Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

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  • Woman’s Hour

    Janice Turner in the Times:

    You run the flagship BBC radio show for women and — wow! — two Scottish women, their arms raised in victory, are pictured outside the Supreme Court on the front page of every national newspaper. They’ve made history! Everyone is talking about their seven-year battle for this landmark ruling on what the hell is a woman.

    If you were the Woman’s Hour editor Karen Dalziel, wouldn’t your journalistic instincts tell you to rip up your running order, (maybe cut your 4,000th item on the menopause) and rush these women to the studio? Er, no. Next day, hilariously, WH had a man, Joshua Rozenberg, explain the ruling.

    Apart from a brief appearance on World at One, Radio 4 ignored the women: they weren’t interviewed on the Today programme, nor PM, whose presenter Evan Davis sounded delighted to find in Lord Sumption a man to trivialise and misrepresent the judgment (while failing to name the Equality Act correctly), with no balancing voice.

    Finally yesterday, after substantial social media pressure, Susan Smith of For Women Scotland appeared on Woman’s Hour. A whole week late. Hey, Karen, what a scoop!

  • Why can’t politicians admit they got it wrong?

    Hannah Barnes in the New Statesman on Labour and the Supreme Court ruling:

    That this was left to the courts at all is an indictment of politicians. The response from Labour has been woeful. It took the Prime Minister six days to say he was “really pleased” with the “clarity” brought by the judgement. His spokesperson confirmed that Starmer no longer believed trans women were women. But the PM hasn’t condemned the threats made to women during the trans rights activist protests that followed the judgement, at which some carried placards bearing abusive messages, including “The only good Terf is a [dead] one” and “Bring back witch burning”. A bust of the women’s rights campaigner Millicent Fawcett was daubed with the homophobic slur “fag rights”. The Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper (who previously refused to go down the “rabbit hole” of defining what a woman is), condemned the damage, but had nothing to say of the misogyny on display. The Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson was the first in cabinet to criticise the rhetoric.

    More embarrassing has been Labour’s attempts to rewrite history. A Labour source told the Telegraph the judgement showed why it was “so important that Keir hauled the Labour Party back to the common-sense position the public take on these sorts of issues”. This was, the source said, “one of the reasons the country felt Labour was safe to elect”. Really? Wasn’t it Starmer who, in 2021, called the then Labour MP Rosie Duffield’s statement “only women have a cervix” “something that shouldn’t be said”. And wasn’t it John Healey, now the Defence Secretary, who said during the 2024 election campaign that clarification of the law around sex and gender was a “distraction” and “not needed”? On 16 April, Phillipson claimed Labour had “always supported the protection of single-sex spaces based on biological sex”. But she said in a June 2024 interview that trans women with a GRC should use female toilets. Why can’t politicians admit they got it wrong?

    Presumably they think it would damage their reputation for infallibility (!). A reputation for honesty might be more worth the saving – but that's politicians for you.

    One group, however, would have faced erasure had the court ruled the other way: lesbians. “For lesbians, this was not merely about safe spaces and same-sex services: it was absolutely foundational to our very existence,” I was told by Sally Wainwright, who helped put together the case for three lesbian organisations granted permission to intervene at the Supreme Court. The judges agreed. Sexual orientation “is rendered meaningless” if sex is not confined to biological sex, they said. Yet press coverage has largely ignored this, Wainwright said.  This was a judgement “all – and only – about women’s rights”. That it has been reported as if it’s an attack on trans people signifies the extent to which parts of the press were “captured”, she argued.

    The lesbian history – called transphobic for opposing the influx of bearded men on lesbian dating sites, told they were "sexual racists" for not wanting to have sex with "lesbians" with a penis – surely ranks as the most absurd manifestation of gender culture. And it's also the best response to those who somehow believe that trans women are some poor threatened group who just want to get on with their lives. Does anyone honestly think the vast majority of these men aren't just cynical chancers?

    British women are rebuilding sanity brick by brick. Maya Forstater secured the right to say that sex is real and immutable and not be punished. Keira Bell took on the care provided to gender-distressed children at the Tavistock. And FWS has now reinforced the long-fought-for rights of women.

    But attempts have already begun to undermine the judgement, with some questioning its legitimacy and indicating they will refuse to comply. The Supreme Court ruling will require businesses, public bodies and other institutions to change their policies in accordance with the law. How will a government that has thus far been weak on women’s rights respond? Despite reports of unease in Labour’s ranks, Phillipson spoke definitively on BBC Radio 4’s Today on 22 April: “I can be crystal clear with you that we welcome the ruling.”

    There is now an opportunity to be rid of the lies and toxicity of the past; to ensure that the rights of both trans people and women are respected. But one thing is certain: if that chance is not taken, women will not stay silent. History shows they can, and will, say “No”. And they will win.

  • Syria’s direction away from Iran and towards Turkey

    A JC report on an interesting development in Syria:

    Syria’s new government has arrested two senior Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) figures, the terror group’s military wing has announced.

    The Al Quds Brigade confirmed that Khaled Khaled, the head of the group’s operations in Syria, and the chief of its organisational committee, Yasser al-Zafari, have been detained in the country for the past five days.

