Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

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  • One of the greatest educational crimes of the last century

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    "They risk becoming the lost generation".

    Lazzarini is head of UNRWA.

    Here's Einat Wilf from November 2023:

    In short, why are there still millions of people claiming to be refugees from a war that ended more than seven decades ago? Because to the Palestinians, that war has never ended, and they continue to believe that one day, with enough patience and violence, they could still win it to achieve their original goal: no state for the Jewish people anywhere from “The River to the Sea”.

    All thanks to UNRWA. 

  • Another saddened man

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    Full text:

    Which of the following do you imagine makes actors and directors who aren’t involved with the HBO reboot of Harry Potter so miserable?

    Is it my belief that women and girls should have their own public changing rooms and bathrooms?

    That women should retain female-only rape crisis centres?

    That men don’t belong in women’s sport?

    That female prisoners shouldn’t be incarcerated with violent men and male sex offenders?

    Let me have your thoughts.

    That That women should remain a protected class in law, because they have sex-specific needs and issues?

    That language should reflect reality rather than ideological jargon, especially in a medical context?

    That women shouldn’t be harassed, persecuted or fired for refusing to pretend humans can change sex?

    That women should not be threatened with violence and rape when they assert their rights?

    That freedom of speech and belief are essential to a pluralistic democratic society?

    That troubled minors, especially those who are gay, autistic and trauma-experienced, should be given mental health support instead of irreversible surgeries and drug treatments on non-existent evidence of benefit?

    That gay people shouldn’t be pressured to include the opposite sex in their dating pools, nor should they be smeared as ‘genital fetishists’ when they don’t?

    That cross-dressing heterosexual male fetishists aren’t actually oppressed, but having the time of their lives piggybacking off gender identity ideology?

    That said ideology, and the privileged, blinkered fools pushing it because they suffer zero consequences themselves, have done more damage to the political left’s credibility than Trump and Farage could have achieved in a century?

    The saddened man would be Chris Columbus, director of the first Harry Potter films.

    I don't suppose he's given the subject much thought, beyond picking up on the general opinions of the nice "be kind" sort of people with whom he mixes. For them trans people are an oppressed minority to whom Rowling is, inexplicably, unpleasant. And that's it.

  • “Language that is considered prejudicial and outdated”

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    …His paper was rejected from a leading journal because, among other things, "Throughout the manuscript, the authors use language that is considered prejudicial and outdated (e.g., "natal sex" as opposed to "sex assigned at birth"). It is critical to follow best practice and guidelines surrounding gender inclusive language, particularly for research specifically on the topic of gender incongruence, expression, and identity."

  • “Trans women are women” vs. “Free Palestine”

    Interesting times for the new Corbyn-Sultana "Your Party". The obvious mismatch between the traditional Corbyn hard-left and the fervently anti-Zionist Sultana and her Islamist chums has come into the open over – well, this is 2025 – the trans question. Of course.

    Joan Smith at UnHerd:

    Anti-establishment parties are famously prone to splits early on. But Jeremy Corbyn’s new germ of a party has surely set a record. Before it has even been formally constituted, supporters have turned on one of the MPs in the “independent alliance” that consists of Corbyn, former Labour MP Zarah Sultana and four “Gaza independents”.

    In the old days, it would have been safe to assume that any new party of the Left supported single-sex spaces. But that was before women were relegated to second-class citizens. Hence the spectacle of a Corbyn ally and Muslim MP being attacked by supporters of “Your Party”, the current placeholder name of the Corbyn-Sultana project, for supporting women’s rights.

    Adnan Hussain, the independent MP for Blackburn, was received rapturously when he appeared with Corbyn at a Your Party rally this weekend. But his post on X arguing that “women’s rights and safe spaces should not be encroached upon” has exposed a chasm in the new party. Some of the replies are too abusive to repeat, but it’s clear that Hussain has made the fatal mistake of offending trans activists. “Didn’t waste much time on regurgitating the transphobic talking points, did you?” asked one. Another addressed Sultana, pleading with her to “do something about this phobic loose cannon”.

    This is where large sections of the Left are these days, unable to hear the word “women” without a furious response of “but trans people”. It doesn’t bode well for the presumptuously-named Your Party, where Corbyn and Sultana already appear to be at odds with each other. Her premature announcement of the new party evidently caught him by surprise, and she has since claimed he “capitulated” on the definition of antisemitism when he was Labour leader.

    So this new trans divide is the last thing they need.

    Whether the trans issue will prove a dealbreaker has yet to be seen. Until now, some secular people on the Left have looked the other way when it comes to their allies’ religious conservativism, especially if they are Muslim and support the Palestinian cause. But now hyper-liberal Corbynites must ask themselves a question: can they be in the same party as alleged transphobes who are ardently pro-Palestine?

    A neat example of this meltdown was posted by the Stats for Lefties X account in response to Leeds Green councillor Mothin Ali defending Adnan. “Adnan is a blatant transphobe,” the account wrote. “The fact that you’re defending him and comparing his critics to Farage is absolutely disgusting and makes me very glad I did not vote for you.”

    This public spat in the new party has highlighted one of the most corrosive political developments in recent years. It’s not so much single-issue politics as a refusal to allow people to dissent from a rigid party line. In an era of slogan-based politics, “trans women are women” has equal billing with “free Palestine”. But which will the Corbyn-Sultana crusade choose?

