Increasing Operational Demands

We all wondered how long it would take John Healey to work out that he could make far more on OnlyFans. Pat McFadden will be next. Seriously, though, each of them fancies himself as a potential "common sense compromise" candidate for Leader, and Healey has moved first.

If the benefit cuts were for defence, then why has the Defence Secretary resigned? If they were to push people into work, then they would be aimed at the well and able-bodied. But instead, the Limited Capability for Work and Work-Related Activity component of Universal Credit has been halved, and then frozen until 2030. "Frozen" will be the word.

Yet benefit cuts do not magic up jobs, and those to the sick and disabled do not cure anyone. More of this is coming, ostensibly for defence. Well, defence has not seen a penny of the cuts that there have already been. Ask Healey. And where has that money gone?

Net Zero Is Reversing The Industrial Revolution

The Thatcherite arrivistes have messed up Brexit, and we must not let them do the same with that of which James Woudhuysen writes:

Denby Pottery has survived more than its fair share of economic turmoil in its 217-year existence. But nothing it seems on the scale of the industry-destroying policies of the current Labour government. This week, the famed Derbyshire company closed its doors for the final time, citing soaring energy and labour costs. Around 600 workers have lost their jobs.

The pottery firm took its name from the village where, in 1809, it first began turning local clay into stoneware bottles, before expanding to homewares. It went on to furnish dining tables in Britain and across the world for 10 generations. But, in June, work at its kilns ceased. No doubt weak consumer demand for upmarket housewares was partly to blame. Clearly, too, chancellor Rachel Reeves’ hikes in the national insurance taxes haven’t helped. Yet make no mistake: the real culprit in all of this is energy secretary Ed Miliband.

In March, when administrators were appointed for the floundering company, Denby was perfectly clear what the problem was – ‘soaring industrial energy costs’. This is an insurmountable problem for a ceramics business because, to get a finished product, kilns must run at a temperature of about 1,200 degrees Celsius for hours at a stretch. And it’s here that Westminster’s depressing ignorance of science, combined with its dogmatic loyalty to Net Zero, has taken its toll.

Denby isn’t the first British victim of Net Zero. In November, hundreds of jobs were lost when ExxonMobil closed the Fife Ethylene Plant in Scotland. In 2024, 2,000 jobs vanished when the Port Talbot steelworks in Wales closed its last two blast furnaces to meet decarbonisation targets. Later that year, Vauxhall shut its 120-year-old van factory in Bedfordshire, shedding more than 1,000 jobs. Only a last-ditch intervention by the government prevented British Steel’s Scunthorpe plant – and its 2,700 employees – from facing the same fate.

These tales of economic devastation have one thing in common: Net Zero. It has led to Britain having the highest industrial energy prices in the developed world, and made it all but impossible to make or produce anything.

We can expect many other of Britain’s famed potteries to go the way of Denby. According to Rob Flello, CEO of industry body Ceramics UK, for kilns to reach the same temperatures with electricity as they do with gas is four or five times more expensive. Now, as with steelmaking, those of an environmentalist persuasion talk up new electrical technologies as an alternative to heat supplied by gas. In principle, future technologies, including low-carbon ones, are always worth exploring. But with ceramics, electric methods of heating will not supplant gas ones for years.

Britain’s Trade Union Congress has published a very balanced report about decarbonising high-temperature ceramics production through electrification. It notes that while electric kilns may make for better glazes, their components degrade rapidly and do not distribute heat as uniformly as gas. To retrofit existing kilns is a big, expensive hassle, and to scale up electrical heating technologies and power supply for industrial purposes will be no easy business, either.

So why does the government dogmatically insist that electrification is the way to go for UK ceramics factories? After all, Miliband himself states that 30 per cent of UK power generation is still based on gas. His figure is debatable, but clearly full decarbonisation of British ceramics factories is decades away.

Oblivious to all this, Miliband, the messiah of Net Zero, demands that industry abandon the cheap gas it currently depends on for some of the dearest electricity on Earth. Worse, a byzantine system of energy-relief schemes for business, first introduced by the previous Conservative government and now made still more complicated by Labour, only softens costs for firms that rely on electricity, not gas. A summary of the reliefs contains not a single mention of gas.

Looking forward, a relief system for gas-intensive industries could prevent future bankruptcies like that of Denby. Moreover, future UK governments should celebrate ‘heritage’ manufacturing for its design merits. That is not nostalgia – it is entirely in the UK’s interests. Denby outlets in America, China and South Korea are still operating.

It isn’t just Labour that is to blame for Denby’s closure. Tory bigwig Tom Tugendhat has claimed that ‘energy policies that have pushed prices higher in search of a carbon ambition at home’ are the culprit at Denby. This is rich, given that, in 2022 he (along with other candidates for the leadership of the Conservative Party) made an unreserved commitment to uphold Net Zero.

What makes Denby’s closure all the more galling isn’t only the jobs that have now vanished. We have lost something of British history, too. In 2024, it was reported that Denby Pottery Village welcomed 300,000 visitors a year.

This is the cost of Net Zero. Thousands of jobs and livelihoods lost. Factories that were once the lifeblood of a community decommissioned. And the memory of all of the remarkable things our nation once produced, vanishing without a trace.

Heart of a Dog

Down comes the statue of Mikhail Bulgakov in his native Kiev, where the ones of Alexander Pushkin were already long gone. Those who bewailed the toppling of the statues of slave traders never object to this cancellation of literary masters, despite never having heard of either.

Via the NATO member state of Turkey, IS fighters have been brought into Ukraine. Their suicide bombing of the Kerch Bridge was under British direction. IS is part of the side that we are backing, and that side accordingly tears down the monuments to great art and thought.

Before the statues of Bulgakov and Pushkin, there were the Temples at Palmyra, where the Head of Antiquities, Dr Khaled al-Asaad, was publicly beheaded. And before Palmyra, there were the Buddhas of Bamiyan, blown up by those whom we fought in Afghanistan for 20 years before surrendering unconditionally. Pakistan claims that it has just killed 26 Taliban, and Afghanistan claims that Pakistan has just killed 13 noncombatants, mostly children. Believe both.

