‘SHOCKING: WATER COMPANIES WANT YOU TO PAY MORE TO CLEAN UP THEIR MESS. [1]
Water companies have APOLOGISED for sewage spilling into our rivers and seas, and announced that they would FINALLY proceed with the upgrades we have been demanding – to the tune of £10 billion. [2]
But that’s not the whole story!
It was also revealed that we – their customers – will be footing the bill. [3] Then, to add insult to injury, these same companies are still planning to give out shareholder dividends of £14.7 billion from our increased bills at the same time. [4] It’s an outrage!
Thankfully, this has yet to be approved by Ofwat, the water regulator, and we have some time to show these companies how strongly the public is against these plans. If we get thousands of signatures on a petition demanding no bonuses for CEOs or dividends for shareholders, we can pressure them to put a stop to this unjust system – and take responsibility for cleaning up their mess once and for all.
So, David, if you think water companies should be footing this bill and not us – their customers – add your name to this petition today:click the button below and your name will be added automatically.
No bonuses or dividends while you hike our bills to clean up the mess you made.Why is this important?Although the announcement of investment in our sewer network is welcome – your customers cannot be expected to foot the bill.The lack of investment and funding since water companies went private is not the public’s fault and therefore the onus to fix this should not be on us. And we definitely shouldn’t be paying a penny more for as long as shareholders and executives are still getting bonuses and dividends.SignedThousands of your customers
Our pressure is working but we cannot take our foot off the pedal. Sign the petition below and demand water companies stop this bill hike if shareholders are still being paid.Click the button below and your name will be added automatically.
I’ve signed it, because I strongly believe that it’s outrageous that customers should be charged for cleaning up the mess solely so that the companies can keep their boosted profits for their shareholders and senior staff, and I hope you’ll sign too.
Last week the government was forced to bring yet another rail company back into public ownership because of its dreadful failures and shabby service. As organisations like We Own It and Bring Back British Rail have been pointing out for years, this is just one in a long series of cases where failing rail companies have had to be renationalised. Rail privatisation, which was introduced by John Major’s Tory government and hyped as improving the rail network through private industry, has failed. As We Own It and Bring Back British Rail have long argued, it is high time the rail network as a whole was renationalised. They have therefore produced a standard letter for people to send to the responsible minister, Mark Harper, calling for this. Here’s their message about it.
‘Dear David,
The Government has JUST announced it is taking TransPennine Express (TPE) into public ownership.
A few months ago, 8000 of you emailed the Transport Department calling for both TPE and Avanti to be run in-house – for people not profit.
This is your victory. It shows that when you take action you get wins.
The next 24 hours are a huge chance to double your VICTORY. Email Mark Harper, the transport secretary, now to take the rest of our railway system into public ownership.
With allies like Bring Back British Rail, Association of British Commuters and the rail unions, you’ve forced the government to take TransPennine Express into public ownership.
Now that you’ve got this victory, you can press for more.
The first 24 hours after a government decision are crucial. Ministers and their staff will be watching anxiously to see how the public reacts.
If their inboxes fill up with your letters supporting the TransPennine decision, and demanding they go even further, they’ll know public ownership is popular.
Our latest poll shows 67% of the public support taking all of our railway into public ownership.
This groundswell of support for public ownership will influence their ongoing discussions about other railway lines.
Tell the Transport Secretary now: more privatisation won’t help our railways.
Thanks to your actions, TPE will be the seventh rail franchise to come into public operation in just 6 years!
LNER, Northern, Transport for Wales Rail, Southeastern, ScotRail, and the Caledonian Sleeper have all been brought into public operation since 2018.
By emailing Mark Harper, the Transport Secretary, today you can get even more wins for a railway run for people, not profit – and also ensure these wins are permanent.
Thank you!
Cat, Johnbosco, Matthew, Kate, and Imogen — the We Own It team
P.S. Here’s a photo from the fantastic action We Own It, Bring Back British Rail, RMT and others held outside the Department for Transport in March demanding TPE be taken into public ownership.
