A Corbyn Government Would Have Defended People’s Rightful British Citizenship

This week the Tories once again took away more of the British people’s hard-won freedoms with the Nationality and Borders bill, proposed by Dominic Raab and the noxious Priti ‘Vacant’ Patel. This allows the government to strip a naturalised Brit of their citizenship, without giving notice to the person concerned. It follows the 2002 act that allowed the government to strip someone of British nationality so long as they had another. Then there’s the 2014 Immigration Act, pushed through by Tweezer when she was home secretary, that allows the government to strip someone of their citizenship, even if it left them stateless, so long as they could apply to another country for theirs. The Home Office decided that notifying the person affected could be done simply by putting it in their file if their whereabouts were unknown. The High Court ruled that this was insufficient, and so Patel has including legislation exempting the process from judicial review. Which has been described by Ian Dunt at inews as retrospective legislation denying people their right to appeal. It doesn’t matter how long the naturalised person has been here. They could have been here their entire lives, Patel and Raab can still strip them of their British nationality. This has been excused on the pretext that it would stop foreign criminals using human rights legislation to avoid deportation, particularly under the legislation protecting ‘the right to family life’. This is another Tory lie. Mike has pointed out that no foreign criminal has ever dodged deportation using that clause. The effect of the act is to turn immigrants into second-class citizens. This has chilling implications for the rest of us, because what Tony Benn said was true: the Tories start their attacks on people’s rights with immigrants before moving on to the settled population. But as this appears to target Blacks, Asians and channel migrants, it will inevitably be supported by racists.

It’s alarmed very many people. The increased restrictions on immigration have been criticised by a number of Jewish organisation, including Reform Judaism. They have stated that Jews who fled to Britain in the 1930s were not protected in 2021. According to Zelo Street, the Board of Deputies has expressed similar concerns. But Zelo Street has also pointed out that Patel’s and Raab’s wretched legislation particularly affects Jews because of Israel’s ‘Right of Return’. According to this, all Jews everywhere have the right to settle in Israel. Benjamin Netanyahu went further, and declared that every Jew around the world automatically had Israeli citizenship. This didn’t impress the growing number of Jews critical of Israel and its persecution of the Palestinians. One Jewish American said on the Net how ridiculous it was that he, who came from Anchorage in Alaska and had never been to Israel, had the right to settle their, while his friend, a Palestinian, was banned from entering his homeland. And the Israeli state certainly seems to share this sentiment when it comes to The Wrong Kind of Jews. There have been a number of instances where Jews, who have voiced criticisms of Israel, have been very quickly rounded up by the Israeli authorities and put on the next flight home when they’ve tried to enter the country. It’s obviously a case of all Jews being citizens of Israel, except for those that aren’t.

But the effect of Netanyahu’s wretched piece of legislation combined with Patel’s and Raab’s is that any Jew, who gained their British citizenship through naturalisation can now be stripped of it, as there is somewhere else they can go. The Street notes that despite all the screams about Corbyn and anti-Semitism, in reality genuine anti-Semitism comes from the far right. And this is the direction in which this government is moving. The Street concludes

‘That may not be the current intention of Ms Patel and her pals. But, with the certainty of night following day, after they come for the Muslims, the far-right come for the Jews.

And the far-right have now been quietly emboldened. Be afraid. Be very afraid.’

https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2021/12/borders-bill-and-anti-semitism.html

Absolutely. But one other thing may be said about this vile piece of legislation and Britain’sJ ewish community:

It would never have been passed by a Corbyn government and Jews would have been protected.

Corbyn was never an anti-Semite. Indeed, he is one of the most anti-racist MPs and has spoken up in the House and elsewhere in support of the Jewish community. He was simply critical of Israel and its persecution of the Palestinians. But the militant Zionists, who denounced him and his supporters as Jew-haters don’t distinguish between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. As a result, Britain has been denied a government, which would have actively defended the rights of Jews alongside other ethnic groups. Instead we have an increasingly extreme right-wing Tory government, which is taking those rights away, alongside those of the mainstream, White, gentile population.

