Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

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  • Open University pays out

    We've been here before with Jo Phoenix, after she won her case against the Open University for unfair dismissal after a campaign of harassment against her for her "transphobic" – ie sex realist – views.

    And here we go again:

    A law lecturer who was sacked by the Open University after expressing gender-critical beliefs has been handed a payout from the institution.

    Dr Almut Gadow was dismissed for gross misconduct in November 2022 after she criticised changes to the curriculum based on gender identity in an online forum.

    She claimed the university was introducing requirements to “indoctrinate students in gender identity theory”.

    The lecturer, who taught law at the university for almost a decade, claimed she had raised concerns about new teaching requirements, including making students use offenders’ preferred pronouns.

    She took the university to an employment tribunal alleging she was “harassed, discriminated against, and unfairly dismissed because I reject gender ideology and believe in academic freedom”.

    The Open University has now settled with Dr Gadow before a hearing was scheduled to take place later this month, The Telegraph has learnt.

    The OU were all gung-ho and ready for the fight, but now, suddenly,….they're not.

    It amounts to an about-turn for the university, which previously told The Telegraph it would “vigorously defend” itself before a judge.

    The institution also accused the academic of making “spurious allegations” about the circumstances surrounding her dismissal and said it looked forward to presenting its own version of events at an employment tribunal.

    In a statement, Dr Gadow accused the university of agreeing “to pay me an undisclosable amount of money to avoid a public airing of the facts”.

    “After long claiming it could not wait for the truth to come out in court, that it would fight this case ‘vigorously’ and ‘robustly’ all the way, the OU [Open University] – while making no admission as to liability – has resolved the matter by way of payment of an undisclosable sum of money.

    “Why, the OU faithful will be asking, has the university decided to pay me an undisclosable amount of money to avoid a public airing of the facts, if what I said was not true?”

    In a statement provided to Times Higher Education in 2023, the Open University said: “Since being dismissed, Almut Gadow has made a series of offensive and spurious allegations online which we reject in the strongest of terms. We welcome the opportunity the tribunal hearing provides to present our evidence about the facts of this case”.

    And what were these "offensive and spurious allegations"?

    Dr Gadow had alleged that the university’s equality, diversion and inclusion (EDI) department announced plans to “incorporate its political ideologies” across the curriculum in the 2021-22 academic year.

    She claimed she voiced concerns that a criminal lawyer’s role “is to present facts” and that “sex is a relevant fact for offences involving perpetrators’ and/or victims’ bodies”.

    The academic also argued that “no offender should be allowed to dictate the language of his case in a way which masks relevant facts”.

    Dr Gadow said she was told that her posts on the online staff forum amounted to “serious insubordination” because she had been told it was not the place for such discussions.

    She was informed by the university that her persistence in posting comments on issues relating to gender identity, paedophilia, and sex offending amounted to “serious bullying and harassment”.

    The content of several of her posts was a breach of the university’s transgender staff policy because they may “create an environment in the forum that isn’t inclusive, trans-friendly, or respectful”, Dr Gadow was also told.

    In a statement following the settlement from the Open University, Dr Gadow claimed her experience illustrated that EDI policies at universities often place undue pressure on staff and teaching.

    “Much needs to be corrected in this area, where EDIdeology dictates the content of OU teaching at the expense of academic freedom. My case has highlighted the extent to which EDI-fied and ‘liberated’ curricula violate not only the university’s obligations to uphold academic freedom but the human rights of its members,” she said.

    It would perhaps be too much to suggest that they realised she was right. More likely, they decided they didn't want their dirty washing aired in public.

  • The Kremlin’s most useful idiot

    Dominic Lawson in the Sunday Times:

    Trump truly is the Kremlin’s most useful idiot.

    In fact, it is a genuine attraction to Putin’s exercise of unbounded brute power that makes Trump roll over to have his tummy tickled by the poisoner in the Kremlin. There is no need to seek a reason based on rumours of secretly filmed bizarre sexual antics in 1980s Moscow. When Putin sent his tanks trundling towards Kyiv three years ago next week, Trump was overcome with admiration for this supposedly decisive attempt to decapitate a nation on the pretext of protecting its Russian-speaking population: “This is genius.”