I’ve signed it, because it’s badly needed and I’m sick of the public sector supporting failing private companies simply for reasons of Tory free market ideology.
I noticed that GB News had a Johnbosco Nwogbo on one of their programmes to debate the issue of rail nationalisation. This looks like the same John Bosco who appears as part of the We Own It team above. He’s been a speaker on many of the online meetings and rallies against the privatisation of our vital public services. I didn’t watch the GB News item on the grounds that it would annoy me. John Bosco himself has a very deep grasp of the facts and is, like the rest of We Own It and similar organisations, well able to marshal powerful arguments in favour of nationalisation. I’m therefore sure he was more than a match for his free market opponent. And for some of the other morons mouthing off on the network.
I got this from the pro-nationalisation, pro-NHS organisation yesterday.
‘Dear David,
The government wants to use the huge NHS waiting list as an excuse to bring in more NHS privatisation.
You can make sure they know that we won’t let them normalise NHS privatisation. They need to know that there’ll be a public uproar if they push for more NHS privatisation.
We can create a big uproar if thousands of us write to our MPs now. Can you push back against Rishi Sunak’s lie about NHS privatisation?
*We have not prepared a template email for you to send to your MP. Writing a short email to your MP in your own words, straight from your heart, based on your own experiences or those of your family and friends will be incredibly powerful and make your MP sit up and listen.
Speaking to Tory press outlet, Conservative Home, Rishi Sunak said NHS privatisation has “worked in the past and we are going to do more of that going forward”.
It will come as no surprise to you that Rishi Sunak is absolutely wrong. NHS privatisation has never worked.
Not unless “working” means stuffing public money into the pockets of private healthcare shareholders.
Open Democracy reported last week that despite private hospitals being paid over half a billion pounds to help with NHS waiting lists, fewer patients are being seen overall.
We know that NHS privatisation is causing deaths. A recent Oxford study linked NHS privatisation to the preventable deaths of 557 people.
We also know that private cleaning companies contracted to clean our hospitals are leaving our hospitals full of germs, leading the NHS to spend an extra £1 billion to deal with the health fallout of privatisation.
Private companies with NHS contracts made £831 million in profits between 2011 and 2017 from just one form of NHS outsourcing. What a waste! We could have used that money to treat more people.
NHS privatisation might be working for greedy private companies like Centene and Virgin. It’s just not working for our communities.
Rishi Sunak wants to normalise NHS privatisation, using the crisis as his excuse because he knows that NHS privatisation is massively unpopular – even among those who voted for the Conservatives in the last election.
Over 68% of Conservative voters in our polling want private companies out of our NHS, with just 18% wanting more privatisation in the NHS.
Labour (77%), LibDem (75%) and other voters (73%) also massively support an NHS run for people, not profit.
Millions of us are waiting for healthcare and can’t see our GP, so it might seem like common sense to use the private sector so that people can get help immediately.
But we already know it doesn’t work. The government has already been doing that. It’s just not working.
Politicians need to face the facts. The real and popular solution is to invest directly into NHS capacity and pay our NHS staff.
Can you make sure your MPs know that you saw what Sunak said and that you are absolutely against it?
Regardless of your MP’s party, it is really important that you make your voice heard.
If your MP is Conservative, Liberal Democrat or Independent, email them and tell them to write to Rishi Sunak and let him know you oppose his plans to invest public money in private companies instead of directly into the NHS.
If your MP is Labour, email them and tell them to write to Keir Starmer and Wes Streeting asking them to confirm that Labour does not agree with Rishi Sunak that NHS privatisation has worked well.
If you live in Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland, email your MP and ask them to contact the Welsh, Scottish or Northern Irish government to make sure that they are NOT following Rishi Sunak’s lead.
You can have a big impact in showing that it’s a choice between investing in the NHS and investing in the private sector.
Making this choice clear is really important as we approach the next election. Your MP needs to know this is an issue people in your constituency really care about.
We can create a public outcry against Rishi Sunak’s lie about NHS privatisation. Please write to your MP now and share this action with friends and family too.
