Via Mutual Aid Structures

The Supreme Court of the United States has declined to hear Ghislaine Maxwell's appeal. Yet just as we are expected to believe that the Hillsborough victims were unlawfully killed by no one, so we are expected to believe that Maxwell trafficked her victims to no one.

If you want to know quite what a colony Britain is, then consider that this is the country where the whole Jeffrey Epstein affair is having the most impact, from the Royal Family, to, rather more importantly, the dominant faction of the governing party. That faction has had close ties to the Maxwells for more than 60 years. Whenever Alastair Campbell turns up, then remember that before he was Groom of the Stool to Tony Blair, he was Groom of the Stool to Robert Maxwell. What a CV.

Completing a process that went back at least to the Miners' Strike, Britain is now policed as a colony, with its nearest remaining thing to a colonial police force of any real size, the Police Service of Northern Ireland, brought over to London to arrest 488 of the Empire's elderly and disabled dissidents for silently holding up cardboard signs bearing the name of a nonviolent organisation that has been proscribed for reasons that Parliament had accepted that it was not allowed to know, making it a three-generation throwback of a colonial legislature, since that would not pass muster in the British Overseas Territories today.

If, beyond the Met and presumably also the City of London Police, everyone in the United Kingdom's other 42 territorial police forces refused to have anything to do with this operation, then good for them. But if, as Doug Beattie of the Ulster Unionist Party would have it, the Ulstermen, who in February were complaining that cuts to the bone had reduced them to a skeleton service, had contributed "of their own time", then may we take it that they were not paid, and that they picked up their own tabs for travel and accommodation?

Although it did gain a Westminster seat last year, the UUP has long been a shadow of its former self, and the Orange Order officially disaffiliated from it 20 years ago. But there are still informal ties, as there have never ceased to be between the officially long-separate worlds of the Loyal Orders and Freemasonry, which cause a section of Evangelical Protestantism in Northern Ireland to denounce the Orders in the strongest possible terms. Via mutual aid structures, indeed.

And to such are to be given the power to decide that a demonstration was too big, or that there had been too many in the same location on the same issue over a period of time, or that individuals had used up their respective allowances of protest credits, all backed up by digital ID. Those powers will not be used against the person or supporters of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, an honoured guest of the IDF that trained our Police in occupation. Again, then, via mutual aid structures, indeed.