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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Also, you didn’t answer the question. Given that Graham Linehan is now an Israel and Trump supporting activist, who has recently been tweeting racist tweets (according to other GCs), do you now regret editing his book for him?
“I do hope that helps” snide replies are quite something when you’ve written a lot of words to basically admit that trans advocates were right all along about what the GC movement was.
i understand that Linehan is a public bully and any expression of regret will undoubtedly lead to him bullying you in public, so I would understand if you didn’t feel brave enough to answer the question. He’s particularly nasty to GC people who slight him in any way.
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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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“Safeguarding women and girls” is the clarion call of bigots everywhere.
I’m old enough to remember how it wasn’t homophobia, it was a whole lot of people who had “concerns” about what “the gay agenda” was doing to young boys.
JK Rowling cited her own experience of domestic abuse and a fervent wish to stop domestic abuse as one of her five reasons for being GC in her 2020 essay on trans rights, and yet, she sat on her hands while the GC movement, in lockstep, eulogised Rod Liddle, a man with a police caution for assaulting his pregnant girlfriend.
In the same month that Posie Parker knowingly did an interview with Avi Yemini, a convicted domestic abuser (threw a chopping board at his ex-wife’s head), Rowling quote-tweeted a tweet referring to Parker as a “genius” campaigner.
She had nothing to say when Graham Linehan knowingly did an interview with Joey Barton, convicted of kicking his wife in the head.
In fact, the only time Rowling has spoke of Linehan is to defend his call to assault trans women using women’s toilets. Even if you couldn’t give a damn about trans women, this will undoubtedly lead to the assault of butch lesbians in toilets. Rowling also said that it would “easy to tell” who was trans and who wasn’t. Linehan recently wrongly identified the woman who stabbed four people in London last week as trans.
Actual feminists don’t ally with domestic abusers, and they don’t sit on their hands while their movement welcomes them into the fold, do they?
At what point is enough enough on this argument?
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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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The point is that you’re not acting reasonably, which is how you’ve ended up being an activist in a largely Right Wing / Far Right movement.
It’s right there, it’s only ego stopping you admitting you got this so wrong. You hate trans people, which is how you endef up in a movement with other people who hate trans people.
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Hey yes, just keep on telling people who they are, what they’re doing and what they think – that makes it so-o-o-o-o easy for you to point out why they’re wrong, doesn’t it. Think about this: we are on the brink of utter destruction through war, climate crisis and the Epstein-fueled rubbish government we’re currently stuck with and you’re spending your time helping to destroy women’s and gay rights because you imagine it helps trans people. Many, many people are spending their energy that way. Others are being led into racism and far-right, murderous bollocks. I gave Simon’s story space here because it might help some people realise that danger. You carry on all you like – it really helps the blog ranking but I’m bowing out, now. Cheers!
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The GC movement is a part of the fascist machine that is causing these problems. That’s why it allies with fascists of other stripes.
This blog is literally laying out that GCism is very comfortable with fasicsm.
And your only retort here is to just endlessly restate your opening position.
I’ve told you that GCism allies with domestic abusers and yet you still just blithely state that you are fighting for women’s rights.
Actual feminists (the ones Linehan calls “handmaidens”) are fighting for women’s rights.
Your hatred of trans people has blinded you.
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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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You’re replying under a blog by a “gender critical” activist admitting that most of his allies are either Far Right, or very comfortable with Far Right allyship.
My contention is that GCism is, at its root, fascism. That some of its adherents don’t recognise themselves to hold a fascist proposition is not surprising: very few bigots ever admit that they are bigots. You’ll find very few people who will openly admit to being racist, most bigots think they come to their position by reasonable means.
As for your challenge, I’m almost 50, so this is very reminiscent of when I was advocating for marriage equality and homophobes (who never thought they were homophobic either) would challenge me to “prove” that being gay was “natural.” I provided many reasons why this was obviously true, and I’m sure you, as a Leftist, would know at least five of those reasons. Can you list them for me? Three will do if you’re caught for time.
(If, of course, you don’t think that being gay is natural, you should state that instead.)
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