THIS WEEK IN VIOLENCE: Van Life

2026, Week 41

I think it was Lenin who once said there are slow news weeks, and then there are quick news weeks, and then there are silly news weeks. Over the past few days, the United Kingdom appears to be experiencing one somewhere between the latter two categories.

This story has been developing, or possibly disassembling, at quite a clip, so for the sake of anyone who hasn’t been keeping up with events on our fair isles, here’s a quick overview of the timeline as best I can understand it.

In the early hours of Sunday, September 27—around half-past one in the morning—a farmer living near to a Royal Air Force base in Fairford, Gloucestershire, made a police call via 999 reporting that she had observed three vans in a ‘weird formation’. Reportedly she had initially tried to contact Ministry of Defence police at the base itself, but was unable to get an answer.

The US Air Force operates out of the RAF Fairford base, and has been using the base to carry out strikes related to its ongoing, illegal war against Iran, which the British government insists it is not party to, despite allowing the United States to use British soil and airspace to prosecute it.

Shortly thereafter, police from the Gloucestershire Constabulary arrested five men in Whelford, a small village which juts onto the base’s North-East perimeter, on suspicion of offences under the Explosives Act. An image has been released showing five shirtless men handcuffed and sat on the roadside with several officers surrounding them.

At 8 o’clock in the morning, police declared a major incident in Whelford, evacuating around 85 houses in the area to a local leisure centre. A 400m cordon (around a quarter-mile) was set up around the vehicles, and an Army Explosive Ordnance Disposal Unit was brought in to inspect the vehicles. Aerial imagery released has shown a large remotely-controlled robot approaching the vans.

Roughly six hours later, around 2pm on Sunday, British Counter Terrorism Police confirmed they had taken over and were now leading the investigation. In a statement, it was confirmed that the five men had now been arrested on suspicion of preparing a terrorist act. A request was put out by the Deputy Assistant Commissioner for the public not to speculate about the incident.

Two hours later, US President Donald Trump told reporters that US intelligence “had [the men] under investigation. They were looking to do big damage to our fort and working with the British worked out great.” 

Around midday on Monday, the next day, police stated that the five men arrested were all from London and aged between 23 and 35, that their custody had been extended, and that they were being held under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act.

A few hours later, at 4pm, all five suspects were released on bail following what the police called “extensive interviews and enquiries.” Conditions were placed on their movement and contact with others, and they remained under investigation. Questioned on this decision, Donald Trump stated that he was surprised, and that he wouldn’t have done so.

Assistant Commissioner Laurence Taylor defended the decision, stating that it was “grounded in experience and careful consideration of policing powers.” The same day, in an interview with Fox News, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio stated that the incident clearly involved a foreign actor, but did not substantiate his claim. “I think [the incident] ties us to the reality here, and that is we are dealing with elements in the world, in the case of Iran, for example, who have openly threatened to attack American interests globally.”

On Tuesday, at 6pm, Counter Terrorism Police stated that a number of properties in London had been searched in relation to the investigation. The three vehicles in the original stop had also been extensively examined with assistance from military and forensic experts. It was stated that no improvised explosive devices had been found in the vans, but a “quantity of petrol” had been recovered.

The next morning, on Wednesday, it then transpired that another 999 phone call had been placed on the Sunday morning, roughly 45 minutes before the farmer’s call. The call was placed by… one of the men in the vans. It has not been clarified why he called the police or what was said to them. That same day, Gloucestershire Police lifted their cordon.

At 5pm on Wednesday, in an interview with the BBC, British Prime Minister Andy Burnham stated that the UK government continues to believe that the government of Iran had played a role in the incident at RAF Fairford. He did not provide any details or elaborate, but confirmed that the police investigation is ongoing, complex, and serious, and that Britain was working closely with the United States of America on the matter.

Regarding the release of the suspects on bail, which had been challenged by Trump, Burnham stated the men had been subjected to the strictest possible bail conditions and assured the BBC that British authorities had the incident “under the strongest grip and closest control.”

The Iranian government has consistently disavowed any connection to the incident, and the Iranian embassy in London stated that it “categorically rejects and strongly condemns” any “unfounded and malicious speculations” linking the country to the events at Fairford.

In the evening of Thursday, October 1st, it was then announced that a 25-year-old male with dual British-Iranian nationality had been arrested in Westminster on suspicion of preparing terrorist acts under section 5 of the Terrorism Act 2006. On the morning of Saturday, October 3rd, it was then reported that that male had also been released on bail.

Story developing (or disassembling)

One thing that I think this story has inadvertently demonstrated is the discursive ratchet mechanism which is mutually exploited by the British press, political class and security state—the product of phenomena discrete to each field which are, nevertheless, interrelated.

When the story was first breaking and the Counter Terrorism Unit took over the investigation, Gloucestershire Police Assistant Chief Constable Richard Ocone (name) requested that the public not speculate and refer to official channels. That’s probably a reasonable request, but we live in an age of decentralised social media so good luck with that as far as the British and global public is concerned. I would argue there perhaps are things that could be done to confront and ameliorate some of those issues, but apparently nobody wants to talk about that. So be it.

