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.
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.
The Daily Mail’s “migrant hotel” coverage isn’t just selective, it’s structural. By merging separate legal matters, foregrounding asylum status, and importing political imagery, it constructs a narrative in which migration itself becomes the crime.
Ben Gvir’s prison-cell confrontation with Marwan Barghouti is not security but theatre, a staged humiliation designed to rally the far-right and remind Palestinians that even their most prominent leaders can be silenced. Occupation thrives on such performances; the degradation is the point.
This isn’t a victory for ordinary folk. It’s a victory for the border regime. One that thrives on pitting worker against worker, stoking fear while leaving the landlords, developers, and ministers who created the housing crisis untouched.
Trump didn’t send dozens of masked federal agents to Little Tokyo to enforce the law, he sent them to send a message. If Newsom really means it when he says California won’t be intimidated, the answer isn’t just outrage. It’s cutting every state pipeline that makes ICE’s work fast, easy, and invisible.
Bezalel Smotrich’s plan to build more than 3,000 homes in the E1 corridor is not a provocation. This is the burial of a Palestinian state. Populated through state-subsidised domestic relocation and diaspora recruitment from Queens to Moscow, E1 will sever the West Bank, cement annexation, and prove once again that without sanctions, arms embargoes, and trade penalties, international recognition of Palestine is an empty gesture.
The right’s talk of a “coming civil war” is not a forecast as such, but a repeated political script. From the Ulster gun-runners of 1914 to Powell’s “rivers of blood” and today’s viral predictions of ungovernable cities, the plot is always the same: declare an existential threat, build the apparatus to counter it, and keep the threat just far enough away that the apparatus becomes permanent. The danger is not that Britain will descend into the racial-ethnic conflict of their imagination, but that we will sleepwalk into the authoritarian Britain they need to “prevent” it.