Pakistan is at war with Afghanistan because Narendra Modi has used the Taliban to take colonial possession of it. The Durand Line is as meaningless as the Sykes-Picot Line. The P in Pakistan is Punjab, the a is Afghania (i.e., the Pashtun homeland of which most of the area is in Afghanistan, but there remain two and a half times as many Pashtuns in Pakistan), the k is Kashmir, the i was added "for ease of pronunciation" to sound more Urdu and less Punjabi, the s is Sindh, and the tan is Balochistan. But of those, only Sindh has ever been wholly in Pakistan. Part of Bolchistan is in Afghanistan, while rather more of it is in Iran. It is fundamental to Pakistan that Amritsar, Kandahar and Srinagar are all naturally and rightfully Pakistani cities. And it is fundamental to Pakistan that so is Zahedan. 

Remember that when you consider that Pakistan was the principal broker between Iran and the United States, and that the United States had just bombed the Pilau-flagged by Indian-crewed Settebello off the coast of Oman. Here we go again. It is all very well for the Government to crack down on the proliferation of barbershops, vape shops and mini-marts as fronts for drug dealing, money laundering, prostitution, immigration crime, and much else besides. This time last year, I was hearing it all. But the Government never asks why those behind such operations had washed up in Britain in the first place.

Who is to demand such an account? Based on the Division Lists, neither Suella Braverman nor Robert Jenrick had the brass neck to attend the House of Commons today. One quarter of Reform UK's total number of MPs was Ministerially responsible for granting Hadi Alodid's indefinite leave to remain. Stephen Ogilvie's family says that his condition is stable, but what if he died? Would Braverman and Jenrick be right honourable enough to resign their seats?

And might there finally be a COBRA meeting? In April, there was one of those, and a national emergency was declared, in response to two nonfatal stabbings out of the 150 to 212 knife attacks committed per day in the United Kingdom, leading to the deployment of an extra 100 Police Officers who had apparently had nothing else to do, as well as the imposition of further obligations on universities and on cultural institutions, obligations of the kind that otherwise inspired derision from the quarters that were lauding them in that case. If Bloody Sunday had happened in England, Scotland or Wales, then the Government would have resigned the next day. Nothing has changed.

Pride and Fall

Paul Knaggs writes:

Pride, the old proverb warns, comes before a fall. And so it has proved. A movement born so that a man could love a man and a woman could love a woman has been captured twice over: by capital, which rented its flag, and by an ideology that now brands same-sex attraction itself a heresy. It is a story of pride and prejudice both, and what is falling is not gay people. It is a product, and a betrayal.

Pride’s Corporate Collapse: Who Killed the Rainbow?

Something is falling, and you can measure it precisely. Among Britain’s ten largest corporations, the FTSE 100’s usual suspects of banking, brewing and retail, social media posts mentioning Pride collapsed by ninety-two per cent in two years, from fifty-two in 2023 to just four in 2025. Three quarters of Pride organisers report their corporate money drying up; a quarter of them have lost more than half.

Manchester Pride, forty years old, went into liquidation last October owing creditors more than three million pounds, leaving performers unpaid and chasing wages through a union. Across the Atlantic, donations to smaller Pride events have dropped between seventy and ninety per cent in a single year. Whole events are folding: Tampa Pride cancelled its 2026 festival outright, and Tucson Pride dissolved itself in January. The names walking away from the sponsorship tables read like a stock index.

And now the public bodies are following the private money out of the door. This very month, the newly elected Reform council in Gateshead announced it will stop flying the Pride flag outside its civic centre and end funding for future Pride events. In Havering, the Reform council cancelled the flag ceremony of 5 June. In Essex, library staff across the county’s seventy-four branches have been told not to promote Pride events. You may think those councils right or wrong. The point is that five years ago no council in Britain would have dared.

Today, St Helens Council leader announced his council would cut all funding for LGBT Pride events in town. Around 75% of UK Pride organisers reported reduced corporate sponsorship, and around 25% reported sponsorship losses of more than 50%. So ask the question the people running these events will not ask. Is this only bad weather, or has Pride won the war for gay rights and then surrendered the peace to a toxic ideology?

The answer is in the polling. Only about seven per cent of Britons hold a negative view of gay and lesbian people. The right to love your own sex, to marry them, to live openly with them, has never been more widely accepted in this country. The public has not turned against gay people. What it has turned against, in growing numbers across every age group and political allegiance, is something else entirely: the ideology that Pride wrapped itself in while nobody was watching. In 2022, British women supported legal gender change by forty-four per cent to thirty-two. By 2025, they opposed it by forty-two per cent to thirty-seven, a swing of seventeen points. That is not a reaction to gay rights. It is a reaction to something Pride chose to become.

The Rented Rainbow

Pride began as a riot. Not a parade, not a festival, not a month of corporate virtue: a riot, in the early hours of June 28, 1969, when police raided the Stonewall Inn in New York’s Greenwich Village. The patrons, drag queens, butch lesbians, homeless gay youths, transgender people of colour, fought back. They threw coins, then bottles, then a parking metre. For days, protests spread across the city. It stayed a protest for years because it had to. There was nothing to sell when the demand was simply the right to love your own sex without losing your job, your home, or your liberty.

Then capital noticed. A flag in June turned out to be the cheapest virtue on the market, and the banks, the brewers and the supermarkets queued up to wear it. The first corporate float appeared at New York Pride in the 1990s; by 2019, Barclays, Lloyds, BP and the Ministry of Defence all marched under the rainbow. Pride in London’s 2019 parade featured over 300 corporate contingents. But be honest about why they flew the flag. It was never conviction. Half of it was marketing, and the other half was fear: the knowledge that to be the one bank, the one council, the one library that did not fly it was to invite the accusation of bigotry, an accusation duly delivered, this very week in Essex, against a Reform council in exactly those terms. A symbol enforced by fear is not a symbol of acceptance. It is a loyalty oath. And loyalty oaths last only as long as the fear does.

