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.
The rest of the blog
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.
Caroline Fraser’s Murderland dismantles the voyeurism of true crime by tracing serial murder not to aberrant monsters but to the poisoned infrastructures, institutional apathy, and cultural amnesia that made their violence possible.
The British housing crisis is not a matter of scarcity but of structure—a system that treats homes as investment vehicles, tenants as revenue streams, and housing itself as a battlefield between capital and collective life.
On Larry Alan Busk’s Democracy in Spite of the Demos
Ryan’s Second Strike is a taut, post-Brexit techno-thriller in which privatised warfare meets Cold War ghosts, and the real enemy is the story you’re told to believe.
Geoff Dyer’s Homework shows childhood not as innocence, but as class training—plastic toys, unwritten rules, and a welfare state already fraying at the edges.
On Jane Borden’s Cults Like Us
They knew he was unfit—and backed him anyway; Original Sin is the story of how denial, deference, and decay brought Trump back.
A chilling portrayal of how cruelty embeds itself in routine, and how history is domesticated.
Read side by side, Karen Hao’s Empire of AI and Keach Hagey’s The Optimist show that what Silicon Valley sells as salvation—artificial general intelligence, safety, abundance—is in fact a system of extraction and control, built on scraped data, outsourced labour, and centralised power, with Sam Altman not merely as its architect, but as its most convincing prophet.
On Laura Bates’s The New Age of Sexism.