Mick Hartley

After the recent dismissal of the case against him brought by a trans activist, Graham Linehan feels entitled to have a moan. “It is past time the state stopped pretending that trans activism is anything other than an entitled male sexual rights movement”.

For over a decade now, ever since I first spoke up for women in the face of an aggressive rights grab by trans activists, I’ve been pursued by a small group of men who seemingly use UK police as their private goon squad.

“Stephanie” Hayden, “Lindsay” Watson, and more recently “Sophia” Brooks could not have generated a more enthusiastic police response if they’d been wearing chief superintendent’s uniforms.

When I first began speaking out, Hayden complained to the police about my comments. This led to officers contacting me and, on one occasion, coming to my home. I believe the strain of these encounters with the police significantly contributed to the breakdown of my marriage.

But I’m far from being alone. Women have been suffering at the hands of men like this for longer than I have. Caroline Farrow has been pursued through the courts for years, only for two police investigations into her to be dropped and a libel case against her organisation to be dismissed.

The aim is to provoke a reaction that meets the extraordinarily low threshold the police appear to act on when the complainant is a so-called trans person.

My view is that there’s no such thing as “trans people”. There are transvestites, transsexuals, perverts, and distressed young women suffering from a virulently fashionable new form of anorexia. In other words, men and women in various states of distress and confusion.

But there are also predatory petty criminals and sadistic activists, and it’s these in particular for whom UK police seemingly cannot do enough.

It’s one of the reasons I left the UK. I couldn’t be sure I wouldn’t get a knock at the door at any moment, from a police force that works harder for men dressed as women than it ever has for women themselves.

Set the slow, feeble response to the Rotherham rape gangs against the speed and efficiency the police bring to a complaint from a trans activist. The miracle of modern British policing is that a man only has to put on a dress to be treated, finally, like a woman should be.

What concerns me is how easily institutions can be weaponised. After the Macpherson Report, the police became so terrified of being accused of bigotry that they swallowed, without scrutiny, the version of the law Stonewall was selling them.

It took the recent Supreme Court judgment in For Women Scotland v The Scottish Ministers to finally dispel the lie. Men are not women, and saying so is not bigotry.

Unfortunately we still await full implementation, as Labour politicians sit on their hands.

It’s long past time the state stopped pretending the trans movement is anything other than a demanding, entitled male sexual rights movement. There can be no progress until that aspect of trans activism is acknowledged. Trans rights activism is uniquely violent, aggressive, dishonest, entitled and sadistic. It isn’t enough that the cases stop. The police need to start policing the men bringing them.

The simplest legislative fix is one the Government already has in front of it. Implement the Supreme Court ruling, without delay. The ruling would return us to a position most people in this country have always taken as obvious. The reason it isn’t being implemented is that our politicians are too frightened, or too confused, to stand up to the truth.

Keir Starmer famously said it was wrong to claim that only women had a cervix. David Lammy seemed to think men could actually grow one. We have a political class so terrified of being called bigots by the millennials in their staff that they’re prepared to look completely ridiculous in public. I fear nothing will change while such useful idiots are in charge.

The upcoming local elections are likely to see huge gains, at Labour’s expense, by the Greens, and possibly the Lib Dems – both of which parties are notably trans-friendly. We may have to wait awhile….

The man who's spent years talking over and attacking women for defending their rights has now decided that you must belong to a protected group to express an opinion on the threats facing it. pic.twitter.com/KTPWjA1rxo

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) May 3, 2026

I posted on that Janice Turner piece here.

Important new study just published from the always brilliant Michael Biggs. Biggs studied homicides in Britain and found more transgender perpetrators than victims.
And yet in this time the @BBC reported 4 times more homicides with trans victims . pic.twitter.com/KmnxCreTTr

— Genspect (@genspect) May 2, 2026

Article here.

