Saiqa Ali has just been elected in Lambeth
— teresa smith (@treesey) May 8, 2026
Ali’s Instagram: a picture of the Earth suffocated by a giant serpent with the Star of David on its skin.
She thinks that the British government includes too many ‘Zionists Jews’, and that Trump is ‘owned by Jews’
Shame on Lambeth pic.twitter.com/KYXHglLkDd
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Just beamed down…
Was the victory due to the super-high environmental awareness in Hackney? Or was it perhaps, given the borough’s high Muslim representation. more about the new-found antisemitism driving the Green Party now?
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From the Telegraph:
An Arts Council-funded magazine cancelled a poet because she was critical of pornography, legal documents have revealed.
Abigail Ottley’s poem was accepted by the Aftershock Review, a literary magazine funded by Arts Council England, but later withdrawn by editors with no explanation.
The poet, who is in her 70s, has now applied for a judicial review of the Arts Council’s handling of her complaint.
Legal documents revealed the poet was rejected because she was not “sex-positive” about “sissy porn” and “cross-dressing”.
Ms Ottley, a survivor of rape and abuse, had written a confessional essay about the alleged proclivities of her “cross-dressing” former husband, whom she described as secretly selling and starring in “sissy porn”.
This is a form of pornography featuring men who are submissive and “feminine”. It has been linked in public discourse to transgenderism, which Ms Ottley is also critical of.
In the essay, which was published on her Facebook profile, she wrote: “This diagnosis [of chronic fatigue syndrome] came just before my discovery that my then husband was a compulsive and obsessional cross-dresser and had been living a whole double life making, selling and starring in what I now know to be called sissy porn.”
The Arts Council said the poem was not published because Ms Ottley’s writings were “perceived as stigmatising consensual adult sexual expression” and “reinforcing sexual shame”.
This was said to contravene the Aftershock Review’s policies and its ethos as a “sex-positive publication committed to inclusive representation”.
It read: “Aftershock Review decided not to publish your client’s poem because of your client’s post on 11 October 2025 on the social media platform X. It contained references to alleged sexual practices of your client’s ex-husband which Aftershock Review regarded as capable of being ‘perceived as stigmatising consensual adult sexual expression’.”
Perhaps there are some adult sexual expressions that could do with some stigmatising. Besides, she – Abigail Ottley – wasn’t consensual. She clearly hated it. Doesn’t she count?
Ms Ottley, who lives in Penzance, Cornwall, told The Telegraph: “I find it difficult to adequately express how distressed and angry I feel about the implicit expectation that I should positively affirm the sexual proclivities of a man who destroyed our marriage.
“I am now denied the right to speak out on the subject of my experience. It is unfair and intolerable. I still can’t really believe that my work was withdrawn because of my failure to be properly ‘sex positive’.
“It feels like the silencing and victim-blaming which I experienced as a teenage girl. Have we not, even now, learned better?”
Apparently not. Men must not be criticised for their little perversions – especially under the strict Arts Council-mandated ideological controls.
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Well then. Not all Reform and the Greens.
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Dickensian-style labour in the great socialist nation. From the Daily NK:
Wig and eyelash assembly work has taken off as a cottage industry in Chongjin, North Korea’s third-largest city, as intensifying market controls and rising inflation leave North Korean people with few other ways to earn income.
“Wig and eyelash contract assembly has until now been carried out mainly in detention facilities and factory units, but since late last year, trading companies have been negotiating higher per-unit rates with Chinese partners and expanding the scale of their operations, so work is now flowing into ordinary private homes as well,” a source in North Hamgyong province told Daily NK on Thursday.
The source described scenes now common across Chongjin: “These days, it has become a familiar sight to see people working through the night by oil lamp in dim rooms with unreliable electricity, making wigs and eyelashes. Because it has become impossible to make a living through market trading, people are flooding into wig and eyelash assembly work, however physically demanding it may be, because at least you get paid for what you produce.”…
“You can feed your family by making eyelashes, so people work through the night, and even children help with the assembly work after they come home from school,” the source said. “Among people, there is a saying going around: ‘Every single strand helps keep us alive.’”…
The finished wigs and eyelashes are shipped to China, where they are relabeled as Chinese-made products and exported to global markets. North Korean labor, paid a fraction of what workers elsewhere would earn, effectively underpins the bottom of an international supply chain.
