Hunger striker Qesser Zurah has deteriorated significantly overnight, but would the prison call and ambulance? Not until an MP turned up... Right, so it tells you everything about Britain right now that a woman can be on Day 46 of a hunger strike, collapsing on the floor of her cell, drifting in and out of consciousness, and the people in charge still think the real emergency is an MP and two NHS doctors turning up to ask why no ambulance has been called. That’s where we were as of the early hours of this morning. A Filton hunger striker, Qesser Zuhrah is dying, the decline has been predictable for weeks, the warnings have been shoved under ministerial carpets, and the prison’s first instinct was to shut the doors and hope the problem stayed out of sight. And when that didn’t work, they called the police on the people trying to save her life, which is the moment the state showed you exactly whose safety it values and whose it doesn’t. Right, so a prisoner is dying on hunger strike in Britain at time of writing, about half past eight in the morning as we are right now, and the state is still trying to pretend it isn’t happening, which tells you everything you need to know about where power sits in this country when someone decides to challenge the government’s favourite arms companies and the government’s favourite client state. Qesser Zuhrah is on Day 46 without food, she has collapsed repeatedly, she has drifted in and out of consciousness, her legs have been shaking uncontrollably, her chest pains have radiated into her neck and shoulder, and the people running Britain’s largest women’s prison looked at that deterioration and decided their priority was to keep an MP, two NHS doctors and a pair of journalists outside the building until the situation became impossible to ignore. That is what you’re dealing with here. A medical emergency that has been allowed to develop in full view of ministers because confronting it would mean admitting their political use of terror legislation is collapsing in real time.