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.
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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…
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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.
Kay Green 
17 responses to “The alarming tale of the far right bookshop in rural Suffolk”
Is this a joke?
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Joanne May initially fooled a number of we locals, including myself, with her centre right branding. But her behaviour became increasingly thuggish and extremist, and it was obvious that she was more attracted to the possibilities of belonging to the far right global networks and the fame and funding that this now (unfortunately for all of us) attracts. Trouble is that this distracted her from running the bookshop/cafe which was almost never open by the end, as she was too busy preening herself at weirdo conventions up and down the country. It’s a measure of her ethical level that she’s now blaming the locals, not only for her appalling behaviour, but also for the rubbish management of her business. Luckily though her personal stupidity means that there is so much recorded and digital evidence of her racism and overall conduct to discount any serious treatment of her ludicrous claims.
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Hi Simon,
Given that Graham Linehan has become everything you seem to abhor, do you now regret editing his book for him?
Isn’t there a glaring answer here?
If you find yourself in league with bigots, isn’t it reasonable to conclude that the GC movement was always a bigoted movement?
You’re a movement that universally lauded a woman who called trans people “pathetic, sick fs”, and you seem now, very lately, to have discovered some issue with extremism?
It was fine when they were doing it to trans people, right?
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Hi Aidan, I have approved your comment as I would like to answer it, as a woman who has stood up for women’s rights and objected to abusive behaviour (towards anyone but on this topic, particularly) towards trans people. This is my message: please grasp the fact that all the evidence suggests that the majority of the people in this country get that women, lesbian and gay people need sex-based law to remain for their own safety. The fact that two people both think that does not mean they both have the same politics. It ‘s not that hard to grasp that, once you think about it.
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Hi Aidan
It’s bigoted to hate all Muslims, to say that millions of foreigners should be deported and many of them hanged, to call for mosques to be burned down and to cheer on the genocide of the Palestinian people.
It’s not bigoted to observe that men aren’t women just because they feel like it, to believe that women have sex-based rights, to say that lesbians have the right not to have sex with men and to oppose the sterilisation of confused but healthy children to indulge the whims of virtue-signalling middle-aged men.
I do hope that helps.
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“Men aren’t women just because they feel like it.”
This isn’t the argument. All these years of activism, and you don’t actually know what the trans argument is.
Trans people, like gay people, are an innate human reality. Have you ever read one trans person’s biography in your life, or is your bookshelf just stacked with bias-affirming GC tomes?
“lesbians have the right not to have sex with men “
No-one says they don’t. No-one is forcing you to sleep with anyone you don’t want to sleep with.
That BBC article from a few years ago had one “source” on trans women “coercing” lesbians into sex, lest they be thought of as transphobic (which is a nonsensical argument when you think about it for a second.) Lily Cade. The BBC had to drop their only named source from the article after she wrote a blog calling for trans women to be lynched and parents who support their trans kids to be gang-raped. Do you remember that? Do you also remember that Lily Cade had three credible allegations of coercing lesbians into sex herself, which was found by people who support trans rights within 5 minutes of the BBC article being published. This suggests that the journalist was so desperate to include one named source that she would take literal ANYONE who was willing to go on record. That’s because, again, this is propaganda.
Also, while on the subject of lesbians, and since you like polls, lesbians, in survey after survey are the group most likely to support trans rights in the LGBT+ community, which suggest, again, that the idea that lesbians are “under attack” by trans women is simply propaganda. Again.
“Confused but healthy children.”
Again, I keep hearing *about* victims and not *from* victims. You grasp the distinction.
Everytime I come across a GC detransitioner I find that they are a Right Wing ideologue. You must have noticed this yourself? Keira Bell, Maia Poet, Sinead Watson, etc, all Right-Wingers coming with Right Wing talking points. Isn’t it reasonable to conclude that just like “ex-gay” people who opposed “the gay agenda” tend to be Religious Right mouthpieces, “ex-trans” people who oppose “trans ideology” are the same?
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How is it actually possible for someone to not grasp that transphobia is an integral part of far-right ideology? Being aghast at all the lovely GC books, authored by fine feminists, being featured in a far-right bookshop is ludicrous. They are part and parcel of the exact same phenomenon, and there’s no point in sticking your fingers in your ears and going ‘la la la, I don’t see it’.
Please step back for a second and just look at the ‘gender-critical’ movement. Its figureheads. Its greatest champions. How can you possibly not see that they’re all right-wing bigots?
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Transphobia, homophobia, racism – you name it. How can *you* not possibly see that a whole range of people wish to defend safeguarding for women and girls, etc etc.
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Hi Kay,
Thanks for approving the comment and for the answer.
Will you concede that the vast majority of the “gender critical” movement idolises Magdalen Berns, who, infamously, referred to trans women as “pathetic, sick fs.”?
Only within the last year you can find JK Rowling laughing it up in response to a tweet referring to trans people as “fetid troons.”
To say that abuse of trans people is not the modus operandi of the GC movement is just a denial of reality.
If you have objected to slurs and similar abuse in public, I would like to see it? Do you have evidence of you objecting to GC people idolising Magdalen Berns?
