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.
JD Vance’s outrage isn’t about defending human rights. This is the religious right’s export strategy, dressing up theocratic politics as “freedom of conscience” and using America’s human rights report as a battering ram against the separation of church and state.
Publishing a suspect’s ethnicity isn’t transparency, it’s a gift to the mob, a state-sanctioned dog whistle that trades justice for headlines and hands Reform UK exactly the ammunition it craves.
The Telegraph calls it “the full story” but it’s really the Home Office’s bedtime story – a script of shadowy threats, secret evidence we can’t see, and the quiet redefinition of protest as terrorism. Today it’s Palestine Action. Tomorrow it could be any movement that crosses a minister’s red lines.
Keir Starmer’s government has turned protest into a criminal offence, wielding counter-terror laws against pensioners, vicars, and schoolteachers while arms dealers cash in. This isn’t public safety, it’s the criminalisation of conscience.
The crimes of Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki were supposed to teach the world “never again.” Huckabee’s defence of Gaza’s destruction turns that into “do it again” — not moral clarity, but moral collapse.
Restore Britain isn’t an alternative to Farage — it’s his spawn, bred in the gaps when he feigns moderation. Their game isn’t winning elections, it’s shifting the boundaries of the possible until the grotesque feels ordinary.
Israel killed Anas al-Sharif because it feared what he could still show the world.
Jenrick’s “medieval attitudes” line isn’t about protecting women — it’s about importing the far right’s script into the Tory mainstream. From Powell to Farage, the cast has changed but the grammar is the same: the outsider as danger, the nation as victim, the politician as saviour.
Keir Starmer’s proscription of Palestine Action marks a new stage in Britain’s authoritarian turn, retooling counter-terrorism laws to criminalise dissent, define solidarity as “terrorism”, and dress up political repression as public safety.
Gilbert Achcar’s The Gaza Catastrophe is not a plea for sympathy. It is a political weapon. Written in the midst of genocide, it strips away the euphemisms, the diplomatic theatre, and the moral fog. This war, he argues, is a settler-colonial project. Accelerated to its most brutal form, with the full backing of the Western powers who claim to uphold human rights. Achcar names the system, maps its historical scaffolding, and indicts not only Israel but the global order that enables it. This is not a book of mourning. It is a call to act.