And unfortunately, this is a government that has the support of those who claim to represent Britain’s Jews. When Tweezer got in, she was congratulated by the Chief Rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis. Who was one of those pushing the anti-Semitism smears against Labour. Now, partly thanks to this smear campaign, British Jews are left vulnerable to real anti-Semitic persecution. All done perfectly legally by the next racist, who fancies his or her chances as the new Oswald Mosley.

The BUF also had women members, who used to go out goose-stepping to defend Britain from Communism. I wonder if Patel’s wardrobe contains the odd black shirt and jackboots?

Another Step on the Road to Fascism as Raab Plans Attack on Judges’ Independence

Mike’s put up a chilling post about the Tories’ latest attack on our civil liberties. It starts with a tweet from Paul Delaney stating that Dominic Raab plans to set up a mechanism in the UK’s human rights act which would ‘correct’ rulings by the European Court of Human Rights. Mr Delaney concludes ‘We live in dangerous times as Fascism looms large’.

Yes, we do. As Mike points out, this means that if the government does not like the decision made by human rights judges here in Blighty, he will override them. Raab has tried to excuse this attack on the judiciary by stating that it will somehow strengthen democracy by stopping ‘judicial legislation’. But as Mike explains, the judges don’t actually make laws. They simply apply them, and stopping them from doing so breaks the law. He goes on to explain

You see, so-called “case law” – legal precedents set by judges – are only examples of the way the law should be interpreted when applied to particular situations, to be followed if such situations arise again in order to avoid contradiction and confusion. They are not situations in which judges take legislative power for themselves and Raab is lying by suggesting that.

Mike’s article also contains a tweet from Nafzir Ali, explaining that the Human Rights Act is British law, enforced by British judges in British courts. We already have a mechanism for overriding it – legislation. It is dishonest to blame foreigners for it, and challenges to government are part of the basis of democracy.

Jonathan Jones, the former head of the government’s legal service, stated that as parliament was already able to do this, it seems that Raab is attempting to enable ministers to do so without parliaments approval. Mike’s article also quotes Cambridge professor of public law, Mark Elliott stated that giving ministers the power to overturn judicial decisions simply because they didn’t agree with them cut across ‘principles that are the fundamental components of the rule of law.’ Mike’s article goes on with this quotation:

“If that is what is in contemplation, then that is profoundly problematic,” said Prof Elliott. “Indeed it turns constitutional principle on its head.

“Ministerial power to do this would itself be deeply troubling. It would reassign a basic judicial role – interpreting the law – to ministers.

“Ultimately, this all strikes me as part of a project to enhance executive supremacy by treating courts, whether foreign or domestic, as unwelcome interlopers.

“And yet all of this masquerades as an attempt to protect parliament. The reality of this executive power project, as we might call it, is that it will be the executive that is the principal beneficiary of such changes, and the loser will be basic standards of good governance.”

Mike calls this what it is: Fascism. It resembles the Nazis’ attack on the independence of the judiciary during the Third Reich.

The entry ‘Justice in Nazi Germany’ in James Taylor’s and Warren Shaw’s A Dictionary of the Third Reich (London: Grafton Books 1988) has the following passages. These show how the Nazis also attacked the judiciary in order to subordinate to their control. While much of this is far more extreme than what Raab is currently proposing, I’m including it here as a warning of where this ultimately leads.

Hitler’s revision of the laws of Germany did not affect civil laws, such as those on wills, torts, commercial contracts, but criminal law was massively restructured. By 1945, 43 crimes carried the death penalty. Judges who did not conform to the practice of Nazi justice were removed from office; only conformists survived. Their role was to maintain not ‘the state’ but the Nazi view of the state, preserving the existing volkisch (traditional ‘Aryan’ and Germanic) elements, punishing anything like anti-Nazi behaviour and getting rid of any obstruction to the Party’s will. Prosecution lawyers were given added powers and importance in court, while lawyers for the defence were weakened… To ensure the operation of Nazi justice, from 1942 judges and prosecution were allowed to confer without any defence lawyer being present.

From March 1933 Special Courts (Sondergerichte) were set up to try political offences without a jury. In 1934 the People’s Courts (Volksgerichthofe) were established to try cases of high treason, but with a jury drawn exclusively from Nazi party members. This was the court over which the vicious Roland Freisler presided in Berlin and which condemned those accused of complicity in the July 1944 bomb plot.’ (P. 198-9).

