Britain
The Free Speech Martyrdom of Lucy Connolly
Keir Starmer’s law-and-order theatrics have handed the far right its new saint: a self-styled free speech Joan of Arc—except this saint didn’t want to be burned, she wanted others to be.
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Keir Starmer’s law-and-order theatrics have handed the far right its new saint: a self-styled free speech Joan of Arc—except this saint didn’t want to be burned, she wanted others to be.
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.
Every August, the right reheats its old contempt for higher education. Their complaint is not about debt or “Mickey Mouse” degrees, it is about closing the gates of knowledge, keeping universities for the dominant class and consigning everyone else to warehouses and call centres.
Dan Hodges’s Mail column denouncing Palestine Action as “terrorists” is not journalism but ideological policing, an attempt to criminalise dissent while excusing the real violence: Britain’s complicity in Gaza’s destruction.
Jon Lee Anderson’s To Lose a War is a correspondent’s chronicle of America’s twenty-year occupation of Afghanistan: vivid, textured, and damning in its account of how an empire mistook firepower for authority and was undone by an enemy that understood time better than it did.
Robert Jenrick dresses up an authoritarian wish list as “radical honesty.” From sacking judges to mass deportations, his proposals echo Orbán and Trump more than any British tradition of justice. This isn’t reform, it’s repression in plain sight.
Trump’s Alaska summit with Putin wasn’t diplomacy. It was pure theatre. No ceasefire, no deal, just a spectacle in which Trump played host, rolling out the red carpet for Putin while Ukraine burned in the background.