And at the very moment Pride grew most commercial, it also grew most crowded. A movement founded on one clear demand, the right of a man to love a man and a woman to love a woman, swelled into an ever-lengthening coalition of identities and acronyms: L, G, B, T, Q, I, A, plus, and beyond. You can see the change stitched into the cloth itself: the simple six-stripe rainbow of the freedom marches has been supplanted by the chevroned Progress flag, the standard of what one writer this week called the omnicause. Somewhere in the expansion the founding demand was quietly shuffled towards the back. A sharp political claim is hard to sell. A parade of a hundred floats, with a headline sponsor and an acronym broad enough to offend no buyer, sells itself.

The backlash when it came was imported wholesale from Trump’s America, where one beer can sent to a transgender influencer, Dylan Mulvaney, April 2023, wiped billions off Bud Light’s market value and taught every marketing department on earth that a rainbow can cost you. Anheuser-Busch walked away from a St Louis Pride it had backed for thirty years. What one report politely called reputational shielding swept through corporate boardrooms on both sides of the Atlantic. Rainbow capitalism was always a lease agreement. The lease has lapsed.

The Heresy of Same-Sex Attraction

But the commercial collapse is only half the story, and the easier half. The other is what Pride did to the people it was built for. Here is the truth that Pride organisers will not say aloud. In today’s movement, being a lesbian or a gay man is no longer enough. It is almost suspect. It is why, as even conservative commentators now observe, many gay people have come to see the modern incarnation of the rainbow flag as a hostile symbol: hostile to them.

In April 2025 the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom handed down its judgment in For Women Scotland v The Scottish Ministers, confirming what used to be common sense: that the terms ‘sex’ and ‘sexual orientation’ in the Equality Act 2010 rest on biological sex. Same-sex attraction, therefore, means attraction to the same biological sex. That ruling sent a shock through the activist world, because the activist world had spent a decade insisting otherwise. For holding to it, lesbians and gay men are now branded bigots.

The slogan No LGB without the T has hardened into a loyalty test, and dissent is not tolerated. Question the doctrine that an inner gender identity overrides biological sex, and you are cast out of a community that gay people found. This is not rhetoric, and it is not new.

The LGB vs T: How Pride Turned on Gay People

In 2018 a group of lesbians calling themselves Get The L Out forced their way to the front of the London Pride march, carrying banners that read Transactivism erases lesbians and A male can never be a lesbian. Pride in London apologised for their presence and condemned them as hate. Four years later, at Pride Cymru in Cardiff, police physically removed lesbians from the march. An officer was filmed telling them it was for their own safety. Read that again. The police removed lesbians from a gay rights parade, and called it protection.

The ferocity of the response tells you everything you need to know. The establishment cannot tolerate dissent because dissent reveals the emptiness at the core of the project. The movement built by and for same-sex attracted people now treats those people as the threat. There is a word for that. The word is betrayal. Pride in London apologised for their presence and condemned them as hate. Their crime was to say that a woman who loves women is not a bigot for declining a male body. Four years later, at Pride Cymru in Cardiff, police physically removed lesbians from the march. An officer was filmed telling them it was for their own safety. Read that again. The police removed lesbians from a gay rights parade, and called it protection. The movement built by and for same-sex attracted people now treats those people as the threat. The police removed lesbians from a gay rights parade, and called it protection.

In fairness, the other side has a case and it should be heard. Pride organisers say these protesters are a hostile fringe who do not speak for most gay people, that many lesbians and gay men welcome trans inclusion as a matter of plain solidarity, and that trans people are a small and frightened minority who face real violence and deserve a place under the flag. All of that is true, and a serious left does not wave it away. But solidarity cannot be built on a lie, and the lie at the heart of the new orthodoxy is that there is no material difference between same-sex attraction and a claimed identity. There is. One is about bodies. The other is about belief. Conflating them does not liberate the lesbian; it erases her.

The Vulgar Bargain

There is also the matter of what Pride has actually become, and who it is for. Too many parades now carry open fetish displays and stalls selling sex merchandise: leather harnesses, dog masks, explicit paraphernalia in plain view of children. None of this has the slightest thing to do with whether two men may marry, and none of it belongs anywhere near a child. The honest thing to admit is that this is no longer, in any meaningful sense, a political event. It is a commercial carnival that has outlived the cause that justified it. 

The first battle, the right to love and marry and live openly with the partner of your choice, was long ago won. In twenty-first-century Britain almost nobody disputes it. A march no longer needed to demand a right will always be colonised by something else. What has colonised this one is commerce on one flank and ideology on the other. A publicly funded body pleading poverty has no business underwriting a parade of corporate floats. A movement confident of its acceptance needs neither the council budget nor the bank float to prove its point. That neither condition applies at most Pride events tells you everything about the distance the march has travelled from the Stonewall Inn.

Predators in Rainbow Clothing: Safeguarding Failures 

There is a darker charge that must be faced rather than dodged. It is the most devastating blow to Pride’s credibility has been self-inflicted. A series of criminal prosecutions has revealed that predatory paedophiles operated with impunity inside some of the movement’s most prominent organisations. In 2023, when Welshpool planned its first Pride, the man who had appointed himself organiser, a drag performer known as Miss Gin, turned out to be a convicted sex offender already under a lifelong sexual harm prevention order. Andrew Way pleaded guilty to attempting sexual communication with a child and to breaching that order, and was jailed for thirty-four months. 

Stephen Ireland, who co-founded Pride in Surrey in 2018, was jailed for twenty-four years after being convicted of raping a twelve-year-old boy he met on Grindr, alongside a string of further offences against children. The judge at Guildford Crown Court noted that Ireland had prided himself on being highly alert to the vulnerabilities of young people connected to the organisation he ran. That awareness, she said, was what made his crimes so grave. David Sutton, his co-defendant, pleaded guilty to distributing indecent images of children and was also imprisoned.

These are not isolated incidents. They are symptoms of a systemic failure. Whistleblowers who raised concerns were ignored or punished. Ideology was prioritised over child protection. And the result is that Pride organisations have lost any moral claim to speak on behalf of vulnerable young people.