    Oh dear. Settle back with the popcorn…

  • Glasgow’s Centre for Gender History

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    Your gender gibberish for the day. Yes, it's a thing. And here's the original for easier reading, including a recommended reading list, "as the starting point for an historically informed and sustained engagement with the discriminatory dynamics of the Supreme Court’s Ruling, and as the basis for our rejection of its core premise".

  • “Women and people with a cervix”

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  • A lesson for the west as well as Israel

    Jonathan Spyer argues that Israel, prior to October 7th, was guilty of concentrating on the empirical and ignoring the ideology of Hamas – the power of political Islam:

    To understand the dynamics and likely direction of events, one must study ideas, and the societies that adhere to those ideas, and not only military systems.  This was Israel’s mistake before, and it was its mistake in 2023, too.  But the Jewish state was hardly alone in this error.  In the west, where supporters and apologists of political Islam have been permitted to burrow deep into the key systems of political power and of the formulation and dissemination of ideas, the problem is yet more acute.  Israel may have been gravely in error and allowed itself to be attacked.  But the society that could produce people like Roi Beit Yaacov, and Gal Shabbat, and Shani Louk too possessed the vitality and cohesion to mobilise effectively in its own defense.  In the case of the west, partly as a result of the years of neglect, it is not at all clear that the same can be said.  In any case, capacities like those displayed by the 202nd battalion of the paratroopers brigade in Jebalya, with the heavy price incurred, are of the type which only need to be deployed when something has gone terribly wrong.  The failure to take an interest in the enemy and his mode of thinking was what began the road to October 7.  The west should learn from this as well as Israel, and with no less urgency.   The old slogan of the Polish patriots was ‘For your freedom and ours.’ 

  • The “JK Rowling trans controversy”

    "It's very sad", said Harry Potter director Chris Columbus the other day. He was talking about JK Rowling. “It’s unfortunate, what’s happened. I certainly don’t agree with what she’s talking about. But it’s just sad, it’s very sad.” Sad about what, he doesn't say – but we can guess.

    Today he's interviewed in the Sunday Times:

    Columbus previously stated that he wanted to direct a film adaptation of the stage show, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, using the original Potter movie cast (their characters are older in the play). Since then, alas, the JK Rowling trans controversy has made any potential adaptation impossible.

    “It’s never going to happen,” he says. “It’s gotten so complicated with all the political stuff. Everyone in the cast has their own opinion, which is different from her opinion, which makes it impossible.” He adds: “I haven’t spoken to Miss Rowling in a decade or so, so I have no idea what’s going on with her, but I keep very close contact with Daniel Radcliffe and I just spoke to him a few days ago. I still have a great relationship with all the kids in the cast.”

    Miss Rowling?? Anyway the controversy is less about her than about the Harry Potter actors like Radcliffe who basically stabbed her in the back after she allied herself with the sex realist position in the face of gender ideology. That took some courage on Rowling's part. Muttering about "all the political stuff" takes no courage at all.

    The point of the interview, though, is Columbus's latest effort, The Thursday Murder Club.

    Chris Columbus has a confession to make. Something “really weird” happened to him when he finished shooting The Thursday Murder Club. The 66-year-old Oscar-nominated film-maker behind Home Alone, Mrs Doubtfire and the first three Harry Potter movies (directed one and two, produced number three) noticed that his views on ageing and even death had been radically transformed. After spending three months in the company of the film’s veteran stars Helen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan, Ben Kingsley and Celia Imrie (combined age 306) he no longer feared the end of everything.

    “With these actors, they’re all in their seventies and early eighties but there’s still a hunger there and an obsession with doing good work, and it’s not going away for any of them,” he says. “It’s like they still want to do better, even after everything they’ve accomplished. And I responded to that because it taps into my desire never to retire. There is no fear of death because the fear is of failing on something I’m working on right now.”

    Columbus, who is warm and ingenuous, is ensconced in a swanky Mayfair hotel that he calls “posh” and is, he says, worlds away from his Pennsylvania roots as the only son of a father who worked as a coalminer and a mother who was a factory worker. There’s a winning wholesomeness to Columbus that has made him the perfect “family movie guy” (he also wrote The Goonies, Gremlins and Young Sherlock Holmes) and that he brings to his best films. The Thursday Murder Club is infused with it.

    The interview is with the Times' film critic Kevin Maher, who gave The Thursday Murder Club a gushing 4-star review. And now gives the director a gushing interview.

    I thought the film was awful. It set my teeth on edge. I'm old enough to enjoy a bit of "cosy crime", but this was one of the worst. I've never liked all that Richard Curtis, Marigold Hotel stuff anyway – selling a gentrified hammy vision of Britain to America, it seems to me.

    Compare perhaps to the Marlow Murder Club. Nonsense, of course, but, in the first episode at least, quite clever: three killers swapping victims. Yes, it's been done before with Patricia Highsmith/Hitchcock Strangers on a Train, but it was well handled. And it didn't take itself too seriously. Low budget – and there weren't any megastars strutting their stuff. Pierce Brosnan and Ben Kingsley in The Thursday Murder Club, though – godawful. And the dim lower class policeman bamboozled by all the clever Oxford-educated, ex-MI5 toffs….

  • Radical trans ideology

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  • Man dancing

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    Like Ricky Gervais in The Office.