Guest blogger Simon Edge was horrified to find a far-right bookshop on his doorstep. He was even more horrified to discover it was backed to the hilt by some prominent gender critical figures.

The Suffolk village where I live is a well-known destination for day-trippers and prides itself on its quirky range of independent shops. In the early summer of 2025, a woman called Joanne May, who had no previous connection to the village, opened the Oldspeak Bookshop here. Its name a clear nod to George Orwell, she billed it as ‘Britain’s only centre-right bookshop’, with which I had no problem. If you can have left-wing bookshops, why not right-wing ones?

It soon became clear, however, that ‘centre-right’ was a lie. Even before she opened, May regularly reposted Islamophobic tweets by a self-published author called Peter McLoughlin, whose main claim to fame was co-writing an anti-Muslim screed with Tommy Robinson. Robinson himself provided an endorsement for the bookshop’s homepage, saying: ‘Support this brave lady.’

Like Robinson, May openly supports Restore Britain, which has provided a political home for former members of  the British National Party, Homeland and Blood & Honour. On X, her bookshop bookshop regularly retweets posts by Restore or its leader, Rupert Lowe.

This summer, the outside of this shop has been draped with flags bearing the slogan ‘Remigration Now’.

Although May had no political base in the village, challenging her in public has been tricky. If we expressed our alarm on the local Facebook group, the post would get blitzed by a small number of very aggressive supporters of the shop – many of them from some distance away – whereupon the group admins shut everything down. There was also intimidation. When a couple of locals delivered a letter asking the owner to take the flags down, she put their images on X, asking for help identifying them and did nothing to discourage a follower who promised to ‘educate’ them once they had been tracked down.

Recently we began to hear rumours that the bookshop was in trouble and May seemed to be saying she had been hounded out. When my friend Lisa challenged her in the street and asked when she was leaving, she lapsed into a foul-mouthed meltdown, literally stopping traffic to hurl sexist abuse from her car window – ‘You’re an absolute fucking scumbag who needs a good shag,’ – and to proudly agree, ‘I’m a racist’.

That night I was horrified to find an unctuous Substack interview with May, posted three months earlier, by SEEN in Publishing (SiP), a group with which I was once involved. It’s part of the gender critical (GC) movement which arose to resist the misogyny, homophobia and other excesses of trans activism. SEEN stands for ‘Sex Equality and Equity Network’ and SiP was one of the 50-odd GC groups recently attacked by Amnesty International UK as ‘anti-rights’.

On its X account, SiP had gushed: ‘No independent bookstore is more independent-minded than Oldspeak Bookshop, which was opened to champion freedom of expression and common sense.’

This felt like a kick in the stomach. I’d already watched as GCs were drawn into the slipstream of the far right. I was one of the authors of an open letter in 2024 expressing concern that anti-Muslim populism had gained traction in a large number of GC social media accounts, and I knew the situation had got worse since then.

But to find people I knew, whom I had once regarded as allies, openly promoting a business owner who was to all appearances a fascist, and giving her respectability by glossing over her true nature, took this far-right sympathy to a new level.

I commented angrily (but not abusively) on the Substack, saying that if GC organisations didn’t like being called far-right, they should stop promoting far-right businesses. By the next morning, my comments had been removed and I was blocked. One of the group’s two co-chairs told me in private messages that she had deleted the interview, but she was clearly furious at having to do so – ‘congratulations on the censorship’ – and notably unrepentant for having published it.

Of May, she said: ‘1) We interviewed her on a specific topic. 2) There was no Tommy Robinson endorsement when we undertook the interview. 3) We don’t do background checks for wrong-think when we interview people, neither do we do continuous background checks on people we have interviewed. 4) She ran a legitimate business. Nothing she said in her interview was illegal, nor were any of her remarks “far right”. They were on [a] specific topic. If as you claim she was screaming in the street after a year-long campaign of harassment which was intended to make her shut her dream business, perhaps she was having a mental breakdown. You will be aware of the severe mental strain that harassment and bullying of this nature which people can experience.’

