Mick Hartley

The Times, profiles hunger striker Amy Gardner-Gibson, one of “the Bronzefield Six”…..as no one to my knowledge has yet called them, but it’s surely only a matter of time.

In a prison voicemail from HMP Bronzefield, Surrey, Gardiner-Gibson made a new list of demands including access to entertainment and distance-learning classes.

The inmate, who is non-binary and goes by the name Amu, goes on to demand “BDS compliant products”.

Amu presumably being non-binary for Amy.

These are items that are not made by companies said by activists to be “complicit in Israel’s treatment of Palestinians”, which can include Nestlé coffee or Cadbury chocolate.

The demands were made in addition to 24-hour care in hospital while they are refusing food, immediate bail and the de-proscription of Palestine Action.

“Give us access to Al Jazeera TV, give us access to books, CDs, DVDs, the same as outside without censorship or limitation,” Gardiner-Gibson said. “Give us access to BDS products on the pod, including hot chocolate.

“Give us access to a kettle, a TV with a DVD player and a remote. Give us access to education and distance learning with lectures by favourite writers.”

The self-regard, the entitlement, is off the scale. Clearly these people are saints, not criminals.

Gardiner-Gibson, who has been visited in prison by Corbyn and former shadow chancellor John McDonnell, grew up in a £1.5 million house in north London and has two sisters.

The queer activist, who denies charges of conspiracy to enter a prohibited place and conspiracy to commit criminal damage, has been training to be an ambulance driver, according to a friend.

At the time of arrest, police recorded Gardiner-Gibson as being “of no fixed abode” but on company records submitted this year, the 30-year-old listed their parents’ five-bedroom house in Islington, London.

They were briefly a director of the Peasant Evolution Producers’ Co-operative, a collective of small-scale organic farmers in the south-west of England.

What – her parents were? Or they as in her as non-binary? Phew.

Gardiner-Gibson, one of three sisters, attended City and Islington sixth form college, then briefly studied at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) but dropped out.

Since then, they have worked as a bike mechanic and a masseuse, according to a close friend, and enjoyed periods travelling in South America, becoming fluent in Spanish.

Other hunger strikers are less diligent.

Lewie Chiaramello, 22, who is being held at HMP Bristol, is said to be refusing food on alternate days due to his diabetes.

As I wrote in my book Everyday Hate: everyone wants to imagine themselves as Anne Frank, saintly in her suffering, except for Jews, who want to avoid being like Anne Frank because we remember how her story ended. https://t.co/ngTMVjDM5K

— Dave Rich (@daverich1) December 20, 2025

Story here:

An image of Anne Frank wearing a keffiyeh that has become associated with Palestinians on display at a museum in Potsdam has drawn criticism from the Jewish community and a criminal complaint by the head of the German-Israeli society.

There’s nothing they love better, the Palestinian crowd, than to portray Jews as the new Nazis. And here we go again.

I spent part of my childhood in the Middle East before immigrating to Canada in my late teens. None of my Muslim girlfriends liked wearing the hijab or niqab. Whenever they could, they took it off because they found it oppressive. If their parents found out, there would be… https://t.co/CT1kMOaof7 pic.twitter.com/socJHRsAwH

— Rupa Subramanya (@rupasubramanya) December 19, 2025

Full text:

I spent part of my childhood in the Middle East before immigrating to Canada in my late teens. None of my Muslim girlfriends liked wearing the hijab or niqab. Whenever they could, they took it off because they found it oppressive. If their parents found out, there would be consequences.

I often helped my friends carve out a few hours of freedom at real personal risk. Some came from extremely powerful families. Had I been caught, they could have had me jailed and deported. Anyone who has actually lived in an Islamic society understands how pervasive and institutionalized the oppression is, especially for women and girls. While conditions have improved in a handful of places, the absence of genuine theological reform in Islam means many of these changes are superficial, largely designed to make life more comfortable for expatriates rather than to liberate local women.

So imagine my horror when Canada began celebrating World Hijab Day which is a celebration of paternalism and the normalization of female subordination. Many naive Canadians particularly white folks are deeply naïve about Islam. A kind of white saviour multiculturalism prevails, “isn’t diversity wonderful, therefore everything associated with it must be good”.

