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.
On Robert Muller’s After All, This Is England
Harry Mulisch’s The Assault is not about what happened in 1945, but about the slow, bitter process by which a man and a society, learns what it meant.
A brutal, brilliant novel that exposes the violence of care, the politics of desire, and the limits of our empathy.
On Ibtisam Azem’s The Book of Disappearance and Michel Nieva’s Dengue Boy
Tony Benn was not a relic of a lost left but a constitutional insurrectionist whose writings—on the Crown, industry, war, and tradition—still offer a blueprint for democratic rebellion in a Britain built to resist it.
In Solidarity Betrayed, Ana Avendaño takes aim at the labour institutions she once helped lead. Drawing on personal experience and survivor testimony, she reveals how trade unions, far from shielding their members, have too often shielded abusers instead
Douglas Murray’s On Democracies and Death Cults isn’t journalism, it’s propaganda, where settler colonialism is recast as civilisation and Palestinian resistance is pathologised as a death cult. He doesn’t analyse October 7; he sanctifies it.
In Reem Gaafar’s first novel, the Nile doesn’t just carry the dead, it carries the weight of history, abandonment and everything the state refuses to name.
In Capital’s Grave, Jodi Dean argues that capitalism isn’t simply in crisis, it’s decomposing into a new neofeudal order of rent, servitude and fragmented power.
Michel Houellebecq’s Annihilation is a novel about the end of things: not apocalypse, not collapse, but the quieter, lonelier ruin of meaning in a technocratic capitalism that no longer pretends to offer hope.