John Hall. RadioFreePiispanristi 🐺 🇬🇧🇫🇮

Ircestrian. (O)Wellingburian. SSEES.
Deighton, Allbeury, Ambler and Household. 1er REC.
WWFC, Cobblers, Northampton Saints and Steelbacks.
Irchy Romans.

[John Hall. RadioFreePiispanristi 🐺 🇬🇧🇫🇮 @jatrius]

@timothy_stanley Not all future constituency battles will be in oil towns.
Makerfield is much more typical.

[John Hall. RadioFreePiispanristi 🐺 🇬🇧🇫🇮 @jatrius]

@Neogeo2570 @KTHopkins Failed my A levels in telepathy.
How would a court of law determine intent?

[John Hall. RadioFreePiispanristi 🐺 🇬🇧🇫🇮 @jatrius]

@AvonandsomerRob @JamesMelville Cost of living for many means there are no choices to exercise.

[James Melville 🚜 @JamesMelville]

Britain is not the same.
The lockdowns in 2020-2021 did not merely pause life; they rewrote its rules. What began as a 3 week ‘flatten the curve’ shield against a virus became a slow, grinding experiment in how much freedom, community and common sense a nation could surrender before something essential broke. And something broke.

Children spent the Covid era incarcerated away from education and friends, robbing them of early learning and social skills.

The elderly were often isolated alone behind closed doors.

The economy did not bounce back; it collapsed. Small shops and pubs that defined high streets vanished, replaced by the cold efficiency of multinational corporation platforms that never close and never employ or circulate money locally.

Debt piled upon debt while the government discovered new appetites for control and new excuses for spending.

The cost of living has continued since the Covid era. This is restricting the ability of millions people live their lives with fulfilment and prosperity.

Young people who should have been building their lives instead watched house prices and rents climb beyond reach, their wages eaten by inflation that the same institutions that locked them down now lecture them to accept as normal.

Most quietly devastating was the loss of something harder to measure: the unthinking assumption that Britain was still a free country in the old, stubborn sense. That an individual could decide for themselves whether to open their business, hug their loved ones, or send their child to school. That the state existed to serve the people, not to rule them or decide freedoms.

The habit of deference to authority, once a quiet British strength, became a dangerous reflex. Dissent was reframed as danger. Questions were treated as something to be cancelled or punished. And when the restrictions finally lifted, the psychological damage remained, like scaffolding left standing long after the building had collapsed because of unnecessary repairs.

Britain survived the Blitz. It endured rationing, deindustrialisation, recessions, and every political crisis of the modern era. But the lockdowns were different. They did not ask for national pride, courage or endurance. They asked for obedience and isolation, and they received both in abundance. The Britain that emerged since the Covid era is more anxious, more divided, more dependent, and less certain of what it still believes.

The question is not whether we can go back. We cannot. The question is whether we will remember what was taken and refuse to let it happen again, or whether we will grow tragically conditioned to a less confident, subdued, more frightened version of ourselves that the lockdowns left behind.

Britain is not the same.
The only choice left is what we decide to become instead - and ideally, reboot our national confidence. But I’m not hopeful of this. The Covid era broke something in Britain. You can feel it still lingering. And ultimately, only we can try and resolve this. We need to rebuild our national confidence and stand up to the governments who continue to try and keep us in forms of restrictive confinement under their control. No one voted for this. And it’s time to do something about it before it’s too late.

[John Hall. RadioFreePiispanristi 🐺 🇬🇧🇫🇮 @jatrius]

@AvonandsomerRob ENG 2-0 CRO
Neither side what they once were.

[Dan Hitchens @ddhitchens]

Top ten responses so far from Labour MPs:

—Antonia Bance: “Head in hands”
—Ian Byrne: “Grim”
—Ashley Dalton: “Very sad…deeply flawed and unsafe”
—Florence Eshalomi: “Where to even start’”
—Allison Gardner: “An insult to parliament that this bill has been brought back”
—Rupa Huq: “Last thing we need”
—Adam Jogee: “Insane stuff”
—Emma Lewell: “Absolutely dismayed… A deeply flawed and dangerous bill”
—David Smith: “Very sad news indeed… I can’t think of a more divisive issue”
—Kirsteen Sullivan: “I cannot believe we are back here again. With no humility about the concerns raised previously”

[David Betz @DavidBe31099196]

Britain used to be good at propaganda. Really good at it. Alongside the Navy, it was the one thing Britain’s foes always respected: not brute force, but the quiet art of trickery, the information gambit, the elegant misdirection woven so deeply into the machinery of state that you barely noticed the strings until they were already pulling you off course.

