Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

recent posts

email me

  • 40 days on

    In Iranian culture the 40th day after a death is a solemn threshold. Families & friends gather at graves in a ritual of grief, both private and communal.

    As in the 2nd video, they continue to chant slogans: “your canons, tanks, and machine guns no longer have an effect, tell my mother that she no longer has a son.”

    In light of the tens of thousands exterminated, what we are seeing here is off the scale fearlessness.

    In the past, the regime have crushed dissent during this early stage of grief after regime murders in uprisings. People’s anger eventually turns into immense sadness and depression.

    But now, the people are showing the world how anger can eventually turn into unprecedented levels of courage and determination. Why this time it’s different.

    Amazing to me the world is, by and large, completely blind to this incredible and inspiring story of revolution. It deserves to be on the front pages. Every day.

  • The goal was to kill as many as possible

    An insider’s account of Tehran’s killing nights.

    A man who says he was deployed during Tehran’s January crackdown describes watching protesters shot and helping load bodies into refrigerated trucks, including a little girl whose earrings had been taken before her body was thrown inside.

    Kazem, a 40-year-old Tehran resident, says he was present as part of the state’s repression apparatus during two nights of mass violence, January 8 and 9.

    He says he had previously spent a relatively long time in detention by the IRGC Intelligence Organization and was released after promising cooperation. He maintains that he did not kill anyone and that he fired only into the air.

    His account, given in an extended interview, offers a detailed insider description of how forces were assembled, armed and deployed.…

    He says he observed what he calls two distinct operational patterns.

    The first he describes as “hunting leaders.”

    According to Kazem, experienced intelligence operatives infiltrated protest crowds while appearing to join demonstrators. Their task, he says, was to identify individuals perceived as organizers or focal points – often those who appeared physically fit or athletic.

    “After identifying targets, at an opportune moment – such as in dark streets where lights had been cut – they would shoot them from behind at close range with handguns,” he said. “Or they would communicate with snipers stationed on nearby rooftops, giving descriptions of clothing so the target could be shot.”

    He says rooftop snipers were positioned on multiple buildings in the area.

    The second pattern, he says, involved steering crowds into enclosed spaces.

    “They would drive and direct frightened people into dead-end alleys or places already under control,” he said. “This pattern was repeated many times Friday night in the part of Tehran where I was. The goal was to kill as many as possible. No one was meant to be arrested there. Many fell into ambushes and were killed.”

  • Shropshire starlings

  • Bridget Phillipson’s failure

    A useful summation of where we are, from Akua Reindorf in the Times:

    The Supreme Court typically addresses cases of general public importance that contain the knottiest unresolved points of legal analysis. It is a measure of just how messy things had become in 2024 that the court agreed to answer a question about which nobody has ever had the slightest doubt: what is a woman?

    Even for grizzled veterans of the gender wars, it was surreal that the court needed to spell out that, for the purposes of the Equality Act 2010, a woman is a person born female and not a person born male. More surreal still is the fact that, for ten months now, many employers and service providers have simply ignored the judgment and have continued to allow males to use women’s facilities.

    What is not a surprise is that this widespread defiance of the law has been brought about by a campaign of disinformation waged by trans rights activists. It was just such a campaign that convinced employers and service providers they were legally obliged to allow trans people to use opposite-sex facilities in the first place. That false idea should have been laid to rest by the judgment in For Women Scotland. Instead, activists claimed that the judgment is “not yet law” until parliament passes the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s statutory code of practice.

    Simultaneously, they tried to ensure the code would not see the light of day by launching ill-conceived attacks on the judgment. Since September the code has been gathering dust on the desk of Bridget Phillipson, the women and equalities minister.

    Last Friday the High Court rejected the latest attempt to frustrate the process through a judicial review brought against the EHRC by the omnicause campaign group the Good Law Project. The High Court dismissed all the arguments deployed by GLP’s barristers against an interim update published by the EHRC last year. It also rejected the submissions made on behalf of Phillipson, who was an interested party in the case. Having stated that she was taking a neutral stance, her submissions were obviously aligned with those of GLP.