Vogue – the now irrelevant organ last noted for praising the mass-murderering couple the Assads for their glamour – returns to relevance in the ugliest way possible.
Is this your view @britishvogue @voguemagazine @CondeNast Anna Wintour. Repulsive if it is. https://t.co/Oz66OshVhj

— S Sebag Montefiore (@simonmontefiore) May 3, 2026

Meanwhile Josh Glancy looks back to the “quiet genius” of Jewish life in the UK, centered on Golders Green where his grandpa Harold settled:

Harold was a proudly Jewish man and ran a kosher food company. But he also lived a British life almost indistinguishable from any other suburban small business owner, checking his share portfolio on Ceefax, jumping in his Rover to nip down to the tennis club, cheering on the Arsenal. 

Harold’s story embodies the quiet genius of British Jewry in the late 20th century. Having seen off Hitler and the threat of domestic fascism, Britain and its Jews then somehow contrived to make being Jewish in this country almost boring. If you know your Jewish history, that is no small achievement. Each Saturday we would say a prayer of thanks to the royal family, to acknowledge our good fortune.

This was the lucky world I was born into. Of course antisemitism nibbled away at the margins, we still had security at synagogue, but we were safe, our place in British society settled and secure.

My fear today is that this long and peaceful chapter of Jewish life in this country may now be ending….

There are lots of different stripes of antisemitism in this country, from the golf club to the far right, but it is the prejudice now commonplace in some British Muslim communities (and I really do mean some), advanced and echoed by parts of the progressive left, that represents a threat to the Anglo-Jewish future. 

And a comment:

Beautifully written. You have said what so many Anglo-Jews are feeling right now. As I sat in synagogue today for the yahrzeit (memorial) of my father’s death, I wondered what he would make of it all. The only Jewish boy in his grammar school, to which he won a scholarship, he became head boy, head of football and of cricket. A qualified solicitor, he joined up early, was at Dunkirk and in India in WW2 and married my mother, a GP in 1948. We were always taught to honour the country which gave my grandparents a home. I want the country for which he and others fought, one of liberal and tolerant values, back. I hope and trust that will be possible.

Hadley Freeman, in the Sunday Times, joins the chorus warning of the dangers of Zack P and the new Greens.

I am old enough to remember when the Greens were a gently batty lot focused on the environment. These days it’s less green and more a mix of the rainbow (ultra-progressives) and the crescent (sectarian Muslims). As a result, it produces local candidates like Saiqa Ali in Streatham, who posted “Resistance is freedom” over an image of a Hamas terrorist, and Sabine Mairey in Lambeth, who insists that “ramming a synagogue isn’t antisemitism, it’s revenge”. It’s almost enough to make me miss the days when the Green Party would bang on about composting.

On Thursday, Ali and Mairey were detained — not by Green HQ but by the Metropolitan Police, on suspicion of stirring racial hatred. The party’s leader, Zack Polanski, has said that vetting candidates has been “a real challenge” because the party has been attracting “an immense amount of people very quickly”.

I almost admire how Polanski affects to see the number of raving, Jew-hating loons joining his party as a sign of his popularity, as opposed to proof that they see him as a useful idiot who is hosting the current home for Jew-hating loons. And as if to confirm his status as the latter, shortly after arresting the two Green candidates, Sir Mark Rowley, the Met’s commissioner, publicly rebuked Polanski for retweeting an allegation that police had been too violent when arresting the man charged with stabbing the Jews in Golders Green.

“It is this kind of inaccurate and misinformed commentary … that is contributing to rising tensions,” Rowley wrote. Or, as Polanski put it two weeks ago, a mere “perception” of rising tensions.

Ali and Mairey can spend this week burnishing their favourite antisemitic memes, but there are still plenty of other swivel-eyed options on the Green ballot. There’s Feda Shahin in Bournemouth, who has said that Jeffrey Epstein’s private island “is a symbol of the headquarters of the Zionists who are trying to control the world”. Or Philip Notley in Stevenage, filmed last week telling voters that “Israel shouldn’t exist”. Or Tina Ion in Blakelaw & Cowgate, who posts under the handle “thereal.anne.frank” with a photo of the murdered teenager in a keffiyeh, and has called for “killing every single Zionist”. And the Green Party’s reaction? They are shocked — as Captain Renault in Casablanca would put it — shocked to find gambling is going on in here.

