Mick Hartley

Jo Bartosch in the Telegraph, on Bash Back, the new face of trans violence:

It was an attack that stripped away the chintzy veil of victimhood that has long shielded the transgender movement, revealing well organised thuggery. Yesterday, Bash Back, the self-described “direct action project” hacked the Free Speech Union (FSU) website and published the names of donors, alongside the sums they gave and the campaigns they supported.

The intention was unmistakable: to intimidate and punish private citizens after the FSU’s founder, Lord Young of Acton, commissioned a security report into the threat posed by the group. On Bash Back’s website, the activists make clear that more such actions are planned, welcoming visitors to “a new era of trans rage”.

And yet lovely trans folk are meant to be a sad persecuted minority, just trying to live their lives. Ha!

Since its launch in the summer of 2025, the group has pursued a steady escalation of criminal activity. In July, Bash Back targeted the constituency office of Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, smashing windows and spraying graffiti branding him a “child killer”, after the Government restricted the prescription of puberty blocking drugs. 

By autumn, vandalism had become routine. Masked activists attacked the FiLiA feminist conference, explicitly targeting a venue where women and girls were meeting to discuss male violence. The group then vandalised the headquarters of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, dubbing the statutory equalities watchdog a “hate group”.…

Yet ministers continue to insist that those who adopt a transgender identity are uniquely vulnerable, even as activists operating in their name engage in criminal behaviour. Bridget Phillipson, the Education Secretary, has warned that trans people must not be used as a “political punchbag”, cautioning against abuse or targeting on the basis of identity. This rhetoric does not merely mislead; it helps to shape the response of institutions charged with maintaining public order.…

It remains the case that many on the Labour benches still posture as embattled outsiders fighting “the Establishment”, oblivious to the fact that they themselves are the establishment. In doing so, they persist in treating trans activists as marginal or vulnerable, as on their side – the side of the “underdog” – ignoring the thuggish behaviour of groups like Bash Back. The result is an inverted moral logic in which vandalism is dignified as protest and threats are reframed as political expression.

This is not a sustainable position for a democratic society. The law judges actions, not identities or grievances. If authorities continue to minimise organised intimidation while policing peaceful dissent with increasing zeal, they will not preserve social order. They will lose the consent of the public to be governed. Panes of glass can be replaced. Once shattered, trust in the equal application of the law cannot.

Trans activists have always been violent, but no one in authority seemed much to care – perhaps because it was largely women and girls who suffered. The same can be said of the attitude to Islamism, from the cover-up of the grooming gangs scandal to the West Midlands police allowing themselves to be dictated to by Islamists – perhaps because it’s only working-class girls and Jews who suffer.