Keir Starmer
Dawn Raids and Banned Placards
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.
The rest of the blog
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.
The High Court’s ruling on the Bell Hotel in Epping is not a local quarrel but a turning point: councils asserting veto power, judges dismissing statutory duties as time-wasting, Farage and the Tories cheering, and Labour keeping silent. What began as a far-right protest has been laundered into national policy.
At the Alaska summit, Alexander Dugin saw triumph in mere recognition. But sovereignty today (whether in Moscow, Washington, or Westminster) exists only as theatre, feeding on crisis and rendering peace impossible.
The bullet missed, but the image hit. And it’s the image that rules now. Trump, mid-stumble, hand to ear, flanked by agents in suits. It has already been cropped, filtered, multiplied. Not just a moment, but a message: the strongman under fire, the martyr made live. The spectacle doesn’t distract from the violence; it packages it. Sells it. Projects it across TVs, phones, and tablets until belief hardens into doctrine. This is what power looks like in the age of algorithmic memory: not stability, but survival on camera.
Trump didn’t just return to NATO; he returned as “Daddy”—a role not earned through diplomacy, but conjured through spectacle. Baudrillard warned that when image overtakes reality, politics becomes performance. The bombs may have hit Iran, but the real strike was rhetorical. What mattered wasn’t destruction, it was the appearance of obliteration, the meme of authority, the myth of restored order. In the empire of simulation, the sovereign returns not with treaties, but with merch.