Mick Hartley

Blog

  • Demos old and new

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    Full text:

    We wanted to *smash* the BNP, to *kick out* the Tories, to *fight* Alton's bill, to *stop* various wars, and Clause 27, then Section 28, then the Poll Tax, and we marched *in solidarity* with miners, and with refugees who we wanted to *welcome*.

    You can argue with each of these causes, of course.

    I don't recall chanting to *punch* *fuck* *shit on* *piss on* or *burn* anyone, including *bitches*

    I know I'm getting old, and I may have misremembered, but there might be another explanation.

  • A tantrum disguised as a protest

    e grip this muddled mob of dimwits and fetishists once had on public life. How did we get to a point where women were hounded from their jobs for stating biological facts – all to avoid offending these deranged people, some of whom are prepared to piss in protest? How did they hold so much sway that even the prime minister felt he could not definitively say that women don’t have penises?

    One day, we might well laugh at the collective lunacy that gripped the early 21st century. But not yet. First, we need to ask the people who indulged it: what the hell were you thinking?

  • Criminal incitement

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  • Starmer’s silence

    Should we be worried about the backlash to this week's Supreme Court ruling? The hysterical reaction of many trans activists was to be expected, and has done little to dispel the notion that they're just a bunch of spoiled man-childs (men-children?), but the sense that many Labour MPs are unhappy is more troubling. Joan Smith at UnHerd:

    The backlash has begun. It’s happening up and down the country, where thousands of trans activists raged at the weekend against last week’s Supreme Court judgment. In London, they carried placards threatening to kill “terfs”, urinated on a statue of the suffragette, Millicent Fawcett, and daubed it with the slogan “fag rights”. In Sheffield, a small group of women had to be protected by police from an angry mob of trans activists.

    But there’s also something going on behind the scenes. Yesterday’s Mail on Sunday has revealed that government ministers secretly condemned the ruling in a WhatsApp group and plotted to challenge it. Labour MPs specifically attacked Baroness Falkner, chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, which is due to issue new guidance this summer on the court’s common-sense ruling that “sex” means biological sex.

    Has Starmer stepped in to confront these gender rebels? He has not. Has he issued any statement yet on the ruling? He has not. Are we surprised? We are not.

    Trans people have not lost a single right in this country. What they don’t have — and never had, despite the claims of activists — is a right to be treated as biological women. The hysterical response to the judgment is a cry of pure fury, an echo of every time an entitled man has heard the word “no”. And that makes it an exceedingly dangerous moment for women.

    As a former prosecutor, Starmer should know this perfectly well. The most dangerous moment in a woman’s life is when she stands up to an abusive man. Trans activists have nowhere to go except the streets, and some of them appear to be itching for a confrontation; it is clear that someone could get seriously hurt. The Prime Minister has, in the past, been quick to denounce public disorder, but the sight of women being shouted at by thugs with trans flags appears not to move him at all.

    Refusing to speak is taking sides. Starmer has tolerated and enabled misogyny in the Labour party for far too long. His silence is no longer tenable.

    You'd think it would be a good opportunity for Starmer to extract himself from the gender mess he got himself into and show some leadership…but no. The sound of silence.

  • Men peeing in women’s toilets

    Yes, it's today's great cause.

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    Added: Brendan O'Neill.

    They’re demanding the right to urinate wherever they please. I’m serious: ‘We piss where we want’, said a placard at the Manchester demo.

    Tell me you’re a man without telling me you’re a man! ‘We pee where we want’ is literally the cry of unpleasant blokes everywhere. That haughty demand was made in St Peter’s Square. People once gathered there to demand the right to vote, giving rise to the Peterloo Massacre. Now they gather there to demand the right to relieve themselves in the women’s bathroom. It’s less Peterloo than Portaloo: from demanding the franchise to advertising your fetish.

  • Trump and Bukele

    Andrew Sullivan (via Jerry Coyne):

    In some ways, the core character of the Trump administration can be seen in two Oval Office press conferences with two young, informally-dressed foreign leaders. The first was with Volodymyr Zelensky, president of a country invaded and now partly occupied by Russia, who has courageously kept his country free from total Russian domination. The second was with Nayib Bukele, a man who governs in a permanent emergency, has seized 83,000 people with no due process and put them in brutal gulags, strong-armed his Supreme Court to gain an unconstitutional second term, and is one of the worst human rights violators in Latin America.

    So it’s obvious which one Trump and Vance prefer, isn’t it? They humiliated Zelensky while lavishing Bukele with encomiums for his collaboration in providing an extra-territorial, extra-judicial, concentration camp for whomever in America Trump wants to grab off the street, bundle into an airplane, and get Stephen Miller to call a terrorist. What’s not to like?

    But the intense bromance between Trump and this populist dictator is rooted in more than the convenience of cheap gulags. The more you examine Bukele’s rise, tactics, and politics, the more you see that it offers not just an insight into what Trump has already done, but is a playbook for what Trump wants to do in the future.

    . . . As president, Bukele bars journalists he dislikes from press conferences and directly communicates via social media. He has a domination complex: according to one of his former aides, Bukele “is explosive. He doesn’t listen, nor is he tolerant. If he meets with you, he’s not asking for your opinion. He just wants you to do what he says.”

