EXCESSIVE POLICING OF PENTONVILLE DEMO IN SOLIDARITY WITH PALESTINE ACTION HUNGER STRIKERS ~ Blade Runner ~ The traditional anarchist New Year’s Eve gathering outside HMP Pentonville was joined on December 31, 2025 by a solidarity demonstration for remand prisoners currently on hunger strike, organised by Palestine Pulse alongside other grassroots groups. Hundreds of people assembled on Caledonian Road carrying Palestinian flags and banners, with the demonstration centred on solidarity with prisoners rather than disruption. Nevertheless, police responded with a large and visibly disproportionate deployment. Protesters counted at least 21 police vans in the immediate area, equating to roughly 170 officers. Many were deployed in boiler suits and carrying long batons, signalling a preparedness for confrontation rather than assembly facilitation. Despite the heavy police presence, passing drivers repeatedly sounded their horns in support of the demonstration. Officers attempted to confine protesters behind railings on a narrow stretch of pavement, but as numbers grew this quickly became untenable. Protesters spilled onto the road and began a spontaneous march around the prison block, entering Wheelwright Street. Police reinforcements arrived as officers moved to block surrounding streets, fragmenting movement and preventing the crowd from circulating freely. > The march was halted and forced back towards Caledonian Road. Further attempts > to move south were blocked by additional cordons, leaving protesters penned-in > on the carriageway. The aggressive policing approach generated predictable > friction, resulting in minor injuries and two arrests, both reportedly > released in the early hours of 1 January. Following the standoff, demonstrators regrouped and moved away from the prison under continued police pressure, later continuing through central London and dispersing at Piccadilly Circus. At the centre of the protests is a coordinated hunger strike involving eight remand prisoners held in multiple UK prisons, including Pentonville, Bronzefield, New Hall and Peterborough. All are being held without conviction for alleged offences linked to Palestine Action. Several prisoners are approaching 60 days without food, while two others previously paused their hunger strike following severe health deterioration after more than seven weeks. The hunger strikers’ demands include the closure of Elbit Systems’ UK sites and an end to prolonged pre-trial detention. Doctors, families and supporters have repeatedly warned of escalating health risks, with hospitalisations reported and serious concerns raised about irreversible damage. > Recent demonstrations outside Pentonville have already focused on solidarity > with one of the hunger strikers, Kamran, who is among the Filton 24 arrestees > and has been hospitalised for the fifth time after more than 50 days on hunger > strike. NYE demonstrations were also planned outside prisons in Brixton and > Peterborough this year. Since the proscription of Palestine Action earlier in 2025, the British state has increasingly relied on remand, isolation, and restrictive custodial regimes against those accused of involvement in the group. Supporters describe a pattern including censorship of books and correspondence, denial of prison work, transfers far from family networks, and repeated refusals of bail. > Taken together, activists view the policing of demonstrations and the > treatment of remand prisoners as part of a domestic counter-insurgency > strategy, in which overwhelming police presence, pre-emptive containment and > punitive detention function to send a broader warning to those considering > militant solidarity with Palestine. > In this context, the hunger strike has become a focal point, seen as exposing > how prisons and public order policing are being used to suppress dissent and > discipline political resistance. > > As the new year begins, the prisoners’ fast continues. > > -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- > > Photos: Blade Runner The post Hundreds at New Year’s Eve London prison protest appeared first on Freedom News.

