#uk labour

I’m on tour with my new book, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI. Catch me TOMORROW (Jun 23) in TORONTO at Osler Records, and WEDNESDAY (Jun 24) in NYC at The Strand. After that, it’s Philly and Chicago.

Some people love to admire a beautiful football play; me, I can't get enough of politicians doing good politics – and like those World Cup fans, I am doubly pleased when it's my team making the play.

I definitely have a team in Brazilian politics: President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and his Workers' Party. Lula's done so many amazing things in his career, and these often intersect with my own special interests. Like, he made Gilberto Gil his minister of culture, and his people built the telecentros, free software-based internet dojos for the poorest kids in the country, living in favelas:

https://www.informationweek.com/software-services/brazil-turns-away-from-microsoft

Lula was royally ratfucked – framed by a corrupt justice minister who secretly conspired with the country's oligarchs – and imprisoned, and the conspirators installed Jair Bolsonaro, a fascist war criminal whose covid bungling led to mass death:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Car_Wash

When Bolsonaro lost his next election – to a triumphant Lula – he attempted a coup, for which he was arrested and handed a long prison sentence, despite Trump and Microsoft trying to intimidate the Brazilian judge into letting him walk:

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/09/22/bolsonaro-prosecution-us-sanctions-00575122

Now, Lula is fighting to keep Bolsonaro's nepobaby failson, Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, from wrestling back control over the country for his fascist party; and that's where the good politics come in.

Lula's party has just scored a massive, national political victory by tabling legislation to establish a five-day workweek. While Brazil's professional/managerial class enjoy a two-day weekend, the working poor of the nation are prisoners of the escala 6×1 system, which sees them working six days per week. It's a hangover from the era of Brazil's fascist dictatorship, which (nominally) ended in 1988, but whose legacy still haunts the Brazilian people.

Lula's 40-hour workweek is incredibly popular. So popular that Bolsonaro's party whipped its members to vote for it, because they fear that to do otherwise would hand an even bigger majority to Lula, who might go on to give workers a four-day work-week:

https://prospect.org/2026/06/22/lula-sees-boosts-as-he-pushes-to-reduce-brazilian-workweek/

It turns out that weekends are popular and promising the electorate access to a weekend is good politics. What's more, denying weekends to the electorate is shitty, awful politics, which is why Bolsonaro's fascists were forced to vote in favor of a policy they hate, even though all credit for that policy will still go to Lula and the Worker' Party. The bill passed 461-19.

Contrast Lula's muscular, deliverism-based politics that seeks to improve the lives of working people in tangible, immediate ways with the catastrophic series of blunders that Keir Starmer's Labour has delivered. Despite having won a majority so large it would have made Saddam Hussein blush (not because Labour was popular, but because the outgoing Conservatives were universally loathed), Starmer has refused to lift a finger to improve Britons' lives. Instead, he's abetted genocide, criminalized protest, proposed ending jury trials, imposed austerity, handed the NHS over to Palantir and all the remaining potable water and electrical capacity in the country over to American most unprofitable AI giants.

Starmer's insistence that we can't have nice things is bad politics, because (and it's weird that this has to be said) a government that makes people's lives worse is less popular than a government that makes people's lives better:

https://www.whatwelo.st/p/everyone-hates-tech-but-nobody-knows

Now, the right is incapable of making working people's lives better, because broad improvements to the vast majority necessarily come at the expense of the tiny minority of morbidly wealthy hoarders whom the right serves. In order to get millions of turkeys to vote for Christmas, the right substitutes spectacular acts of cruelty against disfavored minorities to distract their voters from the quiet acts of everyday cruelty they subject those voters to:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/12/always-great/#our-nhs

This isn't good politics. The sadistic torture of your base's enemies will never please them so well nor so durably as making immediate, significant improvements in their lives will.

Companies already squeezing their workers will now have the leverage of being immigration enforcement.

And many more people will be able to find asylum accommodations to do this:

Starmer is not adopting Reform policies for electoral gain. Keir Starmer’s Labour Party is enacting the racist and xenophobic policies they believe in, by targeting and endangering people whose humanity they deny. This is evil. As is the French-UK ‘one in, one out’ scheme, which is just a fancy procedure for pushing back asylum seekers. It’s inhumane.

