Mick Hartley

John McInally demolished this ludicrous reactionary bollocks in the Morning Star last year. pic.twitter.com/OD1R7VyOGH

— TAFKAMacM (@TAFKAMacM) March 30, 2025

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You don't have to buy the whole Marxist schtick to get this.

In full:

This comes as no surprise. From the Telegraph:

Tim Davie, the BBC’s director general, refused anti-Semitism training for the broadcaster, the Government’s adviser on anti-Jewish hatred has revealed.

Lord Mann, Sir Keir Starmer’s independent adviser on anti-Semitism, said he had visited BBC bosses to offer training on three occasions since taking up his role in 2019.

However, he said senior figures, including Mr Davie himself, turned down his repeated offers despite growing fears of an anti-Semitism problem at the BBC.

In a strongly worded condemnation of the broadcaster, Lord Mann accused it of failing to take seriously allegations of anti-Semitism and alleged anti-Israel bias in its reporting, saying there was an “arrogance at the top”.

He called for senior executives of the news corporation to be sacked for signing off on a controversial documentary.

Titled Gaza: How To Survive A Warzone, it attempted to tell the story of children living in the Gaza Strip during the war between Israel and Hamas.

However, revelations that the narrator was the child of a Hamas government official in Gaza caused an uproar in February.

Hamas – which is a proscribed terrorist organisation in the UK – orchestrated and carried out the biggest atrocity against Jews since the Holocaust on October 7 2023.

An internal BBC review found “serious flaws” in the making of the documentary, which was pulled from iPlayer shortly after broadcast.

Referring to the scandal, Lord Mann said: “Heads should roll. And the heads that roll shouldn’t just be the little heads. You know that’s always the danger with organisations the size of the BBC. Oh hey, there’s something wrong, let’s get rid of a few of the people at the bottom. No, let’s get rid of some at the top, would be my view.

“Someone at the top should carry the can. It’s not acceptable and I’ve been in there several times, I’ve offered them training, they’ve never accepted it. I think there’s often an arrogance there.”

Also, from an interview in the Sunday Times today with Danny Cohen, former BBC director of Television:

For years after he left the BBC, Cohen was careful not to criticise his former employer publicly. The Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, changed this. “I didn’t feel I had a choice,” Cohen says, making clear that he is speaking in a personal capacity. “If I’d said nothing, I’d probably look back in ten years’ time and think I let myself and my community down by not speaking up.”

After the massacre the BBC did not describe the Hamas gunmen as terrorists. Then, last month, the broadcaster showed a documentary, Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone, about the conflict in the region. Hours after it went out it emerged that the 13-year-old boy who narrated it was the son of a minister in the Hamas government. The BBC subsequently removed the documentary from iPlayer.

“It’s been a disastrous moment for the BBC, and they’ve had to acknowledge very significant failures of journalism and oversight,” Cohen says. “Very senior people at the BBC saw the doc before it went out and didn’t ask enough questions.” He doesn’t name her, but he means Deborah Turness, the chief executive of BBC News. Cohen has been calling for an independent inquiry into the BBC’s coverage of the conflict.

“That is not an isolated moment — it’s an issue of systemic bias,” he argues, pointing to all the corrections — 80 in the first five months of the war — made by the BBC’s Arabic news channel after complaints of anti-Israeli bias. “The BBC continues to put defending the reputation of the BBC above transparency.”

Was it an issue when he was at the BBC? “I think there has always been a problem, but nothing on the scale it is now.”

Alice Sullivan – her of Sullivan Report fame, on the disastrous erasure of biological sex by UK bodies like the NHS and the Civil Service and the ONS – interviewed in the Telegraph:

“I’m optimistic. I think this review marks a watershed. It has taken a long time but I really do believe we are beyond the point where we can be silenced. It’s the beginning of the end for no debate.”

Wouldn’t that be nice? I can’t help suggesting that Donald Trump of all people may have had a part to play in changing the proverbial mood music surrounding gender issues.

