Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

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  • Behaviour that was “not appropriate”.

    Meanwhile, in Southwark:

    It was as Miranda Newsom entered the female changing room of her local council-run leisure centre in Southwark, south London, that she first noticed someone who was clearly a biological man washing his hands at the sink.

    Newsom, a 60-year-old marketing executive, had been a member of the gym for over two years, using it four or five times a week to keep fit.

    But this was not the first time she had noticed men using women’s facilities and had emailed the centre previously to complain, to no avail. However, on this occasion, she refused to remain silent.

    “I saw him straight away – a man, around 5ft 10in tall, with long hair, wearing a halter top and loose-fitting trousers, standing at the basin washing his hands,” says Newsom, a married mother-of-two.

    “I’d spotted him in the female changing room the previous week and had been too nervous to say anything. He’s the second man I’ve seen in the female facilities at this particular centre, but today, I was feeling braver.

    “As I approached, I said calmly, ‘I’m sure you’re probably a perfectly decent person, but this is a female changing room, and males can’t be in here.’

    “He turned on me immediately, saying, ‘I’m a woman on my birth certificate and passport!’. But he was unmistakably male.”

    Before Newsom could respond, she says, “he started filming me and asking if other women in the changing room had a problem with him being there”.

    She continues: “My heart was racing. One woman – possibly in her twenties – said she had no problem. There was another woman, standing in just a towel, who didn’t say anything.”

    Ah, good old female solidarity.

    It was, of course, Miranda Newsom who got banned. Her behaviour, in confronting a man in the women’s changing room, was “inappropraiate”, and – the horror – she’d misgendered him.

    Newsom says the row in the changing room escalated when she was accused of threatening violence.

    “Seconds after I’d started talking to him, suddenly, out of nowhere, he said, ‘I’m scared! You raised a fist at me! I’m calling the police, I’m getting the manager.’

    “My hand was closed as I was holding my earbuds, but I was in no way ‘making a fist’ or threatening to punch him. I’m a 5ft 5in woman, and he was so much taller than me. It was a ridiculous thing to say.

    “We both walked to reception, where he objected to my calling him a man and then called me a ‘cis woman’ [a woman who identifies as their biological sex]. I took exception to that as I’m simply a ‘woman’.

    “He then called me a man, but this simply doesn’t bother me.”

    Newsom admits that she “did become agitated at the time – particularly when this man started filming me. No doubt my cortisol was already spiking from seeing a grown adult man in the female changing room while at least one woman was standing there in just a towel”.

    Within 15 minutes of the encounter, however, two police officers had arrived.

    “They talked to him first while the female gym general manager came to speak with me, clearly startled. She said that the centre tries to be “inclusive and welcoming to all”.

    “The next part of our conversation was jaw-dropping. She said that when it comes to trans people, they do a ‘visual assessment’ to make sure they look ‘enough’ like the sex they aspire to be.

    “It is utterly ridiculous. I asked if a man with long hair and a pink top would be allowed in, but a man with short hair wearing a t-shirt and baggy track suit bottoms wouldn’t? How can that form a policy?”

    Newsom was told by the police officers that there would be no action, but the council management said her case would be investigated further.

    Last week, she was invited to a meeting with Southwark’s head of leisure. There, she was told that the centre is “reviewing its policies”, but for now, she was banned for a year for behaviour that was “not appropriate”.

    If the useless Bridget Phillipson had published the single sex EHRC guidance, this could have been avoided. But she hasn’t, so here we are.

    Last words to the redoubtable Newsom.

    “Why should the safety, privacy and dignity of women and girls be put on hold because the council doesn’t want to upset these men?”

  • The elite class

    “”For Stock and Power are correct about this much: psychoanalysis does not presume that we in general know our own minds.”

    There’s more to Srinivasan’s LRB article than her patronising dismissal of Nina Power and Kathleen Stock. Here’s how it starts:

    The unconscious​ is back. Why now? Certainly it ruptured into consciousness in the days and months following 7 October 2023, when the Israeli death machine let loose on Gaza, accelerating into a genocide of the Palestinian people.

    Ah yes. The genocide of the Palestinian people.

    Denials of the reality of genocide mask a deeper, libidinal investment in its perpetration. In June 2024, the right-wing politician Moshe Feiglin took to Israeli television to invoke Hitler:

    “As Hitler … once said, ‘I cannot live in this world if there is one Jew left in it.’ We will not be able to live in this land if one Islamo-Nazi is left in Gaza, and if we do not go back to Gaza and turn it into Hebrew Gaza.”