Thank you so much for all you do to protect our NHS from privatisation and for being a part of this key fight as we approach the next general election.
Cat, Johnbosco, Matthew, Kate, Imogen – the We Own It team
PS: We would usually provide you with a ready-made letter to send to your MP, but your MP hearing from you, in your own words, will really make them sit up and listen. Your letter can be very short. What matters most are your experiences with the NHS and those of your family and/or friends. Speak from the heart. Make sure they know you want Labour to commit to investing directly in our NHS and not in private companies.‘
I have indeed written to my MP about this, and requested her to write to Streeting and Starmer to confirm that they won’t support Sunak’s privatisation plans. I’ll let you know if I get a reply. If you feel as I do about this issue, please also write to your MPs as well.
It’s a crisis over thirty years in the making. Since privatisation in 1989, private water companies in England* have underinvested in pollution prevention to boost profits.
They’ve built a debt mountain of £53bn, while giving shareholders £72bn!
Attempts to regulate them have failed. Under privatisation, it clearly pays to pollute.
Send the Government a clear message: stop privatisation, stop the sewage.
It doesn’t have to be this way. The UK’s most trusted utility company is publicly owned Scottish Water.
They’ve spent £72 more per household per year than English water companies. That’s equivalent to an extra £28 billion being invested in England’s water network!
Yesterday’s pollution plan from Government includes just £1.6bn extra investment. That’s tiny compared to what we could reinvest by stopping private dividends!
Sign the petition now to demand the Government stop the pollution crisis by taking our water companies into public ownership.
The more signatures added just after the Government’s lacklustre announcement, the clearer it’ll be to ALL parties that any “plan for water” must end privatisation.
22,000 people just like you have already signed. Thank you for amplifying their message: water belongs in public hands!
Cat, Johnbosco, Matthew, Kate, Imogen – the We Own It team
*If you’re in Wales, Scotland, or Northern Ireland — where water is publicly owned or not-for-profit — please still sign this petition in solidarity! By fighting for public ownership of English water, you’ll force the press and politicians to confront the truth: privatisation fails our public services. That will make it harder for politicians to justify leaving other essential public services across Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland in private hands.‘
I’ve signed it, because these scandals have been going on for nearly 40 years, ever since Thatcher privatised the water companies in the 1980s. The Tories set up a body to protect the waterways, but gave it less power than the previous regulatory authorities. And over the past few years there’s been one scandal after another of sewage or untreated chemicals or both being poured into England’s rivers and seas, all to boost the directors’ bonuses and the companies’ share values.
It’s another Thatcherite failure. It’s time the whole charade that private industry is automatically better was ended, and we moved back to a mixed economy.
Apart from banning Jeremy Corbyn from standing as a Labour MP and telling Welsh Labour party members that they may not watch a documentary disproving the charges against him, Starmer has also been highly mendacious about the Forde report about racism in the party. Martyn Forde, KC, documented a significant amount of general racism in the party against Blacks and ethnic minorities. His report contained a list of something like 139 recommendations for changing this. Starmer has said that he’s implementing all of them.
Except that, according to Kernow Damo, he isn’t. And he’s also forbidden members of the NEC from meeting Forde.
So, once again, we see Starmer lying. Unfortunately, this is no surprise. As Hunter S. Thompson said of Richard Nixon, this is a man so crooked he has his aides screw him into his pants in the morning. At least in my opinion. I can see why Starmer would be highly wary of the Forde Inquiry, because many of those responsible for the racism and bullying are going to the be the right-wing Labour apparatchiks who supported him against Corbyn.
But it seems that this kind of institutional racism could go back much further, right back to Tony Blair. The left-wing blogger Buddyhell put up a piece back in a January about Tony Blair’s treatment of asylum seekers. which does much to explain the current climate of hate against the channel migrants. He notes that when Bliar enter power in 1997, the number of asylum seekers was low, about 40,000. Most applications for asylum were turned down, so that only just over 1. per cent were approved. And polls showed that only 3 per cent of the British public were worried about immigration.