One group who perhaps could have exercised more restraint was the British press, who quickly leapt to reporting on the incident with shorthands like RAF Fairford Terror Incident, Terror Plot and so on. As initial reporting was subsequently followed up with increasingly incongruent and, indeed, farcical disclosures, we’ve seen a dynamic in which the press has proven either unwilling or incapable of gearing down.

And so after several days of breathless reporting about a terror plot being foiled at a military base—accompanied, of course, with ample commentary about the necessary actions to be taken—we were then treated to a wave of headlines, news tickers and television news chyrons about the mystery of the plot deepening, or questions mounting about the plot. This resulted in perhaps one of my favourite sub-stories in a live news coverage page of all time, on Sky News, who at one point had a bulleted list featuring the sub-head: What to know as questions mount

Which might as well be a fucking Zen Koan. 

The British Security apparatus is not doing so hot

Contrary to the expressed opinion of Defence Secretary Wes Streeting, who has been assiduously careful not to make any dispositive remarks about what this event actually was or wasn’t, while praising the work of British police, intelligence and security services, I don’t think this debacle has reflected well on those organisations—and that’s as much to do with how politicians like Streeting and the press have handled the story as it is about those services themselves.

As the team at Trashfuture have covered and commented on extensively over the past few months, the United Kingdom is currently being subjected to an ongoing, coordinated campaign of aggression, intimidation and outright political violence by a domestic far-right street gang.

November Kelly is far better versed than myself regarding legal specificities, and she has quite capably laid out over recent episodes how a group like Patriot Platform is already, arguably, breaching numerous laws regarding political violence and the formation of uniformed paramilitaries. Nevertheless, that group has been, and still is, advertising and carrying out actions entirely above the waterline, on social media and messaging apps in full view of those same police, intelligence and security services.

After several weeks of watching a domestic street gang numbering in the hundreds gallivanting around on public transport, blocking roads, disrupting infrastructure and most recently carrying out a violent attack on emergency workers in the English Channel—for which Patriot Platform leader Danny Tommo has been charged with a few comparatively mild charges against the offences he could have been argued to have committed—British intelligence are now being praised for their handling of an event which was brought to light by the actions of a farmer calling 999 and, we later learned, an earlier phone call from one of the suspects himself.

And this matters, in my view, because one can’t help but wonder whether the approach taken to this case is consistent with the severity of the threat. The UK government has, for example, the power to issue Defence and Security Media Advisory Committee notices (DSMAs or D-Notices). They have done so in the past over matters of national security, particularly pertaining to terrorist attacks.

These D-Notices are not legally binding, and the ultimate decision to comply with them or not lies with individual journalists and their editors. Nonetheless, that option was there, and was not used. So I think it is reasonable to wonder if at least one or two people were happy for the story to be out there and the speculation to be flowing because they either thought it made them look good after several weeks of frankly embarrassing stories, or, like the press, were incapable of climbing back down once the story was being leapt on and exploited by other foreign leaders in service of their own domestic and foreign policy agendas.

Irrespective of what this event ultimately transpires to have been or not been, the narrative that this was a major coup by the British security state has been thoroughly seeded and propagated and so has to be maintained.

Gotta love that Special Relationship

One of the arguments I’ve seen put forward to defend the idea that this must have been a genuine security threat of some kind is precisely that Burnham has now come out and reaffirmed that it was, and that it would be unlikely the government would do this if it wasn’t due to the potential diplomatic fallout and/or embarrassment.

In the abstract, I think this is a valid argument. But in actuality, what we have seen time and time again over the past few years, particularly on matters of foreign policy and attendant national security matters, is that the British government and, indeed, politicians and diplomats across Europe are all too willing to debase and make absolute clowns of themselves to either satisfy the interests of Donald Trump and the United States writ large, or to avoid embarrassing him/them and risking a petulant lash-out in response. Increasingly, such prostration is performed at the expense of prostrate country’s own laws, interests, and commitments.

Irrespective of what this event transpires to have been, I think the fact that both Donald Trump and US Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Marco Rubio have come out and made very bold assertions about the character of this incident cannot be discounted from analysing this situation—and this ties back to the British Security Services and the behaviour of our politicians and the press. Maybe there was a hope that at some point Trump and the United States would back down or back off. Surprise! They didn’t.

The handling, coverage and response to this entire event has been an absolute farce and has made everybody involved look incredibly stupid. Some people are more comfortable admitting and stating that out loud than others, but everyone knows it. And so when Andy Burnham came out on Wednesday evening and reaffirmed the position that Iran had been behind this event, I am of a mind to believe that was an attempt to draw a line under things in a way that wouldn’t risk pissing off our good friends over the Atlantic.

So again, I don’t actually know what this event was or wasn’t. None of the people reporting on and covering it do either. And the people in positions to know—politicians, police and security services—have handled it in such a diabolical way that it has been incredibly detrimental to both public understanding and to their own images and reputations. And I am personally inclined to believe that some of that handling was strategic and deliberate.