This article has been withdrawn. The Restorationist voluntarily offers a full and complete apology to Mr Shukman and Hope Not Hate.
Misery abroad has quietly acquired the power to create obligations here, and nobody was ever asked to approve it. A tyranny persecutes its own citizens, one of them reaches Kent, and the invoice arrives in Britain. Sympathy and responsibility have been treated as the same thing for forty years.
Ministers insist there is no room. There was room. It was allowed to rot wing by wing, by a department which had never once worked out whether repairing a cell was cheaper than building one. It found out in 2024. By then it was renting police cells at £688 a night to hold men it could not house.
The British state rarely hides things now. It makes them hard to find. A court archive ordered deleted, statistics quietly demoted, a watchdog drowning in its own postbag, and a tribunal to stop you counting. A government that can say anything, and be checked on almost nothing.
Thirty bodies on racks. A mop and bucket of putrefaction in the corner. Three million pounds through the accounts of a man who switched off the refrigeration to economise. Westminster answers with a licence and a regulator, and cannot say which of them would have opened the door in 2019.