    Moshe Feiglin – assuming this is a genuine quote – is a far-right Israeli politician, and of course by no means representative of Israeli opinion. But Srinivasan happily implies that somehow this is the deeper unconscious wish of all Israelis, thus neatly allowing her to complete the Israelis-as-the-new-Nazis point she’s so keen to make. That’s how it works with our intellectual “elite class”.

  • Educated beyond all common sense

    Julie Burchill, in the Spectator – It’s hard to take the Palestine Action hunger strikers seriously:

    For connoisseurs of silliness, the group’s website provides a smorgasbord of the stuff. Even overlooking their demands to be released on immediate bail, shut down a defence firm with links to Israel, achieve an end to the ban on Palestine Action and receive miniature unicorns in their Christmas stockings, they really do not appear to have one iota of common sense between them. For starters, they’re on what’s been called a ‘rolling’ hunger strike – taking it in turns, as though it was Secret Santa. One of them is on a ‘partial’ strike, refusing food every other day, otherwise known as dieting….

    But wait, it’s not over yet – there’s more laughs to be had here than anywhere outside of the ‘Your Party’ Christmas party, as these overprivileged young people finally face the consequences of their actions. One of them has suffered the indignity of having ‘prison staff force her to remove her kuffiyah hijab, and confiscated all of her hijabs with the kuffiyah pattern from her cell. Her cell has also been searched without reason or respect for her privacy’ – that’ll be a sign you’re in prison, mate. One of her fellow jailbirds complains that his ‘calls, visits and access to post are also severely restricted and monitored’. It’s like they read rabble-rousing populists like me complaining that prison is basically a holiday camp now – and believed it. That’ll teach them to give credence to a paid puppet of the many-headed Zionist monster!

    Educated beyond all common sense, is there a way back for these goons? Probably not. The dumbness goes all the way through with this type; ‘The abolition of prisons is predicated upon the liberation of Palestine’, their website solemnly informs us. So they’re not just nut jobs on their specialist subject; they’re general nut jobs, of that most extreme sort, the ‘anti-carceral’ kind, who want all houses of correction closed down and presumably all murderers and rapists running around free.…

  • Restrictive feminine stereotypes

    At that age, I refused to wear any colour other than blue. I pleaded to have my hair cut short, properly short, like the boys. My parents would not let it be shorter than a bob. I am sparing you the photograph. It was truly dreadful.

    From about the age of three, I was unmistakably a tomboy. I asked for toy soldiers and a football shirt for Christmas (Chelsea- Blue is the colour!). I was the only girl invited to a friend’s football party. I was the only girl who turned up dressed as a prince to a ‘princes and princesses’ party.

    I read and wrote obsessively. I gravitated towards The Lord of the Rings, spy novels, all the familiar ‘boy’ stories. In every story, in every game, I imagined myself as a male protagonist. His name was always Theo, the boy version of my own.

    If someone had told me then that it was possible to actually BE a boy, that there were drugs I could take to transform myself and my body, I would have seized the opportunity. And deeply regretted it later.

    As I moved through my teenage years, I began to realise something crucial. I was perfectly capable of loving all of these things while still being a girl. I had despised the words ‘girl’ and ‘woman’ because I had bundled them together with every restrictive feminine stereotype I had encountered.

    Today, I would have almost certainly been described as having ‘gender incongruence’ or ‘dysphoria’. And on that basis, I might have been offered medical interventions that risk infertility and amount to chemical castration. Then when I’d been brainwashed enough, I might have been pushed towards a double mastectomy or cross-sex hormones. The Pathways trial MUST BE STOPPED. #StopTheTrial

  • Like a zombie apocalypse

    They still go on, these trans disruptions. Incredible.

    A leading academic who led a recent government review into sex and gender data collection has threatened legal action against the University of Bristol, claiming it failed to protect her freedom of speech.

    Prof Alice Sullivan has also written to the university regulator, the Office for Students, after a talk she gave at the university was disrupted by a trans rights protest.

    Prof Sullivan told the BBC it was like a “zombie apocalypse” as some protesters pressed up against the window with placards and loudhailers.

    The fire alarm was set off more than once, disrupting the talk, until security staff advised they move to a higher floor.

    As she left after the event, Prof Sullivan said she heard “howls of ‘shame on you, shame on you’”.…

    The letter that has now been sent by Prof Sullivan’s lawyers says the University of Bristol had 15 months to find a secure location on campus for the talk.

    It adds that documents disclosed by the university reveal there had been complaints made by its LGBTQ+ staff network against her speaking.