According to data from China’s General Administration of Customs, wigs and eyelashes account for well over half of all North Korean exports to China, making them by far the country’s leading export commodity. Because neither product appears on the list of goods banned under U.N. Security Council sanctions against North Korea, Pyongyang treats the sector as a strategic export priority.
Disputes over per-unit pay rates between North Korean trading companies and their Chinese counterparts have persisted, but the arrangement is sustained by a convergence of interests: North Korea urgently needs foreign currency, and Chinese buyers need low-cost processing. The source suggested the sector will remain North Korea’s dominant export to China for the foreseeable future.
South Korea has Samsung, Hyundai, K-Pop; North Korea sells wigs and eyelashes assembled by families working through the night by oil lamp.
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Equally infuriating is the way harrowing stories such as this one from detransitioners were suppressed because their stories might “harm” the trans community. Young people who regretted irreversible medical damage were treated not as victims deserving compassion, but as inconvenient obstacles to an ideological narrative.
“She then told my mom that if I matured through male puberty, the prejudice and worsening mental health would be so crushing that around 60 percent of kids in my position would choose to kill themselves rather than live that way. Since then, my mom and I have discussed that appointment at length, and she still remembers that warning. It’s still so emotional for her that she rarely talks about it. My mom had watched me struggle for years—coming home from school in tears, and withdrawing more and more into myself. And here was a professional, in a clinical setting, telling her that the alternative to medical transition was her child’s death. My mom says she was so ultra-focused on the suicide risk that it became her top concern: She just wanted to keep me alive.”
Original article here.
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An interesting post from Adam Wagner:
One of the reasons why looking back to the 1930s might be useful is that whilst the political climate is very different now, some of the questions our society urgently has to answer are similar, as are the core British values which can guide us in answering them.
The issue I will focus on in this post is what powers public authorities have to limit public protests – and, perhaps even more importantly, why they have those powers and what should principles should be applied in deciding whether to exercise them.…
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….two harmful ideologies that are diametrically opposed to one another.
Sadly, the Green Party – which once prioritized the environment – has signed up to the Omnicause instead.
This is a dangerous movement led by a shallow and treacherous man who has been shown to lie repeatedly about his past. Nothing good can come from this mess.
Also, Julie Burchill at Spiked:
Nevertheless, he gives me the creeps. Polanski has cultivated a gentle, come-to-me-my-flock look — but when he is questioned persistently, a look of imperious confusion followed by a flash of real contempt and anger comes through. Being grilled by Laura Kuenssberg in early May, he came across as testy and slippery. When he talks with his hands, which he does often, one is irretrievably reminded of his breast-building days, and how perhaps he must have described similar circles in the air. It distracts me from what he’s saying – which is just as well, as he really does spout bunkum.
We’ve all heard his blather about the allegedly heavy-handed police in Golders Green, his ridiculous accusations of Israeli ‘genocide’ and, of course, his ludicrous championing of transvestites’ fetishes over women’s rights. But due to the monumental incompetence and unpopularity of Labour, the Greens look set to clean up at the local elections.
Hopefully, they carry within them the seeds of their own destruction. Every party can be said to have different factions, but none as contradictory as the middle-class anything-goes brigade on one wing of the Greens and the extremely reactionary Muslim wing on the other. We all know the one issue that unites them.
If the safety of our heartbreakingly loyal and small Jewish community wasn’t so threatened, it would be fun to see what transpires from this loveless liaison. The Greens were always in competition with the Lib Dems for the floating crank vote, somehow managing to come across as both broad-minded and authoritarian – Legz Akimbo join the Stasi – and this time they look liable to outdo themselves, picking up a sizeable part of the solid crank Labour vote, too. Polanski can change his name all he wants – but the whiff of the snake-oil salesman will always be strong with this one.