As Mike has also pointed out, this has been coming for a long time. The Tories have been stirring up hatred of the courts when they have dared to rule against them. Remember the Heil’s headline labelling the judges who upheld Gina Miller’s challenge to Brexit as ‘Enemies of the people’. That could have come direct from the Nazis, Italian Fascists, Stalin or any of the other totalitarian monsters. The independence of the judiciary has been a vital part of the British constitution with its origins going right back to the founding legal theorists of the twelfth century. It, and parliament, are part of what has made Britain a democracy rather than an absolute monarchy or dictatorship.

And now Raab plans to destroy this bulwark of British freedom. And he’s justifying it by claiming it’s all being done to protect our sovereignty from those evil Europeans. Just as Priti Patel is claiming to be protecting us from the threat of illegal immigration by planning to grant officials immunity from prosecution if they push the channel migrants back out, or don’t rescue them, and someone dies.

The great Tony Benn pointed out that before the Tories start taking away the rights of the settled population, they always begin with immigrants. It’s because they can count on a good reception from the right-wing press by dressing it up in nationalist garb.

But Raab’s attack on the European Court of Human Rights is just a pretext and the beginning. After he’s passed this nasty piece of legislation, he’ll be coming for more British freedoms.

See: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2021/10/19/fascism-looms-as-raab-threatens-to-correct-court-judgments/

The Nazis and the Tory Destruction of British Civil Liberties

A few days ago, Mike over at Vox Political commented that our smirking, intriguing Home Secretary, Priti Patel, had gone from Fascism to Nazism in her latest assault on democracy. Hacks publishing leaked documents can now be punished with up to 14 years imprisonment for embarrassing the government. This is in addition to her massively authoritarian, racist approach to dealing with the influx of illegal immigrants crossing the Channel. This isn’t hyperbole. The Nazis passed similar legislation when they seized power in 1933, making it illegal to defame the government. See Martin Broszat’s The Hitler State: The Foundation and Development of the Internal Structure of the Third Reich, page 66, for how the Nazis banned and intimidated Communist, Socialist and liberal newspapers using the laws against defaming the government.

This follows creeping Tory legislation gradually destroying civil liberties and further restricting constitutional limits to Conservative authoritarianism. Patel has passed further legislation limiting the right to demonstrate, abolishing fixed-term parliaments so that the Tories can choose when they hold elections rather than have to abide by the limits set by law, and further limiting the courts’ ability to hold them to account. This all reminds me of the Nazi suspension of German civil liberties following the Reichstag fire and the passage of the emergency decrees as shown in this piece of Nazi legislation

By the authority of Section 48 (2) of the German Constitution the following is decreed as a defensive measure against Communist acts of violence endangering the State:

1. Sections 114, 115, 117, 118, 123, 124 and 153 of the Constitution of the German Reich are suspended until further notice. Thus restrictions of personal liberty, on the right of free expression of opinion, including freedom of the press, on the right of assembly and association, and violation of the privacy of postal, telegraphic and telephonic communications, and warrants for house-searches, orders for confiscations as well as restrictions on property rights are permissible beyond the legal limits otherwise prescribed.

In J. Noakes and G. Pridham, Nazism 1919-1945, 1: The Rise to Power 1919-1934 (Exeter University Publication 1983) 142.

The Tories haven’t gone that far yet with outright bans on newspapers and opposition publications, but this is clearly the direction they are going unless the process is halted. We are heading for a Tory dictatorship.

But stopping this means having an effective opposition, something which is glaringly lacking in the Labour leadership of Keir Starmer.

Hugenberg’s View of Rule by Elites – Shared by Boris and the British Tories?

Alfred Hugenberg was a German press baron and the First Party Chairman of the DNVP – the German Nationalist People’s Party – a right-wing party during the Weimar Republic. In 1928 he wrote

I believe in government by the elect few, not by the elected… I believe in leaders, not in speakers. Words are enemies of action… I believe in a government by strong men who have the willpower and strength to carry through their decisions.