Legal and Governance Cases Involving Pride-Linked Figures

Editorial note: This table summarises reported legal and governance cases involving individuals linked, formerly linked, or alleged to have been linked to Pride or LGBT organisations. It includes convictions, guilty pleas, contempt proceedings, allegations, and cases where charges were dropped. The inclusion of a case does not mean all individuals listed were convicted of a criminal offence. Readers should consult the linked source material for full legal context.

Stephen Ireland

Co-founder and former director, Pride in Surrey

Surrey Police reported that Ireland was convicted of multiple child sexual abuse offences, including rape of a child under 13, sexual assault, making indecent images of children, and possession of prohibited images and extreme pornography.

Convicted and jailed for 24 years, with a further 6 years on extended licence.

Surrey Police

David Sutton

Volunteer/associate, Pride in Surrey

Surrey Police reported that Sutton pleaded guilty to distributing Category A and Category B indecent photographs of children and possessing 64 prohibited images of children.

Pleaded guilty and was sentenced to a custodial term alongside Ireland.

Surrey Police

Andrew Way

Also reported as Andrew Bryant“Miss Gin”

Reported organiser connected to Welshpool Pride coverage

BBC News reported that Andrew Way admitted trying to engage in sexual communication with a child of 14 and repeatedly breaching a sexual harm prevention order.Jailed for 34 months at Caernarfon Crown Court.

BBC News

Andrew Easton

Contributor to an earlier coming-out guide, LGBT Youth Scotland guide contribution. LGBT Youth Scotland says he was not an employee or volunteer.

LGBT Youth Scotland acknowledged recent criminal charges against Easton and stated that his involvement related to an earlier edition of one of its coming-out guides, not employment or volunteering.

The organisation said it was “deeply troubled” by his criminal actions and confirmed the guide was no longer a current resource.

LGBT Youth Scotland statement

James Rennie

Former LGBT Youth Scotland coordinator/youth worker, LGBT Youth Scotland

The Guardian reported that Rennie was convicted of 14 offences linked to a child abuse network, including offences against a very young child.

Jailed for life in 2009, with a minimum term of 13 years.

The Guardian

Christopher Joell-Deshields

Former chief executive, Pride in London

Pride in London said his employment was terminated after an independent investigation. ITV reported that he admitted contempt of court after failing to hand back login details and other organisational property. The Guardian separately reported allegations concerning misuse of sponsor-provided vouchers.

No longer employed by or affiliated with Pride in London. Admitted contempt of court and was due to be sentenced in June or July 2026.

Pride in London

ITV News

The Guardian

Gergely Karácsony

Budapest mayor

Budapest Pride, municipal Pride event

Reuters reported that Hungarian prosecutors charged Karácsony over organising a banned 2025 LGBTQ+ Pride march.

Charges dropped on 4 June 2026 after a Court of Justice of the European Union ruling concerning Hungary’s “child protection” law.

Reuters

Géza Buzás-Hábel

Teacher, activist and Pécs Pride organiser

Pécs Pride

Amnesty International reported that Buzás-Hábel faced criminal charges for planning the 2025 Pécs Pride march despite a ban under Hungary’s anti-Pride law.

Human Rights Watch reported that Hungarian prosecutors dropped Pride-related charges on 4 June 2026 against a mayor and civic activist involved in 2025 Pride events.

Amnesty International

Human Rights Watch

The conclusion must be drawn precisely. It is not that gay men, or drag performers, or Pride, are a danger to children. That is a libel, and the institutions that have sheltered abusers by the hundred are churches, football clubs and the BBC, not Pride committees. The point is accountability. When an event becomes a brand or a one-man vanity project, with nobody doing the dull, unglamorous work of safeguarding, it is precisely the kind of event where a predator can crown himself master of ceremonies. The spectacle comes first. The scrutiny comes too late.

Reform UK Cuts Pride Grants: Durham’s Culture War

The economic fall is the easy part to see. The backlash came wholesale from Trump’s America, where one beer can sent to a transgender influencer wiped billions off Bud Light and taught every marketing department on earth that a rainbow can cost you. Firms with American parents began what one report politely called reputational shielding. Rainbow capitalism was a lease, and the lease has lapsed.

Then came the councils, and a politics that had smelled the same change in the wind. Where Reform UK has taken control, the Pride grant has been among the first things cut. Durham, Gateshead and Staffordshire have all pulled or refused it. In Gateshead the newly elected administration took the Pride flag down from the civic centre and ended the twelve and a half thousand pounds it used to give, its leader saying it was simply not a matter for the council. In Staffordshire the Reform leader told Pride to go to the private sector and put its hand in its own pocket. And in Durham the deputy leader Darren Grimes, himself a gay man, announced that Pride would not get a single penny, that the council was no ATM for contested causes, and that residents deserved their bins emptied and roads fixed rather than, in his words, council-sponsored politics in fancy dress and political street theatre. He went further, and the line deserves quoting precisely because of who said it. Pride, he wrote, had stopped being a celebration of gay rights a long time ago and morphed into a travelling billboard for gender ideology that many in the gay community, himself included, wanted no part of. 

It would be lazy to pretend there is nothing in that. The feeling Grimes describes is real, and it is felt most sharply by the people who marched when marching was dangerous. In 1984, when the pit villages of South Wales, Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire and Kent were being starved back to work by Margaret Thatcher’s government, along with generous working class people of London it was Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners who stood on street corners with collecting buckets for the coalfields. They raised thousands of pounds at a time when the National Union of Mineworkers itself was bankrupted by fines. The miners repaid that debt by marching at the front of Pride, notably the 1985 London Pride, where the Kent miners’ banner led the parade, and carrying gay rights into the heart of the labour movement. It was solidarity of the old kind: people standing with people whose cause was not their own, whose need cost them something, whose difficulty came with no sponsorship deal attached. 

When Reform UK cut Durham Pride’s council grant this year, the unions stepped in. The Durham Miners’ Association, whose own banner had been carried by LGSM in 1985, together with the TUC and Equity, raised twenty-five thousand pounds, comfortably more than the council had ever given. Durham Pride went ahead in May 2026, the largest in its history. Darren Grimes filmed his defence of the cut inside Redhills, the Durham Miners’ Hall itself, built in 1915 as the Parliament of the Coalfield, while the Association was among those keeping the flag flying. If there is a richer irony in British public life this year, it has not been reported.

