"Our Lips Are Sealed" by Fun Boy Three
Can you hear them talking about us? "Our lips are sealed" turned up in my iTunes. I had completely forgotten about this song despite its immediate familiarity.
🤮 “Sir” Robin Wales and “open” Clive Furness announce in Spiked that they are leaving the Labour Party - and will doubtless be joining Reform alongside “Lord” Peter Mandelson.
Crucial Track for 08 February 2026
"Mabrouk el hanna" by Cheba Maria
Fancy re-adjusting your musical aesthetic? Here's Mabrouk el hanna from Cheba Maria 15 years ago. It's always time for Raï.
Crucial Track for 07 February 2026
"Loa Do Mar" by Eta Carinae
I have no idea how or why Loa Do Mar by Eta Carinae is in my iTunes library, or how it got there. But there it is - and you should listen to it.
Banger of a piece from Rafael Behr in the Guardian on the regulation of social media.
The Epstein files: literal evidence you are living in the patriarchy. What will change? My guess: absolutely nothing.
An interesting thing about the Mandelson-Epstein affair is that no one is expressing any surprise at Mandelson’s venality and corruption. Yet until recently the media treated him as a “serious politician”, albeit controversial. Which leaves me wondering, what is it that political journalism does?
I need to work on my burgeoning online presence: I can no longer feed the beast.
📧 Blogging by email. It’s a blast from the past!
Press any key
Superficially, it’s disappointing that a Labour leader is way more timid than a Canadian former central banker turned centre-right PM.
More worrying is how the UK government’s slithering exposes nakedness where UK state capacity should be. Surely Treasury and FCDO considered the end of neoliberalism and contemplated the breaking-down of the post-War rules-based order? The “Error. Press any key to restart” status of the UK establishment now - which we witnessed a decade ago after Brexit, and then again at the start of the pandemic - is a painful reminder of how unserious and irrelevant the country has become in the years following the global financial crisis: out of ideas, without a plan, and desperately seeking the magic key combination that reboots to normalcy.
But like Mark Carney said, “nostalgia is not a strategy”.