Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

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  • Natural allies

    This is interesting, from MEMRI TV, featuring Iranian International Relations professor Gholamreza Haddad.

    Israel, he says, is accused of being an expansionist power – “from the Nile to the Euphrates”. But isn’t this slogan a much better fit for Iran, with its intrusions into Iraq and Yemen and Lebanon and Syria and Sudan and Gaza?

    His main point, though, is that Israel and Iran should be natural allies against pan-Arabism, which has defined Jews and Iranians as the enemies in the Middle East. Nasser’s war-cry in 1967 was “breakfast in Tel Aviv, lunch in Ahwaz [in Iran]”. He quotes Saddam Hussein’s father-in-law, a senior Ba’ath Party official, who wrote “I am surprised that God created three creatures: the Jew, the Iranian, and the fly”. Yet what is Iran doing? It’s scaring the Arabs into Israel’s arms.

  • A magnet for predators

    From the Telegraph. No, mixed-sex changing rooms are not a good idea:

    Women and girls are being sexually assaulted in mixed changing rooms across the country.

    New police data show that at least 16 rapes, 80 sexual assaults and 65 acts of voyeurism were committed in sports centres in 2023, equating to three offences a week.

    Many of the offences were in mixed-sex changing areas, according to a report by the Women’s Rights Network (WRN), which obtained the figures via freedom of information requests.

    I think we knew this, but ideological concerns, as so often, have been allowed to override common-sense safety issues.

    The WRN also accused local authorities and other providers of sports centres of “designing in harm” by promoting mixed-sex changing areas.

    “Mixed-sex changing villages are the default design for new swimming pools and refurbished wet-side changing areas, and they are a magnet for predators,” the report said.

    “Women and girls are being put at risk of serious sexual crimes because local authorities, sports councils, leisure centre operators and architects do not take women’s safety seriously. They ‘design in’ harm and provide opportunities for avoidable abuse.”

  • Let down by a legal system hamstrung by class and sexism

    Gethin Chamberlain:

    Sandie Peggie has been badly let down by a legal system hamstrung by class and sexism. The employment tribunal simply couldn’t accept that a working class woman might be entitled to stand up for her rights. So it rejected her evidence and tried to rewrite the law.

    Her win was a technical one; a grudging admission by the tribunal that NHS Fife made mistakes in handling her case. But the tribunal made it clear that it did not believe that female staff had any right to single sex spaces.

    The Supreme Court judgement that the definition of sex in the Equality Act 2010 should be interpreted as ‘biological’ sex was succinct and crystal clear. But the tribunal thought it knew better.

    The result is a rambling, bloated and incoherent 312 page judgment riddled with grounds for appeal. (The Supreme Court took just 87 pages to resolve For Women Scotland).

    The judgment made it abundantly clear that the tribunal much preferred the evidence of middle class doctor ‘Beth’ Upton over working class senior nurse Sandie Peggie. But why?

    Anyone old enough to remember the 1987 Archer libel case will remember the judge’s summing up in which he praised Lady Mary Archer’s fragrance and elegance. How could anyone doubt such an exquisite creature?

    And so it was too with Dr Upton, a middle-class man with middle class luxury beliefs who thinks he’s a woman.

    He used female pronouns and a female name, wore female clothing and makeup. He even had a voice female in tone and pitch. Why be mean to him? The tribunal thought him rather brave.

    Sandie Peggie though is a working class woman. She has opinions that wouldn’t play well at a middle class dinner party. She doesn’t believe that men can become women. The tribunal didn’t take to her at all.

    So who to believe? The tribunal instinctively knew who, and it wasn’t the woman who thought she had a legal right to get changed away from a male gaze….

  • A view from the left

    Paul Knaggs at Labour Heartland – Sandie Peggie and the Institutional Madness That Chose Ideology Over Women:

    A 318-page tribunal judgment confirms what working women already knew: Britain’s public institutions will sacrifice them on the altar of fashionable nonsense

    Ask yourself a simple question. What kind of health service suspends an experienced nurse for objecting to undressing beside a man in a women’s changing room? What kind of organisation spends over £250,000 of public money defending that suspension? And what kind of political class watches this unfold and calls it progress?

    The answer arrived in 318 pages: the kind captured by ideology so completely that biological reality, women’s dignity, and basic safeguarding all became negotiable. The kind where a working-class woman’s right to privacy matters less than institutional compliance with fashionable doctrine.

    And yes, this is a Labour activist writing, but he can still see how badly Peggie was let down by the unions:

    Where were the unions while Peggie was suspended and investigated for defending women’s spaces?