But solidarity means something, or it means nothing. A few miles down the road in Darlington, eight nurses raised a concern that most people would understand immediately. They did not want to share a changing room with a biological male colleague. They were told to broaden their mindset, to get re-educated, to be more inclusive. They launched an employment tribunal and won in January 2026, the panel ruling that County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust had unlawfully harassed them. They went through the entire ordeal without a union at their backs. They had to form their own.

Because the UNISON president, presiding over a membership that is seventy-six per cent female, had a different response. When Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, met those nurses, offering them a fair hearing, the union president publicly declared his concern that Streeting was pandering to anti-trans bigotry. He posted the trans flag, the clenched fist, his solidarity. Not for the nurses. Against them.

UNISON was not alone. The Fire Brigades Union published its response to the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s code of practice and declared that it stands firmly in solidarity with trans, non-binary and gender-diverse members. It mentioned nothing about the female firefighters it represents. UNISON announced its intention to oppose the EHRC guidance built on the Supreme Court ruling, the most significant legal protection for women’s rights in a generation. At TUC Congress 2025, delegates voted unanimously against that same guidance.

These are not fringe positions. They are official union policy, passed by vote, issued as press releases, placed on the parliamentary record. The unions that found twenty-five thousand pounds for a Pride float and called women bigots for wanting to change in private have not lost the thread of 1984. They have chosen a different thread. That is not solidarity. That is capture. Where was the solidarity for the women in Darlington? The same county. A different budget line.

There Is Nothing Socialist About Gender Identity Ideology 

That question has an answer, and the answer is the second half of this story. All along, as the movement rushed to grow the alphabet, its own pride and prejudice were doing quiet work. Each new letter was announced as an act of inclusion. But the ideology that rode in with the later letters did not merely crowd the founders towards the back of their own parade. It made a claim on women. It demanded their identity, redefining the word woman until it meant whoever claimed it. It demanded their spaces: the refuge, the ward, the prison wing, the changing room, the sports field, every room women had fought a century to call their own. And it demanded their name, until the people who object to losing it are the ones called hateful. The lesbians of Get The L Out and the nurses of Darlington are casualties of the same advance. Pride did not simply forget women. It marched over them, flag aloft, and called the marching progress.

There is nothing socialist about any of this. We made the full argument in these pages in December, in Trans Liberation or Socialism: You Can’t Have Both, and the months since have only confirmed it. A politics rooted in material reality, in bodies, in labour, in the conditions of actual life, cannot also hold that sex is a feeling and a woman is whoever says so. That is not materialism. It is ultra-liberal individualism in a rainbow sash: the self elevated above the collective, the declaration elevated above the fact. And it lands its costs precisely where the left should be standing guard.

The defenders of the doctrine answer that trans people are vulnerable and that compassion demands their inclusion. The Supreme Court itself was careful to preserve their full protection from discrimination, under the protected characteristic of gender reassignment, and rightly so. But a movement that can only protect one group by dissolving the rights of another is not practising solidarity. It is practising power. A left that cannot tell the difference has forgotten what it is for.

THE VICTORY 

Pride is not falling because the battle was lost. It is falling because the battle was won. The right to love your own sex, to marry them, to build a life with them, to live openly and without apology: that is settled. Seven per cent of Britons hold a negative view of gay and lesbian people. The war is over. But a movement that wins its war must either stand down with honour or go searching for new enemies and new paymasters. Pride found two, and they have consumed it. Capital rented the flag and has handed back the keys. An ideology that treats same-sex attraction as heresy moved in behind it. What remains is a commercial carnival without a cause, a parade without a destination, an institution hollowed out by the very forces that claimed to defend it.

The gay men and lesbians who built this movement did not march through danger so a bank could drape a rainbow over its trading floor in June. They did not do it to be told their attractions are bigotry and their boundaries are hate. They did not do it to watch a union president post a clenched fist against nurses defending a changing room. And the women who marched beside them did not do it to surrender their name. They did it so that people could love who they love. In peace. With dignity. Without apology. That victory belongs to them. Not to the brand. Not to the ideology. Not to the union that forgot its own women.

So let us be clear about what is dying and what is not. Rainbow capitalism is dying, good riddance. The ideology that recast same-sex attraction as a heresy and women’s rights as an obstacle deserves to die with it. What cannot die, because it was never for sale, is the thing underneath: people standing with people, the right to your own body and your own desire, and the solidarity that makes the demand stick. They built a movement so a man could love a man and a woman could love a woman. Then they called that love a heresy and rented the flag to any corporate taker. Pride comes before a fall. But the cause beneath it, love without shame, truth without fear, solidarity without sale, remains.

The Case For Coal

Andrew Montford writes:

Whisper it, but it is becoming clear that the UK is going to have to start building coal-fired power stations again.

The reality is that we now face a very real risk of blackouts in the next few years. The warning signs are already flashing red. At the start of 2025 there was a (very) “near miss”, when, in the middle of a “dunkelflaute” — a period in which both solar and wind are generating essentially nothing — grid managers found themselves left with no reserve capacity. A fault on a single power station anywhere on the system could have forced them to impose rolling blackouts.

We should discount official claims that everything is fine. Those who watch these things closely understand that NESO has a dangerously lackadaisical approach to electricity grid security. While the gas grid is expected to withstand a 1-in-50-year cold winter, our power system is only required to withstand an “average cold spell”. That simply isn’t good enough.

A shortage of reliable generation capacity to see us through the winter is not the only threat. Grid insiders warn that a combination of low consumer demand and high proportions of renewables in the generation mix is destabilising the grid in the summer months too. Get this wrong and the whole country could lose power. This was exactly what happened with last year’s Iberian blackout.

As the Spanish and Portuguese know to their cost, blackouts bring economic and social chaos, and even death. A dozen direct fatalities have been identified across the Iberian peninsula, and statistical analyses suggest that more than a hundred premature deaths may have resulted.

