I thought Magdalen Berns was our queen. Heroes don’t die just because they die. She gave her life for us. She did. She knew she didn’t have much left, but she used it – with stunning energy, to teach us to rediscover our voices, after the trans lobby thought they had successfully cowed women into silence.

“I’d rather be rude than be a fuckin’ liar.” That’s my favourite one.

We called her our queen because she led women where they needed to go, not because she was rich or powerful or anything dangerous like that.

So why did they start saying JK Rowling was our queen? I stood up for her, where it seemed necessary. This is from 2020.

I’m also very impressed by her career path. To climb out of the EFL mire (that’s an industry that runs on sex and alcohol, and the poor woman had picked a wrong-un for her man, too) – To climb up from there not just to become a best-selling author but to grab that success in both hands and make sure she got as much, if not more out of it than her corporate publishers did; to actually manage, at one point, to stop being billionaire, because she’d put so much into projects for women and children — that is quite something.

And sure, I’m eternally grateful that she ‘came out’ with that famous tweet (as a result, so she said, of watching Magdalen Berns’ videos. Long live the queen!) But – well, I don’t know about you, but finding yourself being grateful to billionaires is not a great feeling. They shouldn’t be there. They shouldn’t have that power, that standing. We shouldn’t have to depend on them being on our side because – well, as in the case of Rowling, she hasn’t been, always.

I’ve been reading Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt’s book about the privileged and powerful people who helped to destroy the Corbyn movement and my goodness, Rowling’s deep in there. I’ll take the bit about being a founder-member of Saving Labour with a pinch of salt because back then, famous people used to get added to social media groups without their knowledge but Gordon-Nesbitt also found her on a list of top pro-Israel influencers for 2020 and then of course there’s that excruciating bit of propaganda in Rowling’s book, Lethal White, published in 2018: the ‘Israel-hating anti-Semite’ character – who appears to be a member of the Labour Party.

The evidenced truth: a survey in Westminster gave us fact-based figures for prejudice and there was – a small amount – of anti-Semitism on ‘the left’ but nowhere near as bad as the right’s anti-Muslim prejudice and, in fact, the Labour Party was demonstrated to have less anti-Semitism in it than in the general population. Rowling’s character might have survived for a while in Iain McNichol’s Labour Party because for as long as he was General Secretary, the Party seemed to be eternally a couple of years behind in sorting out things like that – a trait the right cheerfully blamed on Corbyn. But once Jennie Formby was in charge, Rowling’s grubby conspiracy-theorist would not have been tolerated.

And Rowling was not innocently wrong, as I believed back then. She had senior Labour figures amongst her personal friends. She could easily have found out the truth but in 2018, at the peak of the onslaught against Corbyn, she chose to use her prominence to join in the attack, helping the powerful to destroy the hope of millions.

That’s the trouble with billionaires, isn’t it. What billionaires want, they tend to get.

…And I begin to have horrible suspicions about why the Zionists had their feet so firmly under the table in some of our women’s organisations where I once felt reasonably at home as a socialist. and now, there’s this…

I know, it’s only a newspaper story and I daresay Murdo Fraser is a dreadful old Tory. Just because he says she can destroy Amnesty – and the story says Amnesty International, not just Amnesty UK – it doesn’t mean it’s going to happen.

Of course she’s blisteringly angry.  All true feminists are. It’s not just that Amnesty thought they could get away with slandering so many of our women’s groups. It’s far worse than that.

They’ve been running staff training sessions, trying to teach their staff to undo what Magdalen Berns did, trying to show them how to put women’s rights campaigners back in their box and make them shut up. Shut up about the Scottish Prison Service and the Scottish Government, when they were defending their decision to lock up vulnerable female prisoners with rapists. Shut up, when the gender ideology pundits went into schools to sell kids the idea of sex-change as a cure for all their woes. Shut up, when they were working to defund lesbian and gay organisations that insisted that same-sex attraction was a thing.

All the women who know that are blisteringly angry, and many are reading that Murdo Fraser newspaper article and saying ‘good’. But surely, when they calm down, they’re going to realise that we’re in an era of increasing danger and injustice from out-of-control governments. We desperately, desperately need our human rights organisations. It’s not as if Amnesty was the only organisation that fell for gender ideology. We live in a highly sexist society, which means many people are going to fall for sexist schemes.

We’re all furious, but only Rowling, being a billionaire, can crook her little finger, bring on the big shiny lawyers and kill Amnesty.

The enemy of my enemy

I am grateful for so much that Rowling has done for women and girls, but she’s not my queen. She’s not my enemy either. Money is my enemy – that’s why I’m a socialist, but if she destroys Amnesty, she’s most certainly not my friend. Women called Berns ‘our queen’ because she cared about us, and taught us something, not because she had the power only money bestows.

Why are we in this mess? Personally, I think the main cause is the left’s dismal failure in tackling post-modern identity politics. Way back before the Corbyn movement died, the real left were saying ‘hang on a minute, that’s not socialism’ — on various issues where individualist sensibilities over identity were triumphing over solidarity and reality alike but by far the worst example was the inability of Corbyn’s Labour Party to stand up for women when it mattered. Now, the right – and in some cases, the frighteningly racist far right – are on the front foot, talking good sense about the needs of women and children, while the confused mess that’s supposed to be the left continues to splutter about ‘trans rights’, as though we’d never had to do anything so difficult as unravel a clash of interests.

But in close second place, I’d put the blame on our tendency as a society to crown the rich and the powerful as ‘voices of the people’. Be it Nigel Farage or J K Rowling — It’s only money that puts them on those pedestals. They really are not your friends.

That’s why real socialists are not royalists and why, for everyone’s safety, we should stop anyone becoming a billionaire.

So now, we simply have to wait, and hope that Rowling decides to fix, rather than destroy Amnesty International. That’s all we peasants can do, hope. Hope like we hoped Corbyn’s Labour Party would survive. It’s all we can do, because Rowling is not merely a constitutional monarch.

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