That was the genius of it. Subtle. Institutional. Almost artistic. Which is why half the world’s sharpest PR minds still cluster in London—trained here, highly compensated here, operating in that grey zone where influence feels like consensus.

So it’s genuinely painful to watch this latest episode. The official story around these Ukrainian arsonists and the attack on the PM’s property isn’t just clumsy; it’s an outright embarrassment. A gross, unvarnished shambles of deflection, selective omission, and conspiratorial stitching held together by the thinnest sheen of authority still available from the usual compromised assets—Hope not Hate and their like.

It has all the hallmarks of a once-great machine that’s simply given up. You can almost hear the weary sigh from the back rooms: “Sorry, this particular turd just can’t be polished. We’re out.”

The result is exactly what you’d expect: obvious lies, ill-connected narratives, and that sad, desperate attempt to project gravitas over something that smells rotten from a mile away. Britain once fooled empires. Now it can’t even fool its own people without blushing. What a fall.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

And then there’s the BBC’s own contribution to this farce — a lengthy “investigation” that breathlessly insists the whole thing is a sophisticated Russian state operation, complete with shadowy Telegram handlers and grand sabotage campaigns. Yet it ends, almost as an afterthought, with the Metropolitan Police’s counter-terrorism chief stating plainly: “we’ve got no evidence to suggest that this was a state-backed threat.”

One can almost picture the poor producer staring at the screen, realising the carefully constructed house of cards has no foundation, and deciding to shove that inconvenient quote right at the end anyway. It’s the journalistic equivalent of polishing the turd for six paragraphs and then admitting in the final line that, actually, it’s still just a turd. The mismatch is glaring, the credibility shredded. Britain’s once-feared propaganda apparatus has devolved into self-owning spectacle.

[John Hall. RadioFreePiispanristi 🐺 🇬🇧🇫🇮 @jatrius]

@MattPinner_ A Sinclair C-5.

[John Hall. RadioFreePiispanristi 🐺 🇬🇧🇫🇮 @jatrius]

@Justine_Roberts @LauraTrottMP No. It won't achieve its stated goal and it will usher in a host of unintended consequences,

[John Hall. RadioFreePiispanristi 🐺 🇬🇧🇫🇮 @jatrius]

@WestminsterWAG Not when a party has MPs like Trott celebrating the disastrous Trojan Horse bill posing as Online Safety measures. No matter how persuasively Badenoch projects herself, the stables still haven't been hosed.

[spankybackpack @spankybackpack]

CEEFAX banned for under-34s after 6:54 PM

[John Hall. RadioFreePiispanristi 🐺 🇬🇧🇫🇮 @jatrius]

@LauraTrottMP @MumsnetTowers @RaiseTheAge16 @HP4SaferScreens @safe_screens @Netmums This is not a win. This is big state nannying usurping privacy and parental control and is itself open to govt abuse and interference. Limp Dumb types cheering.

[David Betz @DavidBe31099196]

I don’t think that academics should do ‘hot takes’ on matters of the day. Their opinions are rarely better informed than anyone else’s and cloaking them in scholarly garb cheapens the principle of objectivity. With respect to what is occurring in Britain today, in my opinion a fundamental error right now is to let the churn of the daily ‘news’ cycle drive your analysis.

The legacy media, the government, and the police have all forfeited any claim to credibility; they lie routinely, by omission and commission, and they are actively shaping the narrative to protect a failing political order. Strong-arming victims’ families, suppressing footage, and spinning every incident as isolated ‘far-right thuggery’ or random criminality is not journalism or policing, let alone governing—it is damage limitation for a system that has lost control of the streets and the story.

Instead, fix your gaze on the structural factors. Demography, geography, economics, and the hollowing-out of institutional legitimacy matter far more than whatever grainy mobile-phone clip is being waved at us this week.

Britain has imported, at scale and with minimal integration, populations whose cultural distance from the native majority is large and, in important respects, growing rather than shrinking. Parallel societies, concentrated in particular towns and cities, now possess the critical mass to sustain sustained low-level conflict and, when conditions align, more organised violence.

The state’s monopoly on force is visibly fraying; its willingness to use what remains of that monopoly is selective and therefore delegitimising. Trust in the police, courts, and political class is in the basement and still falling. Economic stagnation and housing pressure sharpen every grievance. These are not transient conditions; they are the terrain on which coming events will play out.

On the Belfast attacks specifically: the operators are clearly more security-conscious than has been the case with the migrant hotel and other protests over the last couple of years—masked, disciplined about visuals, limiting the evidential trail. Some attribute this to institutional memory of the Troubles. That may be part of it.