    A letter sent by GLP to Phillipson on the same day demanded that she return the code to the EHRC to be rewritten, on the basis that it was now clearly “wrong about the law”. Nothing in the High Court’s judgment remotely resembled this egregious spin.

    Depressingly, at least three MPs immediately went in to bat alongside GLP. It is likely that these backbench interventions will intensify the pressure on Phillipson. Earlier political leadership might have headed off these outcomes. Its absence has created the ideal conditions for this most toxic of the so-called culture wars to escalate.

    In a tough competition, surely Phillipson is the most useless of all the Labour ministers. Scared of the trans lobby, or a true believer? Or both?

  • Not some lone nutter

    More on Jolyon Maugham and his denial of defeat, here from Jo Bartosch at The Critic:

    There is a whiff of the swivel-eyed 9/11 truther in Maugham’s telling — that official accounts cannot be taken at face value, that powerful forces are aligned against The Righteous, that GLP has privileged information about the way things really work.

    Such face-saving guff is perhaps predictable — it is much easier on the ego to believe you are a brave truth teller and that they are out to get you. If I’d staked my reputation on the belief that sex can be changed with magic words, I too would prefer that story to the more prosaic reality that I was in the grip of a middle-aged messiah complex. (After all, championing a cause beloved of the young is a tried and tested method of postponing one’s political and personal twilight.)

    Despite scepticism from many lawyers, social media silos ensure GLP’s claims still find an audience. Indeed, Kate Osborne MP has already publicly claimed that the ruling “confirmed that the EHRC’s code of practice got the law wrong” and other public figures have repeated these claims.

    What transforms Maugham from an amusingly sore loser into something more concerning has been his sly suggestion that the system is rigged. Following the Supreme Court’s landmark judgment on biological sex last year, Maugham proposed that one of the judges “did it to please their dinner party friends.”

    To believe there is a cabal out to get you, or to crush a cause you cherish, is immensely flattering. It casts you and your beliefs at the centre of events. Defeats become proof of the forces arrayed against you, of your own influence. Every loss fuels the belief that one is a crusader for truth, albeit in Maugham’s case, a suitably intersectional and decolonised one.

    But Maugham is not some lone nutter who insists birds aren’t real on Rumble. He is a high profile lawyer heading a well funded campaign organisation with friends in Parliament and a loyal online following. However much he rages against the machine, he is part of it.

    When people in that position imply judges cannot be trusted simply because they lost, or disseminate claims that muddy clear judgments, the damage is not to their pride but to public confidence in the rule of law. That is a high price to pay for saving face.

    There are rumours that the Maughams have two trans children – which would certainly explain a lot.

  • Drinking blood

    Never ones to let an opportunity pass to spread the most deranged nonsense, a fanatical antisemite here, along with the familiar blood libel, seizes on the Epstein scandal to inject more poison into the world:

    Swedish-Algerian journalist Yahya Abu Zakariya spread blood libel in a February 4, 2026 interview with Roula Nasr on YouTube. He alleged that the West sought to eliminate “Zionist crimes,” including the slaughter of children in Europe, in order to prepare the “Matzah of Zion,” a ritual, he claimed was “well-known in Talmudic culture.” He added that the Zionists are killing children in Palestine because Jewish religious law dictates that they should be sacrificed to Jehova. Abu Zakariya also alleged that Jeffrey Epstein and others, including Donald Trump, blackmailed and raped boys, cutting off their feet and drinking their blood, which he said represents the intersection of “murderous and sinful Talmudic belief” with Satanic belief. He further claimed that Israeli prime ministers David Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir, Ehud Barak, and Yitzhak Shamir confirmed that the content of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is “Zionist.”

