Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

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  • Pandering to the bully

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  • Gender identity theory “largely a middle-class pursuit”

    The Sandie Peggie-NHS Fife tribunal hearing has revealed the class divide at heart of gender debate, according to Susan Dalgety in the Scotsman:

    The employment tribunal, which will continue into the summer because of NHS Fife’s inability to produce essential documents in time, has not only exposed the nebulous nature of gender identity theory – that a human being can change their sex through sheer will – but the ingrained class divide at the heart of the NHS that also characterises the debate around gender.

    Gender identity theory is largely a middle-class pursuit, a fake radicalism which doesn't bother its pretty little head with tackling the material causes of poverty and inequality. Instead, as feminist writer Sheila Jeffries argued in 2014, it is a social construct designed to maintain male dominance. And since its inception, the National Health Service has put the demands of the doctor class first before the needs of the largely working-class nursing and support staff.

    Former Labour MSP Jenny Marra, who attended the tribunal over several days, said the evidence reeked of class and entitlement. She observed: "Middle-class arrogant male doctor breaches nurse's boundaries is not a new story. But this time the doctor is facing down the nurse with the backing of politicians and illegal guidelines drawn up by public sector officials who have been hoodwinked into betraying reality and the many working-class women at the frontline of our public services.”

    So where will the working-class women who provide so much of our health and social care find support and help in their fight for their basic rights – such as single-sex changing rooms? Why, the trade union movement of course. Or will they?

    Not with Unison, that's for sure.

    In an ironic twist of fate, the UK’s largest union Unison held its national women’s conference in Edinburgh this week, and the first motion to be debated called for the Labour government to introduce self-ID, the process where someone can change their legal sex by filling in a form. “Trans women are women,” read the motion which also criticised women who campaign for female-only spaces as “reactionary”.

    Unison’s robustly male president Steve North (pronouns he/him) crowed on social media that not one delegate had spoken against the motion but, as is often the case with carefully stage-managed political conferences, the reality was rather different to that described by President North. Women who were prepared to debate the issue were so intimidated by the hostile atmosphere that they left the meeting, unable to face being called bigots by the very noisy supporters of the motion.

    As one delegate said: “The atmosphere was so toxic that even abstaining would have been noticed. Many of the delegates are working-class women in frontline public service jobs. Their fear of dissension reveals their very real fear of losing the protection of their union….

    It is not surprising that middle-class professionals, whether doctors, HR managers or even politicians, have found comfort in the simplistic politics of identity. How much easier it is to pin a trans ally badge on a set of scrubs or business suit than begin to tackle the centuries’ old structural issues that trap millions of women in low-paid jobs, poor housing and ill-health, often at risk of sexual violence and abuse.

    There is much about the gender debate that has left women aghast in recent years, from placing male rapists in female prisons to the scandal of the NHS mutilating young women’s bodies in the name of progress.

    But surely one of the greatest betrayals is a trade union whose membership is three-quarters female, ignoring the material reality of women’s lives in favour of a fanciful theory that sex can be cast off as easily as last season’s fashions.

  • Sharifeh Mohammadi

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    "…and now faces the ultimate injustice. Please share her story."

    More here:

    Sharifeh Mohammadi, a workers rights activist detained in Iran, has been resentenced to death on charges of baghy (armed rebellion).

    Mohammadi is a 45-year-old workers’ rights activist from Mianeh in Eastern Azerbaijan who resided in Rasht. She was arrested on 5 December 2023 and held in solitary confinement and denied access to phone calls and visits. According to reports, she was subjected to severe psychological and physical torture to extract forced confessions.

    The latest ruling sparked outrage as the Iran Human Rights (IHRNGO) condemns Mohammadi’s death sentence, calling it "a part of the Islamic Republic’s campaign of intimidation following the nationwide “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests.

  • Nowhere to go “free from harassment or male violence”

    This BBC report is such a depressing read – 'I quit running after being followed home by men'. A young woman in Wales speaks out about the sexual harassment she's had to endure out running:

    Ms Browne, 24, from Cardiff, said she was 11 when a man slowed his car down to tell her she "looked sexy".

    She had a "sinking feeling" that this would be what the rest of her life would be like.

    In 2017 she picked up running because she was at "rock bottom" after a boy sexually assaulted her.

    "That really affected me. I took time off school, I lost quite a lot of my hair from stress, and I didn't know what was wrong with me at the time, because I had a form of PTSD," she said.

    To improve her mental health, she went on her second ever run on a well-used road in the daytime.

    A car full of men in their 20s slowed down to drive alongside her and shouted at her to get in.

    "I just remember feeling utterly paralysed and sick," she said.

    "There was nowhere I could have gone, it was one road."

    Ms Browne was forced to run alongside them which she said was "humiliating".

    "That really put me off running," she said. "I just remember going home crying my eyes out."

    She said she felt there was "literally nowhere for me to go" where she would be "free from harassment or male violence".

    The list of male harassments goes on…and on.

    Ms Browne said when women are murdered or sexually assaulted they are portrayed as "isolated incidents" but "they've not just spawned out of nowhere".

    "It comes from a larger issue, which is behavioural and structural," she said. "They might be your friend, your brother, your family member."

    She said that while "the average day-to-day man does not hold the power to change an entire economic political system, everyday men do have the power to call each other out on their behaviour, reflect, and actually do something about it".

    Ms Browne said gender-based violence is an epidemic.

    A brave woman.

    I think – I hope – that it's better here in London. I see at least as many women running by themselves as men. But of course I don't really know. 

    No wonder so many young girls, appalled at the prospect of puberty, get seduced by the siren calls on social media to de-sex themselves.

  • An observant Muslim

    From the Telegraph:

    A police force reissued a mugshot of a convicted Islamic State (IS) terrorist after she complained she was not wearing a niqab in it.

