Paul O’Connell

Jo Grady’s first election manifesto where she says she wants the GS to be more accountable to members

Staff aren’t allowed to say they’re on strike.

UCU members aren’t allowed to mention it to strike-breaking staff.

Regional committees can’t talk about it.

The NEC can’t talk about it.

Congress can talk about it but motions are declared out of order.

Is this the accountability Jo was meaning?

Here are some thoughts on the Palestine Action ruling for the @lrb.co.uk. The ruling shows the importance of the UK Government's national security assessments being challenged - which doesn't happen enough under our current system.

A line of Metropolitan Police officers at the front of a National March for Palestine held in London

Latest Home Office data shows that in 2024-25, there were 162 restrictions on processions and assemblies imposed across England & Wales. Rather than simply publish a full dataset, the department released information that's hard to navigate – so we have tried to untangle it netpol.org/2026/02/12/l...

This is a thread about UCU & what it has become over the last few years. But the first thing I want to say is I didn’t join a union to stay silent or turn my back on a single parent of three facing dismissal on the basis of their trade union activities. Marie Monaghan is the Unite UCU 1/12

No doubt the government will appeal, and this is unlikely to be the last word on the matter, but an important victory for anti-genocide and pro-Palestine activists and for the right to protest

The High Court has ruled that the proscription of Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation was unlawful - a vindication for all those who have put themselves on the line to oppose Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the British states complicity in it

Irish (opposition) politicians condemn the use of Shannon airport for US deportation flights of Palestinians to Israel.

The Irish Government remains silent.

For an excellent in-depth exploration of the US use of financial sanctions since September 11th onwards, listen to Episode 5 of the @lrb.co.uk Aftershock podcast 'In dollars we trust'
@danielsoar.bsky.social

www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and...

Emilios Christodoulides 1963–2026 It is with the greatest sadness that wish to inform you that our comrade, colleague, friend and amazing intellectual, Emilios Christodoulides, passed away

Really sad news, Emilios was a profoundly insightful thinker, and a really nice guy - condolences to his family and close friends: criticallegalthinking.com/2026/02/05/e...

No war on Iran. A war on Iran is a war on its people. No war on the people of Iran. None. Not for any reason.

EU adds Iran's Revolutionary Guards to 'terrorist list' EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas says the move is a response to Tehran's deadly crackdown on protesters.

Less than a month after Iran’s massacre of protestors, the EU slaps sanctions on Iranian officials & entities, inc designating the IRGC a terrorist org. Nearly 2.5 years of genocide by Israel against Pals, w/ a death toll of 70,000 at min, not one sanction against Israel www.bbc.com/news/article...

Millionaire Liverpool GP behind asylum seeker hotels A firm founded by a GP tried to evict 100 people from flats while planning to move asylum seekers in.

Money-grubbers like Dr Faisal Maassarani are creating a housing problem not people seeking asylum. This man evicted 100 tenants from their homes simply because he could earn more from Serco. Shout at him not the people he's exploiting.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

For the Palestinian people, psychic life is just as much a site of struggle for liberation as social life. Palestinians are persistently refused psychological amplitude, characteristics easily granted to those who are never worried they might fall out of what is constituted as the category of the human. Abdaljawad Omar’s writings in English published since October 7, 2023 (as well as writings by other Palestinians, other Arabs, and those of Palestinian descent) offer means of understanding material resistance in relation to the terrain of the psyche. Omar offers distinctive accounts of mourning, loss, and ruins, as well as of how settler colonialism reorganizes experiences of time and relations between past, present, and future. The article reads Omar’s writings against other accounts of mourning and of psychic phenomena that are indebted to psychoanalysis. Omar’s analyses of Palestinians’ resistance to unfreedom and annihilation open up other ways of understanding the psychic vicissitudes of those who suffer, grieve, and struggle to exit a colonial condition characterized by the colonizer’s repeated attempts to break psychic worlds as well as erase bodily life. Understandings of psychic life that do justice to how Palestine is redrawing the world are central to the work of ‘cracking history open’.

I wrote on psychic life and Palestinian resistance

– to ensure more people read Abdaljawad Omar @hamayel.bsky.social.

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

I’m looking forward to this new Conversations event, getting to talk and think through the tumult of 2025 sociologically. Never have we needed a critical sociology lens more. Come join us as we try and make sense of where we are now.

Many thanks for this great collection and pleased to have my article 'Public Power and Private Hands: Outsourcing in UK National Security Law' included.