  • Non-binary sex letter

    Lucky Bridget Phillipson. As well as that Good Law Project letter, she’s also getting this.

    This is in response to a UK Supreme Court ruling that the term “woman” refers to a human of the female sex, and that access to single-sex spaces must be based on “biological sex” instead of a person’s subjective “gender identity.”

    The letter (LEFT) claims that “biological sex” is not a scientific term but a political one. It also peddles sex pseudoscience, falsely stating that an individual’s “sex” is “made up of a collection of characteristics, including external genitalia, secondary sex characteristics, gonads, chromosomes, and hormones,” and should be considered “bimodal” instead of binary.

    This claim is not only incorrect but incoherent, as I explain in detail in a recent Commentary for the Archives of Sexual Behavior (RIGHT).

    Of the letter’s 38 signatories, 23 (~60%) included their pronouns, and 5 (~13%) used “nonbinary” pronouns.

    See the letter, plus list of signatories, here.

    People – academics mostly – who can’t tell the difference between basic biological sex and sexual characteristics and stereotypes. Or at least pretend they can’t tell the difference for ideological reasons….

  • In Rotherham

  • The turd polisher

    Jolyon Maugham’s Good Law Project lost their appeal in the High Court last week against the EHRC’s single-sex guidance. That’s not how they tell it, though. Jolyon claims that the ruling means that Equalities minister Bridget Phillipson must reject guidance submitted by the EHRC on single-sex spaces.

    Some lawyers have had enough of his nonsense:

    Lawyers, academics and activists have turned on the Good Law Project, accusing it of “selling hope” through fundraising to fight for transgender rights, despite being repeatedly defeated in court.

    In a letter to Bridget Phillipson, the equalities minister, more than 30 barristers and legal academics accused the project, a non-profit campaign organisation, of publishing “egregiously false” claims about a High Court ruling on single-sex spaces last week.…

    Jolyon Maugham, the founder and executive director of the Good Law Project, said after the judgment that “the judiciary can’t be trusted always” in a reaction that critics have dubbed “Trumpian”.

    The project claimed the ruling meant that Phillipson must reject guidance submitted by the EHRC on single-sex spaces, and started a fundraiser that has brought in tens of thousands of pounds to appeal.

    Separately, it has crowdfunded more than £150,000 for its “fighting fund for trans rights”.

    In their letter to Phillipson, the lawyers and academics said GLP had made inaccurate conclusions about the ruling, specifically in claiming “the High Court makes clear that service providers are not obliged to exclude trans people from gendered spaces and services”.

    The lawyers said: “Nowhere in his judgment did Swift J conclude that ‘service providers are not obliged to exclude trans people from gendered spaces and services’. The phrase ‘gendered spaces’ is absent from the judgment and has no legal meaning.”

    The project also claimed the court had said it was “not true” that allowing a woman-only space to be accessed by biological women and transgender women was “very likely to amount to unlawful sex discrimination”. The lawyers’ letter said: “The Good Law Project’s assertion to the contrary is straightforwardly false.”…

    It added: “We are aware of no other organisation that has ever published such egregiously false material about the judgment in a case that it has lost.”

    Some of those supportive of the project’s aims have also started to question it.

    Posting on a popular pro-transgender forum, one user said: “Maugham always pretends he’s had some sort of win even when he has unambiguously and comprehensively lost. He did the same with his Brexit cases. I’m fed up of this turd polisher claiming he does so much for us.”

    Letter here.

    As it’s to Phillipson, nothing will be done. It’ll sit in her in-tray, gathering dust

  • The Witching Hour

    From the LensCulture Art Photography Awards 2026 – 3rd place – images from Anastasia Sierra:

    My images follow the logic of my dreams, where we are trapped in a strange colorful world, playing a never ending game of hide and seek in a labyrinth of love, care and fears, pushing against its walls, with no way to escape but wake up.

    [Photos © Anastasia Sierra]