“As a life-long Leftie, it feels uncomfortable to be put in the position of agreeing with Donald Trump. But the fact is that he is simply saying that there are two sexes and that this matters, for example in prisons and sports. If Donald Trump says that the earth is round, should Leftists claim it is flat just to avoid being on the same side as him? This kind of tribal thinking has been horribly damaging to the Left. The idiotic positions that the Democrats took on these issues helped to gift the election to Trump. Mainstream politicians of all stripes need to learn from this that denying observable facts about the world is dangerous.”

For years now Sullivan has refused to be silenced by gender militants who have bullied and threatened her online. Instead she has continued to focus on “biological truth” and has striven – not always successfully – to staunch the tide of “ideological capture”, which has seen LGBTQ+ networks within our key organisations mount successful, sustained campaigns to change the culture within them.

“As a result, an atmosphere of fear has been created making people scared to speak out against or even discuss issues surrounding gender,” she says. “Bad decisions have been made by management because they have erroneously assumed these highly vocal activists represent far greater numbers than they do.”

Yet she still insists on recording gender identity:

“Sex and gender identity are distinct characteristics and are not interchangeable,” has always been her message. “But unfortunately people in a great many organisations don’t understand data collection as a discipline and have been taking advice from other people who don’t understand it either; the result is a mess. We need – we have a responsibility – to record both sex and gender identity.”

But why? The whole notion of gender identity is deluded – it's not a thing: it's a creature invented by trans activists. And including questions about gender identity will surely only add to the confusion, and replicate the disaster of the ONS survey where people not understanding what they were being asked led to the absurd "finding" that there more trans people in areas of high immigrant population. Everyone knows their sex – even if some try to deny or obfuscate – but only people versed in gender ideology have any idea what "gender identity" is supposed to mean.

Ah well. It's a big step forward anyway…

 

 

Sydney, Australia – speaker at University of Technology Sydney

“Jews in particular should feel uncomfortable, and it’s our duty to make them feel uncomfortable”@JasonClareMP @smh @australian @dailytelegraph @2GB873 @SenSHenderson @SenPaterson @ECAJewry pic.twitter.com/hsDNbRm2KQ

— Menachem Vorchheimer (@MenachemV) March 26, 2025

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Whoops. Of course he meant to say Zionists….

Kathleen Stock interviewed in today's Sunday Times:

Kathleen Stock wants to speak to the students who once tried to get her sacked. The philosopher and writer, who resigned from the University of Sussex in 2021 after being accused of transphobia and harassed for her views on gender, was vindicated last week when her former employer was fined £585,000 for failing to uphold freedom of speech.

“I’d love to know what those protesting against me think now,” she says in her first interview since the ruling. “I wouldn’t shame them — I’d have a public conversation with them. Well, not the dicks who threatened me, but the girls with their banners — where are they now?”

Well yes. There haven't, as far as I'm aware, been any public renouncements by any Sussex Uni demonstrators now looking back with remorse at their youthful follies. But it's a lot easier to forgive the students than to forgive those hundred or so philosophy academics who signed a letter of protest accusing her of using her status to “further gender oppression”. How do they feel now? No wonder Stock's happy to be out of academia.

Stock now calls herself a “recovering academic” and makes her living from writing. What made her so sure in her opposition to gender self-ID? In part she says it was being a lesbian, which meant she knew biological sex mattered to sexual orientation, and that she felt immune to the “bewitching” power of gender nonconformity. But her background in philosophy played a role too. “I didn’t believe in the power of words utterly to change reality,” she says.

Universities were once bastions of free speech — how did they become places of censorship and moral cowardice? “Some disciplines in the humanities and social sciences became extremely ideological in the 1970s,” Stock replies. “When I was trying to raise the alarm about this to philosophers, I was stuck between the ideologues attacking me, and a bunch of others who thought, ‘Why are you wasting your time with this when it’s clearly stupid?’ But I could see it would have massive implications if we didn’t stop it.”

Stock emphasises this is not unique to Sussex: “I think there’s contempt in universities for ordinary people’s attitudes … on race, immigration or feminism.”

But she also sees signs this is improving on campuses, with academics setting up groups to promote free speech. The other side of the gender debate has “gone to ground”, she adds, a shift she attributes in part to the work of grassroots campaigners — Fair Play for Women, Sex Matters and Transgender Trend. 

