A real page turner! The Family Upstairs by Lisa Jewel

Over the last four months or so I've ploughed through near on twenty different crime and mystery thrillers. Some like all three books by CJ Tudor and The July Girls from Phoebe Locke were excellent and gripping. Others were good but there were a couple that disappointed however nothing prepares one for the story that unfolds in this tome from Lisa Jewel.

It's not often I get angry when reading (or watching) fiction but as the tale develops in this mystery one does want to intervene against the obvious injustice. It's no wonder that this book has been in the best seller charts for a while now.

The premise as outlined on the cover is that the police find three bodies in a virtually empty house which have began to decay having been dead for several days. Yet upstairs in a cot lay a young baby well fed and cared for. But who had been looking after her?

This appears to be a triple suicide. But where have the other children gone?

Libby receives a letter on her 25th birthday from solicitors stating she has just inherited a house. And not just any old building. This is a prime property in Chelsea worth millions.

A text is sent saying the "Baby is now 25".

What does this all mean?

Meanwhile Lucy and her children are living an itinerant life style in France. The actors in this gripping page turner are about to be introduced in a tale that is told gong back and forth in time.

You will be shocked. It certainly raised my blood pressure and the story will certainly get under your skin. I cannot recommend this book enough.

Support Campaign about marriage law and rights of minority women

Southall Black Sisters (SBS), with support from the One Law For All campaign, recently intervened in the Court of Appeal case of Akhter v Khan to outline our concerns about the current law on marriage and its serious implications for black and minority (BME) women and their rights. The Court of Appeal judgment (14 February 2020) ruled that women who are unable to register their marriage in accordance with the law cannot on the break-up of their marriage seek to ‘void’ it, which means that they are not entitled to any financial remedies. This outcome has profoundly discriminatory consequences for minority women.

In light of this judgement, SBS and One Law for All have now written to the Law Commission as it is currently conducting a review of the law on marriage. We want to ensure that this issue is given proper consideration. You can find out more about the scope of the review here.

Our letter to the Law Commission follows a previous letter from SBS to the Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Justice, dated 6th August 2018, setting out our concerns on Sharia law and civil divorce to which we received no response. You can read both letters here and here.

You can also read more about the One Law for All campaign here and on our website.

How can you support our campaign?

We welcome support for this campaign from members of the public.

Please contact the Law Commission directly, using the contents of our letters above: weddings@lawcommission.gov.uk. 

The Law Commission will be inviting views from stakeholders and members of the public. If you wish to participate, please respond to their consultation paper when it is announced. We will update our website when the consultation paper is made available. 

You can find out more about the Law Commission’s review here.

• Please also write to your local MP, using this template. You can find out who your local MP is and their contact details, using this website: https://www.writetothem.com/

• Please write to the relevant Parliamentary Select Committees: including the Women and Equalities Committee: womeqcom@parliament.uk, the Joint Committee on Human Rights on this matter via: jchr@parliament.ukand the Justice Committee: justicecom@parliament.uk, to express your support for a reform of the marriage laws.

• Please promote this campaign on social media, using #OneLawforAll #EqualityNotDiscrimination.

Please feel free to share any correspondence with us directly, by contacting janaya@southallblacksisters.co.uk or Maryam Namazie onelawforall@gmail.com

The shame of SOAS: HAMAS Linked Terror Group on UK Campus

Pro-Israel undercover researcher David Collier has discovered that a British university plans to host a purveyor of Nazi and KKK antisemitic theory on its campus, EUROPAL

The School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) is known as a hotbed of antisemitism.

It has the dishonour of being a university in central London where Jewish students have said they are ‘scared to wear the star of David and speak Hebrew’.

During the month of March, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and others have scheduled events under the Israel Apartheid Week banner.

On March 7 SOAS will host the Hamas linked group EUROPAL.

Full briefing on EUROPAL by David Collier: david-collier.com/europal

Join our campaign against Israel Apartheid Week here.

Michael McCann

Free Tibet: An Introduction

One of the worlds most remote and unreported countries is Tibet high in the Himalayas and militarily occupied by China since 1950. In 1959 the Tibetan people rebelled against Chinese rule but this was brutally suppressed and the Dali Lama was forced to flee and form a government in exile.

Over one million Tibetans have died since the Chinese invasion. They are a people facing cultural genocide as thousands of Hans Chinese are settled in Tibet changing the demographic against the indigenous population.

The media is banned from Tibet. Like North Korea Tibet has become a prison for it's inhabitants but resistance continues.

The following video from Free Tibet gives a brief and concise introduction to the plight of the Tibetan people.




For further information please go to:



freetibet.org



www.tibetwatch.org



Tibetan Uprising Day Rally 

Tuesday, 10 March 2020 

London from 11:00 Downing Street SW1

Manchester: 11:30  Piccadilly Gardens

Join us for a Free Tibet!

A Tale of Two Serwotkas

Having spent near on two decades in the largest of the civil service unions fighting the far left led by Mark Serwotka and then both changing unions & retiring you'd think that one would be able to escape the mad antics of the comrades. Yet here we are once again addressing Serwotka's destructive intervention inside the Labour Party.

The PCS union was once not just the largest but also the most influential of all the civil service unions. Then the left under Serwotka managed to gain control and it all went downhill from there. Today the union is barely just over a third of what it was at it's height and the left has spent more time fighting over the plum jobs and roles provided by the union rather than doing things for their actual members.