Children are assumed to lack full agency. If a child says she wants to wear the hijab or niqab, an enlightened parent should say no, and revisit the question when she is an adult. The rationale behind the hijab is explicit: it exists to shield women from the male gaze. When young girls are made to wear it, they are being sexualized at an age when they should not be thinking about sexuality at all.

This video is of Liberal MP Salma Zahid commemorating World Hijab Day in the House of Commons. She has blocked me for my views on the hijab.

I wonder how many women like this, coming to the liberalised west from societies with deeply ingrained views of women as subservient, find themselves astonished that their new hosts, far from supporting their desire for freedom, go out of their way to praise and support these customs which have misogyny written all over them.

As you’re fighting to remove our daughters’ rights to the privacy and safety of single-sex bathrooms and changing rooms, while poised to allow the unethical puberty blockers trial, perhaps children should be protected from @UKLabour. https://t.co/PS8elE5nYV

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) December 19, 2025

Jonathan Glancey, at The Critic, on cooling towers:

These awe-inspiring structures, each taller than St Paul’s Cathedral and three times the diameter of its inner dome, were what had caught my eye. Now, I knew where I was. This was Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station, closed in September 2024 and the last of its English coal-powered kind. King Coal may have been dethroned here, yet he has left monuments in his wake that some, if not all of us, can only look on with awe. 

Not so long ago, there were some 240 of these giant towers sited, for the most part, in the former realms of Lancashire, Yorkshire and Midlands coalfields. Just 37 remain and, immune from listing, they are likely to be extinct by 2030. Certainly, Historic England is no friend to them, telling governments that they “do not have the architectural interest requisite for listing”. 

This sentiment helps to get around the fact that despite their artistry, cooling towers were the work not of “interesting” architects but of skilled engineers. And what engineers they were: the concrete shells of these immensely tall and strong hyperboloid structures are just seven inches thick, the ratio of their diameter to the thickness (or thinness) of their walls less than that of an eggshell. 

In a foreword to the Twentieth Century Society’s suitably massive book Cooling Towers: A Celebration of Sculptural Beauty, Industrial History and Architectural Legacy (2025), Sir Antony Gormley sees them as “twentieth-century equivalents of Stonehenge”. 

Yes, I’m with this. Our industrial heritage is always under threat, as we reject the “satanic mills” of our grimy past. The urge to destroy, though – especially here in Britain, the birthplace of the industrial revolution – really needs to be checked. So many of these structures, from blast furnaces to railway bridges, have a beauty that flows directly from that form-follows-function aesthetic. No architectural rococo extravagance, just what works. And the most impressive, surely, are these huge towers. I wouldn’t go so much for that Stonehenge line, but yes, cathedrals of the coal age works for me.

In Derbyshire, not far from neolithic henges, the five cooling towers of Willington power station, closed in 1999, still stand. They feature on the badge of the local football club and on the school crest of the village’s primary school. Peregrine falcons survey the landscape from their hyperboloid concrete eyries. Meanwhile, if uncertainly, Drax Power Station near Selby, fully fuelled since 2018 by biomass, and with its dozen attendant cooling towers, steams on for now. Perhaps there is hope yet. 

Remember Chris Wiliamson?

Mr Williamson was elected as Labour’s MP for Derby North in 2010 and re-elected in 2017 after losing the seat to the Conservatives in 2015.

He stood as an independent in 2019 after being suspended by the party in a row over anti-Semitism.

Antisemitism? Surely not.

Daniel Sugarman:

A reminder that the idea that “in the 1950s Mossad bombed Synagogues to terrorise Iraqi Jews into emigrating to Israel” is based on claims by the Iraqi authorities at the time, who had obtained ‘confessions’ via the torture of arrested Iraqi Jews.

St James Clerkenwell and Southwark Cathedral, this morning.

🚨Hyndburn Green Party councillor Sohail Asghar arrested as “part of an investigation into alleged modern slavery in Accrington.”

