Mick Hartley

From Jonathan Sacerdoti in the Spectator:

Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, has announced that the country’s temporary leadership council has approved the suspension of attacks against neighbouring countries unless those countries launch attacks on Iran themselves. He said that the council decided the day before that Iran will stop attacking surrounding states unless attacks on Iran originate from those territories. The statement was delivered publicly as the war in the region continues to intensify, and while Iran continues to launch attacks in the region in response to the US-Israeli strikes on the Islamic Republic.

That may be making a virtue out a necessity: they simply don’t have the missiles any more. Or it may be that they’ve realised what a disastrous decision that was. Instead of scaring off the Arab states, they’ve pushed them into the US/Israeli camp.

The Iranian attacks on Gulf and Arab countries have reinforced the alignment between those states, Israel and the United States. Israeli planes and other defence mechanisms have actively been protecting Arab countries – something once unimaginable.

This dynamic represents a real-world demonstration of a strategic idea pursued for years by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Donald Trump through the Abraham Accords. The central concept was that shared security threats from the Iranian regime would gradually produce deeper cooperation between Israel and Arab states. The events of the past week show that this logic works in practice. These Arab states did not distance themselves from Israel. The Islamic Republic attacks strengthened their alignment with Israel and the United States.

Meanwhile Israel is continuing its attacks on Hezbollah, potentially liberating Lebanon from the malign influence of its Iranian proxy.

This could be huge…

From the Telegraph:

Sir Keir Starmer has “ended up in the wrong place” on trans issues, Dame Emily Thornberry has said.

The senior Labour MP, who was Sir Keir’s shadow attorney general before the general election, claimed the party had not been “following our hearts” when it came to trans people.

The Prime Minister’s public position on trans issues has significantly changed since he became leader of the Labour Party in 2020, backtracking last year on his previous stance that “trans women are women”.

Dame Emily blamed Morgan McSweeney, the Prime Minister’s former chief of staff who left Downing Street last month, for “trying to push” the Labour Party into political positions that did not come “naturally” to MPs.

She told the BBC’s Political Thinking podcast: “I think we’ve ended up in the wrong place on trans and I think we’ve ended up treading very self-consciously and not ending up following our hearts.”

She has a point. Quite clearly Labour is not happy with the Supreme Court ruling on single-sex spaces. Starmer is not happy back-tracking on his “trans women are women” position. Look what happened to Rosie Duffield, the one woman in Labour who publicly stated that people can’t change sex: she was snubbed by Starmer and was forced out of the party.

She added: “Trans people are on the margins, they are vulnerable. If the Labour Party doesn’t look after trans people, what are we about?”

There you go. She actually believes that. She and most of the Labour Party. And the unions. And the BBC, come to that. They’re still stuck there, while the world moves on.

In Batley:

Added: 14 x 11 = 144? Non-binary maths, perhaps. [h/t Alan]

From Facebook:

But how do they know she was a woman? They couldn’t ask for her pronouns since she was dead🤡🤣

— Sophie Robert 🎗️🧡 (@SophieRobertRBX) March 4, 2026

Stephen Pollard in the Spectator reinforces the point made here yesterday – that the fight against Iran is our fight too:

It must be a comforting thought to those who oppose the military action against the Iranian regime that it is, to coin a phrase, a quarrel in a faraway country, between people of whom we know nothing. It’s not our fight and not our war, they argue.

But the arrests this morning of four people – one Iranian and three dual British-Iranian nationals – on suspicion of assisting a foreign intelligence service show how ludicrous such a view really is. (Six other men were also arrested on suspicion of assisting an offender.) Iran has been our fight – our concern – for decades, and not simply because of its plans for a nuclear weapon and its use of terrorist proxies to create instability across the Middle East. It is our fight for a far more direct reason: the Iranians have plotted and planned the assassination of British citizens, on British soil, for many years. As Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy put it this morning, after the arrests: ‘Iran is the biggest state sponsor of terrorism globally and sadly, that is in effect in our own society as well. Our intelligence services and counter-terrorism police have thwarted lots of action over the last few years.’…

Ken McCallum, the director general of MI5, has reported that Iran’s ‘aggressive intelligence services’ actively plan terrorist attacks on British soil. In 2023, the then security minister Tom Tugendhat told MPs how the police and security services had detected at least 15 ‘credible threats’ to kill or kidnap UK citizens and residents in 2022. Iran had been gathering information about Jews as ‘preparation for lethal operations’. Tugendhat cited IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps) member Mohammad Mehdi Mozayyani, who ‘worked to conduct a lethal operation against Iranian dissidents here in the United Kingdom’.