    Prof Sullivan says she has raised many of her concerns with the Office for Students, which as regulator of universities in England has the power to fine institutions if they fail to uphold freedom of speech.

    Earlier this year, the OfS handed out a record fine of £585,000 to the University of Sussex, warning that its transgender and non-binary inclusion policy had a “chilling effect” on freedom of speech.

    That might shake them up a bit – a hefty fine.

    How long before these addle-brained students realise they’ve been conned? – that people can’t change sex, and trans isn’t the next great liberation movement? Sorry you were late for the party with civil rights, feminism, gay rights and all, but that’s no excuse for shouting and screaming for a cult based on regressive sexist stereotypes and homophobia.

    Added:

  • The state of Britain’s creative class

    Jo Bartosch ponders the very different career paths of Graham Linehan and David Walliams. The former went against the “correct” media thinking, and was ostracised; the latter said whatever he thought was required, and stayed on board.

    Britain’s creative class functions as a gated community, policed by fashion and bounded by fear. For decades, comedy writer turned presenter and children’s author David Walliams was safely inside the walls: his best-selling books populated the shelves of schools and Little Britain, the show he co-created, became a part of the comedy canon.

    Walliams rose to fame portraying Emily Howard, a transvestite whose insistence, “I’m a lady”, in the face of every challenge provoked hilarity. Meanwhile, comedy writer Graham Linehan has spent recent years becoming infamous for disputing the same claim when it is made in earnest. The disparity in how the two men have been treated is instructive.

    Linehan, who has refused to apologise for his campaigning against trans ideology, has been effectively exiled from British cultural life and forced to start again in the United States. Walliams, by contrast, perfected the art of saying sorry and was repeatedly granted the benefit of the doubt, remaining comfortably on the lucrative side of history.

    Never mind that Linehan was by a long long way the better comic writer, producing brilliant fresh comedy – Father Ted, The IT Crowd – while Walliams churned out mediocre and often properly offensive (“black face” etc.) pabulum.

    More than two decades after Little Britain, Walliams has also displayed a keen instinct for ideological calibration. Last year, on a podcast, he offered a fashionably up-to-date gloss on his own identity, reminiscing about going to gay clubs as a student, wearing skirts, and experimenting with his presentation before concluding: “I think in a way I’d probably say I am non-binary. I don’t know exactly.” It was a declaration that cost him nothing and signalled everything.

    Unfortunately the recent decision by his publishers to drop him, after allegations of sexual harassment, leads one to doubt the sincerity of his “non-binary” identity – but who knows?

    The lesson is not that Linehan should have been protected or that Walliams deserved destruction. It is that British cultural life now operates on a simple rule. Mouthing the correct platitudes is a shield. Say the right things, apologise on cue, and even the most tasteless or troubling conduct can be absorbed. Say the wrong things, particularly those deemed low status, and no amount of talent or prior success will save you. Small wonder, then, that Britain’s creative class is so timid; everyone knows where the gates are, and how easily they close.

  • Gaslighting at its finest

    A headline BBC Indepth piece today – Why British Jews are experiencing their biggest change in 60 years.

    David Collier:

    In typical BBC whitewash fashion – the long 1700+ word article does not mention Muslims, Islam, Islamism anywhere (SERIOUSLY!!) – even though it mentions both Bondi Beach and Manchester. The BBC erases the biggest change (on this subject) in the UK – in an article about the big changes happening here.

    It gloats over a public fall of support for Zionism – without once considering this may be a sign of persecution and fear. Persecuted groups are KNOWN to be less confident in public about their identity….

    The only thing it really wants to do is pretend more and more young Jews hate Israel. One of the BBC’s favourite pastimes.

    To do that it gives voice to “Robert Cohen” and describes him as “a PhD student at Kings”. He may be – but he is also in his 50s and a veteran BDS supporters and anti-Zionist activist – who has stood alongside JVL, Corbyn, and has been part of the very Jewish bloc demonstrations in London he is meant to be impartially “researching”. Long battling against the claims of a rise in antisemitism, Cohen has proudly said “I’ve married out, my children are Christian, and my wife is a vicar.”” – but hey – the BBC does like “sharp practice” when it comes to reporting on Jews, and he has the name “Robert Cohen” – so why not just let his name do the heavy lifting.

    And did I mention the piece was co-written by someone called “Aleem Maqbool” – a Muslim journalist – and a Catherine Wyatt – who has only been in this role a few weeks.

    The article is gaslighting at its finest.