Zack Polanski, Mothin Ali and then co-leader Adrian Ramsay MP pulled out all the stops to get Asghar elected. 🧵 1/ https://t.co/HLEeuu7G6x pic.twitter.com/aTXJBhlres

— Starmer Sycophant (@sirwg202110) December 19, 2025

Former Metropolitan Police officer Gill Evans at the JC, on how the Met failed the Jewish community. As long as there was no overt violence in the Free Palestine marches, the Met could pat themselves on the back and consider they’d done a good job. But the demonstrators saw this as a free pass to chant their antisemitic bile – and it got worse.

In October 2023, the then home secretary, Suella Braverman, attempted to set clear expectations for policing the pro-Palestinian demonstrations. In an open letter to police chiefs, she urged a proactive approach. Chants such as “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” she argued, should be understood as expressing a violent desire to see Israel erased from the world and “may amount to a racially aggravated section 5 public order offence”. Glorification of terrorism and harassment of communities, she insisted, should be confronted head on.

Her stance was politically inconvenient. It also cost her the job.

The failure to follow that advice has allowed the Overton window to shift, drip by drip, towards the normalisation of Jew-hatred. Eventually, the drips have become something far darker: the mark of Jewish blood.

Words lead to deeds. The normalisation of Jew-hatred leads inevitably to violence.

Meanwhile, the unthinkable became routine. Calls for people to die were chanted on British streets. Police stood by as speakers demanded the removal of the “cancerous Zionist entity” or crowds screamed “death to the IDF”. When Jewish protesters held a sign stating the obvious, that “Globalise the Intifada” is a call to murder Jews, police planned their arrest even as they were physically attacked.

British Jews have lived under constant pressure since. A continuous noise, always present. The Met’s recent declaration that “globalise the intifada” has crossed a threshold for enforcement is not a gift to the Jewish community. At best, it may slightly ease the burden created by months of normalised calls for the deaths of our families and friends. But let us be clear: this is not a sudden show of courage, Commissioner Mark Rowley has not suddenly grown a spine.

As the war in Gaza has ended and the demonstrations continue to disrupt London day after day, while Jewish bodies lie in the streets of Manchester and Bondi, the lesson has finally become unavoidable and Sir Mark Rowley has realised what Jews knew from the start. You cannot appease a hateful mob. Police leaders may believe their familiar objectives were met. In reality, they failed British Jews, even if they could not see it at the time.

Now, as that failure becomes impossible to deny, enforcement begins, not as justice, but as damage control.

The Telegraph – Phillipson blocks trans rules protecting safe spaces for women:

Bridget Phillipson is blocking the publication of trans guidance that would force business and public bodies to protect women-only spaces.

The Women and Equalities Secretary has given a statement to the High Court describing the proposed rules as “trans-exclusive” and has failed to sign them off more than three months after receiving them.

She’s looking over her shoulder at Labour’s back-bench trans supporters.

In her High Court submission, Ms Phillipson says that banning transgender women – biological males – from women’s lavatories would also mean women could not take their “infant sons” into changing rooms at swimming pools.

Oh ffs. Grasping at straws. She’s looking for any excuse to delay.

However, more than eight months after the court decision, Ms Phillipson has still not rubber-stamped the EHRC’s guidance. Sources told The Telegraph that she had insisted on additional bureaucratic processes that have held approval up.

Because of the delay, hospitals, businesses and other public facilities are doing nothing to prevent biological males from using women’s loos and changing rooms.…

Claire Coutinho, the shadow minister for equalities, said: “Government lawyers – working under Bridget Phillipson’s instruction – are trying to rewrite the Supreme Court judgment that sex means biological sex. It is clear that they have no intention of complying with the law or implementing the ruling to make sure women’s rights to single-sex spaces are protected.

“The minister’s arguments would be laughable if they weren’t so dangerous. Calling for sex-based rights on a case-by-case basis to try and appease radical gender activists in her own party is a betrayal of women and girls everywhere. Whether it’s this court case or failing to publish the EHRC’s draft code of practice, the Government is doing everything it can to deny women the right to single-sex spaces.”