So we really, really don’t want blackouts. Unfortunately, Ed Miliband is more relaxed about grid security. In fact, he wants more renewables on the grid, despite the fact that it is wind and solar that have got us to this sorry state in the first place.

What we actually need is more firm capacity — which is to say real power stations — and because as much of a third of our existing reliable generation capacity is due to be retired over the next few years, we need it very quickly.

That rules out nuclear, which is notorious for very long lead times (and troubled construction and epic cost overruns to boot). Hopes are therefore generally pinned on delivering a new generation of gas-fired power stations, but these turn out to be equally problematic. The AI revolution has led to a wave of new data centres being constructed across the world, and demand for the gas turbines that will power them has soared. The industry hasn’t been able to keep up, and lead times for new turbines are said to be between four and seven years. Add on the time required for new power stations to clear the UK’s burdensome permitting process and gas turbines stop looking like any part of the solution.

In other words, coal is the only option on the table.

We are not alone. America has just announced that it is going to build new coal plants, Germany and Italy have already announced plans to reopen mothballed ones, and the black stuff is seeing a resurgence across Asia. Our situation is much more difficult though, the last government having decided to demolish rather than mothball coal plants.

Coal-fired power stations are anathema to the climate cult, of course. When I mentioned the possibility of its return to the UK grid in a public forum last year there were audible gasps from the green contingent in the audience.

But there is simply no choice. We must have more firm power.

We should note in passing that modern coal plants are extremely clean — China’s standards for ultra-low emissions coal are far, far tighter than what the UK allows the Drax biomass plant to pump out. Coal is nowadays also very efficient and therefore surprisingly cheap to run.

Moreover, because the fuel is easy to store, coal has important energy and national security advantages. Better still, the UK has vast unexploited resources, albeit now mostly only accessible through deep mining. In an increasingly unstable world, a rehabilitation of coal-fired power starts to look less like a long-shot and more like a no-brainer.

However, these are rational considerations, and rationality is in short supply across society. So it’s hard to imagine that the climate cult, which dominates every institution of society, will willingly accept the return of coal-fired power, or indeed pretty much anything that could keep the lights on.

So even if we do manage to elect a government that wants to change direction, it will be fought every step of the way. What chance do we really have to get the reforms required through the House of Lords, packed to the gunwales with eco-warriors? I’d hazard a guess that even if we are getting blackouts, they would still try to prevent change. They are that mad, that dangerous.

Svante Arrhenius first theorised about anthropogenic global warming in 1896, and Margaret Thatcher was briefed about it by Sir Crispin Tickell, the then Deputy Under-Secretary of State for Economic Affairs at the Foreign Office. Thatcher always credited Tickell with having convinced her, leading to her speech on the subject to the Royal Society in 27 September 1988, the point at which the agenda of his 1977 Climatic Change and World Affairs entered the political mainstream. Tickell’s briefing of Thatcher was in 1984, tellingly the year that the Miners’ Strike began.

Thatcher began to blather on about environmentalism as a means of Socialist control once she had the dementia that also turned her into a born again Eurosceptic, but she was very Green indeed as Prime Minister, shocking first the Royal Society, and then the United Nations General Assembly, with her passion on the subject. By the time of her speech to the UN on 8 November 1989, she had made Tickell the British Ambassador to it, and the United Kingdom’s Permanent Representative on its Security Council. Johnson described Thatcher’s destruction of the coal industry as “a big early start” towards Net Zero. Her milk-snatching is now held up as a pioneering strike against the wicked dairy industry, as I had been predicting for many years.

To equip us to fight a war if necessary, but primarily to keep us out of wars, we need a complete change of direction, beginning with the lifting of the ban on further exploration of North Sea oil and gas. We need to harness the power of the State to deliver an all-of-the-above energy policy based around civil nuclear power and this country’s vast reserves of coal. Around those twin poles of nuclear power and of clean coal technology, let there be oil, gas, lithium, wind, solar, tidal, and everything else, bathing this country in heat and light. This is why we have a State. There is always climate change, and any approach to it must protect and extend secure employment with civilised wages and working conditions, encourage economic development around the world, uphold the right of the working class and of people of colour to have children, hold down and as far as practicable reduce the fuel prices that always hit the poor hardest, and refuse to restrict travel opportunities or a full diet to the rich. In Britain, we must be unequivocal about regretting the defeat of the miners in 1985. Is Kemi Badenoch? Is Nigel Farage? Is Ed Davey? Is Zack Polanski?

We sent our manufacturing to India and China, yet we have the gall to criticise their carbon emissions. And we expect to depend for energy on the Sun, the wind and the tides, precisely because it is beyond our power to stop them from doing what they do and we just have to live with it, yet we also expect to be able to stop climate change rather than finding ways of living with that. China manufactures most of the  world’s solar panels, which should be on buildings rather than on farmland and which we need to start making here, but let there be solar, wind and tidal energy in the mix. The base of that mix is nuclear and coal. The coal without which there can be no steel, and thus no wind turbines or tidal turbines, just as there could be no rigs, pipelines, or power stations. Britain stands on one thousand years’ worth of coal, and was the world leader in clean coal technology until the Miners’ Strike. Again, do not vote for anyone who will not say that the miners were right. Does Andrew Rosindell, whose constituency office is called Margaret Thatcher House, say that? Does Robert Jenrick, who gave his daughter the middle name Thatcher? Not Margaret. Thatcher.

Fracking? There is no problem with any energy source in principle, but none of that shale gas has turned up yet, and if it is anywhere, then it is in heavily populated areas that could do without the earthquakes, the poisoned water, and all the rest of it. Any economic arrangement is a political choice, not a law of physics, and the “free” market cannot deal with climate change while defending and expanding our achievements. That is precisely why it is being promoted. But instead, we need the State, albeit a vastly more participatory and democratic State than has often existed. The energy sources to be preferred are those which provided high-wage, high-skilled, high-status jobs.

