False Flags and Red Paint

Paul Knaggs gets it, of course:

Does the British state truly lack the capacity to protect a twelve-foot bronze icon in the most watched square mile on earth, or does it simply find the alternative more politically useful?

Shortly after 4:00 a.m. on Friday, 27 February 2026, the statue of Winston Churchill in Parliament Square was found dripping in red paint. The slogans were unambiguous: “Zionist war criminal,” “Stop the Genocide,” “Globalise the Intifada,” “Never Again is Now.” the fourth face of the plinth was tagged in Dutch: “Groeten uit Den Haag”, Greetings from The Hague.

That last line is not incidental. The Hague is the seat of the International Criminal Court, which in November 2024 issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged crimes against humanity in Gaza. It is the ICC’s city. The message was pointed, knowing, and international in scope.

By dawn, the Metropolitan Police had arrested a 38-year-old Dutch national at the scene. He had already published a pre-recorded, seven-part Instagram statement under the name Olax Outis, a deliberate pseudonym. In Homer’s Odyssey, Outis means “Nobody”: it is the name Odysseus gave the Cyclops to escape without being identified.

The man chose the alias of someone who disappears. Instead, he walked directly into arrest.

The Dutch group Free the Filton 24 NL claimed responsibility. The reference is to the 24 Palestine Action activists charged over a break-in at an Elbit Systems weapons facility in Filton, near Bristol, in August 2024. Elbit is Israel’s largest arms manufacturer. The activists destroyed drone components they believed were being used in Gaza.

The Question of Timing 

Palestine Action activists Jordan Devlin, Charlotte Head, Zoe Rogers, Samuel Corner, Leona Kamio and Fatema Zainab Rajwani pose for the camera the night before they smashed up an Elbit arms factory in August 2024. 

Here is the detail your morning television did not dwell upon: nine days before the Churchill vandalism, on 18 February 2026, a jury at Woolwich Crown Court acquitted the first six Filton defendants, the “Filton 6” of every charge put to them, including aggravated burglary, which carried a potential life sentence. They had admitted destroying the drones. The jury acquitted them anyway.

In the same fortnight, the High Court ruled that the government’s proscription of Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation had been unlawful. The state’s entire legal architecture, built to crush this movement, was collapsing in open court. Government ministers were furious. The Crown Prosecution Service, within days, announced it would seek a retrial.

And then, nine days after that acquittal, a Dutch activist in a red boiler suit with “I Support Palestine Action” written across his back in large letters walked up to the most photographed monument in Britain and spent an extended period painting it, before being arrested in under two minutes.

We are not asserting the Home Office handed him the paint. We are asking why the door was left open long enough to get a result.

The Panopticon’s Convenient Blind Spot 

Parliament Square is ringed by some of the highest concentrations of CCTV cameras in the world. The Metropolitan Police’s “ring of steel” around Parliament is a point of institutional pride. The Met states its officers were “on scene within two minutes of being alerted.” Two minutes. Yet the man completed what appears to be an extensive, multi-sided mural before a single officer intercepted him.

The question is not whether the police can respond. Clearly, they can. The question is why pre-emptive monitoring, routine in this specific location, did not flag a man in deep red overalls approaching a Category A monument at 4:00 a.m.

There are three possible answers. The first is institutional incompetence, which those who built the surveillance state around Westminster will find it difficult to argue with a straight face. The second is that the cameras saw, the system logged, and a decision was made to let the act complete itself. The third the most structurally important, is that it does not matter which of the first two is true.

False Flags and Red Paint 

The charge filed is “racially aggravated criminal damage.” This is not a coincidence of phrasing. It is a legal instrument. The “Zionist war criminal” slogan triggers the racial aggravation element; “Globalise the Intifada”, which both the Metropolitan Police and Greater Manchester Police declared a chargeable offence in December 2025, appears on the plinth as if placed for the purpose. 

This man did not merely vandalise a statue. He gift-wrapped a prosecution, a news cycle, and a pretext.

The Home Office called Churchill “a figure of great national pride.” Within hours, the Jewish Leadership Council called the act “disgusting.” The Board of Deputies invoked the Holocaust. Political figures across the spectrum rushed to condemn Palestinian solidarity protesters as a whole, not the individual, not the act, but the movement.

Nine days after the movement had won in court, it was back in the dock of public opinion.

The Verdict 

We are not in the business of conspiracy for its own sake. We are in the business of structural analysis, and the structure here is clear. Whether this individual acted from pure moral conviction, whether he was a “useful idiot” for forces he could not see, or whether the state’s security apparatus made a very deliberate choice about what it would and would not stop, the result is identical.

The paint dries. The arrest is made. The Filton acquittals are buried beneath outrage about Churchill. The High Court’s ruling on Palestine Action is crowded out by photographs of a defaced monument. The government, losing the legal argument, wins the emotional one.

It is not quite the burning of the Reichstag. But it does not need to be. The modern state has learned subtlety. It no longer needs to burn buildings. It needs only to leave a door ajar and wait for someone filled with the righteous passion of indignation or reckless enough to walk through it.

Greetings from The Hague, indeed. The question is whether the message arrived, or whether it was simply repainted into something more useful to those who were already watching.