In J.W. Hiden, The Weimar Republic (Harlow: Longman 1974) 44

This rejection of popular democracy in favour of rule by the privileged elite sounds like it could easily come from Boris Johnson, David Cameron and the other Tory toffs who have taken up 10 Downing Street, presiding over cabinets of obscenely wealthy millionaires. Or even by Keir Starmer.

The Weimar republic eventually collapsed, descending into rule by presidential decree until it was finally overthrown by the Nazis in 1933. Which makes you wonder how long real, effective democracy in Britain will last, now that the Tories are ushering in successively repressive legislation to limit the right to demonstrate, curb the power of the courts and press, and remove fixed term elections.

Starmer: A Puppet Opposition in a Sham Democracy

Is Starmer monumentally stupid and deluded, or deliberately trying to destroy the Labour party? I ask this because it’s now been reported that the party’s membership crisis has reached such an extent that it now faces bankruptcy and extinction. Although reviled as everything from a Communist, Trotskyite and anti-Semite, Jeremy Corbyn and his policies were inspirational. Hundreds of thousands of traditional labour members and supporters return to the party after leaving it under Tory Tony Blair. As a result, Labour had a membership that outstripped the Tories and was the richest political party. Now all that’s vanishing into the wind due to Blair Stalin’s utter incompetence, factionalism, racism and vindictiveness. Starmer betrayed the genuinely popular policies put forward by Corbyn, from whom he had the whip removed. He carried on purging left-wing members, showed a complete contempt for party democracy by suspending constituency parties and officials who defied him, parachuted in his preferred candidates against the wishes of local parties and their supporters and turned his back on Black and Muslim members and supporters. He has done nothing about rising levels of Islamophobia in Labour and refused to investigate and punish the abuse and bullying of Black MPs like Diane Abbott and David Lammy. As for combating the Tories, he’s has been a total failure. So much so that Johnson has been ridiculing him as ‘General Indecision’ and ‘Major Hindsight’. He has no policies to speak of, although a spokesman for this vacuity in a suit told an interviewer that he did, but they were secret and so he couldn’t say what they were. As a result the party is haemorrhaging members and has suffered a string of defeats at the local elections. According to Private Eye, Starmer has appointed a Blairite pollster as his head of Strategy, which means that he’s seeking to revive Blairism long after that’s been proven a massive failure. Albert Einstein once said that insanity was performing the same experiment twice expecting a different result. If politics are likened to scientific experiments, then Starmer must be absolutely bonkers.

But another possibility has occurred to me. Starmer is deliberately trying to destroy the Labour party, at least as an effective socialist opposition. His supporters were actively conspiring to get Labour to lose the 2017 and 2019 elections, including calling for Lib Dems and Tories to enter it to take power away from the real Labour members who had returned and some members of the party bureaucracy were even members of Tory internet groups. It looks like Starmer and his supporters are determined to destroy the party, rather than see it return to socialism.

But they also remind me of the bizarre constitution of the former East Germany. This was a Communist dictatorship, but on paper it constitution, drawn up by the allies after the War, proclaimed it to be a multiparty democracy. And indeed there were other parties, which all duly recognised the leading role of the East German Communist party and were there to provide the illusion of genuine democracy even though the reality was very different. Boris Johnson is taking us towards real Fascism at a rate of knots with his curbs on the right to demonstrate, the ability of the courts to hold the government to account and now Priti Patel’s new laws to impose jail terms of 14 years for any journo who embarrasses the government. All this could very well lead to the establishment of what would be effectively a Tory dictatorship. But the Tories also need to claim some democratic validity, and hence I wonder if that’s Starmer’s role. He’s there to maintain the illusion that there are opposition parties even though their leadership has reduced them to impotence. Lobster once quoted an MI5 official, who said that there wasn’t a political organisation in the country where their man either wasn’t in a position of leadership, or was in a position to call someone off and place their man in charge instead. I wonder if that hasn’t happened to Labour with Starmer inserted by the establishment and secret state. After all, Red Ken’s 1987 book, Livingstone’s Labour, described how in the 1970s there were plans for a military coup in which radical MPs, trade unionists, journalists and activists would be rounded up and interned.

Perhaps I’m being too paranoid here. Generally, I prefer to believe that things are bad because of incompetence and unforeseen circumstances rather than the result of conspiracies, although genuine conspiracies by the secret state have certainly existed.

