The Administrative Noose: Why "Never Again" is Happening Again


January 27 is a date the British state likes to wrap in the velvet of "Never Again." It is a day of curated remembrance, where the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau is treated as a closed chapter of history rather than a living, breathing warning. But for the Romani people, the Pharrajimos, the Devouring, is not a museum exhibit. It is a pulse. It is the cold, surgical weight of the 1530 Egyptians Act pressing against the 2022 Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts (PCSC) Act. It is a straight line of legislative violence that has never been broken, only rebranded.

To understand the current General Crisis of capitalism in Britain, we must look at the legislative DNA of the Nazi regime before the gas was ever turned on. The camps were not the beginning: they were the logistical conclusion of a decades-long administrative strangulation. In 1926, the Bavarian "Law for the Combating of Gypsies, Vagrants and the Work-shy" established the blueprint. It did not start with mass murder: it started with the "combating of the nuisance." It mandated the registration of Romani people with the police, created the Zigeunerpolizei (Gypsy Police), and criminalised the very state of being masterless.

By 1937, the "Decree on the Fight against the Gypsy Nuisance" formalised the classification of Roma as asocial: a term that served as a legislative trapdoor. Once you are asocial, you are outside the protection of the law. You are bare life to be managed, moved, or deleted. This is the colonial boomerang in its most lethal form: the tactics used to police the surplus populations of the frontier brought home to the metropole to stabilise a failing domestic order.

We see this boomerang landing now, not just in the statute books, but in the streets. From the targeted harassment and hate crimes in Ballymena to the systemic pogroms rising across Europe, the "Again" is already here. In Ballymena, the intimidation of Roma families is not an isolated incident: it is the physical manifestation of a state-sanctioned rhetoric that labels our existence a nuisance. Across Europe, the surge in Roma-directed violence is the heartbeat of a resurgent fascism that feeds on the General Crisis. The state identifies a group that cannot be easily audited, taxed, or tethered, and it labels them asocial to justify their disappearance.

The 2022 PCSC Act is the modern heir to this lineage. When the British state criminalises unauthorised encampments, it is reviving the 1926 Bavarian mandate. By making nomadism a criminal offence, the state has effectively re-classified the Romani body as an inherent crime. The power to seize caravans, our homes, is the power to seize the means of survival. It is a repossession of the soul. It is the slow, grey murder of the mundane that precedes the camp: the withholding of post, the lost food refusal logs, and the administrative isolation designed to bankrupt the spirit.

But the state’s reliance on our poverty is a vulnerability we are learning to exploit. This is a revolutionary Matriarchy. We are moving beyond the cultural awareness trap, the state-sanctioned performance of heritage that serves only to pacify. Instead, we are engaging in a deliberate sabotage of the capitalist dependency on Romani poverty. By empowering Romani women in the workforce, social services, and health industries, we are not simply getting jobs. We are seizing the means of survival. We are making ourselves unmanageable. When a Romani woman enters the workforce as a trained professional, she becomes a knife in the side of a system that relies on her being a vulnerable client of the state. She becomes the one who audits the auditor.

The shovels of May 16, 1944, when the Roma Family Camp at Auschwitz rose up and forced the SS into retreat, have become the career reclamations and the elder wisdom circles of 2026. We are sticking the flag into the ash of B-II-e, but we are also sticking it into the heart of the institutions that ignored us. This is our reclaimed geography. The ghost of the Pharrajimos is no longer haunting us: it is leading the charge.

To confront this ghost and build a better future, we must move from memorial to mobilisation. On Tuesday, 27 January 2026, I will be speaking alongside Nathan Bolton and Steve Silver to dissect the truth of our resistance and the memory the state tries to sanitise. This is not a closed chapter. It is a tactical briefing.

Holocaust Memorial Day 2026 - For a Better Future
Online Public Meeting - All Welcome
Tuesday, 27 January 2026 at 7pm

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