This has gone on for years. And yet no government – not the government of which Tugendhat was a member, nor the current Labour government – has done anything about it (Tugendhat should be exempted from criticism as one of the few ministers committed to real action, albeit that he was stymied at every turn). The IRGC remains a legal organisation, free to go about its business until the police and security services manage to interrupt its terror plots as, it seems, they have done today.

To describe this repeated refusal by governments of all stripes to proscribe the IRGC as an abrogation of the duty of protecting British citizens barely comes close to the scale of the failure.

But the IRGC is far from being the only issue. Tehran also operates a network of mosques, student bodies and other organisations. The fact the IRGC remains legal allows the likes of the Islamic Centre of England (ICE) to operate as a charity, despite being described in 2024 by the then chair of the Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee, Alicia Kearns, as the IRGC’s ‘London office’.…

It is worrying to consider what might come next here in the UK. This morning’s arrests show the reality of the domestic threat, which the security services have long believed is no less dangerous than that posed by Russian and Chinese agents. But when you combine the depth and reach of Iran’s proxy organisations here, the rise of Muslim sectarian politics and over two years of regular marches in support of Iran’s terror proxies – and, in recent days, demonstrations of explicit support for the Iranian regime – the ingredients are there for something deeply troubling.

Explicit support for the Iranian regime not just from Muslims here – like the Greens deputy leader Mothin Ali – but from many on the left.

UCL student union have now issued a statement to its trans students, apologising about the fact I gave a talk on free speech and women’s rights. Lolhttps://t.co/d1dQRAVUYn

— Connie Shaw (@_ConnieShaw) March 6, 2026

Here’s the cringe “message to our trans and non-binary community”.

We have and will continue to support students who feel impacted by the event. There are many routes you can use if you feel that you have been subjected to harassment or discrimination of any kind in relation to this event, and we encourage you to report any incidents so they can be dealt with promptly.

Take care.

“We have and will continue to support…” They can’t even write properly.

They’re like the cuckoo in the nest, the trans activists. Progressives, like the poor duped parent birds, are programed to respond positively to certain signals: complaints about discrimination against vulnerable minorities, hurt feelings, etc.. So they respond in what they see as the appropriate manner. The trans activists, meanwhile, kick the other groups – gays, feminists – out of the nest, claiming all the attention for themselves by making the most noise. And it works.

From the Times:

The team of Reza Pahlavi, the shah’s son, have urged President Trump to abandon his view of Venezuela as a model for Iran in an interview with The Times….

He has been stung by Trump’s references to the US military action to capture Nicolás Maduro and replace him with his deputy as a model for Iran, as this left most of the old regime in place.

Pahlavi’s team, based in Paris, called the Venezuela option a “lose-lose” for the US, and claimed it was impossible for a new leader to emerge within the country, as Trump said he would prefer. They spoke out after Trump told The New York Times that “what we did in Venezuela, I think, is the perfect, the perfect scenario”.

That, of course, is the worry. I’m agnostic as to whether Pahlavi might be a good choice as some kind of interim leader. Certainly a great many Iranians seem to support him – though not so many Kurds. But there’s every indication now that Trump just wants to settle on some Khamenei-light type figure, just as he settled on a Maduro-light figure in Venezuela. Given the power of the ruling cliques in Tehran, notably the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps., the IRGC, it’s almost certain that such a scenario would lead eventually to the same Islamist hard-line rule that Khamenei represented. It would be a colossal betrayal of the Iranian people, and a huge missed opportunity.