  • Sabotage by procedure

    Full thread:

    The Supreme Court spoke plainly. Sex in law means biological sex. Single-sex spaces exist to protect privacy, dignity, and safety. That ruling was unanimous, deliberate, and designed to end a decade of institutional confusion. It was not ambiguous. It did not invite reinterpretation. It settled the matter. And yet, months on, women are still waiting for the law to be applied. Not because Parliament has overturned it. Not because the judges were unclear. But because a Cabinet minister – Bridget Phillipson, the Secretary of State for Women and Equalities – has decided she does not like the outcome.

    The task of turning judgments into practice falls to the state. That is why the Equality and Human Rights Commission drafted guidance spelling out what the ruling requires of hospitals, councils, gyms, schools and businesses. It did exactly what it exists to do: interpret the law as declared by the court and urge ministers to act at speed. Instead, the guidance has been sat on, stalled, and quietly attacked from within government.

    While women wait, the minister responsible has gone further. In court filings, she has described the guidance as “trans-exclusive,” as though enforcing sex-based law were an act of discrimination rather than compliance. She has offered bad-faith hypotheticals about infant boys and pregnant women in queues to muddy a judgment that was written precisely to prevent such games. She has demanded extra process where none is required. And she has aligned herself with a legal challenge brought by the Good Law Project, whose purpose is not to clarify the ruling, but to blunt it.

    The effect is not academic. Because the guidance is blocked, institutions do nothing. Hospitals continue to tell women to accept males in wards and changing rooms. Employers continue to discipline women who object. Public bodies continue to pretend the law is unsettled when it is not. The chaos the court sought to end is being prolonged by design. This is how rights are hollowed out in practice while being praised in principle.

    The contradiction at the heart of government is now stark. Keir Starmer told Parliament the ruling must be implemented “in full and at all levels.” Yet his own minister is arguing, in court, for a “case-by-case” approach that would reintroduce the very incoherence the judges rejected. If a women’s toilet must admit a male based on appearance or attitude, it ceases to be a women’s space. There is no middle ground. There never was. The law does not bend because a minister finds it awkward.

    What we are watching is not caution. It is sabotage by procedure. No vote. No Bill. No open argument in Parliament. Just delay, reframing, and obstruction until the ruling is drained of force. That is not how a democracy treats its highest court. It is how an executive evades it.

    The irony is bitter. For years, women were told to be patient while clarity was sought. The court has now provided that clarity. And still they are told to wait – not for the law to be written, but for a minister to accept it. This is not about complexity. It is about will.

    A government that accepts a judgment only in words, while resisting it in action, is not governing under the rule of law. It is testing how long it can get away with ignoring it. And the price of that test is being paid by women who were promised protection and are instead given process.

    The court has done its job. The law is settled. What remains is a simple question of integrity. Will ministers carry out the law as it stands, or continue to stall until it means nothing at all?

    “While women wait, the minister responsible has gone further. In court filings, she has described the guidance as “trans-exclusive,” as though enforcing sex-based law were an act of discrimination rather than compliance.”

  • Setting the record straight

  • A martyr for Palestine

    The Bronzefield Six, I suggested. OK, they’re not all at Bronzefield. Hunger striker Kamran Ahmed is in Pentonville. He’s interviewed (by phone) in the Sunday times today, in the most laudatory terms. Not a word is offered to counter his view of himself as a devout Muslim who considers his life a small price to pay for making the world a better place.

    “Every day I’m scared that potentially I might die,” he said in a telephone interview on Friday night from his cell, where he spends 21 hours a day. “I’ve been getting chest pains regularly … There have been times where I felt like I’m getting tasered — my body’s vibrating or shaking. I’ll basically lose control of my feelings.

    “I’ve been scared since the seventh day when my blood sugars dropped. The nurse said, ‘I’m scared you’re not going to wake up [when you go to sleep]. Please eat something.’”

    “But I’m looking at the bigger picture of perhaps we can relieve oppression abroad and relieve the situations for my co-defendants,” added Ahmed, a mechanic from east London. “Yes, I’m scared of passing away. Yes, this may have life-long implications. But I look at the risk versus reward. I see it as worthwhile.”

    Ring any bells? Another martyr for the cause.

    He and his fellow hunger strikers are awaiting trial on charges of criminal damage, aggravated burglary and violent disorder at a factory for Elbit Systems, an Israeli arms manufacturer, and in relation to an alleged break-in at RAF Brize Norton, in June. Serious stuff. Articles like this serving the cause and feeding the heroic martyrs-for-Palestine myth certainly don’t help.

    Outrageously, “Comments are not enabled for this article”. Yes, perhaps this self-righteous fool’s voice should be heard, thinking he’s above the law – but without allowing anyone the opportunity to call him out?