Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

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  • Sexual predators

    A reminder of the importance of single-sex spaces.

    In Lancashire, Matthew Gilkes, an IT teacher has been jailed for 16 years after being found guilty of a string of child sex abuse crimes including taking indecent photographs in the changing rooms at the leisure centre in Chorley.

    In Southampton, Joshua Vallis has been found guilty of sexually assaulting a 13-year-old girl in the mixed-sex changing rooms at Romsey Rapids swimming pool. Police found thousands of indecent images of children on his computer. He was released on bail and will be sentenced at a later date.

    These two men had accrued thousands of indecent images of children. The crimes they committed in swimming pool changing rooms were part of a prolific pattern of offending.

    Every woman and child is at risk of sexual predators using mixed-sex changing rooms to commit crimes. What will it take for local authorities, leisure providers and the sports councils to take this seriously?

  • New official guidance on its way

    Well now, we seem to be getting there. Eventually. From (yesterday’s) Telegraph – Phillipson to ban trans women from female toilets.

    Trans women must be barred from female toilets, changing facilities and sports teams, new official guidance is to state.

    Bridget Phillipson is expected to confirm on Thursday that official guidance will state what businesses and public bodies must do under the law to protect single-sex spaces.

    The guidance follows last year’s Supreme Court judgment that trans women, who were born male, are not legally women for the purposes of the Equality Act.

    The equalities minister’s failure to publish it until now has meant that hospitals and leisure centres are still allowing trans women into female spaces.

    The guidance was written by the Equality and Human Rights Commission and submitted to Ms Phillipson in September, but she requested several revisions before agreeing to publish it.

    It is understood the EHRC has agreed to make a number of “tweaks”, including adding more examples on how organisations can ensure trans people have access to toilets and changing rooms while ensuring women’s facilities remain single-sex.

    Women’s rights groups said that while they did not expect major changes, they would be looking very carefully at the examples to ensure they did indeed protect single-sex services.

    Helen Joyce, director of advocacy at Sex Matters, called on public bodies to stop dragging their feet and implement the guidance.

    “There never was any reason for employers and service providers to wait for this guidance before implementing the law,” she told The Telegraph.

    “The Supreme Court was completely clear that when providing single sex spaces and services, sex has to mean sex – male and female.

    “But once the EHRC’s new statutory guidance has been published, all delaying tactics must be over.

    “All the organisations – including the NHS, local councils and government departments – which fell for the lie that equality law required them to allow people to self-identify their sex must now rewrite legally flawed policies.”

    We’ll see.

  • Legalising child marriage

    From the Times – Taliban legalise child marriage for girls as young as nine:

    The Taliban have legalised child marriage and declared that the silence of a “virgin girl” who has reached puberty can be interpreted as marital consent.

    According to an official document titled Principles of Separation Between Spouses, the government of Afghanistan has effectively removed the fixed minimum marriage age for girls by linking marriage eligibility to puberty.

    It contains a provision that states the new interpretation of marital consent. In girls, puberty usually begins between the ages of eight and thirteen. The minimum age for puberty is nine, according the largest and oldest Sunni school of Islamic law.

    Previously the legal age for marriage was 16 for girls and 18 for boys, according to Afghanistan’s 1977 Civil Code. Girls below 16 could be married with the permission of her father or a judge. Marriage of girls below 15 was criminalised in the landmark 2009 Elimination of Violence Against Women law.

    “Under the new law, that age limit is removed,” Horia Mosadiq, director of the Conflict Analysis Network, said. “If a girl reaches puberty at the age of nine or ten, she is considered of a legal age to marry.”

    Aisha, Mohammed’s third wife, was reputedly nine years old when the marriage was consummated – and Mohammed was the perfect man., so….

  • Burnham and the woman issue

    If they’re going to impose the latest Labour favourite on us as our next Prime Minister, then at least he could come clean on some of the big questions. Like, for instance, the trans debate:

    Andy Burnham once dismissed the notion of single-sex spaces as a “minority view” and called for transgender women to be allowed to use female toilets.

    Speaking at a meeting in 2022, the Greater Manchester mayor said he did not want to see “culture wars” between trans activists and “people supposedly advocating for women’s rights”.

    The statements risk distracting from Burnham’s election campaign and leadership challenge to Sir Keir Starmer by reviving the party’s “women problem”….