    The deafening silence from organised labour throughout this case speaks to a deeper rot. Trade unions that once existed to protect working people from arbitrary management power have been captured by the same middle-class activists who run HR departments and diversity committees.

    Peggie needed a union to tell NHS Fife that suspending a nurse for safeguarding concerns was outrageous. She needed collective bargaining power to push back against ideological management. She needed solidarity from fellow workers.

    Instead, she got lawyers and crowdfunding. The institutions that should have defended her were either complicit or absent.

    This is not an accident. It is the result of decades of middle-class graduate activists colonising labour movement structures and redefining “progressive” to mean whatever makes them feel virtuous. Class struggle becomes secondary to policing language and enforcing fashionable doctrines.

    The working-class women who need unions most now find themselves abandoned by organisations more interested in corporate diversity initiatives than defending shop-floor workers from management harassment.

    Can’t argue with that.

    Added: there is an amusing touch of the “no true Scotsman” here, though. No true working class unionist would bow their knee to this gender ideology nonsense over the rights of hard-working women – so the unions must have been taken over by the middle class…

  • The made-up quote

  • Teesside 1968–1999

    Photographer Peter Benson, at Cafe Royal Books,

    These black and white images were taken between 1968 and 1999, initially as a result of my interest in the demolition and clearance of the built environment between the Newport Bridge and the Transporter Bridge in Middlesbrough. From here, this body of work expanded to include Port Clarence, High Clarence, Haverton Hill, Seaton Carew and Hartlepool, all of which were to become parts of what is now Teesside.

    [Photos © Cafe Royal Books/Peter Benson]

  • At the University of Kentucky

    A very American problem. A professor at the University of Kentucky has said that the state of Israel needs to be destroyed militarily by international force. He was suspended, and is now suing the university for reinstatement, with civil liberties groups taking his side.

    Professor Ramsi Woodcock really, really hates Israel. And he doesn’t just hate the Netanyahu government, or the war in Gaza, or the violent assaults by West Bank settlers. Those are just symptoms, which even many Israelis oppose.

    Woodcock’s hatred goes so much deeper — to the very survival of Israel itself — that he has demanded the forcible elimination of the Jewish state, with scant regard for the consequences. 

    A tenured professor at Kentucky’s J. David Rosenberg College of Law, Woodcock asserts that the “State of Israel,” which he confines in scare quotes, has no right to exist. 

    For him, the “destruction of Israel” is a moral imperative, and he has called upon the international community to launch a war to “end Israel.” 

    On behalf of his self-initiated Antizionist Legal Studies Movement, Woodcock circulated a petition earlier this year for an international war against Israel. He posted it on various sites, including multiple discussion groups sponsored by the Association of American Law Schools. 

    The petition’s seeming call for violence, demanding “that every country in the world make war on Israel immediately,” drew complaints from law professors and others who saw the posts, including the Majority Caucus of the Kentucky state senate.  

    The article, by another law professor, suggests that the university’s suspension of Woodcock was “a drastic overreaction”, but admits that Woodcock is indeed antisemitic. Well yes…

  • Littered with the language of trans activism

    Yes, an appeal looks likely in the Sandie Peggie case.

    In public, at least, her supporters claimed victory. Sandie Peggie had, after all, been found to have been harassed by her employer, NHS Fife, in four different ways.

    But the veteran nurse’s win was a relatively narrow one. It was far from the slamdunk gender-critical campaigners had hoped for and had, in truth, expected after their landmark Supreme Court win in April.

    “A load of sexist shite,” was how one leading activist privately described the 312-page ruling. “I didn’t think the judge would fall for his [Beth Upton’s] schtick. I was wrong.”

    It means an employment tribunal which has divided opinion for the best part of a year is unlikely to be the end of the case. An appeal, well-informed sources said, is now a “near certainty”….

    “This ruling just shows the reason we need the guidance from Westminster to be published urgently,” Trina Budge, a director of For Women Scotland, said. She noted that the Supreme Court ruling stated that provisions required for the protection of women “necessarily exclude men”, yet this appeared not to have been considered.

    “Unfortunately, this judgment is all over the place and, in parts, littered with nonsense and the language of trans activism,” Budge added. “This is a perfect example of how in the absence of any leadership from the UK government, the water has been muddied further.

    “Public bodies are still being allowed to cling to the ridiculous notion that putting on make up and wearing a dress is what defines a woman.”

  • Citing safety concerns

    “…to “help mitigate the placement of students in their class who come from families that do not support LGBTQIA+ identities.”

    The whole byzantine tale is laid out here.

  • Matching gender stereotypes