From Chartists and Suffragettes to Irish republicans and today’s Palestine activists, the treatment of hunger strikers exposes a consistent pattern in how the British state represses those it deems political prisoners, says KEITH FLETT
THERAPISTS of the mind often try to trace pathological delusions back to repressed trauma.
Both the trauma, and the delusions arising from an unhealthy refusal to ackowledge it, were on display in the House of Commons this week. The emergency sitting to discuss the Afghanistan crisis was a portrait of a governing class in decline and denial.
First, the trauma. The scale, speed and chaos of the collapse of the Western presence and of its preferred government in Afghanistan have produced a profound shock throughout the governing classes of the Nato states. All of them. “The West’s Shipwreck In Afghanistan” splashed the Greek equivalent of the Times.
ANDREW MURRAY looks back on the ignominious career of the former US vice-president, who died earlier this week
As US hegemony crumbles and Trump becomes ever more unpredictable, European powers cling to the pact’s militarist agenda in a bid to disguise their own increasing irrelevance, writes CHRIS NINEHAM