    When Burnham was asked whether transgender women — men who are born male but identify as women — should be permitted to use female toilets, he replied: “Clearly there is a group of people who do feel that toilets should be a safe space only for women and there should not be anyone biologically a male allowed in that space. 

    “I don’t think that’s a majority view. I think it’s a minority view and quite a small minority view, actually. But it is a view so you can’t completely ignore it. Possibly they might be women who have experienced male violence at some point in their life. I don’t know, that’s one way of looking at it.”

    He added: “The idea that people are falsely portraying their gender in a different way just because they want to abuse a women’s space or encroach on women’s safety … maybe it happens but you are talking a tiny, tiny, tiny number of people.

    “So why are we allowing everyone to get into this really polarised and terribly hateful debate about these issues? I am going to make it really plain: I support trans rights and I want that to be known.”

    Hmm. Is he now going to walk back from that? It’s fairly unequivocal, but sounds really like he was taking the regular left/progressive opinion without having given the matter much thought. The mood now has changed, though – especially after the Supreme Court ruling on single-sex spaces.

    The MP for Canterbury Rosie Duffield, who left Labour over Starmer’s leadership but previously said she was open to rejoining the party if Burnham took over, said she hoped the Greater Manchester mayor would try to understand an alternative view.

    “The key thing for me, and most women I know who have left the Labour Party, is whether Andy is willing to take the time to listen to and understand what we have all been put through simply for defending our basic rights,” Duffield said.

    Claire Coutinho, the shadow equalities minister for the Conservatives, said the comments showed that Burnham was “shockingly out of touch”.

    She added: “Protecting the safety, dignity and privacy of women is not a minority view — it’s the law. It is a gross injustice that women have been raped in prison, lost their spots on sports podiums, or lost their jobs for stating biological sex is real.”

    My guess: he’ll dodge the question. If he sticks to his pro-trans line he’ll lose a huge chunk of support, and if he changes his mind and comes out all sex-realist, he’ll lose another huge chunk of support. Best to keep schtum and keep on with those lovely running shorts pics.

  • A prison for American Zionists

    We have the Green Party. In Texas it’s the, um, Democrats.

    ….“which will probably be most of the Zionists”.

    Yes, it’s real, and yes the post is still up. She has a runoff election next week.

    In other posts on her Instagram, Galindo claims that her runoff opponent, Johnny Garcia, was part of a human trafficking conspiracy orchestrated by “billionaire Zionist Jews.”

    Article (San Antonio Current) here.

    Beyond her attacks on Garcia, Galindo has continued to promote the narrative that a cabal of Jewish zionists controls Hollywood, the media and even local politicians.

    Even so, in comments to the Current and other media outlets, Galindo maintained she only has an issue with zionists, or those advocating for the existence of a Jewish state in their ancestral homeland, rather than Jews in general.

    That’s OK then.

  • The Euro-Med connection

  • Raped in a cupboard ”within an hour”

    Yes, our brilliant NHS placed a trans man – a woman identifying as a man – in an all-male secure psychiatric ward. What could possibly go wrong? And then they obstructed the investigation.

    An NHS trust deliberately obstructed a police investigation into the rape of a transgender patient on an all-male secure psychiatric ward.

    Male patients chanted “no Adam’s apple” when the 5ft 3in biological female arrived on the ward and within an hour the victim was raped in a cupboard.

    The South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust ignored dozens of requests for records from detectives investigating the attack. Staff accidentally forwarded an internal note saying “don’t give them any more”. The obstructive behaviour meant a mentally ill patient wrongly stood trial for the rape.

    Two men were tried this year but midway through proceedings detectives cornered a staff member and finally obtained patient rotas that showed one of the defendants could not have been involved. The judge discharged Luther Badejo, 30, midway through the trial when the revelations torpedoed the case against him. His co-defendant, Davointe Thomas, 27, was convicted of rape and was handed an indefinite hospital order in April.

    A source close to the investigation said the trust had “gone into self-preservation mode” after the rape and was “obstructive from the outset”.

    MPs, academics and campaigners have called for an inquiry into how the hospital admitted a vulnerable biological woman onto a ward made up entirely of men sectioned under the Mental Health Act, and its “abhorrent” actions after the rape.

    I know it’s customary to demand that heads must roll when such cases come to light, but yes, here they really should. What an absolute disgrace.