But such is the magnitude of Starmer’s incompetence and sheer partisanship at the expense of the party he’s running and the working class it was founded to represent and defend, that I wonder.

Daily Mail Estimates Libel Trial Against Mike Could Cost Riley £1 Million

As well as the I, the Heil also wrote a piece about Mike’s appeal court victory yesterday. It was briefly on the net, but I haven’t been able to find it today. So I’m afraid you’ll have to rely on what I can remember about the piece.

As well as reporting the basic details of the case, the Heil’s article also featured the opinions of a lawyer specialising in libel cases. He guessed that Riley had already spent £60-70,000 on suing Mike, and if she took this to trial this could end up costing her £1 million. The lowest cost for such a trial is £500,000, according to the expert, and most start at £1 million.

Zelo Street has also put up a great article about Mike’s case and the latest victory. The Sage of Crewe notes that Riley’s case is undermined somewhat by the fact that she hasn’t gone after the author of the original articles Mike also drew on for his. Shaun Lawson, the author, lives in Uruguay, and Riley and her team estimated that he didn’t have enough assets to justify suing him as they would not recover their losses. This conflicts with a statement from Mark Lawson, Riley’s lawyer, that this wasn’t about money.

The article also notes that Riley’s case against the barrister, Jane Heybroek, for retweeting a comment by Shaun Lawson linked to one of his articles, collapsed after Riley had spent £80,000 on it and was unable to show that that the tweet had caused her any reputational damage. See Zelo Street: Rachel Riley’s Court Case Conundrum (zelo-street.blogspot.com).

It therefore looks like any further action Riley carries on against Mike could be extremely expensive for her.

‘I’ Reports Mike’s Appeal Case Victory

The I newspaper has published an article on Mike’s victory in the courts yesterday appealing against a judge’s decision to have his defence against Rachel Riley’s libel action struck out. The article’s on the net, and can be read at Rachel Riley loses latest round of libel case with blogger Mike Sivier over claims she ‘harassed’ a teenager (msn.com)

The article, entitled ‘Rachel Riley loses latest round of libel case with blogger Mike Sivier over claims she ‘harassed’ a teenager’ begins

TV presenter Rachel Riley has lost the latest round of a libel case with a political blogger over an article which claimed she engaged in a “campaign of online abuse and harassment” against a teenager on Twitter.

Ms Riley, 35, the numbers expert on Channel 4’s Countdown, sued political blogger Mike Sivier after he published an article on his website Vox Political in January 2019 with the headline: “Serial abuser Rachel Riley to receive ‘extra protection’ – on grounds that she is receiving abuse”.

Mr Sivier defended what he published, arguing that it was “substantially true”, honest opinion, and a matter of public interest.

In January, a High Court judge ruled in favour of Ms Riley and dismissed Mr Sivier’s defences; Mrs Justice Collins Rice said he had “no prospect” of succeeding at a trial.

But three judges at the Court of Appeal, in central London, overturned the ruling on Friday and said Mr Sivier’s public interest defence should be heard in court.

Looking at the article, it appears to me to be a fair report of the case, rather than explicitly pro-Riley, as many of the news reports of her various libel actions against her opponents have been. It’ll be interesting to see if other papers have also reported on Mike’s appeal victory, and the effect the unbiased reporting of Riley’s conduct has on her public perception.

Congratulations! Mike Wins Appeal against Rachel Riley

Hearty congratulations to Mike over at Vox Political – he’s won his appeal against Rachel Riley. Riley had demanded that his defence against her libel suit against him should be struck out of court. The previous judge agreed, effectively preventing him from presenting any defence against her. Mike naturally appealed, and won. The appeal court judges have not on ruled in his favour, they have also stated that the case must now go to trial.

This is not an overall victory – it’s very far from that. But it is a victory and a setback to Riley. Mike has many supporters and has received many tweets supporting him from people tired of Riley’s bullying and smearing socialists, anti-racists and critics of Israel as anti-Semites, simply because they dare to criticise the country’s barbarous treatment of the Palestinians or wish to return to the social democratic consensus that gave working people dignity, jobs, a proper welfare state and the NHS.

