Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

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  • Dangerous lunacy

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    I've interviewed survivors and criticised our institutions for sweeping it under the carpet due to 'cultural sensitivity'. These are unforgivable crimes and we should never stop talking about it. And I've been called all sorts of names for doing so. So, I'm glad more people are now talking about it.

    But if you think what Musk is doing here is anything short of dangerous lunacy that only increases the safety concerns of British MPs, then we aren't the same.

  • The God-shaped hole

    As a follow-up to the FFRF debacle, here's Richard Dawkins in the Spectator on the myth of the God-shaped hole:

    In a recent interview, I imprudently said I was a “cultural Christian”, and I haven’t heard the end of it. I find myself unwillingly counted in the Great Christian Revival (translation, “We don’t actually believe that stuff ourselves, but we like it when other people do”) which is the subject of so much wishful thinking these days….

    An irritating strain of the Great Christian Revival is the myth of the God-shaped hole. “When men choose not to believe in God, they then believe in anything.” The famous aphorism, which GK Chesterton never uttered, is enjoying one of its periodic dustings-off, following the vogue for women with penises and men who give birth. Whenever I sound off against this modish absurdity, I’m met with a barrage of accusations. “Frankly Richard, you did this. You defended woke BS for years” (of course I didn’t: quite the opposite but, for this believer in the God-shaped hole, discouraging theism is indistinguishable from encouraging woke BS). “But don’t you see, you helped to bring this about.” “What do you expect, if people give up Christianity?” Then there’s this, from a Daily Telegraph opinion column:

    “New Atheists allowed the trans cult to begin. . . By discrediting religion, Dawkins and his acolytes created a void that a new, dangerous ideology filled.”

    There are no doubt interesting reasons for the current cult of gender – social contagion, trans rights as supposedly the next "progressive step" after gay rights, fear of being ostracised – but this "God-shaped hole" is an odd one. The cult of gender is no more than a set of daft ideas about innate gender identities, and being able to change sex, and some children being "born in the wrong body". People have believed in daft ideas, with a passion, for all of human history. Maybe there's a daft ideas shaped hole? There's a ton of supporting historical evidence. Makes more sense than a God-shaped hole.

    The scientific reasons are more cogent by far. They are based on evidence rather than scripture, authority, tradition, revelation or faith. I’ve spelled them out elsewhere, and will do so again but not here. I’ll just support the claim that the trans-sexual bandwagon is a form of quasi-religious cult, based on faith, not evidence. It denies scientific reality. Like all religions it is philosophically dualistic: where conventional religions posit a “soul” separate from the body, the trans preacher posits some kind of hovering inner self, capable of being “born in the wrong body”. The cult mercilessly persecutes heretics. It abuses vulnerable children too young to know their own mind, encouraging them to doubt the reality of their own bodies, in extreme cases inflicting on those bodies irreversible hormonal, and even surgical damage.

    Far from playing into the hands of these preachers, my colleagues and I are opposed to all faith creeds, all non-evidence-based belief systems. This includes traditional supernatural religions, but it also includes younger faith systems such as that in which a man literally becomes a woman (or a woman a man) by fiat. Or by legal decision (you could as well legally repeal the laws of thermodynamics so we can have perpetual motion machines).

    How patronising, how insulting to imply that, if deprived of a religion, humanity must ignominiously turn to something equally irrational. If I am to profess a faith here, it is a faith in human intelligence strong enough to doubt the existence of a God-shaped hole.

  • Excusing the cover-up

    The excuse for the blanket of silence over the rape gangs scandal – from the authorities and from the media – has been that they didn't want to give encouragement to the far right, or inflame racism against immigrant communities. Ben Sixsmith at The Critic:

    In 2015, the historian Tom Holland, reflecting on the Rotherham grooming gangs, posted:

    The true nightmare of Rotherham is that the motives of those who turned a blind eye, however monstrous the consequences, were indeed noble.

    “It wasn’t the indifference that was noble,” he clarified, “But the concern not to demonise a minority. Caring for the weak. The Christian thing.”

    Amid renewed interest in the subject of grooming gangs, this week, Mr Holland has received a lot of criticism. He replied:

    My position remains:

    The authorities have a responsibility to preserve good race relations.
    This is a noble goal.
    In the context of the grooming gangs, this goal resulted in fatefully wrong decisions being taken.
    10 years on, the tragedy of this is even more evident.

