El-Fattah is a genuinely odious character who openly and cheerfully celebrates the murder of Jewish civilians.
— Sohrab Ahmari (@SohrabAhmari) December 28, 2025
I once prevented him from receiving the Sakharov Prize from the EU with a well-timed WSJ editorial. https://t.co/PcUBhW3Zj7
Mick Hartley
Politics and Culture
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Hadley Freeman in the Sunday Times interviews the three For Women Scotland campaigners whose case led to the Supreme Court judgment, on biological sex as the criterion for women-only spaces. We won the Supreme Court sex ruling. The PM is subverting it:
Susan Smith, 53, a former financial adviser and one of FWS’s three founding members, says: “Both the Scottish government and the UK government claim they accept the Supreme Court ruling, but they have done nothing to implement it. Rather, they have gone out of their way to thwart it. Bridget Phillipson [the secretary for women and equalities] in particular is trying to fudge the law by sitting on the Equality and Human Rights Commission [EHRC] guidance, and it is having a serious impact on women.”
After the ruling, the EHRC drafted a code of practice advising businesses and public bodies how to maintain single-sex spaces, including hospital wards and prisons, in order to comply with the ruling, and urged the government to bring it to parliament “at speed”.
More than three months later, however, Phillipson is still refusing to sign it, saying she is concerned the guidance is “trans exclusive” — and if she means that it excludes males from women’s-only spaces, she is correct, because that is what flows from the court’s ruling.
“If Bridget Phillipson and Keir Starmer don’t like what the Supreme Court did, they have the power to change it. But they’re not going to do that, because they know it would be incredibly unpopular and stupid and they’d lose support. So instead they’re playing silly buggers and trying to change the law by stealth,” says Smith.
Phillipson claims that banning males from women’s single-sex spaces would mean a mother would not be able to bring her toddler son into a changing room. It’s an argument that is in equal parts fatuous and desperate, suggesting that a small child with his mother is analogous to a grown man who believes he is a woman.
Marion Calder, 54, an NHS worker and single mother, another of FWS’s founders, says: “Why should we ever listen to Phillipson again if she cannot make a decision about something as simple as this? She needs to ‘woman up’ and face down these men’s rights activists. It’s very simple: things are either single sex or they’re not. But if I had a penny for every time someone said, ‘Oh it’s terribly complicated’ I’d be richer than JK Rowling.”
Trina Budge, 54, a farmer from Caithness and FWS’s third founder, adds: “You know, we asked to meet with Phillipson just before the verdict last April, and she said no.”
Did Starmer contact them? They all burst out laughing at the thought.
But it’s not just the government. It’s “the blob”.
But the real problem, Calder adds, isn’t the government: “It’s the civil service, and [gender ideology] is so deeply embedded there. So it doesn’t matter who the heck you’re voting in because they remain in post and a lot of the bills are going through them.” FWS saw this for themselves when they met civil servants at a time when Nicola Sturgeon, as first minister, was trying to jam through gender recognition reform in 2022. The proposal said a man could become a woman by saying he was, better known as “self-ID”.
“We met this one extremely senior civil servant who was putting the bill together. I was trying to talk to him about self-ID, and he responded with, ‘I have met trans people and they were super nice and I have shaken their hand.’ I said, ‘And what’s that got to do with the price of cheese?’,” says Calder.
But FWS are optimistic. They know there’s a “definite quiet majority” in Scotland who agree with them, many of whom whisper thanks to them when they see them in the street. “I’m rural with no neighbours, but even I’ve had people come up to me in my local café to say, ‘Well done,’” says Budge.
They still receive “lots and lots” of abusive emails, but they’re not threatened in the street. “I know there’s an activist who lives near me who sends us threatening messages. I just pass him in the street, and he doesn’t even see me,” says Calder. “There’s a lot to be said for being a woman of a certain age, you know. You’re invisible. And then you’re not.”
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Can he put a foot right? Starmer again:
Sir Keir Starmer nominated a former adviser for a peerage despite knowing he campaigned for a councillor who had been charged with child sex offences.
Matthew Doyle, who was the Downing Street director of communications until March, is due to take a seat in the Lords early next year. When he left No 10, the prime minister said it was a “privilege” to have worked with Doyle, who had been “by my side every day”.
It can now be revealed that No 10 nominated Doyle, 50, for a peerage after investigating his continued support for Sean Morton, a former Labour councillor in Moray, northeast Scotland, after the candidate was charged with possessing and distributing indecent images of children in December 2016.
Morton was immediately suspended by Labour after appearing in court.
He later admitted crimes including possession of several pictures of naked girls as young as ten.
Despite the charges, Doyle, a former spokesman for Sir Tony Blair, campaigned for Morton when he ran as an independent in May 2017, knocking on doors wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the slogan “Re-elect Sean Morton”.
It’s not a good look.
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Lydon is sceptical of the new wave of punk bands. “You could be influenced by my earlier work, but please don’t show any signs of imitating it,” he says. “You have to have your own ideas.” He finds Bob Vylan, the group who chanted, “Death to the IDF,” at Glastonbury, “rather sad and pointless. That’s just riding on the current wave of leftism, where you don’t have to think any more. You just react with the herd. Moo!” How about Kneecap, the politically charged hip-hop trio from Belfast? “They should follow their own advice [as per their band name].”
Kneecap campaign for a free Palestine, to which Lydon says: “In total agreement, so long as you free it from Hamas.” He has drawn flak for playing in Israel with PiL. Would he do so again? “Of course. There are human beings in Israel, aren’t there? My attitude about playing in pro-Muslim nations has always been the same too. Why won’t you let us?”…
Lydon was bullied for being Irish; did that give him an affinity with other victims of bigotry? “Yeah, but I’ve got news for you: everybody gets it. You get it for being English, Jamaican, Turkish or Greek. That’s childhood. And we learn how to survive.” Kids now are mollycoddled, he thinks, “to the detriment of us all”.
A TV project and book are in the pipeline; until then speaking tours pay the bills. “Apparently I’ve played to over a million and a half people just by going on stage alone and yacking,” he says. There have been hecklers: one time “I was talking about Nora and I was completely upset. Some woman decided to stand up and yell abuse at me. ‘This is not what I paid for.’ Well, I’ve no idea what you paid for, but this is what you f***ing get.”
Yes, he’s back.
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They know best what’s good for us.
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An interesting couple of reports from MEMRI.
First up, a recent article in the Qatari government daily Al-Sharq, resurrecting the Protocols, on the Zionists’ wicked plot to take over the world:
As Vasily Grossman said: ‘Tell me what you accuse the Jews of, and I’ll tell you what you’re guilty of.’
Which brings us to the second report, on the Muslim Brotherhood, with warnings to the west from a number of Arab journalists, who warn that the MB is a terrorist organisation that aims to take over western countries from within, and should be banned – as the US is doing.
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Romi Gonen interviewed here. “I was going to be his sex slave for life”.
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Full video here.
Mick Hartley 