So there was no mass immigration, and the vast majority of this country’s people weren’t threatened by migrants. But rather than adopting a reasonable approach, Blair seems to have taken his cue instead from the Heil. He stopped migrants from being eligible for welfare payments and introduced detention centres for them. Buddyhell’s article quotes one of the critics of this policy, who attacks the unfairness of preventing migrants from looking for work while awaiting the decision on their application. The critic also pointed out that by doing this, it was going to create the impression that migrants were only coming over here to sponge off the welfare state.
All of which has happened.
As for stopping their eligibility for welfare support, this was what spurred charities and campaigners to set up food banks. Which the Tories have expanded into the majority, settled population – Black, White and Asian – as they’ve cut back the welfare state.
As a result, we are seeing angry demonstrations against asylum seekers and the channel migrants. Some of these are by people who genuinely fear for their women and children because of the authorities’ utter ineptitude and active complicity with the Pakistani grooming gangs. But the rage against them also has its basis in attitudes created by Blair’s reforms.
And Starmer is a Blairite, so we can’t expect him to be any better.
For more information, see Buddyhell’s excellent article, ‘Tony Blair, New Labour and Selective Memorialisation’ at: https://buddyhell.wordpress.com/
Kernow Damo posted another video on YouTube yesterday, showing precisely how totalitarian Starmer is prepared to be in his struggle to stop Labour members supporting Jeremy Corbyn. A group of Welsh Labourites wanted to go off to see a film defending the former Labour leader, which was presented by that known Fascist, Alexei Sayle. (For those too young to remember him, Alexei Sayle was one of the new, politically-correct comedians of the 1980s. His parents were Communist Romanian Jews, and he was one who was very hot on being anti-racist and anti-sexist). Unfortunately, their constituency party was told that they couldn’t. Labour party members may not see it by order of the NEC.
What! Who elected Stalin to the Board of British Film Censors? This is a free country, not a Communist dictatorship, and Stalin has no business telling anyone what they may or may not see, provided it is all legal. I think if I were in the Welsh Labour members’ shoes, I’d organise an informal trip for interested people, but completely outside and unknown to the Labour bureaucracy.
This is a disgusting decision, especially as Corbyn was still a Labour member. In my view, this makes Starmer totally unfit for government. There is too much censorship in this country. The Tories would like to take away our right to protest. The woke want to scream down anyone anyone who criticises the postmodern Critical Social Justice Policies, and drive those academics who are critical of them out of the education system. And the Tories have also shown how they suppress reports criticising them, or demanding they take further action. Starmer’s banning of Labour members from using their own judgement about a film about Jeremy Corbyn shows that there is a real danger of him doing exactly the same once he gets into power and the media investigate the failings or abuses in his administration.
I want a Labour government, but Starmer should not be its head.
Here’s another petition against the privatisation of the NHS, this time from pro-NHS, pro-nationalisation organisation We Own It. They are naturally outraged that privatisation, according to a study by Cambridge university, has resulted in 500+ preventable deaths. They believe the Labour party is moving in the right direction, as Wes Streeting last week in an interview with New Statesman, said the party was considering moving more services back in house. But they want to press the point home, and so wish to present a petition to the party’s policy organisation demanding its complete renationalisation. They are also planning a major campaign next year against the health service’s privatisation.
I’ve signed the petition, and if you feel like me about this issue, please do so as well.
‘Dear David,
Last week Wes Streeting made his strongest case yet against NHS outsourcing.
He only did this after you took action to say NHS PRIVATISATION KILLS.
Now we want to push Labour to go even further and make reinstating the NHS AS A FULLY PUBLIC SERVICE their official policy.
We are making a submission to Labour’s policy-making body this Friday, 17th March. We want you to add your voice to it so they know thousands of us want this.
For the next 18 months, our message on the NHS is going to be really simple: NHS PRIVATISATION KILLS.
As you know, a recent Oxford University study has linked the preventable deaths of 557 people to the outsourcing of NHS services.
We want to hammer that message into every home in the country so that at the next election pro-privatisation politicians are forced to explain to voters why they are happy to put up with deaths just so private companies make a profit.
