispatch-media.com/margaux-blan...
Who is Margaux Blanchard? Margaux Blanchard net worth? How old is Margaux Blanchard? Is Margaux Blanchard married? Tbh, I don't know. But today I wrote about how @dispatchmedia.bsky.social exposed her — and why she matters: dispatch-media.com/margaux-blan...
should have known you'd be a Rolt aficionado, Andrew!
Have you ever read Rolt’s ghost stories? The couple I read were pretty good
I wrote this with the aim that it would be a durable piece, relevant every time there's a flare-up of far right violence or as far right ideas make further advances into the mainstream. Hope people find it useful.
'Immigration doesn't bother me but it seems to bother everyone else' – Everyone. This is what happens when the media runs away with Hard Right narratives.
The rage of Dominic Cummings Britain’s rogue intellectual has predicted a civil war. Is he also cheerleading one? 🖊️ John Merrick
All the media and politicians who have created this situation – all the talk of "fighting aged males" and "invasions" – should be ashamed when they see that photo. Instead it's paired with Farage's plans for mass deportations
What a rotten juxtaposition on the front cover of today's Telegraph.
Once again, people who are protesting hotels are not ordinary. If you have travelled to a location, bought a flare, printed a t-shirt with a niche far-right slogan, you are by definition out of the ordinary, and you are almost certainly exceptionally politically engaged and ideologically hardened.
sorry to hear that comrade. don't let them grind you down
I always used to say that i found it hard to experience proper hate, thinking of the famous Alex Cockburn question to interns, "is your hate pure?". But i now see a local far right activist in the area several times a week, i can finally and conclusive answer in the affirmative: my hate is very pure
love this from @mitchtherieau.bsky.social on the difficulty we have historicizing Obama-era musical trends and how folk-rock in particular was “about the capture of social life”
For the bank holiday crowd, ICYMI, here's my NS weekend essay on Dominic Cummings as a case study in elite radicalisation www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2025/0...
Remember when migration went plummeting down the list of public concerns because the papers weren’t using it to make trouble for Boris Johnson, even though we now know the figures were going up? And now they’re going down, and
Just say “the fascists are correct and I agree with them” dude, you don’t have to wrestle a rubber man to death every time you want to shout Migrants Out! You can just do it, without all this finger-wagging, tut-tutting bullshit.
This was published less than a month ago
Nick Tenconi is an evangelical Christian, and UKIP, Britain First and others often have explicitly (Americanised) Christian symbols on their protests
Lots of head-scratching as to why hotel protests are getting outsized news coverage. I wonder how much is to do with Reform's poll lead, used as a editorial weather vane for attitudes/salience, in the same way that Corbyn leadership led to more (non-Labour) Leftwing voices being heard on BBC
I think also a slightly patronising view of class – a few pictures of flags on council estates and all of a sudden you have the unheard voice of real England
Rebecca Mead on the current Persephone Books rediscovery best-seller about the rise of Nazism. I’ve read Crooked Cross and it’s recommended. Good to Read that Persephone is planning to publish more by Carson.
For the bank holiday crowd, ICYMI, here's my NS weekend essay on Dominic Cummings as a case study in elite radicalisation www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2025/0...
Thanks Daryl – and very much likewise! I do, hopefully, have a few bits in the works on some good folk, as well as more on some very bad ones
Also: this is the kind of stuff i wish i was able to write about still! I want to be writing digressive essays on Marxist humanists and Anarchists, or working class history, or literature, or nature and the climate. Instead, i'm forced to care about racists and reactionaries
Sunder Katwala (sundersays) 
