The Filton 24 Just Shattered Britain's Political Prisoner Myth

The Green Party co-Deputy Mothin Ali has visited Bronzefield prison to meet with FIlton 24 hunger strikers, held without charge - political prisoners. Right, so you look at the state of Britain in 2025 and you realise we’ve reached the point where people are starving themselves in prison just to be heard now, and the government still acts like they’re a filing error, actually acting with casual indifference in my view, since they’ve done nothing about it. Six hunger strikers on remand, at least one hospitalised, trials drifting into next year, and the political class can’t even pretend to care. We are of course talking about six members of the Filton 24, this is how the government treats protesters taking their action to the doorstep of an Israeli arms firm after it dresses them up in the language of terror. They treat them like an administrative inconvenience, which tells you everything about who this system is built to serve. And then along comes Mothin Ali, the deputy leader of the Greens, walking into Bronzefield prison to visit these political prisoners as he has called them and I don’t disagree, because nobody else in Westminster dares open the door, and suddenly the whole thing looks as political as it always was. If you want to understand how power works here, you start with the people the state hopes you never notice. Right, so this is what’s happening, and I’ll say it plainly because the state won’t: a group of people are in prison on remand, some for more than a year, not because the courts have found them guilty of anything, not because a jury weighed evidence and reached a verdict, not because the law demanded it, but because in my view the government finds their politics inconvenient and the justice system has quietly allowed the line between protest and extremism to blur until that distinction barely exists. They are the Filton 24, although not all are held in the same place and not all are on hunger strike, and their story tells you more about the real state of civil liberties in Britain than any speech, manifesto or ministerial press conference. And if that sounds like a heavy opening, good, because this is a heavy story and it should feel heavy. It should sit in your chest like a stone because this is one of those moments where you can see the machinery of power working in the open, not hiding, not apologising, just g*inding on as if this is all normal. You have people charged with criminal offences linked to direct action at a weapons factory, a place tied into a wider international supply chain feeding wars many of us have watched in horror.