Arguments from “the majority of people” are doomed to failure when you consider that in the UK in the late 1980s, after relentless homophobic propaganda in the British Press, 75% of people stood opposed to gay rights, because propaganda works.
On propaganda, consider also, since we are talking about evidence, that four years ago you can find most “reasonable” GC activist sharing a story that “1000 families” were imminently set to sue the Tavistock. This was being spearheaded by the law firm Pogust Goodhead. The case never happened with 1 “family”, let alone “1000 families.” So where are all the gay people who have been “transed” in the UK? Back in 2018 I was told, “just wait five years for the avalanche of lawsuits.” That simply didn’t happen. It simply didn’t happen so much that when the GC movement recently tried to block the puberty blocker trial you had to rely on Keira Bell, who is now a Far Right, anti-vax activist, Tommy Robinson fan, who retweets tweets calling black people “monkeys” and “melanted savages.” Doesn’t that suggest your celebrity detrans person was actually an ideologue all along?
As for separating the GC movement from the Far Right, are you seriously arguing that a trans person should experience a Far Right person laughing at someone calling them a “fetid troon” and JK Rowling laughing at someone calling them a “fetid troon” differently? Are they supposed to think, “oh, but JK Rowling came to a position where mocking me is funny from a Leftist “rational” position?” (She didn’t, by the way, she’s very much with Kellie Jay Keen and not you on who the GC movement should ally with.)
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I’ll agree that JKR and KJK are both a long way to the right of me. Trouble is, I’m not going to spend the next 3 weeks listing reasonable people who are skeptical of gender ideology in response to you listing unreasonable people who are – A LOT of people are.
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When Aidan or anyone else who thinks the same way can give a coherent account, relying only on gender identities and in strictly non-binary terms, a) of how babies are conceived, gestated, born and suckled, and b) how that relates to the same process in those mammals with which we have common ancestry – then I promise I shall take their ideology seriously. Until then, ‘TWAW etc.’ is not even a left/right political position, it’s simply reality-denialist nonsense. The fact that its advocates pretend that this nonsense is the only left or progressive opinion and its critics are all nececssarily ‘fascists’ is the gift that keeps on giving for the real fascists and ethnochauvinists.
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While it’s a pity this important post has been hijacked by a habitual harasser and troll, it’s a fair point that Graham Linehan has not hidden his decisive shift to the far right, so suggesting he’s somehow outside the problem is disingenuous. Several of the other writers mentioned in that list of people who can’t help where their books are stocked have ever-stronger right-wing leanings also, and/or are tied to SEEN In Publishing. This shift towards a right-wing omnicause- Kathleen Stock defending anti-immigration thugs, Julie Bindel calling pro-Palestine women “Hamas rape apologists”, Hadley Freeman scorning Black Lives Matter – has pushed some of us away from the movement entirely.
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Thank you to those who have commented. I decided to allow a few on the gender issue, and have tried to make them representative but this article is here as part of the push back against the far right, and I would like readers to have a chance to think about that, so will delete off-topic comments from now on, and permanently unapprove anyone who keeps returning to argue the same points.
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Things were simpler for anti-fascists in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s. It was easy to show that the leaders of the NF, BNP, British Movement and the like were basically neo-Nazis. With the (relatively) recent memory of WW2, it was not hard to puncture the ‘patriotism’ of the ultra-right back then. This current lot are different. Their ‘ideas’ come largely from the present-day US rather than 1930s Germany. They concentrate on ‘culture war’ issues, particularly those where they can claim ‘the left’ takes ridiculous positions. And so we get a bookshop pushing the same demands as the old NF (‘remigration’ = ‘repatriation’) while posing as merely ‘old-fashioned’.
The process whereby formerly left or liberal types get pushed and/or attracted ever further to the political right (Stock, Bindel, Linehan etc.) in the course of their culture wars is a complex one, and well worth discussing. It seems to me to involve money, validation, tribalism, and desensitisation to charges of ‘far-rightism’ because the term gets overused by their culture war opponents (see certain comments above)…
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Yes – and also, the whole political pantomime has shifted right in recent years (a Labour leader sounding like Enoch Powell, for example) which I think also leads people to think it’s ‘normal’ to have what I, and most of the people I know, consider wildly extreme views.
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Question is: what counts as ‘extreme’? When I was young, the idea that capitalism could and should be done away with and replaced by ‘socialism’ – understood as a socially-owned, collectivist and egalitarian economic system – was a minority viewpoint, but not completely marginal in British politics. Much of Labour’s left wing still paid lip-service to the idea, up to the end of the 1980s. Now, it’s seen as wildly impractical, and capitalism is regarded across the spectrum as just a fact of life. But with socialist alternatives to capitalism off the political menu, what is left for people sick of the status quo? Much of our modern ‘left’, with its Americanised culture-war preoccupations, is a complete turn-off. This is where the far right can build its support. The enemy is not the bosses or the rich, but ‘the establishment’. The degradation of our social services and infrastructure is the fault of ‘migrants’. People’s anger at the dismal state of housing can be directed against ‘asylum seekers’ And countless disaffected ordinary people can be conned into believing that Reform and Restore represent their interests.
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