Author: Mick Hartley

ted in numerical order. Usually just the top half dozen get onto the Statute Book if they are lucky and are relatively uncontroversial.

Ms Truss came 18th in the ballot, and third on the list last Friday. Her Bill was highly unlikely to become law even if it was not blocked by Labour MPs reciting the names of their pets and regaling the House with stories of keeping ferrets.

Another way in which private members’ Bills can proceed is if the Government gets behind them. Ms Truss fulminated against Labour for their tactics.

Why are ministers not taking up this Bill? The House of Commons is virtually redundant at the moment, with little legislation to consider. Kemi Badenoch, the Business Secretary, joined the condemnation of Labour. Yet the Opposition is not in office whereas the Tories are. The Cabinet has the power to take these proposals forward before the next election. Rishi Sunak is desperately searching for a measure to show voters he is on their side. Well, here it is.

sing at the end of this month.

Culf said that after the conversation she received a call from the council telling her of “harassment” allegations and saying she could not enter the exhibition without 24 hours’ notice.

She was allegedly told police were investigating her for a “hate crime” and that she needed to prepare a statement, but Hertfordshire police later judged no crime had been committed….

Culf, who is now taking legal action against the council, said yesterday: “I was afraid that the police were going to turn up on my doorstep at any moment and arrest me in front of my children.

“It was just complete madness to me. The conversation I had was calm and considered.

“During my work and life experience I have experienced children and young people regretting all sorts of decisions and continually changing their minds as they grow and develop.

“We are now living in a culture where just expressing opposition to transgender ideology, even politely, can lead to you being reported to the police.”…

Culf is seeking damages, a written apology, and for restrictions on her going to the museum to be lifted. She will also ask that a retraction of the allegations made be given to all parties, and that the council pledge that nothing like this will happen again.

No date has been set for a hearing.

Culf added: “I am aware that me speaking out could be ‘commercial suicide’, but I am not prepared to be silent on these issues and I don’t want this to happen to anyone else.”

Jack Delano still in Chicago, December 1942:

"Chicago, Illinois. Switching and classification freight yards. Looking out toward the icehouse from the freighthouse at a yard of the Chicago and North Western Railroad."

"Chicago, Illinois. Boiler makers inside the firebox of a locomotive on which they have been working in the roundhouse at a yard of the Chicago and North Western Railroad."
[Photos: Shorpy/Jack Delano for the Office of War Information]

channel=rss&ns_campaign=1490&ito=social-twitter_mailonline”>the Mail.

BBC journalists behind a damning report which accused Israeli soldiers of beating and humiliating medics at a Gaza hospital have 'liked' videos celebrating Hamas terror attacks and anti-Israel posts online.

The story last week led to worldwide condemnation of Israel, and was called 'very disturbing' by Foreign Secretary Lord Cameron who called for 'answers'.

Now The Mail on Sunday can reveal concerns about the views of two BBC Arabic reporters, Soha Ibrahim and Marie-Jose Al Azzi, who were credited with working on the story.

The "news", basically, came from Palestinian activists. No independent verification.

It's the same old story – the Al-Ahli hospital bombing; the aid truck deaths. The BBC rushes to get out the Hamas news….and we learn the truth later.

It's not hard to see. "Zionist" is now just another word for Jew.

People are seeing this, right? Jews who support existence of Israel, the most normal thing in the world for both Jews and non-Jews to do since Israel exists and will exist, are being stopped from performing across America. Normal people can't just accept this. https://t.co/8Xl6MTiNvn

— Karol Markowicz (@karol) March 15, 2024

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If like me you'd never heard of Matisyahu, here's his Wiki entry.

On the subject of Hull (yesterday), I can't miss out this classic Bert Hardy 1951 photo of Hull fishwives, "Street Talk":

[Photo: Bert Hardy/Picture Post/ Hulton Archive/Getty Images]

There's a Bert Hardy exhibition on now at the Photographers' Gallery.

Brendan O'Neill in the Spectator – How was the puberty blocking scandal ever allowed to happen?

NHS whistleblowers have been raising the alarm about puberty blockers for years. Yet their concerns frequently fell on the deafest of ears. In activist circles, it was breezily assumed that these people must be vile bigots, hell-bent on depriving ‘trans kids’ of ‘life-saving treatment’.

Authors like Abigail Shrier and Hannah Barnes, who meticulously documented the ‘experiments’ being carried out on gender-confused children, were demonised and even censored. Some stores refused to stock their books. Shrier was slammed for her ‘murderous bigotry’. Such was the hysterical pitch of this silencing crusade: query puberty blockers and you’re complicit in the deaths of ‘trans kids’.

Opposition to puberty blockers became tantamount to blasphemy in certain circles. The soft tyranny of it all is best summed up in the fate of Graham Linehan. He was brutally cast out from the cultural universe for his gender-critical dissidence while celebs who dutifully mouth slogans like ‘Gender-affirming care saves lives’ – shorter version: give kids drugs – still bask in the limelight….