We will push all parties to reinstate our NHS as a fully public service. We are independent of all political parties and we lobby all of them.
But it is really important to focus on Labour because they currently have the best chance of winning the next election.
So we are going to ramp up the pressure on them month by month not just to make sure they sign up to this policy before the next election, but also to make sure they actually implement it if they win.
The public is on your side on this. Two-thirds of them, according to our latest polling, are concerned about NHS outsourcing and want our NHS reinstated as a fully public service.
Going by Wes Streeting’s tune last week, Labour has come a long way on this issue. And they look like they are now going in the right direction.
But they still have a long way to go to pledging to reinstate our NHS AS A FULLY PUBLIC SERVICE.
That is why we are making a submission to their policy-making body – the National Policy Forum – to outline the evidence and demand they make kicking greedy private companies out of our NHS their policy.
If thousands of people add their voices to our submission, they will know that this is not just one organisation’s demand – reinstating our NHS AS A FULLY PUBLIC SERVICE is backed by so many people.
The NHS is a devolved matter, which means that our submission is only about the NHS in England. But we all know that Labour in England has a strong influence on Labour in all the other nations.
If Labour in England pledges to reinstate our NHS as a fully public service, Labour in the other nations will likely follow.
So your voice is really important whether you live in England, Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland.
We know that England is not alone in seeing the effects of private companies making profits from our healthcare.
Just today, we’ve seen a report by the Scotland Herald showing that private healthcare companies with links to UK politicians are charging Scots £250 to see a doctor for 15 minutes.
We know the situations in Wales and Northern Ireland are very similar.
The Labour Party taking a strong stance and pledging to reinstate our NHS AS A FULLY PUBLIC SERVICE would send a strong message to all the nations.
That Preston Journalist, whose real name, I am assured by the great people who comment here, is Ashley Kaminski, put up a genuinely heart-breaking video last night. People had been queuing outside a soup kitchen in Glasgow. Among the adults were ten children, including a babe in arms. Kaminski thought that this was terrible, as he should. He’s an avowed opponent of Nicola Sturgeon and all her works, dubbing her ‘McKrankie’ after her supposed resemblance to one half of a double act back in the 1980s. From the tone of his piece, he clearly wanted to blame her, but couldn’t quite. It was wrong, he said, whoever was responsible.
Okay, I don’t know what powers the devolved Scots parliament has, especially regarding welfare policies. I am sure that many Scots voted SNP, not because they wanted independence, but simply because they wanted a proper welfare state, something that wasn’t being offered by Jim Murphy’s Scottish Labour party. But this scandalous situation has been around far longer than the SNP’s administration, and it afflicts communities right across Britain. In Scotland there was a parliamentary inquiry into food banks a few years ago. One of those speaking before the committee was a volunteer, who described the intensely dispiriting deprivation and poverty he saw as he did his job. And I can remember putting up a 19th-early 20th century poem about children queuing outside a food kitchen. It’s disgusting that Britain has returned to such levels of poverty.
But Krankie isn’t responsible. The Tories are. They’ve insisted on wages so low working families can’t make ends meet, and cut welfare payments again and again, all with mantra of encouraging ‘welfare scroungers’ to look for work, making work pay and all the other nonsense. They’ve also introduced benefit sanction after benefit sanction, all with the same intention. It also helps to fiddle the unemployment statistics, as if they’re off the DHSS’ books, they aren’t counted as unemployed.
It’s possible that Sturgeon’s policies aren’t helping the situation north of the border. But the ultimate blame lies with the Tories, and it started when Ruth Davidson, the head of the Conservatives up there, was in power. And Sturgeon definitely isn’t responsible for it down south in England and Wales.
There’s been a new, serious development in the battle over women’s versus trans rights. Yesterday the Scottish parliament passed their gender recognition act, which lowers the age at which people can declare themselves trans to 16 and further limits the time required to live as a member of the opposite sex and the medical supervision also demanded to make it easier for trans identified people to be officially recognised as members of their declared sex. The issue is enormously controversial. Feminists and other people across the political spectrum have criticised the trans ideology because of the way it impinges on women’s sex based right. The ideology and legislation based on it demands that trans-identified men should be given comprehensive access to women’s spaces, which raises problems for women’s safety, privacy and dignity.
