Five weeks on hunger strike is now a health catastrophe for the unconvicted Filton hunger strikers and the government denies all knowledge. Right, so you look at what’s happening to the Filton hunger strikers and you start to wonder how many people this government expects to collapse before it admits it knows what’s going on. Seven activists on remand starving in its prisons, two already in hospital, families begging for updates, parliamentarians raising the alarm, doctors warning about organ failure, and the Justice Secretary David Lammy has claimed he’s never heard of any of it. And it’d almost be funny, in that bleak British way, if it weren’t people’s lives on the line. Because when a government claims ignorance while its political prisoners waste away in real time, you’re not looking at incompetence anymore. You’re looking at a state hoping the public won’t notice what it’s prepared to let happen. Right, so you look at what’s happening to the Filton hunger strikers and you realise very quickly that the government is not dealing with a criminal-justice issue here, it’s dealing with a political problem it doesn’t want to name, and because it doesn’t want to name it, it’s letting seven people waste away in its own prisons while ministers pretend not to know a thing about it. And once you understand that, you understand the silence, you understand the denial, and you understand why the situation has been allowed to reach the point where two of them are in hospital and others are close behind. This isn’t a breakdown of process. This is what the state looks like when it is cornered by its own authoritarian drift and still wants to present itself as the grown-up in the room. This is a price for that they seem to want to pay. And you can see it clearly because none of these people have even been tried yet. Yet they’re starving. Inside a system that claims to value the rule of law. Seven political activists associated with Palestine Action are refusing food in UK prisons, six of them for more than a month, and the seventh joining after watching the state ignore the collapsing bodies of the rest. Two are already hospitalised. One is Teuta Hoxha, who deteriorated so sharply she had to be taken out under emergency care. Another is Kamran Ahmed, who collapsed after weeks without food and ended up in hospital with dangerously low blood glucose. Those aren’t symbolic gestures, they’re the final stage of desperation.