Mick Hartley

Arthur Rothstein, June 1939. "A ghost mining town. Pony, Montana."

[Photo: Shorpy/Arthur Rothstein for the Farm Security Administration]

Rosie Duffield on Starmer, in the Times:

When she was bombarded with death threats online and ostracised by her Labour colleagues after agreeing with the view that individuals with a cervix should be described as women, Rosie Duffield just wanted a bit of help from her party leader.

“I would have really liked to have had just a short statement basically calling the dogs off, saying that I had Keir Starmer’s backing, that he supported me as an MP,” she says. “But I didn’t ever have that. And I was told very clearly by an adviser that was something he would never do.”

Instead she was “treated like a pariah”, faced a disciplinary investigation by Labour’s National Executive Committee (NEC) and ultimately felt hounded out of the party.

Now, following the landmark Supreme Court ruling that sex in the Equality Act refers to biology, the prime minister has finally asserted that a “woman is an adult female” but has resisted calls to apologise to Duffield for her treatment.

She is not interested. “I don’t really feel like I need that. And it wouldn’t be a sincere apology. Keir comes across as not exactly human, not exactly involved in this and not empathetic and not understanding the issue.

“Sentiment can be written by someone else for you to say. Proper, deep-rooted understanding and empathy? That’s something you can’t manufacture, and that is very lacking in him when talking about this.”

Very lacking in him when talking about anything. He doesn't do sincerity, only that robotic "sincerity". By no means the only politician that's true of, for sure, but still…

Sir Lindsay Hoyle, the Commons Speaker, failed to call on Duffield to speak during PMQs. She wanted to ask the prime minister for an apology over Labour activists and members who had been sidelined and disciplined for offering pro-women views.

It's been suggested, plausibly, that this was deliberate. Hoyle and Starmer are old pals.

 

At the Isabella Plantation, Richmond Park:

The Guardian has concerns:

The supreme court’s decision might, for some, revive a Victorian idea: to protect women legally, we must define them biologically.  Efforts to ringfence women’s spaces could end up excluding trans people entirely.

It's true. Women were invented by Isambard Kingdom Brunel. There's a plaque near Swindon

— Sunday Sport (@thesundaysport) April 25, 2025

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Further to the fantasy history propounded by Mahmoud Abbas, here's Einat Wilf with the real story of how "Palestine" has been appropriated by the Arabs:

The land “from the river to the sea,” to use the now-ubiquitous slogan, has been known as Palestine only twice before. First, the Roman Emperor Hadrian used “Palestina” as a way of suppressing Jewish resistance to his imperial rule. Second, it was used under the British Mandate, which was entrusted to Britain with the purpose of “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”

In both cases, it was understood that “Palestine” simply denoted the territory where there had been, or would be, a Jewish homeland. This is why the League of Nations, in establishing the Mandate, did so to “give recognition to the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine,” thereby forming “the grounds for reconstituting the Jewish people’s national home in that country.” This is also why local organizations at the time freely used the word “Palestine” in connection to entirely Jewish entities: The Palestine Post, for instance, which later became The Jerusalem Post, or the Palestine Philharmonic, later the Israel Philharmonic. Football associations with players bearing names such as Kastenbaum, Friedmann, Nudelman, and Kraus, as well as coins, bore the name Palestine (but always with a mention of “Eretz Israel,” the Land of Israel).

Nor was that all. The Mandate gave Britain the option to separate the territory east of the River Jordan out of the area mandated for a Jewish home. What became Transjordan, and later Jordan, was forbidden to Jewish settlement. The remaining areas are, fantastically, now called “historic Palestine.” As Shany and I observed, “they are ‘historic’ only insofar as they lasted for barely three decades, were governed by a European superpower, and delimited as the future national home for the Jewish people.”

With independence, the Jewish people then did what every self-respecting nation that achieved independence did in the world at the same time. They shed the colonial name given to their territory (Siam, Gold Coast, Ceylon, Rhodesia, and, yes, Palestine) and replaced it with one rooted in its own culture, geography, and history: Israel.

It was only after Israel declared independence, and especially in the 1960s and ’70s, that the Arabs of the land increasingly appropriated the name Palestine to indicate an Arab identity that possesses the sole exclusive “indigenous” claim to any land controlled by sovereign Jews. In doing so, they inverted and erased two millennia of customary association of the land with the Jews and their history, thereby turning the Jews, whose continuous historical, cultural, and religious connection to the land was never previously questioned, into the “foreign interlopers” in an Arab land to which they have no connection. At the end of this process, the associated meanings of the word “Palestine,” of a history and connection of one people to one land (the Jews to Eretz Israel) were thereby transferred to those who have newly taken the name: the Arabs.

Oliver Brown in the Telegraph:

Waiting for guidance. It has become British sport’s answer to Waiting for Godot, such is the glacial pace with which this major country’s governing bodies move towards upholding fairness for half the population, rather than for the males who want to pass themselves off as female.

The London Marathon is the latest to prevaricate, claiming it wishes to receive a “detailed report” from the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) before doing anything to honour the Supreme Court’s unanimous verdict that sex is binary. And so Sunday’s instalment is to take place as if last week’s ruling never happened, with race director Hugh Brasher’s utopian talk of “inclusion” just a limp front for a policy that is fundamentally exclusionary for women.