Saeed Ghasseminejad, the director of the Iran Prosperity Project and a member of Pahlavi’s inner circle, said: “President Trump looks at the Venezuela model and obviously, for any stakeholder that wants to avoid chaos, you would prefer someone who is inside the regime and can control the security forces. They found someone like that in Venezuela. But the situation in Iran is quite different.

“First, Venezuela is a leftist dictatorship. This [Iran] is an apocalyptic regime. They believe their task is to lay the groundwork for the reappearance of the ‘Hidden Imam’ who will initiate the end-of-time battle. So it’s very difficult to imagine that they will decide to be ‘normal dictators’ from now on and are not going to do anything outside the country. That’s not in their DNA.”

It’s the old red-green alliance again – the hard left and the Islamists. Jawad Iqbal in the Times – Tears for ayatollah are a troubling sign in British cities:

How is anyone to make sense of the outbreak of grief at some UK mosques and universities after the death of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei? While Iranians celebrate the death of a tyrant, a small minority in this country choose to hail Khamenei as a martyr. It is both unfathomable and deplorable….

The sympathy for Iran’s theocracy reveals a troubling mindset, shared by many on the so-called progressive left, that defines itself primarily through opposition to western motives and actions. Is there any explanation for this praise for Khamenei? Well, he was a powerful religious authority and spiritual guide for many millions of Shia Muslims worldwide. Marking the passing of a major religious figure by those of the same faith is natural enough — but context is everything. He was also the merciless head of a regime that routinely butchered its own people, denied women the most basic rights and freedoms, jailed political opponents and sponsored terrorism.

Green for Islam – but also green for, well, the Greens. According to the latest opinion polls they now command the support of an astonishing 21% of the electorate after their victory at the Gorton and Denton by-election. Their leader, Zack Polanski, seems little better than a grifter who’ll say anything for his fifteen minutes of fame, while deputy leader Mothin Ali is an Islamist who supports the Iranian regime and whose wife covers her face with a niqab. That’s what is unfathomable and deplorable. They don’t even pretend to care about the environment any more.

Patrick West in the Spectator – The real reason Greens are gaining ground – sees the new wave of supporters as, basically, political illiterates:

Ten years ago, this was the demographic who were being instructed in ultra-progressive dogma at school, or who were entering academia, where their skewered view of the world and fantastical take on the human condition became further entrenched. It was at university where they learnt about the evils of Western ‘civilisation’ – those contemptuous inverted commas being mandatory – the unconscious racism built into the minds of white people, and the unique European crime of colonisation, with Israel now standing as the epitome of that villainy.

Those school children and students of ten years ago, with their highly moralistic, Manichean politics and otherworldly theories on gender and race, are now the voters of today. They are also our first post-literate generation, a demographic which doesn’t read newspapers, which doesn’t read books willingly, who instead get their politics on their smartphones from emotive TikTok videos devoid of nuance, depth and context. This is the demographic with a reduced attention span that doesn’t even listen to radio bulletins or watch the news from reputed broadcasting organisations.

A generation which has been taught that all knowledge is relative has got what it wanted: news with no pretence at impartiality, propaganda masquerading as reportage from partisan activists and bad faith actors. All of this depthless and dubious content, delivered with breathless hyperbole, reinforces the notion that the world can be clearly divided into good and bad people and forces.

It’s also the generation that’s been led to believe that racism is the ultimate sin, and that Islamophobia is racism. That sees criticism of women wearing veils as “racist as fuck”.

I’m still hoping this is all a mid-term malaise as people express their frustrations with a useless Labour government, after years of useless Tory governments, but I’m not that confident any more.

Punchy intervention from ex-EHRC chair, Baroness Kishwer Falkner on the @NewStatesman letters page. Falkner says her experience of Bridget Phillipson, as Women and Equalities Minister, was "at best, disinterest and disengagement". https://t.co/UPHX4mTMRW pic.twitter.com/yK4s8U50qA

— Hannah Barnes (@hannahsbee) March 5, 2026