Mike’s been fighting this case for four years now since 2017. It’s great to see him win this battle against Riley, and I hope this continues.

Wishing Mike All the Best for His Appeal Hearing Today

This is just to wish Mike over at Vox Political all the very best of luck for his appeal hearing against the court ruling in favour of Rachel Riley. The proceedings will be screened on YouTube sometime after 10.30 this morning. Mike has the details up on his blog, including the YouTube address. See Riley appeal hearing: at last, the details! | Vox Political (voxpoliticalonline.com) As a long time Star Trek fan, I say this: Qipla! (Klingon for ‘success’).

Shock Horror! Private Eye Gives Good Review to Book Attacking Transgender Craze for Children

This is actually great. I like Private Eye, but I also have grave criticisms of it. Such as the way it wholeheartedly backed the demonisation of Jeremy Corbyn and the anti-Semitism smears, and which it’s still doing to a certain extent. But this time I think they’ve done something genuinely good. They’ve given a good, appreciative review to Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage. Shrier is one of a growing number of medical professionals, feminist activists and ordinary peeps, who are deeply concerned about the march of trans rights and its excesses. Many of them, such as J.K. Rowling, Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull, Sheila Jeffries and their male supporters, like former Father Ted writer and comedy legend Graham Linehan, believe that transwomen really aren’t, and can never be, women, and that the acceptance of them as such has grave and detrimental implications for women’s safety and the nature of femininity itself. They are also concerned about the massive increase in children, and especially girls, who are being diagnosed as transgender. They are concerned that this is a profound mistake, and that the reality is that deeply psychological disturbed, vulnerable girls are being influenced and manipulated into believing that they are really boys trapped in the wrong body. This is leading them to possibly unnecessary, life-changing surgery which will leave them infertile and with a range of other, serious medical problems. Shrier and another American researcher, Dr. Debra Soh, share these concerns, though are supportive of older transsexuals.

Unfortunately, the trans lobby, of which gay activist group Stonewall is now a part, are determined to silence any criticism of transpeople and the whole issue of gender reassignment, no matter how polite and well supported by the scientific and medical evidence. Such critics have been reviled as ‘Terfs’ – Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists. The Irish gender critical group, The Countess Didn’t Fight For This, have also been called ‘Tans’ – presumably a reference to the Black and Tans, the British military auxiliaries, who committed horrendous atrocities during the Irish Revolution, and even ‘British'(!). This is despite the fact that their name refers to the Countess Moskovitz, an Anglo-Irish aristocrat who became a socialist, feminist and Irish patriot, serving as a general during the Revolution. Over on this side of the Irish Sea, Rowling was accused of wanting to murder transpeople simply because she said she didn’t believe they were women. The rest of her message was actually very supportive of them. She told them they should dress how they liked, have sex with whoever would have them and live the best life they could – hardly a vicious condemnation. But to the militant trans activists, her refusal to accept them as women meant she had a deep loathing for them and really did wish them harm. They reacted with abuse and have tried to silence her, as they have similar critics.

It’s in this context that Private Eye published its supportive review of Shrier’s book. It’s in the literary column of this fortnight’s issue for 22 January – 4th February 2021. Entitled ‘Agenda Wars’, it runs

Thalidomide for morning sickness. Transorbital lobotomies – an icepick to the eye socket – for unruly psychiatric patients. Agonising vaginal meshes for the incontinent. The history of medicine is littered with confidently prescribed treatments that had terrible side-effects.

According to Abigail Shrier, an American journalist, the pattern is repeating itself with the puberty blockers and testosterone given to teenage girls who declare themselves to be transgender. Yet her bestselling book, Irreversible Damage has been subjected to the liberal version of a fatwa: there were calls to ban or burn it, and it has not been reviewed by the Guardian or the New York Times.

Crack it open, then, and let the wrongthink begin! Except this book has nothing in common with Mein Kampf apart from the idea of a struggle. It is a folksy, anecdotal tour of a well-evidenced phenomenon: in the decade to 2018, the number of female teenagers seeking help from gender clinics in the UK rose by 4,400 per cent. The statistics are similar in other countries.