    Farishta Jami, 36, was found guilty of terrorism offences on Thursday for planning to fly to Afghanistan to join IS.

    West Midlands Police initially released an image showing her full face and hair – but then published a second that showed only her eyes beneath a navy blue niqab.

    Matthew Brook KC, Jami’s barrister, told Leicester Crown Court on Friday that she had experienced “considerable distress” because of the photograph showing her full face.

    The mother of four, who planned for her children to become martyrs for the terror group, was described in court as an “observant” Muslim.

    Before:

    Screenshot 2025-02-15 095304

    After:

    Screenshot 2025-02-15 095243

  • A Jewish boy in Toronto

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  • Bethlehem-Fairfield shipyard, Baltimore

    Arthur Siegel, May 1943. 

    image from www.shorpy.com
    "Bethlehem-Fairfield shipyards, Baltimore, Maryland. The canteen building at night."

    image from www.shorpy.com
    "Bethlehem-Fairfield shipyard, Baltimore, Maryland. The shipways at evening."
    [Photos: Shorpy/Arthur Siegel for the Office of War Information]

    In April of 1941, the Bethlehem-Fairfield Shipyard employed around 350, a number that grew exponentially as war production increased. By 1942, 11,000 people worked at the shipyard; in late 1943, the number was at its highest with around 47,000 employees. War production never stopped — Bethlehem-Fairfield employed three shifts, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, year-round.

  • Not-a-woman’s-crime revisited

    Here we go again:

    A transgender paedophile who was snared by police officers while trying to meet up with a young boy has been jailed for four years.

    Bex McCullgh, from Backwell, North Somerset, was arrested on arrival at the scene in Bristol, where officers were waiting.

    At Bristol Crown Court, the 25-year-old – who was previously called Beckham – admitted a number of offences including attempting to incite a child to engage in sexual activity.

    McCullgh was handed an eight-year sentence, four of which will be served in custody, followed by another four on extended licence.

    Despite court records referring to the paedophile using “he”, police have since referred to McCullgh as “she”.

    So he referred to himself as "he", but the police insisted on "she". Right.

    An investigation from the South West Regional Organised Crime Unit (SWROCU) resulted in an arrest in October last year….

    Det Insp David Wells, from SWROCU, said: “The sentence handed down to McCullgh reflects the threat she posed to children and, together with the indefinite order, will help prevent her reoffending when she is eventually released."

    But it's not a woman posing this threat to children. It's not a "she".

  • The Islamic warrior spirit

    Interesting to see Putin's favourite thinker pontificating on Islam and Israel. From MEMRI TV:

    Russian philosopher Aleksandr Dugin said that he was disgusted by the Islamic response to Israel’s war against Hamas and Hizbullah. “Where is Islamic solidarity? Where is the Islamic world?”, he asked, saying that only “a small population of brave Houthis” demonstrated the “Islamic warrior spirit.”

    Speaking on the Hira podcast, posted on YouTube on February 3, 2025, Dugin said that he was “depressed and disappointed” by the “pitiful reaction from Turkey and other Islamic countries.” He slammed what he called the “huge defeat of the Islamic world before the globalist liberal West and Israel,” and said that mainstream Islam is composed of different opportunistic and corrupt regimes. He further said that while Salafis could kill and torture innocent women and children, when it comes to the fight against Israel or the West, “they are like domestic pets. They are kittens.”

    More on Dugin here:

    To help decode the Russian leader’s position, it’s instructive to look at the positions espoused by Alexander Dugin, a Russian intellectual who has done much over the years to formulate what appears to now be the Kremlin’s dominant ideology….

    The French scholar Marlene Laruelle has described Dugin’s political philosophy as an attempt “to rehabilitate fascism in Russia” by stressing its nationalist orientation while disowning its associations with Nazism and racism. Tellingly, Putin’s invasion of neighboring Ukraine has exemplified this vision.

    Fascism embraces a mythic past, where the nation, once great, has experienced humiliation and loss of land, the result of weakness and decadence brought on by liberal democracy. To make up for these losses, real and supposed, fascist leaders encourage violent reassertion of previous greatness, as well as the destruction of liberal democracy in favor of a one-party state or, more typically, a single autocratic ruler who is synonymous with the nation.

    In the Russian nationalist version of the mythic past, Ukraine is central. According to this mythology, there are no Ukrainians—just lost Russians living, whether they know it or not, in the heart of historic Russia. Under Putin, Russia has been harshly sexist and homophobic, familiar manifestations of fascist ideology. But Russia’s violent imperial war against a neighboring cosmopolitan democracy that it seeks to absorb is the clearest manifestation yet that its animating ideology is something akin to classical fascism….

    Also, on the unlikely Dugin links with Aleister Crowley and, um, Throbbing Gristle.

  • A beacon of unity

    The Unison women's conference motion that "“trans women are women and trans men are men” has been passed without any opposition:

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    The state of the union. No one dared raise their hands to oppose. Not so much a happy democratic decision as a sign of the mindless group-think of today's unions, with any doubters keeping their thoughts to themselves.

    They're yesterday's progressives: always the last to abandon the old left shibboleths. They were banging on about class war long after Marx was dead and buried, and now they're full on board with the old gender cult just as everyone else is realising what a crock it all is. 

    Back in November the Darlington nurses, outraged that they had to share a changing room with a trans-identified male, met up with the health secretary.  Unison boss Steve North's response: it was “deeply concerning”, he tweeted, “that Wes Streeting appears to be once again pandering to anti-trans bigotry”.

    As I wrote at the time: The phrase "union dinosaurs" comes to mind. The battling trade unions of old, campaigning against the excesses of a rampant Victorian capitalism, have long since atrophied into stale depositories of a parody "working class" male entitlement.