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The met office told me to do it

I feel a bit of a fool. Our house has never, to my knowledge, been flooded. It sits on a hill that runs in places at a 45 degree angle down to the town. Nevertheless I’ve spent the last hour taking precious things off bottom shelves and shoving them into higher shelves and now everything…
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To a good man

You know that cry, “It’s not all men”? Actually, it is all men. I know it, and I know you can’t entirely solve it – not alone, anyway, and men aren’t brought up to be good at thinking together. It would help if more men could get their heads round exactly what it is they…
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Should we be worrying about what the kids are doing on Tiktok?

Archie Battersbee was not the first to die as a result of a social-media-based challenge, so it’s not surprising that lots of people have been asking that question this week. I know without asking that my daughter would tell me no, it doesn’t matter what platform you get information by, it’s what information you’re getting.…
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I’ve been and gone and done it now

Five years of frustration, trying to get “the left” to sort out the appalling ignorance of lefty MPs, activists and groups on the women’s rights issue, on what’s happening to vulnerable women and girls, and to our kids – now, finally, the problems we’ve been trying to amplify have “gone mainstream”. Most people at least…
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Faux democracy

Jeremy Corbyn lost a fair bit of his loyal following immediately after the Brexit vote because he stood there and told reporters we should now action Article 50 (I think it was called) and start the Brexit process. He lost quite a bit more in the following weeks, when he was asked questions about the…
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Left, right and left behind

This article is, ultimately, about the row about ‘drag’ (!) which I think offers a good opportunity to think about the left/right confusion in the women’s campaign… Is ‘queer theory’ left wing? Is ‘gender critical’ theory right wing? How many people are sufficiently academic, sufficiently fond of critical reading and sufficiently practiced in critical thinking…
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Hey Stonewall, don’t worry – I’ve had an idea!

Stonewall – the organisation that lesbian and gay people formed to fight for the right of same-sex attracted people to live full lives, just like everyone else: they weren’t about right or left, they weren’t progressive or conservative or religious or humanist any more than anyone else was. They were just same-sex attracted people who…
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How the gender identity industry broke society

This is a companion piece to an article I published a couple of days ago. It’s here, if you’d like to read it first… People didn’t mean to destroy the atmosphere by building a life that depended on the petrol engine. People didn’t mean to create the slave-driving gig-economy by pressurising each other to join…
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How the Gender Identity Industry Broke Politics

Before the world went mad, when I was still Vice-Chair of a Labour CLP, and active with my union, and had a seat on the committee of my favourite lefty group, I started hearing really weird things about sex and gender, including being told by a couple of therapist friends I knew that they were…
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Not the Forde Report

When I was out and about in Wales, one of the things I enjoyed was taking photos of any Welsh language signs and posters, so I could check out the meaning later, and learn some new words. I took this one by accident because I didn’t know Splott was a name, so wondered what a…