    Also:

    Currently, El Salvador has an incarceration rate of 1,659 per 100,000 of the total population — #1 in the entire world. Second is Cuba, with less than half that: 794 per 100,000. That’s the kind of country Trump loves. European democracies? Nothing but sneering contempt.

     

  • Hate

    UCU leader Jo Grady continues to embarrass herself:

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    A demo of (mostly) men dressed as women, who were advised to drink loads of water beforehand so they could piss all over the place – which they did, and then defaced the statue of feminist campaigner Millicent Fawcett, all the while holding those posters about "the only good Terf is a dead Terf" from a thousand previous men's rights hate demos….

    Added:

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  • The wrong side of history: not where a lot of people believed it to be

    t themselves into professing this nonsense as a kind of performative obeisance to the gods of progressivism. It was always pathetic.

    From David Lammy to David Tennant, the roll-call of right-side-of-history men who enthusiastically denigrated women for saying primary school-level scientific truths could fill a phone book. The LBC radio presenter James O’Brien couldn’t even grasp why women would be happy about Wednesday’s ruling: “Do you pause and ask yourself, how did I end up on the same team as [Trump]?” he smirked, his brain audibly leaking out of his ears. Well, James, how’d you end up on the side that accuses rape victims of bigotry when they ask for a female counsellor?

    Trans people are still protected from discrimination by the Gender Recognition Act 2004, but the ludicrous era of self-ID and male “lesbians” and “trans women are women” is over. Activists insist — with no evidence — the verdict makes trans women “unsafe” and their “existence is threatened”. Women who have been in abusive relationships will recognise the tactics: say what I want or I will hurt myself, or you. They claim the result is “an overreach”, but if those same activists hadn’t overreached themselves and insisted biological sex is irrelevant, and any woman who disagreed should be screamed at, cancelled and pushed out on an ice floe, none of this would have happened. Their tactics have hurt women, children and trans people. No wonder the formerly ubiquitous Stonewall and Mermaids are now noticeable only by their absence.

    So now it’s April 2025, and what we knew 10, 20, 1,000 years ago has been confirmed: a woman is a woman. What a terrible waste of time, money and energy this has all been. On the other hand, how clarifying: now we know who believes in reality and who doesn’t. Who is brave and who isn’t. Who thinks men can magically become women and children can be born in the wrong body, and who doesn’t.

    Maybe every generation has its witch-hunt, its Joe McCarthy era, when innocent people are denounced for unimaginably bizarre reasons, and we’ve now lived through ours. I’ve lost friends but I’ve gained so many funnier, smarter ones, women — gay and straight — I never would have met were it not for all the men screaming that trans women are women. That’s how I explain the past decade to myself: this was a test. Some passed. A lot more failed.

  • Let down by the so-called bastions of liberalism and free speech

    Hadley Freeman interviews the For Women Scotland trio behind the Supreme Court victory:

    [Susan] Smith started following this issue in 2016: “It was actually your fault, Hadley, because it was something you wrote that made me go, ‘Hang on a second, I need to look into this.’” This was a column I wrote for The Guardian about Caitlyn Jenner, who had undergone a surgical transition the year before and had just been named one of Glamour magazine’s Women of the Year. I wrote that this seemed a bit rum, given that same year Jenner had driven an SUV at what investigators described as an unsafe speed and crashed into two cars, resulting in in the death of a 69-year-old woman named Kim Howe. It was a clear example of an attitude that was already taking shape, that validating trans women’s feelings matters more than women’s safety.

    “I only read The Guardian and the BBC in those days, so I had no clue about what was going on, because they barely covered it at all. I was really cross. I’d invested so much of my time and intellectual energy into these so-called bastions of liberalism and free speech, and they let me down,” Smith says. She assumed others in her centre-left milieu would be equally horrified at the growing prioritisation of trans rights over women’s rights, and so she posted her thoughts in a Liberal Democrat Facebook group.

    “The response I got was like nothing I’d ever seen — all these vicious, angry young men calling me all sorts of abusive names. So that’s when I first logged on to Mumsnet and there were all these smart, funny women who really knew what they were talking about, and I thought, ‘Oh thank God.’”

    Sums it up. The left/liberal media were always on board with the gender woo: if you wanted the truth you had to look elsewhere. Freeman's time at the Guardian was soon to come to an end, with her gender-critical views making her an increasingly isolated figure at Kings Place.

  • A Turkish-Sunni ring of fire

    heir lowest point since diplomatic ties began. Only the US, trusted by both sides, can broker an arrangement that secures their vital interests and outlines a shared future in Syria.

    Hmm. A trust in the US, now, seems foolishly optimistic. 

    Such a deal could recalibrate Turkish ambitions, reassure the Gulf states, and potentially revive the Abraham Accords, leading maybe to the ultimate prize: Israeli-Saudi normalisation. If Syria stabilises and Al-Julani distances himself from jihadist ideology, reconstruction and eventual normalisation with Israel might even be possible. This would reshape the Middle East, ease tensions, and lay the groundwork for a new regional architecture aligned with President Trump’s vision – including a reformed Palestinian Authority in a post-Hamas landscape. The alternative? Regional chaos and rising danger for everyone.

    With Trump? Ah well….we'll see.

    At the bottom, though, beyond the Sunni/Shia clash, is the same Islamic determination to destroy Israel, and its presence on what they see as inalienable Muslim land.

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