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.
Trump’s return to power exposes the just world theory for what it is: a comforting liberal illusion that crumbles under the weight of class reality and fascist spectacle
A short, urgent book that arrives too late, David A. Graham’s The Project lays out the authoritarian blueprint of Project 2025 in chilling detail.
On Faiz Siddiqui’s Hubris Maximus: The Shattering of Elon Musk
On Jefferson Cowie, Carl Freedman, and the Long Seventies of Trumpism
Whipple’s Uncharted is less a chronicle of Trump’s comeback than an unflinching autopsy of a decaying liberal order that mistook gerontocracy for stability and denial for strategy
The Trump–Starmer trade deal and the culture war as foreign policy
The deportation of Kilmar Abrego García is not a bureaucratic error but a deliberate act of offshored carceral spectacle, proof that under Trump, Miller, and Vance, state violence has become exportable, theatrical, and entirely by design.
JD Vance isn’t offering Europe advice, he’s issuing terms from the heart of a revanchist empire, dressed up in the language of realism and loyalty.
With Elbridge Colby whispering war into Pete Hegseth’s ear, the Trump administration has replaced strategic ambiguity with a doctrine of confrontation.
On Trump’s tariffs and the fantasy of economic control