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.
Austerity at home, impunity abroad, this is the Britain that won’t count the bodies, so long as capital is kept comfortable.
Trump’s new tariffs aren’t a return to protectionism so much as a sign that capital, cornered and decadent, is turning inward, more coercive, more nationalist, and more dangerous.
Capitalism hasn’t repented by bringing the jobs back; it’s rearmed, turning screws at home under the banner of patriotic sacrifice.
Jeffrey Sachs wants you to believe the world’s problems can be solved by breaking U.S. dominance and letting other powers rise. But that’s not anti-imperialism, it’s just a multipolar fantasy.
Power posed, punishment filtered, the spectacle made beautiful.
The Trump administration’s latest tariff proposal assumes that other countries will quietly absorb the cost of import duties. But tariffs don’t work like that. They never have.
On Tariffs, Crypto, and the Class Logic of Trump’s Economic Nationalism
Trump’s second coming is less a rupture than the routinisation of political collapse. A Brumaire not of empire, but of entropy.
Under the right conditions, a hoax like the Report from Iron Mountain doesn’t just fool people, it becomes truer than the truth, offering the emotional clarity that politics no longer provides.
If Reaganism found its myths on the big screen, Trumpism built its own spectacle—and may now be searching for its Riefenstahl.