And on and on. Still, Polanski can take comfort that one person believes his party is being too firm with the antisemites in its ranks. Unfortunately, it’s his deputy, Mothin Ali. The Times revealed on Wednesday that Ali advised candidates — including Saiqa Ali — who were rebuked or suspended by the party for antisemitism “to start with some class action”.

Polanski repeatedly bleats that he is “the only Jewish leader of a major political party”, as if that were a Harry Potter-like spell — expelliarmus! — that can fend off accusations his party is pandering to far left and sectarian Muslim antisemites.

Camilla Turner in the Telegraph – Iranian network linked to Revolutionary Guard openly operating in the UK:

A “propaganda network” linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is openly operating in Britain, The Telegraph can disclose.

The Tehran-backed operation risks “compromising national security” and must be shut down, ministers have been told.

The Islamic Radio and Television Union (IRTVU) is a membership group for media entities whose messaging is aligned with the Iranian regime and its regional proxies, including Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis, the Yemeni militant group.

In 2020, it was sanctioned by the US, which said it was “owned or controlled” by the IRGC, and functioned as their “propaganda arm”.

But several of its member organisations are registered in Britain. These include the Manchester-based Hidayat TV, Ahlul Bayt TV and Al Masirah TV, the main Houthi media channel.

Another IRTVU member is LuaLua TV, which uses its online broadcasts and social media channels to heap praise on senior Hamas and Hezbollah commanders, whom it describes as martyrs and heroes.

These include Yahya Sinwar, the former head of Hamas in Gaza, thought to have planned the Oct 7 massacre; Ismail Haniyeh, another former head of Hamas in Gaza; and Hassan Nasrallah, the former head of Hezbollah. All three were assassinated by Israel in 2024.

LuaLua TV, which has offices in Wembley, north London, also hailed Qassim Soleimani as a martyr. The commander of the Iranian Quds Force, an IRGC division responsible for clandestine operations, Soleimani was assassinated by the US in 2020.

Alicia Kearns, the shadow security minister, said: “Anti-Semitic violence doesn’t come from a vacuum. Its roots lie in hate-filled propaganda. 

“For too long, pro-IRGC and openly anti-Semitic broadcasters have abused our freedoms to spread their poisonous propaganda.

“Our media platforms must never be used to legitimise hatred, extremism or terrorist propaganda. Freedom of speech cannot be used as a shield for those amplifying terrorist narratives that threaten our country.”

Are we surprised? The UK has long been intensely relaxed about allowing poisonous ideologies the freedom to promulgate their hatred here. While everyone else, from the US to the EU, has long since banned the IRGC as a terrorist organisation, we’re still dithering…

Lara Brown in the Spectator, on the extraordinary High Court decision to overturn the Sussex University fine imposed by the Office for Students (OfS):

Maybe sex realists really are winning the gender wars. But for every two steps we take forward we are relentlessly pushed at least one back. The most recent victory in the war against common sense has seen the University of Sussex dodge a £585,000 fine over their free speech policies. The fine was awarded after Professor Kathleen Stock was hounded out of her job five years ago following sustained protests over her views on transgender rights and gender identity.

And what was Kathleen Stock’s crime, exactly?

Writing a book in which she claimed gender identity should not supplant biological sex. Sussex University did little to nothing to defend Stock from the abuse. The Vice-Chancellor at the time, Adam Tickell, seemed more interested in pursuing his new equality, diversity and inclusion strategy, which included the goal of getting Sussex University into the Stonewall ‘Top 100’ (few other awards more perfectly encapsulate the total antithesis of a badge of honour). This is almost certainly why the university hurriedly adopted an absurd ‘trans and non-binary’ policy based on a template from Advance HE, a charity running a membership scheme for higher education institutions.