    Now, even though it has been an abject failure (leave aside the cost in human lives and families destroyed), Trump declared last week that in this conflict “Russia hold the cards”. Actually, Putin, with a weak hand, not least economically, is being dealt aces by Trump.

    Many Republicans swallow this astonishing debasement of their country’s reputation, without visibly choking, on the grounds that it is necessary to concentrate US firepower on an expansionist communist China — above all to deter it from a move on Taiwan. If so, they will be humiliated again by Trump, who, to be fair, is characteristically transparent. During the election campaign he declared: “I want China to do great. I love China.” But: “You know, Taiwan, they stole our business”— he meant microchip production. And Trump attacked the vibrant Chinese democracy because it doesn’t “pay us for protection”. As for Xi Jinping: “He’s a brilliant guy. He controls 1.4 billion people with an iron fist.” Trump had been entranced when the Communist Party ended term limits for the presidency, allowing Xi to rule indefinitely. “He’s now president for life. And look, he was able to do that. I think that’s great. Maybe we’ll have to give it a shot someday.” Watch this space.

  • Chairman Trump

    Chairman Mao and Donald Trump: both agents of chaos. Orville Schell at the Daily NK makes the unlikely comparison:

    When US President Donald Trump’s factotum, J.D. Vance, held forth on Europe’s “threat from within” at the recent Munich Security Conference, his audience was left struggling to make sense of America’s confounding new approach to foreign policy. Chinese President Xi Jinping, for his part, has been relatively silent since Trump’s return to the White House – but that doesn’t mean he is any less vexed by what it portends. Nor could he have been reassured by Trump’s brazen response to a question last October about what he would do if Xi blockaded Taiwan: “Xi knows I’m fucking crazy!”

    The Senate Majority Whip, John Barrasso, put it more decorously: “President Trump clearly ran for office to be a disrupter, and he’s going to continue to do that.” He is not wrong. In the first ten days of his second administration, Trump signed more than 50 executive orders; offered all federal workers a buyout; attempted to freeze funding that had already been allocated by Congress; threatened tariffs against numerous countries; and rattled allies with endless other insulting diktats.

    But there is a precedent for Trump’s political blitzkrieg: Mao Zedong. While Mao, who launched China’s violent Cultural Revolution, and Trump share little in the way of geography, ideology, or hairstyle, they can both be described as agents of insurrection….

    Mao’s abiding belief in the power of resistance led him to celebrate conflict. “Without destruction, there can be no construction” (不破不立), he proclaimed. Another vaunted slogan of the time declared: “World in great disorder: excellent situation!” (天下大乱形势大好). This impulse to disrupt or “overturn” (翻身) China’s class structure proved massively destructive. But Mao justified the resulting violence and upheaval as essential elements of “making revolution” (搞革命革命) and building a “New China.”

    The Trump administration has an equally voracious appetite for disruption and chaos. Palantir CEO Alex Karp, whose co-founder Peter Thiel is also a Trump acolyte, recently described the new president’s overhaul of the United States government as a “revolution” in which “some people will get their heads cut off.” And this revolution’s executioner-in-chief would appear to be the world’s richest person, Elon Musk.

    Despite obvious differences, Musk is more than a little reminiscent of Kuai Dafu, who was deputized by Mao himself to lead Tsinghua University’s Red Guard movement. Kuai not only brought chaos to his campus, but led 5,000 fellow Red Guards into Tiananmen Square shouting slogans against Liu and Deng, before attempting to lay siege to the nearby leadership compound, Zhongnanhai – much as Trump’s own version of the Red Guards did at the US Capitol in 2021….

    Trump may lack Mao’s skills as a writer and theorist, but he possesses the same animal instinct to confound opponents and maintain authority by being unpredictable to the point of madness. Mao, who would have welcomed the catastrophe now unfolding in America, must be looking down from his Marxist-Leninist heaven with a smile, as the East wind may finally be prevailing over the West wind – a dream for which he had long hoped.

    Lovely. America's very own Cultural Revolution currently kicking off. With Make America Great Again perhaps as the new Great Leap Forward? Though I doubt even Trump could aspire to Mao's 30 to 40 million or so deaths. Still, early days…

  • Single-sex spaces

    Baroness Falkner of Margravine to the rescue. Watchdog tells NHS Fife to provide single-sex changing rooms:

    ​A top UK human rights body has written to “remind” an NHS board at the centre of a single-sex spaces row that changing rooms must include separate facilities for men and women.