We can no longer be in any doubt: these organisations will dither, delay and dissemble, continuing to present a cynical facade of being kind, just so long as this kindness does not extend to the women involved. A week has passed since the Supreme Court enshrined the immutability of biology in law, and still the Football Association and England and Wales Cricket Board, both enablers of the cult that suggests you can be whatever sex you say you are, have done nothing.

Now the London Marathon – poised this weekend to surpass Paris as the largest in the world, with more than 56,000 finishers – is also doubling down on its complicity in a fallacy.

Men cannot be women: that is now the law of the land. And yet Brasher is signing off on a set of rules that convey the exact opposite, handing men places on the start line that are meant specifically for women.

Think of it this way: the London Marathon has, in its preoccupation with gender rather than sex, three categories of entry – male, female and non-binary – and not one of them excludes men. While the non-binary class serves only to bestow spurious athletic distinction upon mediocre males who would be nowhere in the men’s field, the women’s event has witnessed such absurdities as Glen Frank, having lined up in both the New York and Tokyo marathons as a man, running in London in 2023 as a woman simply by rebranding as “Glenique”. “Girl power!” Frank shouted, in an interview at Tower Bridge with the BBC.

Will the women denied by mediocre men take the marathon authorities to court over this? We shall see. They'd surely have a good case now.

At the Sony World Photography Awards 2025 exhibition currently on show at Somerset House, Iranian photographer Masood Talebi:

‘Give your heart to the sea, if there is water hidden in it.’ It may be hard to believe, but what once had a long history of shipping, boating and swimming has now become a tragedy. Lake Urmia in Iran is the largest saline lake in the Middle East, and the sixth largest saltwater lake in the world. However, the lake has been in a drought crisis for nearly a decade, and is on the verge of destruction through a combination of factors including climate change, damming projects and the excessive use of groundwater for agriculture. Salinity and excessive salt saturation, as well as desertification, results in salt storms and dust, which are a serious threat to the environment, agricultural sectors and the people of northwest Iran. Masood Talebi has been documenting the lake for about 12 years, in the hope that the international community will respond to the disaster.

[Photos: Masood Talebi/Sony World Photography]

From Mahmoud Abbas, talking here at the 32nd (PLO) Central Council meeting in Ramallah. He accuses Israel of attempting to alter the historical and legal status of Christian and Islamic holy sites, "especially the blessed Al-Aqsa mosque, which is an inseparable part of our religious faith and national identity, and our presence in our historic homeland of Palestine for thousands of years". You sure about that? Thousands of years? And the first and second Jewish temples? Built in Yemen. Says so in the Quran.

But he does curse Hamas as sons of bitches who should release the hostages and stop giving Israel the pretext for the attacks on Gaza.

מדינת ישראל אינה ״מתנה״ ליהודים של אומות אירופאיות אכולות רגשי אשמה בעקבות השואה. הציונים בנו את התשתית למדינה לא כדי ש״לעולם לא עוד״ אלא ש״לעולם לא״.
Israel is not a “gift” to the Jews by guilty European nations after the Shoah. It was the outcome of Jewish vision and action: pic.twitter.com/nnVfn3sCTd

— Dr. Einat Wilf (@EinatWilf) April 24, 2025

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A history lesson from Jonny Best at The Critic:

It’s understandable that Conservatives would want to stick it to Starmer’s Labour after the Supreme Court’s ruling on the meaning of sex in the Equality Act. Labour has supplied the Tories a target-rich environment, from David “men can have a cervix” Lammy, to Dawn “a child is born without a sex” Butler, and Stella “some women have penises” Creasy. Towering over them all in his moral failure is the supreme political coward himself, the Prime Minister — a man who loves talking about all the terribly difficult decisions he has to take as PM, how he’s “country before party”, how he’s so much better than the rest of us — but is too scared to say boo to the trans activist radicals in his own party, or to say anything at all to former Labour MP Rosie Duffield who was hounded out of Labour for views which now, apparently, the government has always shared.

Yes, the Labour Party deserves a thoroughly good kicking — and Badenoch, whose record on these issues is stellar, has the moral right to deliver it.

But the decade of gender madness which might now, hopefully, be drawing to a close, was not begun by Labour.

It was the Conservatives, under Theresa May, who invited extreme, misogynistic trans activists into the policy making process.

It was the Conservatives who wanted to make gender recognition certificates available on demand.

It was the Conservatives who sought to replace “sex” with the absurd concept of “gender identity” in law.

It was the Conservatives who took one look at Stonewall’s ludicrous, totalitarian package of trans activist demands and said “we’ll take the lot!”.

Ultimately, it was the Conservatives who, in cahoots with Stonewall, initiated a decade of cruelty and stupidity, which saw women hounded from their jobs, harassed and attacked by trans activists, demonised and abused. A decade which frightened many from speaking openly about their own experiences, their own bodies, lest they too lose their jobs and reputations….

Theresa May — who in 2002 had slightly disturbed the party conference with her “nasty party” comment — had become PM and declared her aim the rooting out of “burning injustices”. She had taken an interest in trans issues while Home Secretary, co-authoring the “Advancing Trans Equality” report with her coalition government partner, Lynne Featherstone, in 2011. She also became pals with Stonewall at this time, giving speeches at their events, and her rise to the premiership coincided almost exactly with Ruth Hunt’s promotion to CEO at Stonewall.

The stage was set for Stonewall’s new trans-first agenda to be ushered wholesale into government.

The roll-call of Tory trans champions, apart from Theresa May, included Maria Miller, Penny Mordaunt, Caroline Nokes, Alicia Kearns…. They've all gone a bit quiet.