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.
Angel Down opens in shriek and filth and never lets up. Kraus has written what feels like the literary equivalent of a migraine, long, unpunctuated, looping sentences, bodily fluids everywhere, voices caked in mud and irony. This isn’t Birdsong, and thank god for that. It’s closer to Wilfred Owen’s Strange Meeting rewritten by a trench-rat high on ether.
What’s being rolled out at Northwestern and other campuses is not a programme to protect Jewish students from abuse. It’s a mechanism to discipline campus speech, to teach students that anti-Zionism is taboo and that political critique must defer to geopolitical orthodoxy. It doesn’t mention the Nakba. It doesn’t mention the occupation. It doesn’t mention that many Jews oppose Zionism. These trainings don’t fight antisemitism, they flatten it into a tool of state ideology.
Caroline Lane wasn’t looked for because the system didn’t need to see her. The system still got paid. That’s the quiet scandal at the heart of Saltwater Mansions. It begins as a mystery, a vanished woman, a locked flat, a pile of unopened post, but becomes something stranger and sadder: an inquiry into how a person can disappear while everything around them keeps functioning. David Whitehouse isn’t writing true crime. He’s writing about the grief we ignore, the relationships we don’t ask about, the neighbours we forget to see. What remains is not just absence, it’s a mirror.
On Dennis Fritz’s Deadly Betrayal
On Daniel Finkelstein’s Defence of Police Violence and the Thatcherite Rewriting of Class Struggle
On World in Action’s Conversations With a Working Man (1971)
Tommy Robinson doesn’t live the life he claims to defend. He parachutes into protest scenes when there’s chaos to film, then jets off to sun himself abroad. He’s not the voice of the working class, he’s a voyeur of decline, turning grievance into spectacle for clicks and cash. What he sells isn’t solidarity. It’s resentment dressed up as nostalgia.
A man, his car, and his gun. This is pure Americana, not the myth of reinvention, but the fantasy that remains when everything else is lost. Sovereign begins with poverty. The ideology comes later.
John Rentoul has never understood the left. A Blairite to his core, he sees politics as something to be managed, not transformed. His call for Starmer to copy Macron isn’t about defeating Farage, it’s about using him. The aim isn’t to inspire, but to frighten voters back into line. Like Macron, Starmer doesn’t oppose the far right. He needs it.
Gary Smith says Britain’s net zero policy has exported jobs and imported virtue. But what he’s really defending isn’t working-class power, this is fossil capital in a hard hat. Decarbonisation without class politics is a gift to Farage. But the answer isn’t more oil. It’s public ownership, planning, and a transition built by workers, not against them.