    Baroness Falkner of Margravine, chairwoman of the ​Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), has intervened in the legal battle involving NHS Fife over the use of female changing facilities by a transgender doctor….

    Falkner has written to NHS Fife and Scottish ministers to reiterate their duty to “have an accurate understanding of the operation of the Equality Act as it relates to the provision of single-sex services and spaces”.

    In a statement, Falkner said the letter highlighted obligations under the Workplace Regulations (Health, Safety and Welfare) of 1992 which state that changing facilities will not be suitable “unless they include separate facilities for, or separate use of facilities by, men and women where necessary for reasons of propriety”.

    A separate letter has also been sent to the Scottish government.

    The human rights body revealed it has requested a meeting with Neil Gray, the health secretary, to discuss a forthcoming “guide to transitioning” document which insists transgender staff must be allowed to use their “preferred facilities” including changing rooms and lavatories unless there is a particular “case by case” reason.

    The guidance suggests it could be unlawful to prevent a transgender person from using the lavatories or changing facilities of their chosen gender.

    ​Helen Joyce, director of advocacy at human rights charity Sex Matters, said it had warned SNP ministers earlier this week that the guide “misrepresented the Equality Act and was legally wrong”.

    ​“It was extraordinary to then see the Scottish first minister stand up in Holyrood on Thursday and refer to the guidance as if these flaws did not exist,” she said.

    “The EHRC’s speedy intervention is a clear sign that in defending this error-strewn guidance, John Swinney was committing as serious an error of judgment as when his health minister, Neil Gray, said that the leadership of NHS Fife had his ‘full confidence’.​”

    Having to tell the Scots where they've got it wrong. It's becoming quite an industry.

  • Inspirational mums

    The BBC's obsession with drag queens and transvestites plumbs new depths. Jo Bartosch at Spiked:

    CBeebies, the BBC’s platform for pre-school children, has run a bizarre puff piece lionising two transvestite prostitutes.

    Ahead of this year’s International Women’s Day, CBeebies’ staff saw fit to include the late Ray ‘Sylvia’ Rivera and Marsha P Johnson in a list of ‘Inspirational Mums’ – alongside figures like poet Maya Angelou and Irena Sendler, the Polish heroine who rescued thousands of Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto. Today, no BBC list of high-achieving women would be complete without some drag queens, and so Johnson and Rivera are lauded for supposedly providing ‘a home, food, clothing and a sense of family to many LGBTQ+ kids made homeless by their biological families’.

    But Rivera and Johnson were not only childless men, and thus not ‘mothers’ in any sense. They were also the kind of men that no loving parent would leave a child with. They were prostitutes known to be involved with the New York mob….

    When alive, Johnson and Rivera were clear that they understood themselves to be gay men who cross-dressed and sold sex. Neither had easy lives, but this does not excuse what they allowed to happen to the vulnerable young people who found themselves at STAR House. The idea that these men were maternal figures can only make sense to the sort of fool who thinks Hamas only gets a bad rep because of ‘Islamophobia’ – in other words, your average BBC staffer….

    The BBC long ago abandoned the Reithian values of educating, informing and entertaining. Everything the BBC does now comes with a political agenda, whether the endless stream of BBC News puff pieces about drag queens, or the tiresome attempts to normalise cross-dressing men in every daytime TV storyline. Yet this CBeebies incident marks a bizarre new low. When the BBC is directing trans propaganda at children, recasting transvestite prostitutes as loving mothers, it is waving a womanly willy in the face of every licence-fee payer.

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  • The fish vendor

    Augusta, Georgia, 1903. "A Southern fish vender."

    image from www.shorpy.com
    [Photo: Shorpy/Detroit Photographic Company]

  • America just switched sides

    Francis Fukuyama at Quillette:

    Even though anyone with eyes could see this coming, Donald Trump’s recent moves with regard to Ukraine and Russia come as a huge blow. We are in the midst of a global fight between Western liberal democracy and authoritarian government, and in this fight, the United States has just switched sides and signed up with the authoritarian camp.

