Welcome to the United Kingdom, a rain-sodden, crumbling museum of former relevance currently engaged in a pathetic game of 'Who Can Be the Most Insufferable?' On one side, we have the British government, a collection of over-promoted hall monitors who have decided that the best way to handle domestic dissent is to play dress-up with the word 'terrorism.' On the other, we have Palestine Action, a group of activists whose primary contribution to global geopolitics involves throwing red paint at office buildings, apparently under the delusion that making a janitor’s life miserable is the tactical equivalent of a ceasefire. This week, we reached the logical conclusion of this pantomime: a trio of hunger strikers have resumed eating, declaring 'victory' in a standoff that exists primarily in the fever dreams of people who spend too much time on social media.

Let’s start with the state, shall we? The British government has recently taken to proscribing Palestine Action as a terrorist organization. Let that sink in. In a world where actual terrorist organizations are busy planning the systematic erasure of populations, the UK state has decided that breaking a window and splashing some pigment on a defense contractor’s foyer is an existential threat to the realm. It is the linguistic equivalent of calling a papercut a decapitation. This is what happens when a state is too incompetent to solve actual problems—like a collapsing healthcare system or an economy that resembles a car crash in slow motion—and instead pivots to performative authoritarianism. If breaking property is now 'terrorism,' then every rowdy Saturday night in a Newcastle pub is an Al-Qaeda sleeper cell meeting. It’s an embarrassing overreach, born of a desperate need to look 'tough' for corporate donors who are annoyed that their insurance premiums are going up because some kid from Sussex decided to play revolutionary.

Then we have the activists themselves. Three individuals decided to stop eating to protest the government's draconian labels. And now, they’ve started eating again, claiming they’ve 'won.' What exactly did they win? Did the government stop labeling them terrorists? No. Did the factories they hate shut down? No. They simply stopped being hungry and decided to frame their biological surrender as a strategic triumph. It is the ultimate middle-class protest move: the performative sacrifice that ends just as the actual discomfort becomes inconvenient. The hunger strike has long been a weapon of the truly desperate, but in the hands of these activists, it feels more like a diet with a press release. They claim they forced the state’s hand, but the state is still the state, the paint is being scrubbed off, and the world continues to burn. Their 'victory' is a hallucination designed to sustain their own sense of moral superiority while they tuck into a celebratory panini.

This entire saga is a masterclass in the futility of modern political engagement. The government wants to be feared, so it uses words like 'terrorism' to describe people who are essentially just annoying. The activists want to be martyrs, but they also want to be home in time for dinner. It is a symbiotic relationship of stupidity. The state needs a monster to fight to justify its increasingly restrictive laws, and the activists need a monster to fight to justify their existence. They feed off each other in a loop of escalating absurdity. While the government pretends it is defending Western civilization from a vanguard of paint-wielding radicals, the radicals pretend they are the heirs to the suffragettes or the anti-apartheid movement. In reality, it’s just a bunch of people shouting into a void that doesn't care about either of them.

The tragedy, if we can call it that without laughing, is the dilution of language. When everything is 'terrorism,' nothing is. When every minor concession is a 'victory,' actual progress becomes impossible to measure. We are living through an era of terminal boredom where people are so desperate for meaning that they will turn a dispute over property damage into a grand ideological war. The British state, in its infinite fragility, cannot handle a few broken windows without reaching for the nuclear option of proscription. The activists, in their infinite narcissism, cannot admit that their tactics are about as effective as screaming at a thunderstorm. In the end, the only thing that has changed is that three people are no longer hungry, and the British taxpayer is once again funding a legal circus that benefits no one but the lawyers. It’s a farce, played out in the grey light of a dying empire, and everyone involved deserves to lose.