But I suspect the more immediate and probable vector is simple tactical diffusion from the modern Left and anarchist playbook. Black Bloc methods, the utility of anonymity, the selective application of violence, the media choreography—these have been field-tested and refined for years in Europe and North America.

The manuals are not secret and the examples are legion: Marighella’s Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla, the writings of the Red Army Faction, Alinsky’s organising principles stripped of the moralising, the operational literature of the Global Justice movement and Antifa networks.

Remove the Marxist dialectical claptrap and you are left with cold, competent observations about how small, determined groups can punch above their weight against a larger but slower and more constrained opponent. Diffusion of those techniques was inevitable once the incentives aligned.

You don't need an aged ex-IRA uncle to tell you how to do these things. The internet and a library card will do it.

I am wary of firm day-to-day pronouncements precisely because reliable, on-the-ground reporting is so thin. I am not in Belfast, the journalistic desert in this country is real, nearly every dead-tree media and teevee pundit is a literal know nothing.

What I will say with higher confidence on account of my reading of such conflicts elsewhere in the world is that certain escalatory dynamics are now highly probable:

Police over-reaction that produces a martyr or martyrs, further radicalising elements on all sides.

Targeted assassination of a judge, prominent politician, or influential voice.

A spectacular, Christchurch-style mass killing when some individual or cell concludes that only dramatic, indiscriminate violence will break the equilibrium.

Stabbings and gang rapes will continue at their grim baseline; they are already normalised enough that they barely shift the political dial. The deeper pattern is polarisation, erosion of restraint, and the slow emergence of organised ethnic and ideological blocs willing to use force to defend or advance their interests.

All of that is in accordance with the rules of the game of identity politics, which were created by the *very same* people now most frantic about the perilous consequences of their own ideology.

The centre is not holding because it has spent years delegitimising itself and disarming its natural supporters.

Watch the structural trends—demographic momentum, institutional decay, the diffusion of effective small-group tactics, the collapse of shared reality—more than the latest headline. The news will keep lying. The underlying physics of the situation will not.

[John Hall. RadioFreePiispanristi 🐺 🇬🇧🇫🇮 @jatrius]

@japan_nobunaga Ruling class of eunuchs and egotist women abasing themselves to reinforce their mutual delusions

[Matt Goodwin @GoodwinMJ]

WOW. This exchange in the House of Commons reveals the problem.

Jim Allister:

“What is being done to stop the importing of alien cultures in which people think it is acceptable to try and behead somebody?”

Hilary Benn: “sorry, what do you mean by alien cultures?”

[John Hall. RadioFreePiispanristi 🐺 🇬🇧🇫🇮 @jatrius]

@mattletiss7 Too many entrants, no hazard, no fun

[Burnside @BurnsideWasTosh]

The poor police: they'll have to arrest 10 white people for beheading now so the arrest statistics don't look prejudiced.

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

Jay, spot on. And for those who aren't familiar with the detail, it's worth setting out precisely what Lowles actually did.

During the Middlesbrough riots in August 2024 he tweeted that acid had been thrown from a car window at a Muslim woman. Over 100,000 people saw it. Cleveland Police confirmed they had received no complaints of any acid attack whatsoever. The tweet was deleted and an apology issued after the damage was done.

He also warned publicly that over 100 far right protests were planned across Britain, urging communities to prepare for widespread unrest. None of those protests materialised. Lowles subsequently admitted the list was a hoax.

A senior Conservative MP called it incredibly irresponsible, spreading misinformation and pouring petrol on the flames at the worst possible moment. No charges were brought. No inquiry opened.

Now compare that with Lucy Connolly. A childminder from Northampton who posted an angry, intemperate message on X on the day three girls were murdered in Southport. Her post was viewed 310,000 times before she deleted it. She was arrested, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 31 months in prison for inciting racial hatred. Her appeal was rejected.

Lowles spread false information about an acid attack that never happened, during active rioting, to over 100,000 people. He issued an apology and faced no further consequence. Connolly posted an angry tweet in the immediate aftermath of a child murder. She received 31 months.

That disparity is the definition of two tier justice. And it remains entirely unaddressed.

[Ike Ijeh @ikeijeh]

Best political interview I've seen in years. Gloriously, Lammy is too stuffed with cognitive dysentery to fully appreciate the baroque splendour of the skewering he's being subjected to. Masterful from @TrevorPTweets, if only all the media were like this.

[John Hall. RadioFreePiispanristi 🐺 🇬🇧🇫🇮 @jatrius]

@HarryLines7 @irishpatriot91 Agree but see the video. Bloke tries to beat him off the victim with a hurley stick but they then withdraw because PSNI turn up.