The rest of the blog
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.
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.
The crimes of Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki were supposed to teach the world “never again.” Huckabee’s defence of Gaza’s destruction turns that into “do it again” — not moral clarity, but moral collapse.
Israel killed Anas al-Sharif because it feared what he could still show the world.
Live Aid was forty years ago. Today, we are haunted once again by the images of starving children (and now, starving adults) in Gaza. But this time, it doesn’t seem to register. No concerts. No campaigns. No national reckoning. Why? Because the system can only process suffering when it’s stripped of politics. Ethiopia’s famine was framed as fate. Gaza’s is a siege, and Britain is complicit. That’s the difference.
The phrase “rules-based international order” has become a punchline. When Russia bombs a maternity hospital, it’s a war crime. When Israel flattens a refugee camp, it’s self-defence. The ICC pursues African warlords and Balkan generals with zeal—but stalls or retreats when the accused are allies of Washington or clients of London. The problem isn’t that international law exists. It’s that it doesn’t apply to everyone. War crimes are prosecuted not on the basis of what’s done, but who does it, and who they do it for.
This month, the British state made its position on violence unambiguous: while ex-generals and loyal newspapers led the charge, Parliament followed. The result was clear: Impunity for its own, criminalisation for its critics. In the same month it moved to quash investigations into war crimes in Northern Ireland, it voted to proscribe Palestine Action under terrorism law.
The state demands loyalty from its killers, and contempt for those who ask why. To question the SAS is treated as heresy. To investigate them, as betrayal. But no one is above the law. Not even the men with night-vision goggles and state-sanctioned impunity. If the victims of British state violence are to be denied justice so that the myth of military virtue can remain intact, then we are not a democracy. We continue to be an empire that refuses to admit it.
We were told this was a war for hearts and minds, but what we gave them was a bullet to the head, or a slit throat, and a culture of impunity that stretched from the killing fields of Helmand to the corridors of Whitehall.
Austerity at home, impunity abroad, this is the Britain that won’t count the bodies, so long as capital is kept comfortable.