Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

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  • The need for new counterextremist laws

    From the Times:

    The Home Office has been accused of allowing Islamists and fascists to glorify terrorism against Jews because it has repeatedly ignored recommendations for new counterextremist laws. 

    Dame Sara Khan, the government’s former counterextremism commissioner, said new legislation was needed more than ever before to close gaps in the law.….

    The aftermath of the October 7 attacks on Israel has seen numerous examples of pro-Palestine protesters glorifying Hamas without facing punishment. Among acts that have gone unpunished during pro-Palestine rallies include chants of “I love the 7th of October” and “I like any organisation that starts with H”. 

    In December a group of pro-Palestine protesters were left unpunished when they chanted in Arabic to disguise their support for Hamas. They chanted “Yalla yalla muqawama,” translated as “resistance” and which is what the “M” stands for in Hamas. 

    Khan also pointed to the images of gliding parachutes that have been seen on pro-Palestine marches; triangle hand-sign gestures that represent the downward-pointing red triangle used in Hamas videos to mark Israeli military targets before they are attacked and also “endless placards with antisemitic imagery and tropes”. 

    She warned these symbols and slogans had been normalised through the “veil of legitimate protest”.

    Urging the government to finally act on her warnings and recommendations, Khan said: “My request is to please go back and look at those gaps in legislation and do something about it because why is it okay for extremist groups to act with impunity? What does it say about our country?

    “Other western democracies have shown there is a way of dealing with this issue as a democracy, there’s no reason why we should be allowing extremists, fascists and others to operate freely with impunity.

    “There was a very deliberate reason why I chose to call the report ‘operating with impunity’ — to send a clear message to the government that you are choosing, under your watch, to allow extremists to operate freely in this country. It is the government’s job to act. 

    “A lot of extremists — Islamists and Neo Nazis alike — are targeting Jews and Muslims and councillors and all sorts of people in our society because of their political or religious beliefs.

    But the problem isn’t Islamists and neo-Nazis, or Islamists and fascists – it’s Islamists and the left. And not even the hard left any more….

  • The Reform candidate in Bootle

    It’s not just the Greens. Reform too. From the Jewish News:

    Jay Leslie Cooper, who won a seat in the Bootle West ward of Sefton council, was previously revealed by the Liverpool Echo to have said on Facebook last year about Adolf Hitler that “I don’t agree with him murdering innocent people. But the Hallocaust [sic] is a hoax. There wasn’t [sic] even 6 million Jews in Europe at the time. Propaganda.”

    Previously Cooper shared video content on social media promoting conspiracy theories about the 9/11 attack, as well as describing the July 2024 Southport terror attack as “three young girls in Southport slaughtered by the hands of Labour.”

    Two weeks ago the Echo approached Reform UK for comment, and was told that the party was “looking into the allegations”. At the time, representatives from Labour told the Liverpool paper that “It’s an insult to the people of Sefton that Farage and Reform put people like this forward to stand in the first place and a total dereliction of duty that he hasn’t condemned them nor pulled his support from them.”

    But Reform did nothing.

    Disturbingly, despite the revelations Cooper was in fact the only Reform UK candidate elected in the ward, outpacing two other candidates from the party, as well as one from Labour, to win the third seat in the area.

  • The Lambeth Green

  • Burngreave, Sheffield

  • Mayor of Hackney

    Just beamed down…

    Was the victory due to the super-high environmental awareness in Hackney? Or was it perhaps, given the borough’s high Muslim representation. more about the new-found antisemitism driving the Green Party now?

  • Stigmatising consensual adult sexual expression

    From the Telegraph:

    An Arts Council-funded magazine cancelled a poet because she was critical of pornography, legal documents have revealed.

    Abigail Ottley’s poem was accepted by the Aftershock Review, a literary magazine funded by Arts Council England, but later withdrawn by editors with no explanation.

    The poet, who is in her 70s, has now applied for a judicial review of the Arts Council’s handling of her complaint.

    Legal documents revealed the poet was rejected because she was not “sex-positive” about “sissy porn” and “cross-dressing”.

    Ms Ottley, a survivor of rape and abuse, had written a confessional essay about the alleged proclivities of her “cross-dressing” former husband, whom she described as secretly selling and starring in “sissy porn”.

    This is a form of pornography featuring men who are submissive and “feminine”. It has been linked in public discourse to transgenderism, which Ms Ottley is also critical of.

    In the essay, which was published on her Facebook profile, she wrote: “This diagnosis [of chronic fatigue syndrome] came just before my discovery that my then husband was a compulsive and obsessional cross-dresser and had been living a whole double life making, selling and starring in what I now know to be called sissy porn.”