BOTH THE “CENTRE” AND THE COBWEB LEFT WALLOWED IN FAILURE, WHILE THE FAR RIGHT EASILY HAD ITS BEST YEAR ~ Rob Ray ~ Reform UK has consistently topped national polls in 2025 as the “anything but LabCon” choice, with its predictable and often ridiculous incompetence in local government barely making a dent on numbers. Barring a minor miracle, it will win big in May’s local elections. Meanwhile its street wing, in the form of Tommy Robinson’s mob, managed to pull out a record crowd for Unite The Kingdom and litter every lamp-post from Kent to Yorkshire with the butcher’s apron. KEIR? HARDLY Much of the blame for this must be laid at the feet of former human rights lawyer Keir Starmer, whose journey from McLibel activism to implacable opponent of left dissent went supernova when his government proscribed a non-violent direct action group, Palestine Action, as a terror organisation. A monumentally stupid decision on all counts, not least for his own political future, as for many, it stripped away their last illusions of Labour as a progressive force. The impact of Labour’s attitude to the left, its abandonment of promised policies, and its seething hatred for protest can’t be overestimated in terms of where it finds itself entering 2026. Starmer’s wing of the party, its eminence thoroughly greased by Morgan McSweeney, never did understand that over the long term, if you have no tame corporate media you need grassroots activity. Not for the election-time door knocking, but for the shield it provides online. When no-one wants to defend you, because you make it clear you despise them, all that gets heard is the negative voice. The impact of this choice, to deliberately insult and alienate its own base, can be seen in the wake of the Autumn Budget, which did have a few vaguely centre-left ideas in it, and the Employment Rights Act, which (even watered down) genuinely does introduce a handful of protections for working people. Nobody cared. No-one has been jumping in on socials to pat Labour on the back, not even the old guard of (lower case r) reformists who previously would have been saying “see, this is better than the Tories”. And as a result, it all goes one way. As many predicted when Starmer first started purging Labour’s ranks of anti-Zionist Jews and rolling back on his leadership promises before the general election, a total reliance on public exhaustion with the Tories was never going to hold up, and so it has proven. With a grassroots shattered by its own hubris, an implacably hostile corporate media, and a public refusing to trust a word said by party or government, how Labour might pull out of the nosedive is anyone’s guess. All of which, in tandem with the Tories’ own self-immolation, has opened the void through which Nigel Farage sauntered. YOU’RE KIDDING ME … To his left, meanwhile, all has been chaos embodied by the extraordinary saga of Your Party. What were they thinking? Freedom has never made many bones about its position on Corbyn and the ultimate uselessness of the cobweb left, but even we weren’t predicting such an immediate and comprehensive proof. It’s hard to think of a critique, sneer, or bald-faced insult that could do justice to the absolute fucking shambles of it all. Amidst perhaps the most dangerous political situation of the postwar era, we watched a handful of inflated egos take all the potential energy created by Labour’s desertion and explode it into little pieces. The people I feel most sorry for are those who genuinely, for just a little while, believed it could go somewhere. Not in a patronising way, but in the comradely sense of knowing how it feels to have hope in a project and see it dashed. That is what the likes of good ol’ Corbs, Zara Sultana, and the various “revolutionary” parties should feel ashamed of: they took the energy and hope of hundreds of thousands of people and stamped it into the mud, unnoticed amidst the squabbling and scrabbling for position. There can be no better example of why we don’t need parties, but to turn outwards and organise the working class directly — place the horse firmly in front of the cart. Leave that pack of blithering idiots behind and give up on their decades of abject, piteous failure. SAVED BY THE (GREEN) BELL? The beneficiaries on the left from these twin towers of dung were, of course, the Greens under their affable, well-meaning and occasionally analytically shallow new leader Zack Polanski. No word of a lie, it’s been nice hearing someone be direct and relatively uncompromising in his language while taking on the press this year. His absolute refusal to play the “how many rights can we take away from trans people this week” game, in particular, is the sort of confidence many on the left could stand to learn from. But, even setting aside obvious anarchist critiques of the inchoate core and systemic shortfalls of the Green Party project, there are plenty of limitations on its surge, which already seems to have peaked. The Greens have no friendly media. Not the Independent, not the Guardian, not even the Morning Star, which (in the absence of a functional Communist Party offering) has broadly plumped for Your Party as the home of a more Proper socialist politic. And the Star is probably correct there — pathetic though Corbs and co. may be, their platform is at heart red economics, while the Greens are, well, green, with social democracy largely tacked on as an often uncomfortable coalition-building exercise. Much like the Lib Dems, green parties are notorious for opportunism, most notably in Germany where they frequently enter coalitions with the conservatives. So it remains to be seen how deep its commitments will run when placed under pressure. WHAT ABOUT US? Perhaps I’m being Mr Bias of Cheerleader City, but I think the direct action movement, particularly that wing of it which refused to simply roll over on Palestine and proscription, deserves a great deal of praise this year. It’s been a hard one, in which it became clear long sentences for non-violent dissent are here to stay, surveillance and repression are on the rise, and money has poured in to fuel our opponents. But thousands of people stood up to be counted, knowing they could face prison terms, knowing they would be mocked and mistreated. There has been a great deal of bravery on display throughout the year, and everyone involved should be proud of themselves. Always under the cosh, always few and underfunded, facing up to a State that increasingly has done away with even the slightest respect for privacy and human rights — the fact you keep going is frankly incredible. If 2025 has shown one thing, though, it’s that we’re right. The “practical” cobweb left and their electoral obsessions won’t save us; they can’t even save themselves. They’ve been given chance after chance, and shown that even if they could win power they probably shouldn’t. We need grassroots strength. We need the force of unified working class communities who can disrupt business as usual and make those in power sit up. It was direct action this year which, time and again, rattled the government where the conferences of electoral leftists produced only a distant gale of laughter. As we head towards the spectre of a far-right government which will show us no more mercy than this one, I can only say: keep going. Because they sneer at you. Because they seek to silence you. There is no greater proof of a government’s fear than a law designed to stop you from doing what you’re doing. You’re right. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Images: Radical Graffiti The post 2025: A gilded year for the right, hubris fulfilled on the left appeared first on Freedom News.