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.
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.
The next state to cross the nuclear threshold won’t be doing anything new. It’ll be following the path Israel already took—building the bomb in secret, shielded by silence and strategic utility. The real precedent was set decades ago in the Negev. That’s the hypocrisy at the heart of the so-called international order: one bomb is a threat to civilisation, the other a pillar of it. This isn’t about non-proliferation. It’s about who gets to own the apocalypse.
Under Trump and Stephen Miller, extraordinary rendition has been refashioned for domestic use—not to fight terrorism, but to disappear the vulnerable. There are no warrants. No charges. No destinations. Just men in unmarked vans, masked and armed, taking people who often never come back. This isn’t immigration enforcement. It’s the logic of the War on Terror—secret transfers, indefinite detention, legal disappearance—turned inward. The spectacle is the point. The fear is the policy.
Trump’s bunker busters, Netanyahu’s theological realism, and Starmer’s threat to criminalise Palestine Action reveal a world in which violence is moralised, empire is rationalised, and dissent is once again labelled terrorism.
Mike Tyson was never just a boxer—he was a system made flesh. Mark Kriegel’s Baddest Man understands this: it’s not a redemption tale but an anatomy of spectacle, where a traumatised boy from Brownsville is forged into a global icon of violence, repackaged as entertainment, and finally rebranded for profit
As Trump ramps up pressure on Iran—economically, militarily, and rhetorically—he discards intelligence briefings in favour of bombast, demands a surrender he can’t define, and courts catastrophe under the banner of strategic clarity. But Iran is not Iraq, and the fantasy of collapse may end in flames, not order.
Trump’s second term marries ICE raids at home with a war machine primed abroad, and Iran, once again, plays the designated enemy.
Trump doesn’t lie to persuade—he lies to dominate, using contradiction as a weapon to break truth itself.
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 LA deployment is not a policing measure. It is a political theatre of domination designed to send a message: the state belongs to Trump, the military answers to Trump, and those who oppose him—activists, migrants, dissenters—will be met with force.