Daniel Trilling

Hello, I have a new book out in the spring with Picador and I would love it if you could help me spread the word.

IF WE TOLERATE THIS draws on years of work, to help readers understand why British politics is hurtling rightwards and what to do about it.

Pre-orders: uk.bookshop.org/p/books/if-w...

Thanks!

Hello, I have a new book out in the spring with Picador and I would love it if you could help me spread the word.

IF WE TOLERATE THIS draws on years of work, to help readers understand why British politics is hurtling rightwards and what to do about it.

Pre-orders: uk.bookshop.org/p/books/if-w...

Inside the BBC’s Gaza Fiasco • EQUATOR How the world’s most trusted media organisation fell apart

3. Inside the BBC's Gaza fiasco: how the world's most trusted media organisation fell apart

www.equator.org/articles/ins...

Starmer v Starmer: why is the former human rights lawyer so cautious about defending human rights? The long read: Many of his supporters hoped the prime minister would restore the UK’s commitment to international law. Yet Labour’s record over the past year has been curiously mixed

2. Starmer v Starmer: the prime minister's curious record on human rights, in the words of his current and former colleagues

www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Daniel Trilling · Is this fascism? Are​ we, as Richard Seymour suggests, ‘in the early days of a new fascism’? In Disaster Nationalism, Seymour...

Three pieces I wrote this year...

1. Is this fascism? An essay on the new global right

www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

The best of the long read in 2025 The long read: Our 20 favourite pieces of in-depth reporting, essays and profiles from the year

My piece on why Keir Starmer isn't turning out to be the human rights hero he talked himself up as is in the Long Read's best of 2025 - and in great company... www.theguardian.com/news/2025/de...

Ten years of fortress Europe has served only cruelty, profiteers and racists. The next decade is up to us | Maurice Stierl The hard right and far right are the political winners from the migration ‘crisis’, but only because centrist parties keep legitimising them, says migration and border researcher Maurice Stierl

Wrote an opinion piece for The Guardian: "Since migration has become the cornerstone of the current authoritarian turn, it is precisely around migration that resistance needs to form."
www.theguardian.com/world/commen...

For more than a decade, Tommy Robinson has been written off by his critics yet he keeps coming back. Now, he's trying to become the new face of Christmas.

Today, @alexvont.bsky.social and @trillingual.bsky.social unpack why it keeps working and how to stop it.
Listen: linktr.ee/bunker_pod

Starmer v Starmer: why is the former human rights lawyer so cautious about defending human rights? The long read: Many of his supporters hoped the prime minister would restore the UK’s commitment to international law. Yet Labour’s record over the past year has been curiously mixed

On this topic, I cannot recommend highly enough @trillingual.bsky.social's Starmer v Starmer profile. It is brilliantly put together, from title to final sentence. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Hardline migration policies are fuelling people smuggling, report finds As leaders try to break smugglers’ business model, research suggests strategy so far has had opposite effect

Rich countries are turning their backs on people fleeing violence & repression, so no surprise they’re forced to use smugglers.

Both having to flee at all & the means they use to do so are primarily problems for refugees themselves & no-one else.

Nothing’s going to change till we recognise this.

NEW EP! The BBC's Gaza and Trump Fiascos | This Is Hell! Get more from This Is Hell! on Patreon

NEW FREE EP!

@trillingual.bsky.social on his @equatormag.bsky.social, “Inside the BBC’s Gaza Fiasco: How the world’s most trusted media organisation fell apart,” which reveals how the BBC may respond to President Trump's alleged defamation lawsuit.

www.patreon.com/posts/new-ep...

Loved Gaughan since childhood and found Nic Jones and Bright Phoebus via an Honest Jons compilation years ago... always wondered why this stuff wasn't more widely available

How the European convention on human rights became a battleground between the centre and the right | Daniel Trilling For 20 years, populists have been blaming the ECHR for endangering Britain by offering basic protections to immigrants, says author Daniel Trilling

A few weeks ago I wrote a piece on the 75th anniversary of the ECHR - and how it is threatened by the vicious politics of resentment that Labour and the Tories have enabled/encouraged in the past 20 years. This to me is what lies beneath the asylum "debate".
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

I mention this because (although this is hardly a unique experience these days) it frustrates me how you can put so much effort into describing a problem, one that you'd think anyone in power who comes across would want to solve, and just see it repeatedly ignored. And... for what?

Funnily enough he eventually got disillusioned, decided he was believing in a myth, and went somewhere else... but then he didn't have any money to pay smugglers anyway.

This was exactly the case for one of the subjects in my refugees book. He came to Europe from Sudan with no idea where to go. Others said "we're going to Britain because Sudan used to be a British colony", so he fixated on the UK. He used to listen to UK rap in Calais and dream about it.

Destitute by design: trapped in the immigration system Migration policy is not only failing people forced to arrive in Britain by boats. In an extract from a new edited volume, Daniel Trilling reports on t...

In 2023 @tom-clark.bsky.social got me to write a chapter for his book on UK poverty about how immigration limbo, which Labour wants more of, makes people destitute. It was the most distressing piece I've ever worked on. We sent a copy to every MP. www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/society/6081...

Have also heard lots of unfavourable comparisons with France but I have never been able to establish how much that's a hopeful "well I've come all this way, the UK must be better... right?" and how much it is because conditions are significantly different.

I have an acquaintance who crossed the Sahara, during which time his friend died in his arms; had his leg crushed when transferring to a rescue boat in the Mediterranean; and was beaten by the CRS in Calais. Clinging to a lorry as it crossed the Channel was the least of it!

It's been happening since the late 90s... when people (incl. me) have asked it tends to be a mix of reasons: language, family/cultural/historical connections, belief there's work, belief UK is a beacon of human rights, or the fact it was the only route available (smugglers aren't travel agents).

I tried to make this point to a Labour activist eyeing up a political career a while ago and they just lost it with me... wouldn't let me finish a sentence, like I was saying the unsayable.

For the @equatormag.bsky.social newsletter, I talked about how I reported my piece on the BBC and Gaza, and what's at stake in the current crisis. You can read/sign up below - Equator is a brilliant and necessary new magazine, so give it your support!

www.equator.org/articles/ins...

I also haven't been able to get this bizarre quote out of my head. "If you don't like this, you won't like what follows me."

I know what she means to say but it's phrased like an admission that they know this will just bring on Reform but they're going to do it anyway. Paging Dr Freud!

I for one am quite glad my family was not told to go back to Bialystok or Kyiv when they were "safe" in 1922.

UK set to limit refugees to temporary stays Shabana Mahmood is expected to say the era of permanent protection for refugees is over, in major changes to the UK's asylum and immigration system.

This contribution to the volume of human misery is yet another policy from Labour based on a false premise, in this case that refugees are overly attracted to Britain. It will increase bureaucratic limbo, thus making worse the problem of "cohesion" it purports to solve.
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Oops, Belfast talk is 26 Nov! ^^

Oops yes - 26 Nov in Belfast

V pleased to be giving a public talk (two, in fact) at Ulster University later this month:

"How did we get here? The rise of Britain's far right."

Derry, 25 Nov: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/how-did-we...
Belfast, 25 Nov: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/how-did-we...

Please come along, or share with friends.

Inside the BBC’s Gaza Fiasco • EQUATOR How the world’s most trusted media organisation fell apart

I spoke to two dozen BBC journalists, from frontline reporters to senior staff, about how the BBC came to symbolise the West's failure to prevent genocide in Gaza - and how the row over its coverage fed directly into its current meltdown.
www.equator.org/articles/ins...