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Mick Hartley
Politics and Culture
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A profile of lawyer Naomi Cunningham, from Julie Bindel in the Telegraph:
Cunningham, 59, became more widely known in 2023 when she represented Rachel Meade, a social worker suspended by Westminster City Council for private social media posts that included “gender-critical” beliefs.
Meade’s was a pivotal case, as it was the first in which both employer and regulator were found liable for discrimination in relation to someone’s gender-critical beliefs. Meade’s former colleague had submitted a dossier containing 70 of her Facebook posts as evidence that her views (that there are only two sexes, for instance) meant she was unfit to practice. Meade was suspended on charges of gross misconduct for a full year before receiving a final written warning.
In January 2024, Cunningham won. The tribunal subsequently ordered professional regulator Social Work England and Westminster City Council to pay Meade more than £58,000, including aggravated damages.
Looking back, it’s hard to believe this actually happened. It’s thanks to women like Cunningham that it’s been exposed for the nonsense it clearly is.
In 2024, she represented rape crisis centre worker Roz Adams in her employment tribunal case against Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre (ERCC), after Adams was subjected to what the judge called a “heresy hunt” for believing that those using the service should be able to know the sex of staff. The centre was found to have unlawfully discriminated against and harassed Adams, forcing her constructive dismissal. The tribunal awarded her £68,900, and ordered the ERCC to issue a public apology.
The Adams case came a few months after the Isla Bryson scandal, which Cunningham believes fuelled empathy for Adams. Bryson was a double rapist who only began identifying as a woman after being convicted, and here was a woman hounded out of her job for wanting to reassure rape survivors that they could access a women-only service.
“I think Isla Bryson is one of the real heroes of our movement,” says Cunningham, wryly. No other case in the public eye had laid the problem so bare. The Adams case was also the first in which Cunningham used correct-sex pronouns (he/him) to describe a trans-identified man.
According to Cunningham, the taboo around using accurate language has been so successful (and so “viciously” policed) that lawyers have been cowed. “We’ve seen offensive absurdities like rapists being referred to in court as she,” explains Cunningham. “So when I did it in Adams, it felt like quite a big deal.”
Her most high-profile case yet is that of the nurse Sandie Peggie, against the Fife Health Board. Needing to get changed because of a very heavy period, Peggie, now 50, had gone into a hospital’s female-only changing room on Christmas Eve 2023 – where a biological man who identifies as a woman, Dr Beth Upton, was using the facility. Peggie’s complaint to the doctor in question at the time saw Upton accuse her of a hate crime, for which Peggie was suspended from work, and put through two years of hell.
How did she get involved in all this?
In early 2021, Cunningham was asked by Maya Forstater, director of the Sex Matters campaign group, to write a short piece on why sex matters in the law. Researching it, she was “shocked rigid” to discover that the Crown Prosecution Service was a Stonewall “Champion”, meaning that they actively support and promote the rights and inclusion of LGBTQ+ individuals. Digging deeper, she discovered that almost every police force in the country, as well as the legal institutions, Ministry of Justice, the judiciary, and all the big law firms were also signed up. In the end, she wrote a much longer piece on the topic….
Today, Cunningham is confident that change is on the way. “There’ll be some remnants of [extreme gender ideology] left but… I think it’s on its way out,” she says.
I’m sure she’s right – but there’s a way to go yet.
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Well now.
Article here.
Algerian boxer Imane Khelif has confirmed he has a Y chromosome, indicating he is biologically male. In a new interview with French sports outlet L’Equipe, Khelif also admitted to having elevated testosterone levels, which he says he has been medically suppressing under the supervision of a doctor….
One leaked report, which was drafted in June of 2023 via a collaboration between the Kremlin-Bicêtre hospital in Paris and the Mohamed Lamine Debaghine hospital in Algiers, revealed that Khelif is impacted by 5-alpha reductase deficiency, a disorder of sexual development that is only found in biological males.
The genetic abnormality influences the normal development of a child’s sexual organs. At birth, male babies impacted are often incorrectly assigned female due to the presence of deformed genitalia that sometimes takes on the appearance of a “blind vaginal pouch.” This disordered development typically becomes apparent by puberty, when impacted adolescents begin to experience signs of masculinization such as muscle growth, hair growth, and an absence of breast tissue development or menstruation.
Which explains why he’s so good at boxing – compared to women, that is.
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I just came across this, from Honest Reporting. Well worth a watch.
I’m currently reading Yardena Schwartz’s Ghosts of a Holy War, on the 1929 Hebron Massacre.