    To be clear, I am a fan of Holland’s, and am quite aware — unlike some of his fiercer critics — that he is not claiming that the failure to stop the rape and abuse was noble but that it sprang from a misplaced noble impulse. But the fact remains that this is outright wrong. The officials in Rotherham, Rochdale, Telford and elsewhere did not have a high-minded concern for social cohesion — they had a selfish and small-minded desire not to rock the boat.

    In defence of Holland, the author and lecturer Adrian Hilton wrote:

    He isn’t speaking about individual motives, but social virtue, and he is absolutely right: the King’s peace—pax regis—is a noble pursuit. You can cavil with his hierarchy of nobleness, but public order is indeed a noble pursuit. And so is child safeguarding.

    Obviously, when a concern for “public order” is enabling mass child rape, “public order” is not the virtue that it might have been…

    Now, it is true that officials were concerned about public order. Turning to page 112 of the independent inquiry into the grooming gangs in Telford, for example, one finds:

    Between 2006 to 2008, senior management within the Council were concerned that allegations about Asian male involvement with CSE in Wellington had the potential to start a “race riot” …

    But what else does one find? One finds the fear of “complaints of racism” and of being “politically incorrect”. That doesn’t sound noble to me — it sounds cowardly and self-centred. Indeed, it makes it sound like the concern with public order had less to do with virtuous ideals than with protecting their careers and their institutions. There is a difference between being concerned with peace for its own sake and being concerned with peace because your arse is on the line if there turns out to be violence.

    Yet the failure to stop the rapes had many causes — and they don’t get any nobler. In the Jay Report into the grooming gangs in Rotherham, for example, we hear appalling details about the classism and misogyny of police officials. According to one witness, the attitude of some police officers was that the victims were “undesirables” who could not be trusted. “Police weren’t arsed with us, really,” said one victim who was key to the belated investigations in Rochdale, “They don’t give a fuck when you’re not from a wealthy background.”

    Then there is the whiff of outright corruption — the laptops and documents that were stolen in Rotherham, with, in the latter case, “no signs of a forced entry to the key-coded and locked security doors”. Whatever went missing, one doubts that it was evidence of a sincere concern for the public good.

    Again, the desire to explain a sin is not the same as the desire to excuse it. I am not suggesting that Messrs Holland and Hilton are anything but appalled by the failure to stop the rapists. But it is a mistake to ennoble that failure. That failure was not just tragic but actively wicked and it is important to appreciate that if appropriate accountability is going to be achieved.

    The claims of "a noble goal", in other words, are in danger of being used to cover up the cover-up. Yes, we get it. No, it's not an argument that after all this time retains much credibility.

    So can we please drop the excuses, and have a proper national investigation into the whole business as Kemi Badenoch has proposed.

  • A kind of riotous, joyful inebriation

    Kathleen Stock at UnHerd on the censorious response to a new report which suggests that the drinking habits of young women in the UK outmatch those of boys here, as well as beating most teenagers in the rest of Europe. The doomsters, she thinks, miss out the joy.

    Remember those first moments of alcohol-fuelled exhilaration when you were young? The energy rising lightly in your solar plexus and making your cheeks ache from smiling; and how time would drop away, so that there was only now, tonight, this? And what a thrill it all was? I still remember, just about. And I did so this week as I read various handwringing responses to the question of why British teenage girls are allegedly getting bladdered so often.

    And a sobering conclusion…

    One of the many hideous features of the grooming gang scandal was that young girls’ natural and age-appropriate desire for a few cathartic, drink-fuelled escapades was used against them so heinously, twice over: first by their abusers, and then by the authorities who failed to recognise what was going on. We need to try harder to see the drunkenness of the teenager for what it nearly always is: something essentially childish and innocent; a kind of riotous, joyful inebriation that cannot be replicated later as a fully fledged adult, no matter how hard you might try. The ideal world is not one where such a thing never occurs, but one where teenagers are never violated or otherwise penalised for now and again succumbing. Thanks to malevolent actors, we don’t live in that ideal world and never will; but along with my teenage liver, I mourn it.

  • Cotton Carnival 1940

    Marion Post Wolcott, May 1940. Memphis, Tennessee. "Main Street at night during Cotton Carnival."

    image from www.shorpy.com
    [Photo: Shorpy/Marion Post Wolcott for the Farm Security Administration]

    Added Shorpy comment:

    Today it's Carnival Memphis. "Cotton" was dropped in 1987 because "our economy has become more diversified. We accomplish our mission through the four C's: Charity, Community, Commerce and Celebration."