Think about the madness of this, the horror of it. Vulnerable kids were given experimental drugs whose safety is uncertain and whose side effects might be severe and yet it was those who questioned the use of the drugs who were demonised. It was those who urged caution who were savaged and shamed. It was those who called for a rethink who were treated like lunatic outliers.

People are right to say that the cavalier prescription of puberty blockers to children with autism, young lesbians and other kids who really need love, not drugs, is one of the great medical scandals of our time. And it’s a scandal that was aided and abetted, from start to prayed-for finish, by censorship. By the silencing of dissent. By an unforgiving insistence on conformity….

There is much to feel down about in relation to the puberty blockers scandal. Medical experts succumbing to ideological crusades. Supposedly liberal journalists turning a blind eye to medical experimentation on kids, including huge numbers of girls. Opinion-formers staying silent, perhaps because they value being part of the in-group more than they do the safety of children. After all, what are a few hundred damaged kids in comparison with their own continued presence on the dinner-party circuit?

Yep. Thousands of lives ruined, but "gender-affirming care" is such a lovely feel-good phrase if you don't bother thinking too much about what it really means.

geois regime of the west) to renounce his enthusiasm for ‘political spirituality.’ Since then, countless people have emulated his steadfast refusal to measure himself ideologically against something as banal as reality. Instead, they follow the changing fashions of pseudo-revolutionary attitudes. Even if sometimes it remains just an attitude, the matter is anything but harmless, as can be seen from the cheers that followed Hamas’s terrorist attack on 7 October 2023….

A few weeks before the Hamas massacre, I was asked what was the easiest way to fuel antisemitism. Today I would have to answer: by massacring as many Jews as possible. Nothing has fuelled hatred of Jews more than the worst attack on Jews since the Shoah, and because the attack was carried out against Jews, the rapists and murderers can only be called ‘resistance fighters’ motivated by a ‘holy Hatred’ against foreign Jewish rule in Palestine. ‘Heilige Hass’ (holy hatred) is, by the way, a motif that literally comes from Julius Streicher’s Nazi magazine Der Stürmer and which has been taken over in anti-colonial discourse. There are forms of ignorance that are entirely culpable. One of these is when Israel haters, who see themselves as left-wing, simply refuse to acknowledge the political foundations of Hamas….

Forty-five years after Foucault abandoned his intellectual and moral standards to support ‘political spirituality,’ the most sensitive youth in the West are forming an alliance with one of the most brutal terrorist representatives of ‘political spirituality.’ There are some new things that the anti-Zionists put forward between Berkeley and Berlin—such as the rigorous rejection of the Enlightenment legacy, which is denounced in self-loathing as a weapon of white supremacy; but the core of their accusation is ancient….

It is not without reason that these days many people sometimes complain that the political debate is no longer about knowledge, but rather only about demonstrating a loyal commitment to one side or the other. However, I must note: antisemitism did not come into the world through Jewish misbehaviour, and it will not disappear from it through Jewish good behaviour. Of course, Hamas cannot achieve its openly declared goal of wiping out Israel [at least not alone]; but on the day of the massacre it had already achieved things that millions and millions wanted. It is therefore necessary to offer protection and security to Jews who are threatened everywhere, through personal courage, social initiatives and government laws. And, especially if you feel politically connected to the left like I do, to support the state of Israel and its right to self-defence.

An extraordinary moment. Fatah's devastating attack on the disaster that Hamas has brought on the Palestinian people. It does not spare Israel blame either but this is damning:
"Those who caused the reoccupation of Gaza by Israel, and caused the catastrophe that the… https://t.co/OmdGZT5rNc

— S Sebag Montefiore (@simonmontefiore) March 16, 2024

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"Those who caused the reoccupation of Gaza by Israel, and caused the catastrophe that the Palestinian people are living, especially in the Gaza Strip, do not have the right to dictate national priorities, confirming that the real detachment from reality and from the Palestinian people is the leadership of the Hamas movement, which has not yet felt the magnitude of the disaster that our people live in the Gaza Strip and the rest of the Palestinian territories."

.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/mt_imported_image_1758240738.jpg” style=”width: 550px” title=”350B-Woodcock-Str-Settee-Gran-Child-Ride-a-Cock-Horse-5-April-1979-by-Alec-Gill” />

[Images © Alec Gill]

That's the man himself in the first shot.

On the second photo:

I saw these women leaving Marr’s fish-processing factory in Hull one Friday lunchtime in December 1977, wearing headscarves and carrying shopping bags, their white overalls underneath their coats, after a morning of filleting and packing fish. I expect many of them were thinking about their Christmas shopping, but who knows? I liked the reflection in the puddles, the row of chimney stacks behind, even though I had to stand in the mud to get the shot. Looking back, I can see how it relates to the whole history of Hessle Road, which was the beating heart of Hull’s fishing industry.