Let's hope she's right. But Sussex University vice chancellor Sasha Roseneil is going all out to fight the OfS fine, so the message hasn't reached her yet. And no doubt she'll be receiving a lot of support from more of those brave academics.

We're back to the old conversion therapy controversy.

The overwhelming majority of children who come to believe they were "born in the wrong body" and want to transition to the other sex will, if left to go through a normal puberty, forget about their early delusions and go on to lead normal lives. Most will turn out to be gay. It would be a catastrophic mistake, then, to insist that these troubled teens should immediately be affirmed in their delusions and undergo serious and irreversible medical intervention. But that's what the conversion therapy ban, if applied to "trans" teens, would mean. It's a duplicitous attempt to co-opt the horror of those gay conversion therapies of earlier less enlightened times – now thankfully in the past – to a wholly different situation. 

And yes, it's Stonewall, as always, leading the charge again.

The new head of Stonewall has pledged to fight for a ban on conversion practices that includes “every member of the lesbian, gay, bi and trans community”, as he said that the progress of Labour’s bill may be exploited by those pursuing global attacks on LGBTQ+ rights.

With the UK government expected to publish draft legislation this spring, Simon Blake said: “It’s really important that a conversion practices bill covers all practices designed to try to change or correct somebody’s sexual or gender identity.”

It's not. It's really important that we don't have a conversion practices bill covering gender identity. It'd be disastrous. For a start, gender identity itself is a delusion: the gateway to the trans cult. It's also really important that Stonewall loses its pernicious influence on British public life, and just disappears.

Julie Bindel at the Spectator:

Stonewall was never much help in guiding employers and institutions on how to support lesbian or gay employees. The charity’s Diversity Champion Scheme seemed more focused at times on upholding gender ideology than properly helping gay and lesbians in the workplace.

I talk to young lesbians on a regular basis, having interviewed dozens of them for my forthcoming book. Even those sympathetic to gender ideology tell me the same story: they are branded as transphobic if they refer to themselves as lesbians. Instead, they are told to say ‘queer’ or ‘non-binary’. This erase of the word ‘lesbian’ is not in spite of Stonewall’s existence, it is because of Stonewall.

Stonewall has forgotten its founding purpose: to campaign for gay rights. The LGB Alliance was set up in 2019 to fill the gap left by Stonewall after it drank the gender kool aid. It’s time to let a new organisation take over. Stonewall must be consigned to history.

Andrew Roth in the Guardian on the common view of big-power politics and spheres of influence shared by Putin and Trump:

As JD Vance touched down in Greenland, the Trump administration received an unlikely endorsement for the US’s first potential territorial expansion since 1947: Vladimir Putin.

Speaking at an Arctic policy forum in the northern Russian city of Murmansk on Thursday, Putin presented a more comprehensive case than any US official yet for Donald Trump’s plan to annex Greenland, crafting a historical argument that sounded suspiciously convenient in terms of Russia’s own territorial designs on Ukraine.

The US’s plans to take control of Greenland “may surprise someone only at first glance, and it is a deep mistake to believe that this is some kind of extravagant talk by the new American administration,” Putin began. “Nothing of the sort.”

We take Ukraine, you take Greenland. And maybe Canada too. Why not? And the Panama Canal. It's how things used to be in the good old days when might was right, and big powerful countries could do what they want.

Then Putin moved on to Alaska, which was sold by the Russian empire to the US in 1867 in what has become a national case of seller’s remorse. “Let me remind you that by 1868, the purchase of Alaska was ridiculed in American newspapers,” Putin continued. Now, he said, the purchase under president Andrew Johnson had been vindicated.

In short, Putin concluded, get over it. Big countries have territorial ambitions. Deals for land and annexations are not just historical relics – they are a modern reality. And, rejecting generations of international norms not to take territory by force or through extortion, it is none of our business what they do over there.

“As for Greenland, this is an issue that concerns two specific states and has nothing to do with us,” Putin said, while adding that Russia would continue to defend its interests in the Arctic from “dangerous” powers such as Finland and Sweden.

Ha. "Dangerous" only in that they don't accept the Putin-Trump world view.