The standing charges on gas and electricity are 50 times the cost of maintaining the networks, and although they are supposed to protect the suppliers from going bankrupt, not only have they repeatedly failed to do so, but they have never come down when those suppliers have been eye-wateringly profitable. Thanks to the all-of-the-above energy policy, just abolish them. And thanks to the all-of-the-above energy policy, let there be an all-of-the-above transport policy based around public transport free at the point of use, including publicly owned railways running on the electricity that public ownership would also supply to charging points in every neighbourhood and village. Astonishingly, and yet not, the fewest charging points for electric vehicles are in the coalfield areas. Also, never forget that, when we can catch them, buses carry far more passengers than trains do, but those passengers tend not to be politicians or the “opinion-forming” sort of journalists. And so on. Let a thousand flowers bloom. In a garden well-tended and well-watered as an expression of democratic sovereignty.

Belfast After The ‘Beheading’

Aris Roussinos writes:

Sheltering from the rain in a bus stop on East Belfast’s Protestant Newtownards Road, a location whose growing trendiness sits uneasily with its active UVF paramilitarism, an elderly couple looked up from their cigarettes to ask a passing fireman when they could go home. “It won’t be for a few hours yet, I’m sorry,” he told them, warning them that the exposed gas mains were a worry and the street was still unsafe.

A good portion of their narrow terraced street, which had, until that evening, housed non-European migrants, had been burned out. The migrants had been escorted away in armoured Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) Land Rovers earlier; the houses, and cars outside, were now blackened shells. Taking a photo of the devastation, eerily lit by the blue lights of the emergency services, I tried to persuade a local woman, on promise of anonymity, to grant me an interview. Two burly men, overhearing me, ushered me into a dark corner where they demanded to search my phone’s camera roll, to ensure I had not captured any local faces. Once they were satisfied, the larger of the two men warned me, “with no animosity, like, don’t be asking any more questions. We don’t want any journalists down here.” I understand, I said, but it’s my job. “In this country?” replied his more excitable colleague, “Are you fucking daft? Fuck away off and get on home before you get kneecapped.”

There was, perhaps, no arguing the point. Hostility to journalists was ubiquitous, at least on the Loyalist side. Over the course of the day, in which protests had been announced on social media in a bewildering variety of locations across Northern Ireland, a constant theme had been that no cameras, and no phones, were to be allowed. Protesters had been advised to dress in all-dark clothes, and to mask up: rather than hosting the carnival of livestreamers accompanying many such anti-migrant events in England and the Irish Republic, tonight was to be serious business. What violence there was, rather than aimlessly directed at the police, was to be coldly and carefully targeted against individual migrant homes. Coming home to Belfast from London that afternoon, I had returned to a place of ghostly quietness, where confused tourists wandered past the shuttered shops and bars of the deserted city centre. The horrifying attempted beheading of a North Belfast man by a Sudanese migrant, captured on video, would have been incendiary enough in a mainland Britain increasingly host to such horrors; in hitherto untouched Belfast, the assumption was that tonight’s response would be a historic event.

What gave the atrocity its added political piquancy was that it took place in a firmly Catholic, Nationalist area. The symbolism of the attacker being beaten off with a hurling stick, a symbol of Irish cultural nationalism — by a local man named Maitiu Mág Tighearnán — was quickly taken up by new Irish Republican factions firmly set against mass migration. Until now, the governing rule of thumb was that anti-migrant riots are, in Northern Ireland, a purely Loyalist affair, which Catholic Nationalists regard with detached dismissal. But it is increasingly common to hear grumblings against mass migration from working-class Catholics, grumblings entirely absent from their community’s social media and journalistic commentators. Indeed, the locally influential Irish Republican Socialist Party (IRSP), which claims not to be the political wing of the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA), has recently begun to make its veiled criticisms of mass migration explicit, seeking to capture the turning mood and turn it against their politically dominant rivals Sinn Féin. In its statement delivered on the night of the attack, the IRSP declared its support for a residents’ group protesting the siting of a migrant hostel in West Belfast’s Republican Glen Road, and warned against the silencing of “legitimate working class concerns about immigration” within “communities, who, with zero consultation, have never seen such demographic shifts in their lifetime”.

Northern Irish Republicanism has, until now, been insulated by the country’s post-peace process political system — guaranteeing an increasingly socially liberal Sinn Féin a role in government — from the anti-migration disturbances that have roiled the Irish Republic in recent years. The long-expected moment when that would change appears to be slowly dawning, accelerated by the violent horror of this attack, deep within the Republican inner sanctum. “You wouldn’t expect this happening here, not since the days of the Troubles,” one Catholic woman, smoking a cigarette on the doorstep of her neatly-presented terraced house, told me of the attack sparking the night’s events. “As a mother of young boys you worry what might happen to them, it’s shocking, just shocking is what it is.”

Yet in North Belfast, a patchwork of jealously guarded sectarian enclaves and exclaves, which makes a map of the Holy Roman Empire look manageable, the traditional ethnic conflict is of far greater relevance than whatever new politics is being formed by the decisions of Whitehall officials, who have rapidly turned Belfast into one of the United Kingdom’s prime destinations for asylum resettlement. On North Queen Street, one of North Belfast’s many euphemistically termed “interface areas”, where the two communities abut each other, Catholic Nationalists cheerily watched masked Protestant youths, masked and dressed in black, set barriers alight and fill petrol bombs, the two sides observing each other from a healthy distance. On the Catholic side, commanding-looking men in expensive black SUVs sat overseeing the events, occasionally nodding at messages whispered to them through their car windows.

On the Protestant side, where older women held up placards saying “Women and Children Not Safe In This Area” behind a screen of intimidating masked teenagers, a woman laughed at a police patrol car making a rapid about-turn from the area. “Look at them doughnuts he’s doing,” she said to her friend, “He’s from Divis [a notorious West Belfast Catholic housing estate] flying about like that.” One older man, who appeared to be drunk, angrily tried to pull the bemused driver of a rental lorry, with Southern plates, from his cab, following his awkward and failed attempt to negotiate the unexpected and blazing barricade. No doubt in the new spirit of cross-community co-operation, other Protestants intervened, leading their errant colleague away and giving the driver alternative directions to his destination with a kind of exaggerated politeness rare to Belfast. Unlike previous anti-immigration riots, where the PSNI came under furious and sustained assault, this time round the police were markedly absent, occasionally sending officers in patrol cars to pull burning bins away from traffic intersections, and instead leaving the two hostile communities they are normally at such costly pains to separate to explore each others’ unmediated proximity.