    What Trump has said over the past few days about Ukraine and Russia defies belief. He has accused Ukraine of having started the war by not preemptively surrendering to Russian territorial demands; he has said that Ukraine is not a democracy; and he has said that Ukrainians were wrong to resist Russian aggression. These ideas are likely not ones he thought up himself, but come straight from the mouth of Vladimir Putin, a man Trump has shown great admiration for. Meeting in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday, the United States started a direct negotiation with Moscow that excludes both Ukraine and the Europeans, and has surrendered in advance two critical bargaining chips: acceptance of Russian territorial gains to date, and a commitment not to let Ukraine enter NATO. In return, Putin has not made a single concession….

    Any peace agreement “negotiated” by the Trump administration and Russia now will not bring peace. There may be a ceasefire for a while, but the Russians will rearm and reopen the war once they re-equip themselves. They have no reason to honour existing ceasefire lines, but will want to reabsorb the whole of Ukraine at the right time.

    Less noticed in the current furor is the policy announced by Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth to cut the U.S. defence budget by 8 percent a year for the next five years. This is the opposite of what the United States should be doing. Down the road there will be new Russian threats to every country on its periphery—Georgia, Moldova, the Baltic states, and Poland. The United States does not have to formally pull out of the NATO alliance; Trump has already signalled clearly that he will not honour the Article 5 commitment to mutual defence. America will be weakened both in terms of intention, and in terms of capacity to meet future great power threats….

    The United States under Donald Trump is not retreating into isolationism. It is actively joining the authoritarian camp, supporting right-wing authoritarians around the world…

  • A key to a greater victory

    Times must be hard for Hizbullah supporters after the comprehensive demolition of their beloved organisation by Israeli forces. Not to worry: everything's fine. Their definition of victory, after the destruction of their homes and the deaths of their leaders, just happens to be a bit different from ours.

    From MEMRI TV:

    Hizbullah-affiliated academic Sadek Al-Naboulsi stated in a February 18, 2025, interview on Tafasil on YouTube that Hizbullah has not been defeated in the war and remains “strong and active.” He explained that Hizbullah’s notion of victory differs from others, and they do not view the destruction of their homes or the deaths of their leaders as a defeat. On the contrary, Al-Naboulsi explained that the killing of Hizbullah's leaders is seen as a “key to the greater victory.” He emphasized that Hizbullah will not surrender its weapons as long as Israel exists. Al-Naboulsi also confirmed that weapons have continued to reach Hizbullah even after the fall of the Assad regime.

  • The Gaza film revisited

    More from David Collier:

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  • Body not Shiri Bibas

    Hamas plumb new depths:

    One of the bodies that were released to Israel from Hamas yesterday, belongs to an unidentified Gazan and not the 33-year-old mother of Ariel and Kfir Bibas, the Israel Defense Forces said on Friday morning.

    The Israeli National Institute of Forensic Medicine and the Israel Police identified two of the four redeemed bodies as Ariel and Kfir, whom terrorists “brutally murdered” in captivity in November 2023, the Israeli military said. At that time, the boys would have been ages 4 and 10 months, respectively.

    “This is a violation of utmost severity by the Hamas terrorist organization, which is obligated under the agreement to return four deceased hostages,” the IDF said. “We demand that Hamas return Shiri home along with all our hostages.”

    Danny Danon, the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, stated that “there are no words that can describe such an atrocity.”

    Hamas “continues to violate every basic moral value,” Danon said, noting that the terror organization “returned an unidentified body, as if it were a worthless shipment.”

    “This is a new low, an evil and cruelty with no parallel,” he added….

    The Jewish Federations of North America stated that it is “appalled, outraged and disgusted by Hamas’s cruel and deceitful psychological warfare against the Bibas family, the State of Israel and the Jewish people.”

    “Not only did these terrorists kidnap Kfir and Ariel Bibas, two young children—aged just nine months and four years—but forensic evidence shows that they brutally murdered them roughly a month into their captivity,” the Federation stated. “Further, they lied about returning the body of their mother, Shiri, adding to the immense pain of the family. In case it was not yet clear to anyone, Hamas cannot be allowed to remain in power.”

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