    The Arts Council said the poem was not published because Ms Ottley’s writings were “perceived as stigmatising consensual adult sexual expression” and “reinforcing sexual shame”.

    This was said to contravene the Aftershock Review’s policies and its ethos as a “sex-positive publication committed to inclusive representation”.

    It read: “Aftershock Review decided not to publish your client’s poem because of your client’s post on 11 October 2025 on the social media platform X. It contained references to alleged sexual practices of your client’s ex-husband which Aftershock Review regarded as capable of being ‘perceived as stigmatising consensual adult sexual expression’.”

    Perhaps there are some adult sexual expressions that could do with some stigmatising. Besides, she – Abigail Ottley – wasn’t consensual. She clearly hated it. Doesn’t she count?

    Ms Ottley, who lives in Penzance, Cornwall, told The Telegraph: “I find it difficult to adequately express how distressed and angry I feel about the implicit expectation that I should positively affirm the sexual proclivities of a man who destroyed our marriage.

    “I am now denied the right to speak out on the subject of my experience. It is unfair and intolerable. I still can’t really believe that my work was withdrawn because of my failure to be properly ‘sex positive’.

    “It feels like the silencing and victim-blaming which I experienced as a teenage girl. Have we not, even now, learned better?”

    Apparently not. Men must not be criticised for their little perversions – especially under the strict Arts Council-mandated ideological controls.

  • Tories in London

    Well then. Not all Reform and the Greens.

  • Working through the night by oil lamp

    Dickensian-style labour in the great socialist nation. From the Daily NK:

    Wig and eyelash assembly work has taken off as a cottage industry in Chongjin, North Korea’s third-largest city, as intensifying market controls and rising inflation leave North Korean people with few other ways to earn income.

    “Wig and eyelash contract assembly has until now been carried out mainly in detention facilities and factory units, but since late last year, trading companies have been negotiating higher per-unit rates with Chinese partners and expanding the scale of their operations, so work is now flowing into ordinary private homes as well,” a source in North Hamgyong province told Daily NK on Thursday.

    The source described scenes now common across Chongjin: “These days, it has become a familiar sight to see people working through the night by oil lamp in dim rooms with unreliable electricity, making wigs and eyelashes. Because it has become impossible to make a living through market trading, people are flooding into wig and eyelash assembly work, however physically demanding it may be, because at least you get paid for what you produce.”…

    “You can feed your family by making eyelashes, so people work through the night, and even children help with the assembly work after they come home from school,” the source said. “Among people, there is a saying going around: ‘Every single strand helps keep us alive.’”…

    The finished wigs and eyelashes are shipped to China, where they are relabeled as Chinese-made products and exported to global markets. North Korean labor, paid a fraction of what workers elsewhere would earn, effectively underpins the bottom of an international supply chain.

    According to data from China’s General Administration of Customs, wigs and eyelashes account for well over half of all North Korean exports to China, making them by far the country’s leading export commodity. Because neither product appears on the list of goods banned under U.N. Security Council sanctions against North Korea, Pyongyang treats the sector as a strategic export priority.

    Disputes over per-unit pay rates between North Korean trading companies and their Chinese counterparts have persisted, but the arrangement is sustained by a convergence of interests: North Korea urgently needs foreign currency, and Chinese buyers need low-cost processing. The source suggested the sector will remain North Korea’s dominant export to China for the foreseeable future.

    South Korea has Samsung, Hyundai, K-Pop; North Korea sells wigs and eyelashes assembled by families working through the night by oil lamp.

  • Inconvenient obstacles to an ideological narrative

    Equally infuriating is the way harrowing stories such as this one from detransitioners were suppressed because their stories might “harm” the trans community. Young people who regretted irreversible medical damage were treated not as victims deserving compassion, but as inconvenient obstacles to an ideological narrative.

    “She then told my mom that if I matured through male puberty, the prejudice and worsening mental health would be so crushing that around 60 percent of kids in my position would choose to kill themselves rather than live that way. Since then, my mom and I have discussed that appointment at length, and she still remembers that warning. It’s still so emotional for her that she rarely talks about it. My mom had watched me struggle for years—coming home from school in tears, and withdrawing more and more into myself. And here was a professional, in a clinical setting, telling her that the alternative to medical transition was her child’s death. My mom says she was so ultra-focused on the suicide risk that it became her top concern: She just wanted to keep me alive.”

    Original article here.

  • Echoes of the 1930s

    An interesting post from Adam Wagner:

    One of the reasons why looking back to the 1930s might be useful is that whilst the political climate is very different now, some of the questions our society urgently has to answer are similar, as are the core British values which can guide us in answering them.

    The issue I will focus on in this post is what powers public authorities have to limit public protests – and, perhaps even more importantly, why they have those powers and what should principles should be applied in deciding whether to exercise them.…