In reaction to the Cass Report in Britain there has been widespread denunciation of the ‘toxic’ debate around the transgender issue without specifying why this is.  There has also apparently been wide agreement that there needs to be better data to find out the effects of treatment of children and young people..  The second link above shows that the apparent agreement is a fiction and that the supporters of gender ideology, within and outside the NHS, have both no need for data and no need for a debate.  The report itself reveals that most of the N ..read more

A couple of weeks ago at an anti-war meeting in Belfast a number of speakers remarked that the state of Israel had exposed itself through its open espousal of genocidal intentions and that the Western powers were similarly damned through their support for it.  And this is true as far as it goes, which isn’t nearly far enough. I made the observation that the open threat of genocide was a double-edged sword.  The point I made was that the ability to openly threaten such a thing was dangerous and particularly when it is then carried out! The full-blooded support of the Wester ..read more

What is going to happen to Palestine?  The sense that the catastrophic situation is almost hopeless and that nothing can be done is reflected in the short video by the Scottish blogger Craig Murray. The question was addressed from a Marxist viewpoint in Boffy’s Blog and we are obliged to consider whether he is he right about the future of the Palestinian cause.  We can start to do this by looking at what is currently happening and what the past has to tell us about how we got here. The invasion of Gaza was for months defended as ‘Israel’s right to ..read more

If we look at the UK government’s 2018 consultation paper on reform of the Gender Recognition Act we see that gender is defined as ‘often expressed in terms of masculinity and femininity, gender refers to socially constructed characteristics, and is often assumed from the sex people are registered as at birth.’  Thus, do we immediately enter the world of indefinite definitions that create uncertainty as to their meaning and a tortuous journey to understand how it all is supposed to hang together in some coherent way. In the document, a legally recognised gender is mea ..read more

Arms-length second-hand imperialism from the British Ukraine Solidarity Campaign: https://ukrainesolidaritycampaign.org/ Just as political programmes have a logic of their own irrespective of intentions, and war is the continuation of politics by other means, so does war impose its logic on those who politically support it.  The pro-war left has defended support for Ukraine and the intervention of Western imperialism, but as the war has developed it has been admitted by the leaders of both Ukraine and Western imperialism that for the war to continue Western imperialism must decisive ..read more

To paraphrase John Donne, “all supporters of the referendum are diminished, because they all were involved in saying that yes was the answer; and therefore, never send to know for whom was the failure; the failure was yours”. This could be the epitaph for all the political forces that supported the Family and Care referendum, but especially for the opposition parties, which, faced with the text put forward by those they claim to oppose, could only find ways to support it. In their obituary for the referendum People before Profit (PbP) invite their supporters to feel sorry for their ..read more

“Woke is Dead”, read the banner. “It was all wokism demeaning window-dressing”, said the main voice of the ‘NO’ campaign, Michael McDowell, former Tánaiste and leader of the late and unlamented Progressive Democrats. The Family and Care referendums, analysed previously here and here were massively defeated, the latter by the biggest ever No vote in a referendum. The amendment to the constitution on the family was defeated by 67.7 per cent of the votes and the care amendment by 73.9 per cent. Both had been supported by the three government parties and by all but one of the ..read more

The presentation of the war in Ukraine in the Western media is exactly like that of the genocide in Gaza.  Just as history began with the Russian invasion on 24 February 2022, so the ‘war’ in Gaza was started by Hamas on October 7, 2023.  Russia and Hamas are to blame. The majority of the Left has correctly sought to put October 7 into context, to be understood as an almost inevitable explosion arising from brutal oppression.  In the case of Ukraine the context has all but been ignored, and in any event Russia is not an oppressed people and it had a choice.  ..read more

The second anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine led to several retrospective summaries of the war and recapitulation of the arguments about its justification.  This should have involved an examination of the various claims made about its course over the two years and how they stand up today, but this was studiously avoided.  If we take even a cursory look at these claims, we can see how the lies told by the Western media about the war have increasingly been shredded by reality. Instead of winning against a stupid and incompetent Russia the all-powerful NATO ..read more

Last year during a break in the local anti-war meeting there was a short disagreement about the transgender issue.  The woman could barely conceal her disdain for the idea that men could claim to be women by wearing a dress and lipstick (as she put it).  The man thought that it was an important issue that had to be addressed. The woman was primarily a Palestine solidarity activist but recognised the war in Ukraine as one in which hundreds of thousands of people were being killed and that had the potential to escalate with catastrophic results for the world.  The ..read more