    "The Cotton Kingdom" was the slogan used by the antebellum South to justify slavery and secession. In 1895, John Philip Sousa wrote his "King Cotton" march, which intentionally or not contributed to "Lost Cause" sentimentalization of the Old South. It is still played.

  • Five years ago

    Matt Ridley at Spiked on the Chinese cover-up that led to the Covid pandemic:

    It is now five years since we woke to the news of a new outbreak of infectious pneumonia in China. Retelling the story of those early days of the Covid pandemic helps to shed light on how something that could have been prevented, contained and eradicated instead went on to kill more than 20 million people and devastate the education, economics and mental health of many more.

    At one minute to midnight, US East Coast time, on the last day of 2019, there was a brief ‘request for information’ on ProMED-mail, an online newsletter that monitors unofficial sources to gather intelligence about new disease outbreaks affecting people and animals. It read, simply: ‘Undiagnosed pneumonia: China (Hubei).’

    Dr Marjorie Pollack, the deputy editor of ProMED-mail, had been alerted by a Taiwanese colleague to a message on WeChat, the Chinese social-media site, sent by an ophthalmologist in Wuhan named Dr Li Wenliang: ‘Seven cases of SARS have been diagnosed at the Huanan Fruit and Seafood Market, quarantined in our hospital’s emergency department.’ …

    Dr ‘George’ Fu Gao, the head of the Chinese Centre for Disease Control in Beijing, saw the WeChat message. Just a few weeks before, he had made a rather bold claim: ‘SARS-like viruses can appear at any time. However, I am very confident to say that “SARS-like events” will not occur again, because the infectious-disease surveillance network system of our country is well established, and such events will not happen again.’

    So Gao was especially alarmed to hear about an outbreak of a SARS-like virus not through the official surveillance network, but through social media. He raised the alarm with China’s health minister. Liang Wannian, head of the National Health Commission, was despatched to Wuhan on 31 December. Immediately on arrival he took the decision to close down the Huanan Seafood Market, despite the fact that Ai’s latest patient had no connection to the market.

    The local officials were already acting fast – but not to stop the disease, only to stop the news of it spreading. Within hours of his WeChat post, at 1.30am on 31 December, Li Wenliang was summoned to an interrogation by the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission. He was made to wait until 4am before being interviewed and forced to sign a humiliating confession of sharing ‘untruthful information’. Six weeks later, he would die of Covid.

    And so it went. Every effort was made to stop the news spreading, but no effort was made to stop the virus spreading. 

    Over the next few days, secrecy and bureaucratic obstinacy ensured that the only chance to nip the outbreak in the bud was missed. The authorities excluded from testing all potential cases that had no connection or proximity to the seafood market. They insisted the virus could only be caught from animals, despite nurses and doctors falling sick. They went ahead with a huge banquet for the Chinese New Year and encouraged people to travel abroad. By mid January at the latest, the virus was already in a dozen countries, every index case tracing back to a traveller from Wuhan.

    It's perhaps important to note that China's cover-up remains a scandal whether the lab-leak theory is true or not. Matt Ridley has co-written a book and written numerous articles explaining why he thinks a lab leak is, overwhelmingly, the most likely explanation for what happened in Wuhan, and the subsequent world-wide pandemic. I think he's right. But even if it came from the street market, or from some other source, China's response to the unfolding crisis remains as an act of criminal irresponsibility.

  • The most appalling atrocity in modern British history

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    After that last post I'm not going to do another "full thread", and anyway it's too long – but it's an important account of the whole wretched saga.

  • A crime that thrives on misinformation, on fears of “racism” and a lack of awareness

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    If you want to know how Labour-led areas treat abuse survivors, here’s a (brief) insight into my story:

    One of my earliest memories is sitting on his lap in the garden, and a hand going into my underwear. I was five.

    I knew that it didn’t feel nice and I wanted it to stop. But I also had no frame of reference for what was normal and what wasn’t. The abuse continued for years, at the hands of multiple different men throughout my childhood and teen years.

    Eventually, I confided in a social worker and filed a police report detailing the years of abuse that I had experienced.

    But, as many other girls systematically groomed in Telford have also testified, I was made to feel as though I was to blame. The system criminalised the victims, rather than going after the perpetrators.

    I remember being asked by a detective whether I “consented” at any point to sexual activity, and told by a social worker that “my actions had led me to where I was today”.

    All the while the Labour-led council tried to block an independent inquiry into CSE for years and their Council Leader (now the MP for Telford), along with 10 other powerful local men, even wrote a letter to the Home Secretary saying they felt an inquiry would unnecessary.

