There’s been a sad lack of trees here recently. Fortunately a trip up to Hampstead Heath this morning enables me to put that right.
Mick Hartley
Politics and Culture
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Trump’s latest unhinged rambling features a swipe at Keir Starmer’s Chagos deal. For once the president is right. Fraser Myers at Spiked:
It is a deal so bad that only Keir Starmer could have negotiated it. With the assistance of the brightest and best of the UK Foreign Office, the Labour government agreed to an arrangement that would hand over territory containing an Anglo-American military base to an unfriendly country, condemn its former inhabitants to permanent exile, and pay tens of billions of pounds for the pleasure.
Not that Trump really cares about Chagos, mind:
Of course, Trump’s motivation for bashing Starmer’s deal now has little to do with the Chagos Islands themselves. The real prize for the US president is in a different hemisphere entirely, as he freely admits. In a bizarre non-sequitur, the US president’s Truth Social post goes on to say that the Chagos deal is ‘another in a very long line of reasons why Greenland has to be acquired’ by the US. This smackdown over Chagos, this attempt to humiliate Starmer and Britain on the global stage, is clearly part of Trump’s broader pressure campaign against the European powers, in his bid to seize Greenland for the US.
Nevertheless, it really should not have taken Trump’s intervention to put the brakes on the dreadful Chagos deal. Whichever way you spin it, this arrangement has never been in Britain’s national interest, nor the interests of the Chagossians who call the islands their home. It poses a risk to Western security interests, handing sovereignty over a territory, where almost 400 UK and US troops and 2,000 contractors are based, to a country that’s allied to China. The cost of leasing back Diego Garcia from Mauritius is also eye-watering. Although the Labour government tried to present the cost as just £3.4 billion, the true figure is believed to be 10 times as much, at around £34.7 billion.
And that’s without taking into consideration the issue of the huge marine protection area round the Chagos Islands now, which is in very real danger of being scrapped under Mauritian control [see here].
So what on Earth possessed Starmer to sign up to such a risible deal? What leverage was a tiny island like Mauritius able to gain over Britain?
Starmer’s eagerness to give away the territory stems in part from his government’s undue reverence for ‘international law’. In 2019, the International Court of Justice said that the Chagos Islands should be given to Mauritius. But this was not a legally binding ruling. The UK had no legal obligation to respond – or ‘no reason whatsoever’ to act, as Trump correctly puts it. Yet this is a Labour government that, as attorney general Lord Hermer has repeatedly insisted, puts international law at ‘the heart’ of its foreign policy. It wants to go over and above what the law actually says. Even, it seems, when this conflicts with the national interest, common sense or moral principles.
No other political leader, in other words, would have for a second considered following the International Court of Justice’s recommendation. But we have Starmer. He’s very very keen on following International law: domestic law on the other hand – like acting on the Supreme Court ruling on single-sex spaces – he’s not so bothered about.
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The government and the Civil Service are doing all they can to block the implementation of the Supreme Court ruling on single sex spaces – which is, after all, the law. From the Telegraph – Civil Service to hire trans equality chief as Labour dithers over Supreme Court ruling.
The Government is advertising for a senior civil servant to “lead on trans equality”.
A new policy manager at the Cabinet Office will focus on the “implications” of 2025’s judgment, in which the Supreme Court ruled that the term “women” in the Equality Act referred to biological sex, meaning trans women are not women under equalities law.
However, Bridget Phillipson, the women and equalities minister, has continued to block the publication of guidance that would force business and public bodies to protect women-only spaces...
The advert reads: “The post holder will lead on trans equality, ensuring that we are able to take steps to improve outcomes for trans people in the UK, liaising with other departments as necessary.
“The post holder will be part of the OEO [Office for Equality and Opportunity] wide team responsible for handling the implications of the recent Supreme Court case known as ‘For Women Scotland’, leading on the implications of the ruling on trans people.”…
Claire Coutinho, the shadow equalities minister, said: “It is astonishing that, nine months on from the Supreme Court ruling the Government’s only action is hiring another civil servant.