    Added:

    – On gender identity. “For some people, treatment may just involve acceptance and affirmation or confirmation of their identity.” https://slam.nhs.uk/gender-dysphoria?utm_source=chatgpt.com

    On the importance of Pride: it is “the right to be seen and accepted as the person you truly are.” https://slam.nhs.uk/blog/why-do-we-celebrate-pride-at-south-london-and-maudsley-446

    In 2024, I wrote in an Unherd investigation on the capture of the NHS by gender ideology: “one Pride post on the South London and Maudsley NHS Trust  website  … talks about “the fight for LGBT rights” as something “to be won against your family or your neighbours or whoever is directly around you”.’ https://unherd.com/2024/04/the-liberal-lessons-of-the-cass-report/

    That is the fantasy. You, a staff member, are a freedom fighter. You are a hero, saving vulnerable people from the urgent threat of misgendering or being put in sex-appropriate facilities. I’m sure it made staff feel very noble at the time.

    The reality: today we learn that in 2022, a 5ft 3 female who said/believed she was a man was put on male psychiatric ward, and raped within hours.…

  • The Greens and the Islamists, again

    From the Times – New Green mayor linked to imams with extreme views:

    The newly elected Green mayor of Lewisham has a close association with an Islamic centre where two of its top imams have expressed extreme views.

    One was found by a judge to be an “extremist Islamic speaker”, while another said that women refusing to be intimate with their husbands unless it suited them was a sin.

    Liam Shrivastava became the mayor at the local elections held on May 7, in one of the party’s most high-profile gains….

    One of the centre’s imams is Ashraf Dabous, who gave a sermon in 2023 suggesting that it was a sin for women not to have sex with their husbands, even if they did not want to.

    In the video, posted on the LIC’s YouTube channel in October 2023, Dabous said that “one of the responsibilities of the woman is to facilitate to her husband, desire-wise”.

    He continued: “In our time today, many women they are refusing to be intimate with their husbands unless it suits them and that’s haram. It’s a sin.”…

    Dabous had previously courted controversy in 2024, when he argued that Zionists were behind the far-right riots in Southport, after the murder of three children by Axel Rudakubana in the town.

    He said: “It’s quite well known now publicly, due to information that has been released online, that their manipulators are Zionists and they are supporters of the state of Israel.”

    No surprise: the Greens under Zack Polanski have cynically espoused the Islamists. We await with interest the battle between the Islamists and the trans crowd for control of the party. If, that is, the dim trans crowd ever notice that there’s a mismatch here…

  • Off to battle

    The Iran team is seen off from Tehran for the World Cup.

    Ideally they’d have chosen a martyr as star guest, to give the send-off that special Islamist oomph. That’s not possible for obvious reasons, so instead – the next best thing – they bring on a “living martyr”, a wounded Iranian fighter, injured while manning missile launchers. Cue lines about the team players who’ll “prepare their missile launchers” during the matches. Then the obligatory “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” chants.

    And, just like we’re blocking the Strait of Hormuz, so will our boys, inshallah, block the goal.

    Rousing stuff.

    It’s a bizarre situation, a sports team heading off to a country with which they’re currently at war…

  • Our ability to tell truth from falsehood

    This, from Roy K. Altman in Free Press, via Jerry Coyne, sums up the obscenity of Nicholas Kristof’s vile NYT piece:

    Which brings us to Kristof’s final departure from our fundamental precepts: his lack of common sense. The most salacious claim in Kristof’s piece is the allegation that Israel is now systematically training dogs to rape Arab Muslim men. This claim used to live only on the fringes of the wildest internet conspiracy theories. In 2010, there was a spate of shark attacks in the Red Sea, situated between Israel and Egypt. For whatever reason, most (if not all) of these attacks occurred on the Egyptian side of the border. I happened to be in Israel that summer and heard an Egyptian minister wondering whether the Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence service, was systematically training sharks to eat only Arab flesh. My father and I, hearing this over the radio in a cab, laughed at the absurdity of the claim.

    What we’ve seen over the last few years is that wild and illogical conspiracy theories that used to reside only on the internet and in the anti-Israel Arab street now circulate in the mainstream media, brought there by irresponsible journalists who flout evidentiary standards, ignore basic notions of fairness, and disregard common sense and the truth. What kind of a society will we be if we don’t reverse this disturbing erosion in our ability to tell truth from falsehood?