I haven't really talked a whole lot about the benefit cuts on here (just haven't had the capacity to keep engaging with it, Tumblr is my safe social media) but I'm going to share what I posted to my Instagram story yesterday:

[ transcription:

I've been living with my parents since loosing my job in September. Even though I can't work a regular job (my previous one was an on-site job so I didn't have to travel and tbh even that was too much for me), my parents pushed me to apply for more jobs in Oct and Nov - I didn't get any of them and now I get approx. £300 from Universal Credit

I don't get PIP or the LCWRA part of Universal Credit. I have made applications to both but, looking at the statistics, I'm more likely not to get them in spite of the fact that I can only walk a few steps and can barely hold a pen

Even if I got them, I'd have approx. £1500/month. In a country where it costs on average £1000/month to be disabled, that is absolutely not enough - tbh it's not even enough to cover rent in London. But to reiterate, I currently get £300 and am unlikely to get more than that with @/uklabour 's proposed changes

My parents are starting to get really pissy about supporting me and they're very vocal about not wanting to support my brother once he graduates. I have no idea where I'll go if my parents run out of money or even just get tired of supporting me, and no hope for long term (or even short term) financial stability *as it stands right now* and with Labour's changes this will only get worse

Labour could introduce a 2% tax on wealth over £10 mln and rake in £24 bln A YEAR as opposed to the £1 bln a year these welfare cuts will save. If they wanted disabled people in work, they would widen the PIP eligibility criteria and increase the payout so that disabled people can pay for the medication, therapy, supplements, equipment, etc, etc, etc that keeps them in work. Instead, they're taking the right wing route of targetting vulnerable, marginalised groups. They do not deserve to be called a "people's party" when they're actively making life worse for a quarter of the people

end transcription ]

I have no idea how long I have left until my parents get sick of me. Ever since I started the process of getting an NHS wheelchair, they've been noticeably more upset about my being unable to work and noticeably more hostile/uncomfortable with my current mobility aids. But they are also the only cushion between me and the benefit cuts. So if you're feeling charitable, please reblog this to get more eyes on it, and take a gander at my Inprnt shop and my Ko-fi page. I make some heckin cool stuff if I do say so myself, so it's completely worth it ;)

Inprnt big link:

Ko-fi big link:

John McDonnell on Instagram:

"Andy Burnham aims to change the culture of the Labour Party & return to being a broad church - a pluralist party where people's views are respected.

"A first step would be to restore the Labour whip to Diane Abbott."

“Death of the author”, in extreme brief, is an academic construct that was developed at a time when the author as the sole arbiter of meaning in a text was very privileged in the discourse to help people understand that any interpretation of a work is valid *as long as it can be supported by textual evidence*. Your interpretation of a text, as the reader, is as valid as the author’s *if* you can produce just as much, or more, evidence from *within the text itself* that supports your interpretation.

This is particularly useful for students within an academic context.

It is *not* in any sense a reasonable justification to say that one is not *actively supporting* a living artist/author/creator, particularly one who has gained huge cultural influence and financial wealth, by buying and actively promoting their work.

Genuinely, I wouldn’t engage with work from a dead very bigoted artist without acknowledging their bigotry.

If I write about or produce a story set within the Cthulhu Mythos, you had better bet that I am acknowledging Lovecraft’s horrific and pervasive racism and misogyny and the effects of that within the Mythos.

If I write about or do some sketches that acknowledge Degas as an influence, you can bet that I am acknowledging his rampant racism and antisemitism and the fact that his familial wealth which allowed him to have the financial freedom to create the art he did was built on plantation slavery in the Caribbean.

If I write about or paint something with Klimt’s ethereal goldwork as an influence, you can bet I’m writing about his deeply abusive sexual relationships with the women he drew and painted, that he used sapphic eroticism in his work while sexually abusing working class sapphics he paid to model for him, and acknowledging that he had the freedom to produce that work because he got the women in his family to tend to his every whim and perform all his domestic labour for him.

That’s the basic acknowledgment you undertake while engaging with the work of someone deeply bigoted - *even* if they are not directly benefitting from your engagement with their work because they are deceased. The material conditions around how a work is produced and consumed are *always* relevant to that work, because otherwise we miss why, for example, privileged people have the time, resources and cachet to create art and have it be consumed *as* art, while other people never have the resources to do so or have the work they create relegated to categories like “domestic crafts” if it is acknowledged at all.