“We have seen too many examples of public bodies across the country, including the Civil Service, failing to uphold the law. That is putting women’s safety, privacy and dignity at risk on a daily basis.
“Yet Bridget Philipson has been sat on the EHRC’s new guidance since September. The best way to protect the rights of everyone would be to approve the guidance and start enforcing the law.”
Meanwhile, the head of the Civil Service has insisted that trans women will be able to use female lavatories in government departments until Ms Phillipson publishes new guidance.
Sir Chris Wormald, the Cabinet Secretary, rejected demands from Sex Matters, a women’s rights group, to withdraw the current advice allowing people to choose which toilet they use.…
Maya Forstater, the chief executive of Sex Matters, said: “We are in the absurd situation that civil servants are advising Bridget Phillipson on the EHRC code of practice while the head of the Civil Service is claiming he cannot tell those staff members what rules are lawful until the guidance is finalised.
“Meanwhile, the Cabinet Office is telling individual government departments to take their own legal advice rather than developing a single, standard policy that follows the law. This is an untenable position. Sex Matters will be considering its legal options.”
Good for them. Civil servants openly breaking the law is not something to be encouraged.
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On that subject, here’s a thread by Dennis Noel Kavanagh:
1/ The Gender war is a class war. Trans activism was confabulated in universities where they’d run out of things to say, it was embraced by the bourgeois management types in HR and it corrupts the same in everything from unions to blue chips. This didn’t come from the streets.
2/ Trans activism is indulged and has no central heroic historical point of defiance, so it steals the gay rights claim to Stonewall because at its heart, it’s dreadfully aware of just how powerful and privileged it is. It’s still really the only cult that can get you sacked
3/ It’s the well fed goth teenage Marxist who knows where the next meal is coming from so screams “I hate you mum and dad” before stomping off to its well appointed bedroom. It’s the child no one ever said “no” to and so it looks and sounds like precisely that in adversity.
4/ So often we see the low paid nurse against the well paid management or doctor. Or the most marginalised in society who have cause to actually use a rape refuge lectured by the otherwise unemployable bourgeois management class fresh from their stonewall course on pronouns.
5/ So often we see those who oppose gender ideology reliant on crowd funds and real solidarity and union ranged against the state funded, the corporate funded, the behemoth government department or indeed the actual Scottish government in the case of FWS.
6/ Trans activism lies like a fish swims from the transubstantiation sex change foundational lie the rotten edifice sits on, but the most obnoxious lie is that it is somehow marginalised or of the streets and there is nothing more contemptuous than this pretence.
7/ Trans activism routinely hires silks to vilify nurses, it cosplays protest all the time knowing the police and government will tolerate it, so it pretends to take corners on two wheels while being on guard rails. It is well fed, well appointed, well funded and comfortable.
8/ It will never match the real marginalisation of the working class nurse who needs an area to change, a female prisoner who has no choice of cell mate or the average Scottish woman fighting her own damned government. And it knows it. This, I think, is its greatest jealousy.
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Suzanne Moore in the Telegraph on the Darlington nurses, confronted by a cross-dressing man in the women’s changing room:
As you might expect, they turned to their union. One of them had been paying subs to Unison for 35 years. The response was not to side with the nurses, or even hear their case, but to automatically side with “Rose” as the ultimate victim in all this. Steve North, the former president of Unison, tweeted about the nurses’ “anti-trans bigotry”.
The nurses then set up their own union, the Darlington Nurses Union. And who can blame them? What are the 75 per cent of Unison members who are female paying subs for?
Who is standing up for working-class women? Certainly not unions captured by this insane middle-class gender ideology, which they seem to defend at all costs. We saw the same thing in the Sandie Peggie case. HR departments are circle jerks of self-righteous fools who write policy for each other without understanding the law or having any conception of competing rights.