It was, she writes, a precursor of the 7th October pogrom. Arabs and Jews had lived together peacefully for years and years in Hebron, Judaism’s second holiest city. In the face of increased Jewish immigration the Arabs, led by Amin al-Husseini the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem – the same al-Husseini who spent most of the WW2 years in Berlin trying to persuade Hitler to extend his Jewish extermination plans to the Middle East – spread lies about Jewish plans to destroy the Al-Aqsa Mosque on Temple Mount. The increasing fervour of hatred climaxed in the 1929 massacre, when Arabs slaughtered their Jewish neighbours, destroying one of the world’s most ancient Jewish communities.
From the introduction:
There is a direct line between 1929 and 2023. The forces that drove Arabs in Hebron to slaughter their Jewish neighbours were identical to the forces behind October 7. Just as the riots of 1929 were fueled by passions surrounding the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the third holiest site in Islam, so too was Hamas’s “Operation Al_Aqsa Flood”. On one level this is a conflict like many others, involving borders and other rational issues. But at the line connecting the 1929 massacre with the Hamas massacre makes clear, the religious dimension of this conflict cannot be ignored.
What’s interesting is that the Jewish community in Hebron, Sephardic Jews for the most part, were at the time very much opposed to the Zionist movement which was being imported by the recent Ashkenazi arrivals, and were totally dismissive of warnings about a coming Arab uprising. We’ve lived together for centuries, they said – of course they’re not going to suddenly turn on us, their friends and neighbours. But they did. After that, the Sephardic Jews joined the Zionist cause.
And what’s alarming is how readily the Arabs were prepared to put aside the centuries of (reasonably) peaceful coexistence with Jews – and, surely, their natural human instincts – in the name of Islam. Nothing much has changed there. Though there were then those few Arabs who didn’t join in, who sheltered their Jewish neighbours from the mob – just as, at Bondi Beach, the one hero who tried to stop the killing was himself a Muslim. It’s the natural human fellow-feeling, set against a cruel relentless ideology…
The official Palestinian line now, as taught in UNRWA schools, is that the Hebron massacre was conducted by the British, and that Jews never lived in Hebron before the 20th century and have no historic link to the city.
Also: what she has to say about the film Palestine 36, at 17 minutes in.
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Who’d have thought lovely super-moral Noam Chomsky, scourge of US imperialism and defender of the down-trodden masses, would be an Epstein pal:
Jeffrey Epstein sought advice from linguist Noam Chomsky over what he called “putrid” media coverage of sex trafficking allegations against him, new files show..…
In 2023, Noam Chomsky, 97, told the Wall Street Journal of his relationship with Epstein: “First response is that it is none of your business. Or anyone’s. Second is that I knew him and we met occasionally.”
Epstein’s email to Chomsky came as the Miami Herald published a series of investigative reports into Epstein and a plea deal he reached to avoid trial on federal sex trafficking charges in 2008.
“Noam. I d love your advice on how I handle my putrid press,” Epstein wrote, adding that media coverage was “spiralling out of control”.
“Do I have someone write an op ed?” Epstein asked. “defend myself? or try to ignore. realizing that mobs are dangerous.”
A reply from an account labelled in the documents as Noam Chomsky reads: “What the vultures dearly want is public response, which then provides a public opening for an onslaught of venomous attacks, many from just publicity seekers or cranks of all sorts.”
“That’s particularly true now with the hysteria that has developed about abuse of women, which has reached the point that even questioning a charge is a crime worse than murder,” the email added.
“The hysteria that has developed about abuse of women”. What a hero for the progressive left.
For some, a clearing of the files has been necessary…
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It turns out they’re doing fine. Matt Ridley in the Spectator:
The BBC reported terrible news last week about polar bears: they are thriving. This is very annoying of them as it goes against the interests of environmental activists, polar bears being the very emblem, mascot and clickbait of climate change cataclysm. But the bears’ stubborn refusal to get the memo and starve has become too obvious to ignore.
The latest evidence comes from the Barents Sea, and the Norwegian-administered archipelago of Svalbard in particular, where bear numbers have been steadily increasing. Surprisingly, they are also getting fatter, according to measurements taken when bears are caught and weighed. This is despite a decline in sea-ice cover in the area, especially in autumn. Even more unexpectedly, the bears are fattest in or after years when the sea ice retreats farthest.
The reason for this is largely down to the increasing life to be found in the Arctic seas, as sunlight gets in: plankton booms, so more fish, so more seals, so more bears.
One study found that in 22 years to 2025, the productivity of phytoplankton shot up by 80 per cent in the Eurasian Arctic, 34 per cent in the Barents Sea, thanks to less ice and therefore more sunlight.