The special edition of the KLJ on national security issues that I edited with Keith Ewing is now out in full. Many thanks to our contributors: www.tandfonline.com/toc/rklj20/3...

My latest law review article "Securitizing the University" just dropped. It interrogates the university's relationship to the US nat'l security state both historically & since Oct 7. This relationship is at the heart of attacks against universities over the last 2 yrs papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

*sighs in Marxist*

Resistance and resilience: Digging into Edinburgh's history of tenant activism NEW research has highlighted the resistance and resilience among tenants in council housing in Edinburgh

A little preview of my forthcoming journal article on council tenants' resistance and resilience today in @scotnational.bsky.social. Massive thanks to @charlielynch.bsky.social for reaching out and giving my work a write-up.

www.thenational.scot/politics/257...

International Fellowships 2026 The International Fellowships Programme enables researchers to work for two years at a UK institution with the aim of building a globally connected, mobile research and innovation workforce.

@britishacademy.bsky.social International Fellowships are now open

Applics. welcome across humanities & soc.sci from early career researchers anywhere in the world to come to UK for 2 years

Deadline:11 March

I’d be very pleased to host ECRs keen to study #protest #policing #publicorder #assembly

Three Palestine Action protesters end their hunger strike Four more who had paused opt not to continue after government opts against giving contract to Elbit Systems UK

Three UK hunger strikers end their hunger strike after the MoD meets one of their demands: The MoD has denied a major new £2 billion contract with the Israeli defence firm's subsidiary, Elbit Systems UK, for an Army training program..

www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...

Excellent from Paul O'Connell: "Terrorism now performs the function that treason once did: not a description of actual conduct but a mechanism for foreclosing political possibility."

Paul O’Connell: Anticipatory Repression and the Proscription of Palestine Action The proscription of Palestine Action in July 2025 represents more than an aggressive application of counter-terrorism law. It reveals a broader, qualitative shift in the British state’s approach to…

A really interesting and thoughtful piece by @pmpoc.bsky.social - perhaps more so for its discussion and dissecting of what he wonderfully terms the “siege architecture” around the right to protest and organise in the UK today

And like buses, two pieces at once on protest, proscription and political participation by @pmpoc.bsky.social

Paul O’Connell: Anticipatory Repression and the Proscription of Palestine Action The proscription of Palestine Action in July 2025 represents more than an aggressive application of counter-terrorism law. It reveals a broader, qualitative shift in the British state’s approach to…

I have a post out today on the proscription of Palestine Action and how, through the lens of anticipatory repression, we can understand it as part of a much wider assault on democratic rights and freedoms in Britain: ukconstitutionallaw.org/2026/01/12/p...

Cadaverous Tranquillity: Proscription, Anticipatory Repression and Coleridge In December 1795, William Pitt’s government introduced the Treasonable Practices Bill and the Seditious Meetings Bill—the “Gagging Acts” as their

"Naming this as anticipatory repression ... is a precondition for building the solidarities and organisational forms capable of withstanding it. They who sow pestilence must reap whirlwinds" - criticallegalthinking.com/2026/01/12/c...

Cadaverous Tranquillity: Proscription, Anticipatory Repression and Coleridge In December 1795, William Pitt’s government introduced the Treasonable Practices Bill and the Seditious Meetings Bill—the “Gagging Acts” as their

"Naming this as anticipatory repression ... is a precondition for building the solidarities and organisational forms capable of withstanding it. They who sow pestilence must reap whirlwinds" - criticallegalthinking.com/2026/01/12/c...

Paul O’Connell: Anticipatory Repression and the Proscription of Palestine Action The proscription of Palestine Action in July 2025 represents more than an aggressive application of counter-terrorism law. It reveals a broader, qualitative shift in the British state’s approach to…

Paul O’Connell: Anticipatory Repression and the Proscription of Palestine Action ukconstitutionallaw.org/2026/01/12/p...

Paul O’Connell: Anticipatory Repression and the Proscription of Palestine Action The proscription of Palestine Action in July 2025 represents more than an aggressive application of counter-terrorism law. It reveals a broader, qualitative shift in the British state’s approach to…

I have a post out today on the proscription of Palestine Action and how, through the lens of anticipatory repression, we can understand it as part of a much wider assault on democratic rights and freedoms in Britain: ukconstitutionallaw.org/2026/01/12/p...