In other words, SiP lavished praise on a business which it hadn’t even bothered to check out on X, but that was fine, because the shop owner didn’t mention the racist nature of her business in the interview. (‘Could you explain how you got the trains to run on time, Mr Hitler?’) And if May had a racist meltdown in the street, that was on me.

It’s worth pointing out that Oldspeak Bookshop stocks an extensive range of GC books, including titles by Jenny Lindsay, Hannah Barnes, Helen Joyce, Julie Bindel, Fiona McAnena, Mary Harrington and Graham Linehan (the last of which I edited and published). None of those authors have any say over which shops stock their work, and they have also struggled to get decent exposure in the mainstream book trade. As many of us have said for years, the liberals and leftists who embraced gender ideology and persecuted dissenters abandoned the gender critical terrain to the right. But that doesn’t mean – and this honestly shouldn’t need saying – that GCs have to sign up for everything else the right (and in this case, the far right) stands for.

For many prominent GCs who genuinely started out on the left, it’s clear that hanging out on the right, taking pay cheques from UnHerd, The Critic, Spiked and The Spectator, and knowing they’ll get a sympathetic ear from Julia Hartley-Brewer of Talk TV or Josh Howie of GB News, has meant they end up sounding very like their new right-wing friends. Cheering for Israel and abusing anyone who opposes the genocide of Palestinians has become de rigueur for many vocal GCs.

When some of them embrace obsessive anti-Muslim racists who happen to be GC, it feels like they’re not doing it despite the Islamophobia, but because of it. This distortion of values doesn’t escape trans rights activists. As one mocked the other day: ‘You could not write a better punchline to the “protect women and girls” TERF academics joke, than them all coming out to eulogise the wife-beating paedophile Rod Liddle.’

Someone else at SiP told me she hated the far right but would ‘link arms with whoever I have to’ on the issue of gender ideology. This is a familiar position, but I would suggest it’s not actually true. Yes, they’ll work with anyone on the right. But if you’re the kind of deranged ‘tankie’ and ‘Hamas apologist’ who thinks it’s bad to shoot Gazan kids in the head for target practice, they don’t want to know you. Just days after my exchange with SiP, the group reposted a tweet by Lord Walney, aka the pro-Israel lobbyist John Woodcock, endorsing the proscription of Palestine Action. So much for single-issue campaigning. The result is that decent-minded sex realists who aren’t genocide-deniers no longer take part in the discussions, and the rump of remaining GCs look more than ever like a bunch of cranks trapped in Elon Musk’s bubble of hate.

As I write, Oldspeak Bookshop has finally shut its doors. ‘It became increasingly difficult to maintain a welcoming environment due to the constant hostility I experienced,’ May wrote on X, without a trace of irony. As a last two fingers to the village, she left behind her remigration flags. Her business will continue to trade – and presumably spew racist filth – online.

In a second tweet, May posted a letter from the local estate agent asking her politely to take the flags down. Her post included the staff member’s name, personal phone number and email address. A prominent blue-tick account with well over 220k followers, which had reposted her closure announcement, asked contemptuously: ‘What’s it got to do with him?’

The owner of that account is the GC author and former GB News presenter Andrew Doyle (who doesn’t even have the excuse of May stocking his work). No doubt he, like other big-name GCs, will continue to laugh dismissively at the notion that he is part of the far right. But in this instance, he seems very clear which side he’s on.

~~~~~~~

Simon Edge’s novels include The End of the World is Flat and In the Beginning

2021 seems like a lifetime ago now but, believe it or not, we were pondering back then how on earth people came to believe some of the things they came to believe thanks to gender ideology, which is why ‘The End of the World is Flat’ was a hit with so many people. I certainly loved it…

~~~~~~~

And finally, if you’re a socialist who’d like to stand up for sex-based rights for women and for gay folks without consorting with fascists, check out The Materialist Left.