The rest of the blog
Paul Bristow cites the Epping Forest ruling to demand hotel closures for asylum seekers, but offers no plan for what follows. The Conservatives built the hotel system; Labour inherits it; local politicians weaponise planning law while migrants disappear from view.
The arrest of a part-time cleaner for sharing Facebook posts backing Palestine Action shows how Britain’s response to Gaza has drifted from foreign policy into domestic repression.
Farage brings the noise, Starmer brings the law. The country falls apart to the sound of flags snapping and doors slamming while capital quietly clears the till.
Robert Jenrick’s Union Jack pantomime isn’t patriotism; it’s a confession of weakness. A dying political class turns to flags and ladders because it has nothing left to offer but theatre.
By sanctioning International Criminal Court judges and prosecutors, Trump’s America has openly declared that empire stands above the law. Europe and Britain now face a stark choice: defend the court’s independence, or accept a world where justice stops at Washington’s door.
The Alaska talks were not a breakthrough but a trap. A “peace deal” that rewards Russian aggression is appeasement by another name. Ukraine’s fight is for survival, and any settlement must be on its terms—not Moscow’s.
The High Court’s ruling in Epping shows how Britain has turned planning law into a border regime, feeding jealous politics of scarcity and erasing the very category of the refugee. Now with Labour councils as willing collaborators.
The High Court’s ruling on the Bell Hotel in Epping is not a local quarrel but a turning point: councils asserting veto power, judges dismissing statutory duties as time-wasting, Farage and the Tories cheering, and Labour keeping silent. What began as a far-right protest has been laundered into national policy.
The presidency was already a sideshow in Trump’s first term, but his second has stripped it of any remaining dignity, turning the White House into just another stage for his brand of gaudy, transactional spectacle.
What if the greatest threat to your freedom wasn’t a government decree, a criminal act, or even a political ideology, but an algorithm? The Dream Hotel, Laila Lalami’s chilling new novel, imagines a world in which surveillance capitalism governs not only what we do, but who we are allowed to be.
A masterful dissection of power, corruption, and the making of modern America, The Apprentice deserved to sweep the Oscars, but the Academy, as always, chose safety over truth.
Histories of 1914 and the start of the First World War continue to proliferate, yet few reflect on how those histories themselves have been shaped. Perry Anderson’s Disputing Disaster is a forensic examination of how the war’s origins have been written, but what does it omit?