Single-sex changing rooms – something we have long taken for granted – exist because women have fought for sex-based rights. No decent man would want to be in a space where he made women feel uncomfortable. But we are not talking about decent men here, are we? We are talking about men whose overriding need to see themselves as female overrules basic respect and protections for women. They are then backed up in this false belief by their management.
Every time this happens, brave women are forced to go through lengthy and costly tribunals, often disclosing distressing sexual assaults in the past, while being pilloried as transphobic in public, to make very basic points about their working conditions. Their tiny demands consist of not having to get undressed in front of male-bodied people. How on earth did we end up here, and why are our unions not embarrassed? Who do they now represent? The men who ID as women and think nothing of using female NHS changing rooms?
Even after the judgement last week, Unison was unbowed in its support of trans rights, and silent on the Darlington nurses.
It turns out that if you are female, then the union will throw you under a bus, or worse, send you for “re-education”. Wherever gender ideology goes, it pushes its ill-thought-out, post-grad beliefs on to working-class women who have to live with the reality of being treated like scum precisely because they do understand that they do have some rights.
If the unions abandon women, then women will abandon them. It’s already happening.
Yes, gender ideology is middle class in the sense that it originated in the universities, but it’s since become another left boilerplate belief – and unions leaders are nothing if not spouters of left boilerplate. It’s what they do. It’s what gets them elected by the tiny proportion of activists who bother to vote in union elections.
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Full text:
Very little media coverage of this, but here’s footage of a march in London today in support of the Iranian protesters and against the Islamic-fundamentalist cavemen holding their country to ransom. Packed with Iranian exiles and secularists, alongside English, US, and Israeli flags. Conspicuously absent were the Muslim activists and agitators who have spent months taking over our streets in support of Palestinian jihadists, along with their braindead leftist and liberal hangers-on. No Islamist flags either.
Few events in recent years have exposed the moral inversion of our political life so clearly. Muslim activists who claim (falsely) to be so horrified by suffering in the Islamic world were largely nowhere to be seen. Leftists who bang on about opposing ‘oppression’ and ‘patriarchy’ were generally missing too.
Meanwhile those routinely smeared as ‘far right’ or ‘bigoted’ by those very same liberal-elite droids – patriots, ex-Muslims, ‘Zionists’ etc – turned up in their thousands to stand with women beaten and murdered for removing their shrouds, and with ordinary people crushed by the mullahs in the name of Islam.
None of this stuff should be forgotten any time soon.
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From the horse’s mouth. Muslim Brotherhood leader Tareq Al-Suwaidan at MEMRI TV:
Allah says they “fight” – so it is not jihad in the sense of inner jihad and so on. Allah says “fight”, not “struggle”. Because “struggle” can be translated as struggle within yourself, but “fight” in Arabic is very clear – it is war, it is fighting, And this is in the first chapter of the Quran. So the idea of having a strategic vision and strategic change – by force even – is very clear from day one.
Someone tell the Met.
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At one point, the owners reported receiving up to 1,000 hate messages per hour, including death threats, not over policy, but simply over identity.
What’s happening to Boker Tov is part of a wider pattern across Europe: Cultural spaces, businesses, and everyday life becoming hostile terrain for anything visibly Jewish or Israeli.
History has seen where this road leads. Ignoring it never ends well.
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This is very, well….sweet. From 2011 – though it has more of the feel of fifty or more years ago. In Dudley. From the late much-missed Martin Parr:
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Mani Basharzad at the Spectator – The West will regret not intervening in Iran:
The longest war of the twentieth century was between Iran and Iraq and lasted for eight years. Yet during those eight years, Iraq killed fewer Iranian civilians than the Islamic Republic has reportedly killed in the past two weeks. The regime’s security forces enter hospitals, not merely to arrest protesters, but to shoot them in the head. In the piles of bodies visible in the tragic videos circulating online, some corpses, with bullets in their heads, still have hospital monitors attached. This is a government at war with its own people. It is an occupying force that does not see Iranians as citizens, but as expendable sacrifices for the larger goal of spreading Islamic revolution across the world.