    Little girls in Telford were branded child prostitutes and p*ki shaggers — my West Mercia Police, no less.

    In Rotherham, Rochdale and elsewhere, victims were continually swept aside by those in positions of power, as if they chose this lifestyle. The attitudes that social workers, local services, authorities had towards children was so skewed, and so deeply unprofessional.

    And my case, like 96.5 per cent of all sex crime cases in the UK, never resulted in prosecution. I was told that there was an unrealistic prospect of conviction against any of my abusers, due to the historic nature of my case.

    It broke me. And I spent years in silence because I thought I would somehow be judged or penalised for the abuse I had suffered. Because I had been conditioned to feel like I was somehow responsible for my own victimisation.

    The Telford scandal made headlines when it broke in 2015, then again when the Crowther Report was released in 2022. Yet, The news cycle moved on far too quickly.

    This isn’t a 60-second-and-then-done issue. For change to occur, there needs to be constant attention brought to this issue because, otherwise, silence and ignorance only serves to support the predators and the paedophiles.

    This is a crime that thrives on misinformation, on fears of “racism” and a lack of awareness, and on being swept under the rug.

    They rely on girls not being taken seriously, the media not caring and the police not taking any action to investigate.

    These are not crimes of the past. Kids are still being exploited, groomed, raped and even murdered in council estates like mine. It isn’t enough to have empty words and hollow promises.

    I even went on national TV to discuss Pakistani grooming gangs in Telford and the continued risk of abuse faced by little girls in my hometown.

    The next day, officers banged on my door, demanding I speak to them about my interview. They ignored victims for decades, but tried to intimidate me for speaking about their failings on live TV.

    CSE is a national epidemic.

    But those in power continue to treat it like a localised issue, choosing to believe that the extent of the abuse is contained to a few bad towns and pockets of bad apples. That couldn’t be further from the truth.

    But those in power refuse to address that fact for fear of being forced to confront their decades-long failure to protect young girls from abuse.

    It’s easier to ignore victims, especially when they come from communities, social classes or demographics that are already disenfranchised in Britain. And for those who do speak out, it feels like you are screaming at a brick wall that would rather label you as the problem than take you seriously.

    "The shame isn't ours to feel. It's theirs." – Gisèle Pelicot. 

  • Giving a toss about violence against women and girls

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    James Heale at the Spectator – Labour rejects calls for Oldham grooming gang inquiry:

    State failure was a consistent theme of British politics in 2024. So as the new year begins, attention has turned to perhaps the most egregious instance of that malaise in modern times: the horrific scandal of grooming gangs in dozens of UK cities. Jess Phillips, the Safeguarding Minister, has rejected calls for a government inquiry into historic child abuse in Oldham, prompting a Tory backlash….

    Reports have previously been commissioned and produced in Rochdale, Rotherham and Telford; Oldham now plans to launch its own Telford-style inquiry. Given the strength of feeling – which Phillips acknowledges in her letter – it seems inevitable that there will be questions or debate in the Commons when parliament returns next week….

    Yet for the hundreds of victims and those invested in bringing perpetrators to justice, this will seem pitifully inadequate. In each town where grooming gangs operated, similar patterns emerged: victims were ignored, law enforcement complicit and political officials more concerned about reputational damage than lives affected. Local authorities can hold their own inquiries, of course. But given the scale of these crimes, the fact they took place over decades, in many towns, suggests a level of institutional complicity requiring the attention of central government.

    Labour’s stance is made harder by its previous support for such inquiries. The party has launched a review every two-and-a-half days it has been in office. If the two-child benefit cap gets a task force, then surely child abuse warrants an inquiry? In its election manifesto, the party pledged to stand for open government.

    ‘Too many victims of historical injustices have had insult added to injury by years of legal delays’, it said, promising to right the historic wrongs of Hillsborough and the Battle of Orgreave. Phillips herself previously claimed that Tory ministers ‘literally don’t give a toss’ about ‘violence against women and girls.’ Critics will ask if that stance stacks up with her decision on Oldham.

    If any recent scandal is just crying out for a government inquiry, it's surely this. Overlooked, ignored – too embarrassed – the whole business is a national scandal dwarfing, say, the recent Post Office affair. Central to the whole business is the fact that this rape on a massive scale was carried out by men of Pakistani heritage on vulnerable young white girls. This has always been a factor – probably the major factor – in why there's been a reluctance by the authorities to carry out any more investigation, and really it's not at all clear that anything's about to change.

  • The rape gangs

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