The conclusion of the investigation and resulting fine could have been the end of a dark period in the university’s history. It was celebrated by many as a turning point for free speech in British universities. By the time the OfS issued its verdict, the university had a new Vice-Chancellor, Professor Sasha Roseneil. She was free to apologies for the actions of her predecessor and review Sussex’s free speech policies. Could things be looking up? Of course not.

Roseneil accused the OfS of pursuing a ‘vindictive and unreasonable’ campaign and of holding to an ‘absolutist definition’ of free speech. It is not clear what definition she would have preferred – free speech is a relatively binary thing. It is either absolute or we exist under some form of censorship. The latter seemed to be Roseneil’s preferred approach. Otherwise, she complained, Sussex was ‘powerless to prevent bullying and harassment’ (something the university seemed pretty disinterested in preventing when it was leveraged against Stock).

On Wednesday, Roseneil won. Not because Sussex’s policies were remotely reasonable, but because the policy was not actually a ‘governing document’ (despite the fact it very much seemed to be governing practice at the university) and on the basis that Sussex had eventually (mildly) amended its policy. The judge also concluded that the OfS ‘wrongly adopted an absolutist approach to freedom of speech (thinking that the University could never restrict lawful speech)’, effectively enshrining in law a university’s ability to censor completely legal ideas and perspectives.

For a short time, it seemed like we had a regulator able to enforce free speech in higher education. Other universities that adopted the ridiculous Advance HE policy knew they needed to change their approach to academic freedom or risk a fine. The censorious tendencies of small groups of activist students could have been reined in. No platforming, at least in universities, seemed briefly to be on the decline.

But in one fell swoop, the High Court has defanged the regulator. A judge has endorsed Sussex’s refusal to learn lessons from the whole ordeal and ensured that future academics can and will face the same abuse that Kathleen Stock did. On Wednesday, we took more than one step back.

Howard Jacobson joins in at UnHerd – Why Jews fear Zack Polanski:

Of the external factions aligned against Starmer’s Labour Party in the coming local elections, the most dangerous — to Starmer and the country — are the Greens. Ask how the Greens have transformed themselves in so short a time from a smug but innocuous band of self-marginalising activists to a smug but menacing army of agitators bent on power, and the answer explains what there is to fear from them. They are not what they until recently purported to be. In the image of their new about-facing leader Zack Polanski, they present a deceptively benign countenance. A party ostensibly for children, with policies of redistribution and fairness, promising goodies (even the naughtiest ones) for everyone, they are only a little less ostensibly a party for Jew haters. Yes, the Greens were always hyper-Gaza-concerned, today they are Gaza besotted.…

Cheered by tens of thousands at Glastonbury but a blink of time ago, Jeremy Corbyn is now pushing “a new kind of politics” — Your Party, it desperately names itself — in company with Zarah Sultana. How the mighty, etc. But Zack Polanski has an advantage over Corbyn, at least when it comes to baiting Jews — he is a Jew himself. And the appeal to the Jew-uncomfortable of an actual Jew who is no less Jew-uncomfortable than they are, is incalculable. Rarely will a Green party candidate forget to rebut all charges of antisemitism with the reassuring lie, “We cannot be antisemitic. Our leader is a Jewish man” — the phenomenon of a Jew-hating Jew being new to voters who are wet behind the ears.

I believe Marx led the way here as a Jew-hating Jew. A grim harbinger perhaps, but an intellectual giant compared to Polanski, with his former career of breast-enhancing hypnotherapist.