We know that today’s teenage girls report high rates of anxiety, that they spend hours online, and that, compared with previous generations, fewer drink or get pregnant. So where to these isolated, stressed, straightlaced kids channel their anguish? Shrier’s answer is that they come out as trans. Then, egged on by adult activists and even their schools, they see any parental scepticism – “you’re 14, Flora, perhaps it’s a phase” – as evidence of transphobic bigotry.

Until recently, “transexuality” largely meant people born male who wanted to have surgery and live as women. As a psychological condition, being trans could happen to anyone, regardless of their personal politics. Kellie Maloney was a Ukip candidate and Caitlyn Jenner was a life-long Republican. But its links with fetishism made this model of transness seem grubby; too many women had found lingerie in their house and discovered their husband was having an affair with himself. So left-wing activists, inspired by the gay movement’s successful “born this way” rhetoric, championed the idea of “gender identity”, an inner sense of self. Being trans was now nothing to do with sex, and everything to do with living your life. Happily for commercial medicine in the US, surgery and hormones could help with that.

Shrier is very clear that adult transition, which she supports, is very different from “rapid onset gender dysphoria”(ROGD) among teenagers. It is an important distinction: trans adults should be entitled to free, safe, empathetic medical care. (In 1972, Jan Morris had to have her surgery in Morocco.) There are also a handful of children whose gender distress is “insistent, consistent and persistent”.

But girls with ROGD are a distinct group. The tend to announce their transness suddenly, along with others in their peer group, and regurgitate the language of forums where being non-binary or something more exotic (lumigender, anyone?) brings great social cachet. They are anxious and unhappy: they don’t want to be degraded like the “teen sluts ” on Pornhub and they can’t imagine being as flawlessly feminine as an Instagram influencer. The answer to these feelings used to be feminism. Now it’s gender identity: they’re not like the other girls, because they’re not girls at all. Shrier argues that ROGD is closer to anorexia than to, say, being a goth – and we don’t treat eating disorders with liposuction.

In Britain the tide is turning against the snap diagnosis of unhappy girls as happy-boys-in-waiting. An English court ruled that under-16s are unlikely to be able to give informed consent to puberty blockers, since these drugs almost always lead to cross-sex hormones (and therefore infertility and impaired sexual function). Fox-bothering QC Jolyon Maugham is trying to get this overturned, but the ruling has emboldened activists – who have faced threats, harassment and career penalties – to demand evidence for the frequent claim that teenage transition “saves lives”. So far, England’s only child gender clinic, the Tavistock, has been unable to produce such evidence.

What comes across from Shrier’s book is the real unhappiness of too many teenage girls – and the mix of groupthink and arrogance which suggests that the answer must be today’s equivalent of an icepick to the eye socket.

Critics of ROGD have also pointed out that, if left to themselves, 80 per cent of child transgender cases sort themselves out naturally. The child becomes a normal member of his or her natural sex. But almost all children put on puberty blockers go on to have surgery. If that’s the case, then the majority of such kids are being horribly mutilated, primarily for ideological rather than medical reasons.

Furthermore, despite the liberal rejection of critics of the transgender movement, not all such critics are Conservatives. Kellie-Jay Keen and Graham Linehan are people of the left, as is the female Guardian journo who found herself sacked from the newspaper for not following the pro-trans line. They appear in right-wing media because it’s only these media that’s giving them space to air their views and concerns. That has to change.

I don’t wish to spread hate against transgender people, or see them suffer abuse or assault. But there is another side to this argument, and in my view that side is thoroughly based on scientific and medical fact and motivated by deep moral concerns. From what I’ve seen, the intolerance, including violent assault as well as abuse, comes from the trans side. I hope therefore more books like this will be published and people are made aware that there is also another view, which needs to be seriously considered.

For those wishing to see more from Abigail Shrier, She’s been interviewed on YouTube by Graham Linehan and Kellie-Jay Keen.

Shrier’s Interview with Keen is at

Abigail Shrier – Irreversible Damage. The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters – YouTube

Her interview with Graham ‘Glinner’ Linehan is at

A chat with Abigail Shrier – YouTube

She’s also been on the Joe Rogan Experience, which can be seen at

Abigail Shrier on the Transgender Craze Amongst Teenage Girls – YouTube