December 2025

In the last six months human rights officials at both the Council of Europe and the United Nations have written to the German authorities to remind them of their obligation to protect, rather than suppress, freedom of expression and assembly for those engaged in what the UN called Palestine solidarity activism. ‘No circumstances can justify unnecessary and excessive police violence or unjust criminalisation for exercising fundamental freedoms,’ the UN experts wrote. Germany denies there is a problem. The measures taken against protesters are ‘grounded in the principles of proportionality and non-discrimination’, a senior civil servant at the Interior Ministry replied to the Council of Europe. ‘I do not see any specific details in your letter to support your assessment.’ He needn’t look far. There are dozens of videos showing ‘unnecessary and excessive police violence’ to be found on social media.

On Monday morning, more than a hundred people formed a picket line outside one of the entrances to the British Library’s St Pancras building. ‘We’ve got a library with no books, no readers, no digital content, no front-facing staff and absolutely no clue!’

In its open aggression and territoriality, Trump’s second National Security Strategy is less duplicitous about US actions around the world than past official documents. But there is plenty of dissembling. Trump’s government, which has bombed Iran, conducted drone assassinations in northern Syria, bombed Yemen and waged a global trade war is said to have a ‘predisposition to non-interventionism’.

Above Côte Brasserie in Kingston upon Thames, overlooking its Riverside Walk, there was for a week in mid-November a very long billboard depicting crowds in sackcloth and red hats trimmed in white, wading across water towards us. Yuletide synapses fired first: here was a Victorian Christmas card rerun of a Renaissance nativity painting, snow-covered fields in the distance, past-times rural types massed up front. Happy shopping! Except: that was a really big crowd. And a lot of stables. Look closer, and the smiles were smudged and strange, more feral than festive.

England doesn’t know how to say: ‘No Kings.’ Instead, it says: ‘Not this one, but perhaps his brother or his son.’ All Windsor crises, from the Abdication through Diana to this Andrew disaster, have been about personal morality – ironically revealing how much faith remains in the monarch as an ethical role model. But it isn’t the monarchs who are the British problem. It’s monarchism: the archaic top-down power structure of the Anglo-British state. In 1689, absolutism was stripped from the crown and transferred to Parliament, which today means the cabinet. The principle of parliamentary sovereignty is monarchism thinly disguised: government by supreme authority, with certain liberties allowed to trickle downwards.

In The Impact of Labour, Maurice Cowling wrote that politics in the 1920s was ‘fifty or sixty people’ in tension with one another. The Battle of Ideas, which packed out Church House for a weekend in October, is like that but for political contrarians: everyone who is anyone in British counter-suggestibility is here, and they all know each other.

The US can bomb Venezuelan military and civilian targets from the USS Gerald R. Ford but it’s difficult to imagine anyone signing off on a ground invasion. Cooler heads in the US military may be wary of a quagmire. If they did invade, US troops would probably end up fighting not only the Venezuelan military, intelligence services and civilian militias but also the Colombian guerrillas that operate along the border.

Qesser Zuhrah, Amu Gib, Heba Muraisi, Jon Cink, T Hoxha and Kamran Ahmed are on hunger strike. All are on remand in British jails awaiting trial for alleged actions either at Elbit Systems UK’s Filton research hub in August 2024, or, in June 2025, at RAF Brize Norton, from where flights depart regularly to RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus, which is used for British surveillance flights over Gaza and military operations across the Middle East.