“It’s an excuse for them [Loyalists] to come out, build their numbers and then they’ll attack our community, it happens all the time,” one Catholic man from the fiercely Republican New Lodge told me, while grinding weed for a joint. “We’re all just standing here so, you can see, and they’re all covered up, covered up to their teeth, all black as your boot. Don’t you be going down that side,” he warned me, “they’re a lot more aggressive down there, even though their side supports Britain, you know.” Even still, he added, tonight was something new. “It’s about both sides, you know, the Green and the Orange coming together.” An older Catholic man from the New Lodge, watching the Protestant rioters with his Southern-accented female companion, agreed. “They [migrants] shouldn’t be allowed in this country,” he told me. “We’re keeping our distance there at the minute,” he added, nodding at the rioting Protestants, “but by right we should all be coming together here. They shouldn’t be in this country.” His grey-haired male friend, shaking his head angrily, walked away saying “I don’t agree with you there, mate.” I asked the first man what he thought of his Sinn Féin elected representatives. “Arseholes,” he replied.

Walking down, past burning barricades on the Clifton Circus roundabout overseen by a thin garrison of teenage sentries, I went to a different burning barricade on the staunchly Loyalist Shankill Road, where I met Amanda, a 60-year old woman shouting “Leftie scum!” at an ITV news crew. Though telling me that I “looked like a Leftie”, she agreed to talk to me. “We’re feeling very, very angry, we’re just tired,” she told me. “It just goes from one thing to the next thing, and they’re just all horrible situations. We’ve just come out of the horrible situation of Henry Nowak, and now, this week, we’ll have the young man almost decapitated up on the Antrim Road.” Smoke rose from a new development of executive apartments under construction over the road, which were locally controversial. Indians were buying up all the new flats on the Shankill, which locals can’t afford, she told me, and turning them into Airbnbs. “We don’t want them here,” she added, telling me of her appreciation for Rupert Lowe — an extremely rare cut-through of English politics in Northern Ireland’s insular political universe — and distrust of the insufficiently staunch Nigel Farage. As for the Catholics, she told me, “You know, we fought each other, ever since I was so high,” indicating a point a little off the pavement with her hand, “but we’ve had to come together because there’s a new threat from outside the country. When you start bringing in another threat from outside, well, the people are obviously going to have to unite, because we’re being invaded by illegal migrants and immigrants on this side of the community, and they’re being equally affected with the same situation. So, what else are we going to do?”

The idea of Catholics and Protestants uniting against mass immigration is, overwhelmingly, one pushed more by Loyalists than by Nationalists, with the former observing both the rabid hostility displayed by Loyalist activists to expressions of cultural identity like the Irish language, and the frequent violent intimidation of Catholics living in working-class Protestant areas as far more of an immediate and existential threat. Indeed, even Nationalists hostile to mass immigration view any coordination with Loyalists as a strategic catastrophe, gifting ammunition to their pro-immigration enemies within Irish Republicanism. But in the aftermath of the North Belfast atrocity, there has for the very first time begun, though certainly not an alliance, then the first glimmerings of a tentative and distrustful rapprochement. The nightmare scenario for Sinn Féin would have been Catholics rioting against immigrants. That did not happen: instead, working-class Catholics merely turned out to watch their Protestant neighbours riot with an anthropological detachment newly devoid of open contempt. I have never until now heard working-class Catholics, from devoutly Republican areas, talking about the coming together of the “Orange and the Green” with anything other than derision. At Ardoyne Roundabout, one of North Belfast’s most volatile sectarian interface areas, protestors from both communities shook hands and declared amity in scenes that were genuinely startling.

But this is, ultimately, Northern Ireland, where the age-old ethnic conflict is as perennial and inescapable as the soaking rain that drew the night’s events to a close. It is, probably, doubtful that anything will come of the cautious street flirtation, and as July’s marching and bonfire season draws close, we can no doubt expect a reversion to the old ways rather than the ungainly new dalliances of 2026. But, nonetheless, there was something novel and unexpected about the occasion: the working-class communities of both sides, accustomed to hating each other, and increasingly estranged from their political leaders in Stormont, for the first time eyeing each other up, from a distance, like awkward teenagers at a disco. Northern Ireland is an extremely dysfunctional country, though very charming and liveable for it: it is entirely unique for both communities to find common cause in blaming Westminster for introducing an unexpected source of random, violent dysfunction to unsettle their old and comforting, formalised one.

You'd Better Shut Your Windows Tight

He would be a good age now, but any surviving member of the Shankill Butchers may well have been back out on the streets of Belfast last night. There were no roadblocks for them as they cut throats from ear to ear for seven years, earning themselves the longest combined prison sentences in the legal history of the United Kingdom.

The Shankill Butchers were largely drawn from the Ulster Volunteer Force, a proscribed terrorist organisation. Yet last April, hundreds turned out, and 30 marching bands played, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Wesley Somerville. "UVF" adorned many of the wreaths laid in honour of a man who had accidentally blown himself up while perpetrating the Miami Showband massacre. In 2024, those same elements rioted side by side with the Tricolour-wavers who returned their hospitality in Dublin, also last April. They even brought their own flags, as their hosts had done as guests. Such are the connections formed in and by the overlapping worlds of British intelligence and organised crime. All cultures have wrong 'uns. Are these new ones muscling in on carefully carved up turf?

One of the speakers was Dublin City Councillor Malachy Steenson. A Special Criminal Court convict, Councillor Steenson has been associated with the proscribed Official IRA, with the proscribed Continuity IRA, with the proscribed Real IRA, and with the proscribed INLA. He boasts that, "I was never a member of the Provos." But Steenson is a Planter surname, like Adams, McDonald or McGregor. Whereas the leader of the Shankill Butchers, eventually taken out by those same Provos, was called Lenny Murphy. Think on.