True to form, the BBC reported the far Right riot in Epping last week, in which they attacked a peaceful anti racist demonstration while seeking to force the closure of an Asylum seekers hotel, on the same lines as the riots last year which tried to burn them down, as a “two sides” issue, even though their pictures clearly showed the far Right mob throwing bricks and bottles at a group of Stand Up to Racism people who were simply holding placards.

The disconnect between the words and images could not have been clearer..

On reading about the case in which armed police in Canterbury threatened a woman with arrest under the Terrorism Act for holding a Palestinian flag and holding signs saying “Free Gaza” and “Israel is committing genocide” – because her placard might be “reasonably interpreted” as expressing an “opinion or belief that is supportive of a proscribed organisation” and that “mentioning freedom of Gaza, Israel, genocide, all of that all comes under proscribed groups, which are terror groups that have been dictated by the government,” and that the phrase “Free Gaza” is “supportive of Palestine Action” – my daughter said “be careful what you write on your Blog Dad.”

Seeing that the Pope has just called for an end end to the barbarity in Gaza, I thought I’d draw something instead.

The question in all of this is whether this kind of insane over reach is an unintentional consequence of panic in the Home Office, faced with a mass movement that keeps on coming, keeps saying “we see you” and exposes a core ally as a genocidal state, and therefore puts into question the nature of our own state; or it is a deliberate attempt to freeze and intimidate that movement, while retaining plausible deniability. Was the armed Plod who threatened arrest just dimly applying his own limited understanding of the situation and relying on his tried and tested repressive instincts, or was he kite flying under instruction? Lets see how far we can get away with this?

Either way, it is backfiring. “Democracy” let us not forget, is supposed to be a “Fundamental British Value”. And, as the policeman put it so well, “the government has dictated that”.

The new report on overseas military bases from worldbeyonwar.org makes it very clear that the United States not only has 70% of them, and that it has them dug into 95 different countries all around the world, but also that the lions share of the remainder are run by direct US allies like the UK and Turkiye.

All the countries that are direct allies of the US, or have a security arrangement with them, are coloured in varying shades of blue in the graph above.

Worth bearing in mind when people here talk about rising threats and “deadly quartets”.

A toddler, in the sort of pink for girls very popular with Eastern european families, is being pushed along past the park in her heavy duty pushchair. Her arms are determinedly folded, a fierce frown and pouted lips, like a minature Mussolini en route to his balcony.

A red faced little boy wearing spiderman pyjama’s and crying forcefully is walked back to the bus stop by his Mum, where his half a dozen siblings are standing about – all about the same size with the same bullet headed haircuts – where he promptly belts his brother in the face. The brother starts crying, as well he might. “Spiderman” looks satisfied for a moment, then cries even more fiercely, to maintain a parity of percieved pain.

On the Thameslink train heading for Farringdon a Scottish family with two small children gamefully keep them entertained. The Dad holds the toddler up by the doors and shows him sights out of the window, adverts, anything to keep him interested. The Mum reads a story to the litttle girl, who sometimes looks at the book, sometimes out of the window, following it intermittently. One of the main characters in the book is a dog called “tramp” and, at one point, she pronounces it as “Trump” and laughs.

Since December last year, more than 15,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza; more than half of that since Israel collapsed the ceasefire in March.

About half as many have been killed in Syria since the HTS came to power on December 8th last year. At least 7,670, mainly civilians, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR). This includes more than 2,130 “extrajudicial executions” and “identity-based killings.”

Given the sheer continuous ferocity of the IDF assualt on Gaza, the total for Syria is alarming.

SOHR – which relies on a network of sources across Syria – documented “the killing of 7,670 people across Syria from December 8, 2024, to June 6, 2025,” adding that this number comprises “5,784 civilians, including 306 children and 422 women.”

The UK-based war monitor warned that “this grim toll is a result of ongoing violence and violations by local and external parties, alongside widespread security chaos,” and reflects “the fragility of the security situation and the increasing danger to the most vulnerable constituents of society.”

SOHR further pointed to what it said was an “escalation of extrajudicial executions and identity-based killings,” noting that it had documented 2,133 of such killings that were “committed in brutal ways.”

According to SOHR documentation, civilians constituted 75.4 percent of the total fatalities during these six months, while non-civilians accounted for 24.6 percent.

Sections of the Left in the UK welcomed the overthrow of the Assad government in December as a “liberation”. The reports above, and the HTS regime’s current discussions with Israel on possible partition of Lebanon, which appear to be animated by the United States, with with the prospect of Syria occupying the North of the country as far as the Med at Tripoli and occupying the Bekaa valley to act as pressure from the North to help secure Israel’s Northern border; should put that sharply into question in their own minds.

Israel is now indicating, with bombs, that it is far from reliant on such a deal and may simply want to hold hard to the Syrian territory it has occupied since the fall of Assad.

Or perhaps not. Today’s busker in the High Street is a woman playing an accordion. Slightly jazzy, fragments of a recognisable tune, skidded away from and improvised around, so the echoes are hard to identify. I’m half way down George Street before I realise its Zippety Doo Dah.

On the way back I give her a coin and said that her music makes you want to get out some spoons, clack along and dance; and asked if the buskers who are now pretty regular on that spot have to book it. It turns out that, apart from Central London pitches and a few suburbs, busking is unregulated. People just turn up. She said it can be a bit awkward if several come at once. She covers a lot of local centres, likes doing Corringham.

I ask, rather shyly, if she could play Captain Pugwash, which might spread a little happiness, but she says something at the same time and plays something else as I walk off. I’m halfway to the War Memorial before I realised its Thoroughly Modern Milly.

The latest opinion poll by Janus Institute for Strategic Studies and Forecasts and the SOCIS Center for Social and Marketing Research, both Kyiv-based pollsters shows that

• 56 percent of Ukrainians would agree to a compromise peace involving giving up land in exchange for the end of the conflict.
• 16.6 percent would agree to a freeze along the current front lines.
• Only 12.8 percent want Kyiv to fight until it wins back the 1991 borders.

This continues the shift in opinion shown in Gallup polls between 2022 and 2024, which showed that

• the number of people agreeing that Ukraine should seek a negotiated end to the war as soon as possible rose from 22% in 2022 to 27% in 2023 and almost doubled to 52% in 2024.
• the number agreeing that Ukraine should continue fighting until it wins the war fell from 73% in 2022 to 63% in 2023 and sharply down to 38% in 2024.

The attempt by the Ukrainian oligarchy and NATO to keep fighting now only has minority support in the Ukrainian population.

Those who claim to be in solidarity with “Ukraine” should ask themselves, in this context, who they are in soldarity with – the majority of the Ukrianian people, who want a negoitiated peace as soon as possible, or the oligarchy, and NATO, who, in the absence of any serious prospect of winning, want to drag the war on as long as possible for fear of the consequences of accepting defeat?