Lots of evidence now suggests that the Arctic Ocean was nearly or completely ice-free in late summer and early autumn in the early millennia of the current interglacial period, around 9,000-6,000 years ago. It was probably very rich in marine life as a result, with lots of seals on the ice for polar bears to eat in spring, even if the bears had to take refuge on land and fast during the ice-free autumn months – just as they do today in Hudson Bay and much of Svalbard.
Most polar bear scientists have continued to insist the species is in imminent danger of extinction, because that way lies funding. They ostracised those who dissented, such as Mitchell Taylor and Susan Crockford, Canadian zoologists who argued that polar bears would probably survive even in a warming Arctic. ‘For the sake of polar bear conservation, views that run counter to human-induced climate change are extremely unhelpful,’ said Andrew Derocher, as he expelled Taylor from the Polar Bear Specialist Group in 2009.
When a Netflix documentary in 2017, narrated by Sir David Attenborough, filmed walrus which had fallen off a cliff in Siberia, Crockford argued that they had probably been stampeded by polar bears. The film’s producers dismissed the suggestion, but it later turned out she was right. Despite being hounded out of the University of Victoria in British Columbia in 2019 for her views on polar bears, Crockford has continued to argue that more seasonal melting of sea ice means more and fatter bears. Turns out she was right about that too.
Plus the melting of the Arctic ice has no influence on sea level, as it’s on top of water – so all good news: more animal life, plus clearing the north-west passage. Unfortunately the same can’t be said for the melting of the Greenland or the Antarctic ice-caps, which do affect sea levels…
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Masih Alinejad, in Tablet, with an open letter to NYC mayor Zohran Mamdani:
While mass killings are unfolding in Iran, you have chosen silence.
While women are being beaten, imprisoned, and killed for refusing compulsory hijab and the entire Islamic regime in Iran, you have offered no sympathy, no solidarity, not even a basic condemnation.
This silence matters….
In Iran, the Islamic Republic has carried out one of the largest massacres of civilians in its history. Protesters are shot in the streets. Detainees are raped and killed. Hospitals are raided.
That is why your celebration of World Hijab Day, lacking your sympathy for women being oppressed in Iran, is not a neutral cultural gesture. For millions of Iranian women, the hijab is not a choice. It is the uniform of their oppressors. Celebrating it while women are being slaughtered for rejecting it is, at best, deeply insensitive. At worst, it normalizes and sanitizes the violence of a terrorist regime.
Of course this silence isn’t confined to Mamdani: it’s right across the western media. The BBC regularly features the latest reports from Gaza as lead stories – today it’s Inside Gaza hospital struggling to provide care to newborn babies – but nothing when it comes to the tens of thousands being slaughtered in Iran. Nothing.
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Why did Putin not allow himself such brutal strikes on civilian infrastructure under Biden, whom Trump calls “weak,” but totally destroys peaceful cities and disregards the “strong Trump”?
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The usual suspects – step forward Corbynite MP John McDonnell – are praising the Palestine Action acquittal. But Amnesty UK?
It does nothing of the sort. These activists weren’t on trial for being members of a proscribed organisation: they were on trial for breaking and entering, criminal damage, and grievous bodily harm. On all of which counts they were demonstrably guilty.
The Palestine Action trial does not raise questions about counter-terror laws. It raises a far more serious question. How do we protect British democracy from being subverted by activist/prejudiced juries?
Let’s not pretend about what happened here.
The defendants were not acquitted because what they did was legal. Burglary. Damage to private property. Grievous bodily harm. These are bog-standard offences. Nothing exotic. Nothing ambiguous. Given the evidence, in any politically neutral case, these people would have been found guilty and sent to prison.
But this case was not politically neutral.
The entire defence strategy rested on one gambit. Compel the jury to acquit despite the fact that every defendant admitted to the acts they were charged with. The argument was simple. Their intent mattered. They believed, wholeheartedly, that smashing property and injuring a police officer was somehow saving lives in Gaza.
That is not a legal defence. That is an appeal to sympathy.
And it worked.
Twelve random strangers who shared the political beliefs of the defendants decided those beliefs were enough to override the law. That is what happened. That is what we should be alarmed about.
The concern here is not sentencing guidelines or prosecutorial overreach. The concern is the source of our laws – the British Parliament – being subverted by activism at the level of the jury box.
If political sympathy can nullify clear-cut criminal liability, then we do not have a legal system. We have a popularity contest dressed in robes.
I doubt that all twelve jurors were sympathetic. Given that they were deliberating for over 36 hours, I get the sense that there were a few there who were absolutely refusing to endorse a guilty charge because of their personal sympathy for the Palestinian cause, and others who saw clearly that their duty was to put aside ideologies and concentrate on the evidence. And they couldn’t agree.
It’d be interesting if we got one of those anonymous juror revelations about what really went on.
Mick Hartley 