Already some men are claiming to be trans, according to the Scottish Daily Record to get transferred from men’s to women’s prison. According to the Record, these men do precious little to behave like women in jail and when they come out revert to identifying as men. There is also the problem that some of those men are violent sex offenders against women and girls. In Scotland this includes a hulking 6/3” brute who tried to indecently assault a 12 year old girl in a public toilet. Black American anti-trans YouTuber Karen Davis has pointed to 50 to 60 per cent of incarcerated transwomen being there for sex offences. She put up a post the day before yesterday commenting on a report that an American female prison officer is suffering from PTSD thanks to being ordered to monitor a trans-identified man on suicide watch, even when he relieved himself or masturbated. This brought back personal memories of sexual abuse. From the newspaper account, the woman was a conscientious officer serving in a women’s prison. She had absolutely no problem watching the female inmates at risk from suicide, self-harm or banging their heads. The prisoner in this case demanded that female officers were part of the team watching him.
I do feel that he did so deliberately to cause upset to the female officers. Way back in the 1980s I read a piece about the cons in male prisons, who masturbated in front of female officer. They were nicknamed ‘gunslingers’ and there seemed no way to stop them doing it. Not even making them wear pink prison uniformed helped. The laws allowing transwomen into the female estate was clearly passed with the best of intentions. I can easily imagine that men’s prisons, for unaggressive, feminine men, let alone those who genuinely identify as women, would be hell. But I feel that very evil, predatory male offenders are abusing it to gain access to vulnerable women.
There are similar questions over hospital care, particular women requiring intimate treatment and would naturally prefer that this is done by someone of their own sex. It is also a problem in sports and sports changing rooms. One of the complaints by Lia Thomas’ teammates was that he was persistently naked in front of them, leading to their obvious embarrassment and discomfiture. Some women are also required by their religion not to be seen by men in an undressed state. Kelly-Jay Keen and her people from Standing For Women held a rally at the open air swimming baths in Hampshire. There were three such baths. One was for men only, another for women only and a third that was mixed sex. The women’s baths had open up to transwomen and this posed a problem for Orthodox Jewish and Muslim women, who could not share it with men, even those who identified as women.
I gather that the passage of the law resulted in angry scenes at the Scots parliament. One irate feminist lifted her skirt to reveal her private parts. A petition has been started to repeal or amend the new act. There is also the question how it will be received by the Westminster parliament and whether Rishi Sunak will overrule it. And if he does, what will this do to the UK? There are theories that Sturgeon is using the act to widen the divide between Scotland and the rest of the UK as part of her independence campaign.
There are also deep implications for the political parties. It’s an issue that crosses the political divide, but conservative activists like the American YouTuber Matt Walsh consistently misrepresent opposition to gender ideology as coming solely from the right. The EDIJester, however, put up a video about it yesterday stating that he has no confidence in Sunak to combat the act and the advance of the trans ideology. He states that if Sunak doesn’t overrule it, then critics of the gender ideology will have to look to founding separate political parties.
Kelly-Jay Keen has already taken a step in that direction with her decision to stand against Keir Starmer under the Standing For Women banner at the next election. Starmer has fully embraced the trans ideology, which has led to several awkward scenes. When asked whether women have cervixes, he replied that it wasn’t a question that should be asked. Other senior MPs have dodged answering the simple question ‘What is a woman?’ Keen was originally going to stand against Eddie Izzard if he got selected as the Labour candidate for Sheffield, This didn’t happen, and so she’s decided to go after Starmer. She particularly feels that Labour under him has betrayed women. At the last Labour conference, trans activists were allowed a platform, but the LGB Alliance, which campaigns exclusively on gay issues but not trans, was excluded from having a place.