There is no room for antisemitism he remembered to say in the heat of the horror, careful not to lose a vote, but must have worried how those who rejoice in the killing of Jews would respond to such a remark, hence, as I understand it, another volte face, this time attacking the police for their brutal handling of the suspect. Whoever would face in two directions at once, might learn from Polanski né Paulden — how to be a Jew and not a Jew, how to express sympathy and deny it, how to say what you think, unsay it and then say it again, and how to keep everyone naïve enough to believe a single spurious word you say, on side for long enough to vote for you.

It is this transparent falsity cynically manipulating fears and libels and trading shamelessly on the ethnic hostilities of numbers of his supporters, that should concern everyone old enough to cast an intelligent vote. Even those whose identity is flattered by Polanski’s schmoozing should think twice before putting a cross beside his party’s name….

The time is out of joint. Yes, it’s hard to know how to put it right. But there is one way not to make things worse. We should not throw in our lot with false promisers and flatterers. We worry about the algorithms that enable social media to sell us the lies we already believe. Extreme political parties are learning to do the same. Whoever promises to give you what research tells them you want is not your friend.

Janice Turner in the Times – Be afraid, be very afraid of disingenuous Zack Polanski:

Yes, Polanski knows exactly what he’s doing. No political leader has ever been so immersed in social media, its codes and language, its sleights of hand. When the Economist analysed his presence on Bluesky, it found he obsessively searches his own name, “liking” around 35,000 posts a month, including anything decrying his critics, particularly journalists who press him hard.

Which he hates, especially since at next week’s local elections the Greens are poised to win councils including big London boroughs such as Lambeth and Hackney. Once, the worst to expect of a Green council was that it never emptied your bins. Now it’s bestowing power and £100 million-plus budgets on Green candidates such as Dr Rebecca Jones in Lewisham, who praised the Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar and urged followers to “BURN ZIONISM TO THE GROUND”; or Tina Ion in Newcastle, who trolls under the name Anne Frank and demands Israel be “deleted and I mean that in every sense possible”; or Feda Shahin in Bournemouth who called Jeffrey Epstein’s island Zionist HQ. This week two Green Party candidates in Lambeth were arrested on suspicion of stirring up racial hatred. Some, such as Mark Adderley in Croydon, are seemingly drenched in Jewish conspiracies and IDF false flags. There are many more.

Polanski has a delicate task: he must be seen to censure Jew-haters who might repel mainstream protest voters, without alienating those for whom a fervent anti-Zionism, which skirts and sometimes crosses into antisemitism, is the big draw. As seen in the Gorton & Denton by-election, the Greens are unashamedly pitching for a sectarian Muslim vote. Reeling it in is the Green deputy leader, Mothin Ali, who helped hound a rabbi out of Leeds and now advises Greens for Palestine candidates to tone down their public ravings, while proposing those expelled take legal advice about suing the party.

For the parasitic Corbynite entity that left its Labour host under Starmer, the Green Party is its greatest hope of glory. Its face is no longer a sour seventysomething allotment holder nor a messianic George Galloway, it is the fluffy, friendly CBeebie-ish Hannah Spencer or the party’s other deputy, head-girl posho Rachel Millward, who told Question Time antisemitic attacks were caused by rising prices. Not Islamists or Iranians roused to jihad by their London embassy, nor years of Hamas banners urging “globalise the intifada”, but a hike in the Tesco Meal Deal.

The Greens hope to attract rightly angry young people who crave a joyous “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn” Glastonbury moment, whose needs are disgracefully ignored by this Labour government. But in inner cities it needs that chunk of Britain’s four million Muslim voters who are attracted by hot-headed Gaza rhetoric.

I see the Greens of old, the lovers of nature, those seeking a fairer world, on the candidates list in my own borough. The Lolas and Freddies, the retired GPs and housing campaigners. But until they reclaim their party, it is wholly unfit for power, accommodating poisonous antisemites and led by a disingenuous chancer who knows exactly what he’s doing.

Polanski slipped up with his criticism of the arresting Golders Green police officers – for which he was nicely rebuked by Mark Rowley, and forced to apologise. Not that it’ll make much difference for his supporters…