Hard to forget the Iranian children sent to clear minefields in the Iran-Iraq war, armed only with a “key” to get them into paradise – a clear indication of the cynical readiness with which the regime sacrifices its people for the glory of their Islamic revolution.
It is therefore no surprise that Iranians inside Iran are calling for help from Donald Trump. The fact is that many Iranians trust American or Israeli bombs more than Islamic Republic guns. Western strikes – such as those Israel has conducted on Iran – are targeted not merely at buildings, but sometimes at the very bedrooms in which IRGC commanders are sleeping. During the twelve-day war, according to the Islamic Republic’s own judiciary, fewer than a thousand people were killed, more than 70 per cent of whom were military officials, members of the IRGC, or the Basij.
Where in the Middle East, except Iran, do protesters chant, ‘America is not the enemy – the enemy is within’? In which Middle Eastern country do protesters rename streets after the president of the United States? In which country do people chant, ‘No to Gaza, no to Lebanon – I will give my life for Iran’? Nowhere. Nowhere else in the Middle East do millions take to the streets against political Islam; usually, it is precisely the opposite. This is the fundamental difference Iran represents – and failing to understand it would be a catastrophic foreign-policy mistake. Iran is not Iraq. Iran is not Libya. Iran has a population that is sympathetic to western values governed by a regime that does not represent who the people are.
What exists is the tyranny of a violent, intolerant minority – armed, organised, and dangerous. Iran today resembles the final days of the Soviet Union, except without a Gorbachev. Even Mohammad Khatami – the regime’s ‘moderate’ figure – has dismissed the protests as a ‘planned conspiracy’. His words prove that no genuine reformer will emerge from within the Islamic Republic. This is what makes the regime uniquely dangerous.
That is why, if the United States does not act, it will regret missing this opportunity to remove the head of the snake in the Middle East. In every case where foreign intervention failed, one never encountered the three elements that exist simultaneously in Iran. The first is a pro-Western population. The second is a clear and recognised alternative. Across Iran, there is only one name being chanted as a leader: Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi. He has articulated a plan and has become a unifying figure for the Iranian opposition. This means there is a clear replacement for the tyranny of the mullahs.
Tony Blair has said that his greatest mistake in Iraq was underestimating the power of political Islam after the fall of Saddam Hussein. Iran presents the opposite case. Without the Islamic Republic, political Islam could collapse entirely. There are no significant Islamist political opposition groups waiting in the wings, nor is there any desire among the Iranian people to return to an Islamic government.
As part of his anti–old neoconservative establishment rhetoric, Trump has repeatedly emphasised a ‘no boots on the ground’ strategy. In Iran’s case, this approach could nonetheless result in regime change because of the unique structure of the IRGC. The IRGC is not a modern national military but a terrorist organisation wholly dependent on one individual: Ali Khamenei. Remove him, and the structure collapses. Following Trump’s assassination of Qassem Soleimani during his first term, and Israel’s recent elimination of senior IRGC and military leaders, there is no remaining figure capable of unifying the forces or launching a coup. Targeted attacks – against senior leadership or strategic bases, including those that have shut down Iran’s internet for over a week – could be highly effective.
The real tragedy would be Western inaction. Iranians who still trust the West would see indecision as effectively backing a regime whose stated goal is the destruction of Israel and the United States. It would repeat Barack Obama’s historic mistake after the 2009 Iranian Green Movement: drawing no red lines, only to find the regime not moderated by diplomacy, but emboldened and more aggressive.
This is a historic opportunity. Millions have risen up in Iran. Tens of thousands have given their lives. If the West does not act now, it will signal to China, Russia, and every authoritarian regime in the world that, as Dostoevsky warned in Notes from Underground, ‘everything is permitted’.
I can’t see Trump intervening now, though I’d be happy to be proved wrong. He made the threats, but then seized some spurious nonsense about the regime stopping the killings as an excuse to backtrack – and now his little mind is full of Greenland.
Mick Hartley 