It does not take a Kremlinologist to understand why Putin has come out in support of Trump’s annexation plan. As US power recedes in Europe, the Kremlin is seizing its chance to establish its long-awaited “multipolar world” in which it holds dominion over a sphere of influence, particularly in Ukraine and Belarus. Putin has railed against US hegemony since his Munich speech of 2007, and he finally has a US president who is just as derisive of the postwar order as he is.

Putin’s mantra that countries should mind their own business dovetails closely with Trump’s transactional view of the world, as well as his deep suspicion of transnational organisations and alliances set up after the second world war….

But as US power recedes abroad, the White House has declared ambitions throughout the western hemisphere in a turn that some commentators have compared to the Monroe doctrine of 1823, under which the US proclaimed itself the protector of the hemisphere. And with each soundbite declaring that the US should take back the Panama canal or that Canada should become the 51st state, Trump will find an enthusiastic ally in the Kremlin who will see his jaded vision of a new world order reflected in another.

Janice Turner counts the cost of all the public money being spent on court cases and payments to those hounded by Stonewall-addled bureaucrats for their sex-realist views.

The waste runs to millions, and the bitter irony is we paid twice over. Because the reason policies were adopted that encouraged the victimisation of staff for beliefs shared by 99.999 per cent of humanity is that government departments, NHS trusts and police forces each paid £3,000 a year to join Stonewall’s diversity champions scheme. In 2022-23, 165 public bodies were members, a total cost of £530,482. But the bill doesn’t end there: the scheme required each body to write a lengthy submission, answer questionnaires and open its practices up to Stonewall scrutiny. Thousands more salaried hours.

Then, to improve their ranking, bodies were told to eliminate “mother” from maternity policies and create an LGBT staff group whose views on gender matters — and punishment of heretics who disagreed with them — should be treated as holy writ. Stonewall instructed employers they must allow workers to shower and undress in facilities that aligned with their gender identity, not their sex. This falsehood, which breaches Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992, is the wellspring of two ongoing cases where female nurses, five in Darlington and Sandie Peggie in Scotland, are fighting for their right to single-sex privacy. If both win, as is expected, that’s another £1 million in settlements and costs.

Civil servants whose primary duty is to uphold the rule of law were guided by activist groups whose “trainings” and “best practice” encourage them to “get ahead of the law”, ie to believe that the 2010 Equality Act, in which sex is a protected characteristic, is a dreary anachronism all righteous progressives ignore.

Yet these employment tribunals are small beer compared with the most egregious waste: the corruption of the Office for National Statistics. A loyal Stonewall diversity champions member until recently, the ONS ignored warnings that its 2021 census question that allowed people to self-identify their sex was confusing and unworkable. But the government’s chief statistician, Sir Ian Diamond, appeared to care less about data than that the question had an “overwhelmingly positive response from LGBTQ+ charities”. Now the ONS has been forced to admit that its sex and gender data is worthless.

What’s the bill here? The government paid the costs of Fair Play For Women who crowdfunded £110,000 for a judicial review; it used its top barrister Sir James Eadie and untold hours of ONS staff time; it commissioned a 200-page report by Professor Alice Sullivan (£200,000) to analyse the mess. But how do you put a price on ruining the integrity of a £900 million national census that feeds into every strand of policy?

Will these cases ever end? Even now, NHS trusts pay outside trainers £900 a session for staff “pronoun training”. The consequences of such brainwashing are evident in the case of Jennifer Melle, a Ugandan-born NHS nurse. Asked to deal with a catheter in the penis of a trans-identifying male paedophile under police guard, she referred to him as “mister” and he responded with vile racist abuse. Even so Melle was hauled in for the far worse crime of misgendering and is taking her case to an employment tribunal.

Yet a lawyer tells me that while previously senior managers preferred to lose a tribunal case than have a showdown with their vengeful LGBT staff network, times and the economy have changed. Gender ideology is creating big red numbers that show up on the bottom line.

It's surely the biggest con in modern history: mistaking a fetish for a civil rights movement. It's perverted not only institutions, but corrupted science itself. It's the new Lysenkoism.

Kim Jong Un posing for a commemorative photo with participants:

An unfortunate side-effect of being a semi-divine leader who can do no wrong is that no one will tell you about lapses in your personal hygiene. The women here, though they do their best to conceal their discomfort, are clearly affected by the inescapable odour.