This is why I’m putting up this video of Labour policy-maker and gay rights activist Lachlan Stuart speaking at the 2020 ‘Expel Me’ rally. Stuart was a member of Corbyn’s team that included comprehensive support for trans rights in the manifesto. After the election, which he thinks gave people like him enough rope to hang themselves, he went back and reconsidered his opinions. He has now reversed them because of the above issues of women’s privacy, particularly regarding medical care. He states he is haunted by the idea of his mother being examined for cervical cancer by a man. He states that his research uncovered numerous cases where women were abused or disadvantaged by the policy. He was also very concerned at the way the treatment for people with problems with their gender identity only seemed to go in one direction – to transition. He also makes it clear that when he dug into the issue, he found a network of lobby groups and the persecution of doctors and other health professionals who dared to challenge the ideology.
Stuart was a member of the gay rights movement and the solidarity campaign between gays and miners back in the 1980s. He describes campaign against Thatcher’s Clause 28, which sought to ban the promotion of homosexuality in schools. Considering Thatcher’s own association with fascists like Chile’s General Pinochet and the outspoken hatred of gays by many Tory MPs, there was a real fear that this would lead to renewed persecution. He talks about the Solidarity with Miners campaign, and urges his audience to watch the British film, Pride. He states that they didn’t no-platform some of the extremely bigoted and homophobic miners, and speaks with real pride about the first cheque his organisation received from a Welsh miners’ union. He also talks about the way trans activists have distorted some of the policies in the manifesto. This was a clause which committed the party to age appropriate and respectful sex education. This is a real issue, as some schools have been pushing teaching children about gender identity at primary school. He also states that the policy was also meant to educate children that violence against women is unacceptable. But the clause has been taken and expanded by the trans rights activists to mean educating children about trans people at any age.
He also talks about the way his new criticism of the trans ideology has resulted him losing friends and support from other organisations and party members. Stonewall backed away, and Dawn Butler stopped taking his calls. But he remains determined to carry on. And if the party don’t like, they can expel him.
This could become an important issue for all parties at the next election. Kelly-Jay Keen intends to use her position as an aspiring MP to get round the ban that councils and other organisations have imposed on her campaigning. A few years ago she paid for the dictionary definition of woman as ‘adult human female’ to be displayed on a billboard in Liverpool. This was taken down on the orders of Liverpool council, which ruled that it was hateful.
Gender critical feminists are unfairly accused of being fascists by the supporters of the trans ideology. This is flat wrong, but there is a real danger that this issue is being exploited by the right and the extreme right. This includes the real fascist outfit Correct, Not Political. They stage counter demonstrations against Drag Queen Story Hour, gay rights marches and environmental, socialist and trade union rallies, along with anything they think is ‘commie’. Their livestreams begin with old footage of Mosley and his Black Shirts marching, in uniform and with the ‘Roman’ salute, all to the Adagio for Strings, as if it was a tragedy these ratbags were rejected by the British working public and rounded up by the government and interned on the Isle of Man. They’ve also posted discussions suggesting they believe in the stupid, noxious and murderous conspiracy theories about Jews and Masons. And unfortunately, one of the places they targeted for a protest was a library near me in south Bristol, which was staging a Drag Queen Story Time.
While I profoundly disagree with the trans ideology, I don’t want to see trans people persecuted. I’ve no doubt the majority are decent people who just want to get on with their lives. But there are fears that ordinary trans and gay people will suffer from a terrible backlash because of the very visible support for the ideology by intolerant activists. I don’t doubt that if they had their way, for example, Correct, Not Political would round up trans people and gays for imprisonment. There are signs that might be happening in America because of the controversy over Drag Queen Story Hour. I came across a report on YouTube that a Democrat politician in New York, who supports it and went to a drag show, had his offices and home vandalised with accusations that he was a ‘pedo’ and a ‘groomer’.
We need to keep this debate well out of the hands of the far right. And there is obviously a place in it for left-wing activists, because people like Stuart are serious when they state that they tried to reconcile their new opposition to trans ideology with support for them as a minority. Quite apart from the absolute need to protect ordinary, decent people from victimisation and prejudice because of their sexuality or gender identity or expression.
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