    This may sound like good news – cracking down on the jihadis – but it's more a sign of the realignment of Syria from Iran to Turkey: that is, from Shia to Sunni.

    Under President Bashar Al-Assad, Syria had adopted a more supportive approach to Palestinian Islamic Jihad due to its alliance with Iran, which funds the likes of the PIJ, Hamas and Hezbollah.

    The Assad regime maintained close relations with Tehran and frequently allowed the Islamic Republic to transfer weapons to its proxies through Syria.

    However, the fall of Assad in December already looks to be reshaping the region, with Damascus increasingly talking a firmer line under interim president Ahmed Al-Sharaa.

    Al-Sharaa, a former member of Al-Qaeda, has distanced his country from Iran, calling its proxies “a strategic threat to the region” in interviews….

    While Al-Sharaa claims to have left his jihadist affiliations in the past, Syria’s apparent direction of diplomatic travel away from Iran and towards Turkey could inform his approach to proxy groups like PIJ.

    He has also cut off diplomatic ties with Tehran, reportedly in order to secure the lifting of international sanctions and ensure stability following more than a decade of civil war under Assad.

    However, Syria’s enmity towards Israel looks set to continue, with the Al-Sharaa government reportedly allowing Hamas to build up a strong base in the country. Jerusalem has also launched a number of airstrikes in Syria, with the IDF saying that the operations were intended to destroy military infrastructure which it feared could be used to target Israel in future.

    Professor Ed Husain, a leading Middle East analyst, recently claimed that Al-Sharaa’s new ruling party, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, is closely aligned with Qatar, which Israel has repeatedly accused of funding Hamas.

    In an interview in February, Husain called the new regime in Damascus a “Qatari project”, adding: “Will his country be a literal… Islamist state, or will it be a moderate Arab country following the route of the UAE and others?

    "I don’t think we should trust what’s going on in Damascus.”

    Different alliances in Syria, with different masters, but still the same hatred of Israel.

  • Keeping the receipts

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    Full list at this Glinner substack from May 2022.

  • Man against calf

    Arthur Rothstein, September 1939. "Calf-scramble. Central Iowa Fair, Marshalltown, Iowa."

    image from www.shorpy.com
    [Photo: Shorpy/Arthur Rothstein for the Farm Security Administration]

  • Sexist stereotyping

    Blimey. A Labour MP, no less.

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  • Like trying to feed a shark broccoli

    Green MSP and trans activist Maggie Chapman doubles down on her Supreme Court insults:

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  • The ruling is clear

    Encouraging from the Labour front bench, after all the rumours of a rebellion in the ranks:

    Trans women should use toilets according to their biological sex, the equalities minister has said.

    Which, for trans women, is male.

    In response to the UK Supreme Court's ruling that a woman is legally defined by biological sex, Bridget Phillipson stopped short of explicitly saying trans women should use the men's toilets.

    But she told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "The ruling was clear that provisions and services should be accessed on the basis of biological sex."

    Pushed further for clarification on whether a trans woman should use the men's or women's toilets she repeated: "The ruling is clear."

    So saying she "stopped short of explicitly saying trans women should use the men's toilets" is inserting doubt where there really doesn't seem to be any. "The ruling is clear".

    Meanwhile, Sir Keir Starmer welcomed the ruling in his first comments on the matter, saying it gave "much needed clarity".

    The prime minister told the BBC: "I'm really pleased the court has clarified the position.

    "We can move on from there. [I] think that has been very helpful."

    Added. But…

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    …"but instead was monstered by Labour blue-fringes, and Starmer did NOTHING to defend or protect her."

  • One of the greatest failures in the history of campaigning

    More on the weekend's trans protests, from Sarah Ditum in the Times:

    By distorting reality to pretend that trans women (males) are oppressed by natal women (females), the trans movement has laundered beliefs and language that in any other context would be instantly tagged as woman-hating. “Suck my dick”, as seen on placards at the weekend, is a progressive slogan so long as you claim to identify as a woman.

    In terms of achieving its political objectives, the trans rights movement is one of the greatest failures in the history of campaigning. Not only did its push for GRA reform collapse but its insistence on forcing an extreme interpretation of the Equality Act ultimately led to its defeat in the Supreme Court. And the more the public has been exposed to the reality of the trans movement, the more the public has disapproved.

    But I suspect that political objectives were never the point for many adherents. Instead, the attraction of the movement was, precisely, the opportunity for men to tear down those uppity women with the temerity to say “no”. Meanwhile, cowardly women embraced it as a signal that they were not like those nasty hags: if you join in with the hate, maybe it won’t be aimed at you.

  • Swastikas in Clissold Park

    Horrifying. This is near me. I know this playground. 

    Half a dozen swastikas were sprayed across a children’s playground in Hackney, north London, on Sunday.

    The Nazi-era symbols were daubed on rocks in the playground at Clissold Park in Stoke Newington, just a stone’s throw from two local synagogues – Adath Yisroel Synagogue and Kehillah North London, both of which border the park.