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Juliet Samuel (previous post) focused on the Islamic element in our current antisemitism crisis. There are two cheeks to the problem though. Allister Heath in the Telegraph looks at the other side of the red-green alliance.
What has happened to the progressive Left? It used to fight poverty, climate change and racism. Today, many of its adherents obsess about Israel, about Jews, about “Zionism”, and sound indistinguishable from the fascists and Black Shirts they once fought against.
Veterans of the Battle of Cable Street must be turning in their graves: like Squealer and Napoleon in Animal Farm, the far Left has transformed into those they once despised. It’s now a case of “four-legged anti-racism good, two-legged anti-Semitism even better”.
The degeneration is complete; the horseshoe theory of politics is confirmed. A group that bemoans Russian influence everywhere has swallowed uncritically a Soviet campaign of anti-Israel delegitimisation launched in the 1950s for purposes of repression and Cold War realpolitik. Activists who claim they are immune from misinformation have embraced TikTok psyops. A modern movement is renewing the most ancient of hatreds. Trans advocates who dismiss religion as the “opium of the people” collaborate with Islamists.
It’s not Jews, we keep being told, it’s the Israelis. If only they didn’t “overact”, there would be no anti-Semitism; if only British Jews repudiated Israel, they would be left alone. The anti-Semites supposedly have no agency and merely respond to unbearable provocations. Everything about this narrative is a lie, and it will destroy the West if it succeeds in rotting our minds, warping our critical faculties and chasing away the Jewish diaspora.
There was once a legitimate debate about whether Zionism, the idea that Jews should again have their own state in their ancestral homeland, was the best way forward for the long-suffering Jewish people in the context of decolonisation and emancipation. Pogroms in Russia and the Middle East, the West’s refusal to let in fleeing Jews in the 1930s, the Holocaust, the UN’s creation of the State of Israel in 1948 and the expulsion of virtually all Jews from Muslim countries resolved that question. Zionism became the reality. Anti-Zionism was obsolete.
Yet anti-Semites, from the pro-Nazi ex-Grand Mufti of Jerusalem to the fools involved in setting up UNRWA to ensure the Israeli-Arab conflict couldn’t be resolved, were having none of it. The KGB’s Operations Zarathustra and Sionistskiye Gosudarstva culminated in the 1975 UN declaration that Zionism was racism, and the Western far-Left gradually realised the potential of that Big Lie.
Many activists have now embraced antizionism, spelt without a hyphen to distinguish it from the traditional pre-1948 variety. It is a specific, modernised hate ideology with an eliminationist agenda that targets the state of Israel, and only Israel, for dissolution, projects upon it everything they loathe about the West, and comes with an entire, warped analytical framework. It is the new anti-Semitism for our times.…
Antizionism claims Israel is committing a genocide against Palestinians, a new lie that it kills children (the original blood libel), enforces apartheid (a new untruth) and betrays every tenet of woke “social justice” ideology.
Crucially, all of these claims are axiomatically unchallengeable under the totalitarian, anti-rational premises of “postcolonialism”. Jews are redefined not as refugees (often from Arab lands) but, in an act of gross inversion, as “white settler colonisers”. They are oppressors, by definition, genocidal, self-evidently, and can never be victims. One doesn’t need to prove this; asserting it is sufficient.…
The genocide libel justifies doing to Israel what the allies did to the Nazis. It trivialises the Holocaust, absolving Europeans of residual guilt. It banalises the actual genocidal behaviour of Islamist countries. It redefines normal military practices as illegitimate, making self-defence impossible. It rewards Hamas’s monstrous human shield strategy. It rationalises intifada terrorism as freedom-fighting.
There’s an undeniable relish in the enthusiasm with which the genocide libel is thrown at Israel. The term “genocide” – “the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group”, according to Raphael Lemkin – was coined in direct response to the horror of the Holocaust. The victimhood of the Jews, as represented by that one all-powerful word – the epitome of human evil, the “crime of crimes” – has long rankled with antisemites. What a delight now to throw it back in their faces.
Mick Hartley 