The shenanigans over who got the assistant General Secretary post and the subsequent falling out between the comrades splitting into opposing camps made the union a laughing stock.

Even at a local level this has broken down in some areas as I was reminded by speaking to an old colleague who had worked in an office without heating between Nonmember and January and said the local reps had been useless. This in a branch long considered to be one of the more "right on" left wing ones.

The Balham office closed with members left to their own devices for the most part despite requests for assistance. PCS came far too late and did too little according to members I spoke to shortly before closure during a visit.

Yet once Serwotka was lauded as the "great white hope" by the left and managed to unite the left behind him for a while in PCS to succeed in gaining hegemony over the union. Despite opposition the stagnation of recruitment and cuts meant that there was little change in the personnel of the union and as people retired the sole mainstream group in the union simply wound up.

Serwotka oversaw the turning of the PCS into a political vehicle for the far left and it's finances and activists were utilised to pursue causes well outside the unions actual raison d'etre and prioritised seeking links to build a new political party. There was Make Your Vote Count which morphed into surreptitious support for Respect and then the short lived Trade Union & Socialist Coalition run b the Socialist Party  with input for a while from the SWP and financed by the RMT.

These projects failed and eventually along came another messiah for the left in the form of Jeremy Corbyn. Serwotka joined the Labour Party with the open intent of deselecting existing MPs and replacing them with hard left activists.

As Labour flounders in the wake of a thorough defeat at the last General Election rather than accept political reality the ideologues including Serwotka himself are attempting to steer Labour in the same disastrous semi-Marxist direction as Corbyn & McDonnell tried.

In a recent interview with Socialist Appeal (one of the fragments of Militant which remains inside the Labour Party) he declared:

The worst thing that could happen is that we turn the defeat in the election into a double defeat. In that we would move rightwards, believing that it was the radical proposals in the manifesto that were defeated.

I think it is critical that we identify the main cause of the defeat. We must certainly conclude that it was not because Labour wanted to renationalise parts of the economy; scrap the anti-union laws; give public sector workers pay rises; deal with climate change, etc. These radical policies were not rejected by the electorate.

According to Serwotka despite all evidence to the contrary:

Walking away now would therefore be a double defeat. It would be giving up on the radicalism that I think is there to be won.

I see the Labour leadership election as important. Personally, I am backing Rebecca Long-Bailey. She is the candidate who is most openly saying that she stands with the radicalism in the manifesto. She has gone further in arguing for essentially mandatory reselection. The opposition that she faces from the right of the movement and the press, shows that she is the candidate reflecting the fact that Labour still needs to be radical.

From this it remains perfectly clear and Serwotka spells it out bluntly that there is no room for compromise the purge of those who do not follow the "party line" for want of a better expression must be purged. Of course at the time of writing RLB looks like losing badly to Kier Starmer but the winner will still need to pander to the likes of Serwotka as the left remain i control of the party machinery and are still grabbing control of Constituency Labour Parties.

It's clear that the days of a broad based Labour Party are over. The far left will not tolerate dissenters from their cause so the other factions must unite to drive the likes of Serwotka and the infiltrators like Socialist Appeal out of the party and establish a modern social democratic party.

Serwotka has wrecked a union., he must not be allowed to destroy Labour the only viable alternative to the Tories which the left has currently made unelectable.

At the same time I am forced by circumstances to support via Women's Place UK (and others) the work of his wife Ruth Serwotka as she defends along with other feminists women's sex based rights from being undermined by the intolerant and quite belligerent trans activist movement.

An unexpected turn of events but such is politics.

However in the long term neither of the Serwotkas or the far-left of which they are both apart belongs in the political mainstream. The time is coming Labour to purge itself of these political deadbeats because only then will it be in a position to actually help the people it was created for. That means making Labour an electable force once again. The far-left are part of the problem and never the solution.

Why Women’s Liberation Still Matters!

Guest Post by Caroline Watson

I cannot specifically remember the first Women’s Liberation Conference, but I know that I benefited from its effects. I was ten and was soon to go to an all-girls’ grammar school where many of our teachers; Old Girls of the School had, themselves, been taught by former suffragettes. The Equal Pay Act had come into being in 1970 and the message given to us at school was that women; or, at least, educated women who had been to the Retford County High School for Girls, could do and be anything.

If I had gone into the workforce at 16, I would have been one of the first working women to benefit from the Sex Discrimination Act although, when I did go into the workforce, as a civil servant in 1981, things were certainly not perfect. Women were not allowed to pay into the dependants’ element of the Civil Service Pension Scheme and part timers were not part of the Scheme at all. In my department, MAFF, women were not allowed on fishing vessels and very few were promoted beyond HEO. Nevertheless, and particularly in my work as a NUCPS rep, I could feel that things were changing, and was excited to be part of it.

Fast forward to 2020 and the current Permanent Secretary of Defra, and her two predecessors, have all been women. For educated women in the public sector, at least, the battle for Women’s Liberation, which has mostly been a legal one, feels as if it has been largely won. We should now be working to ensure that the benefits that we have fought for are felt by all women; that carers and teaching assistants are properly paid and valued for their work, and that free childcare and family friendly workplaces are available to all parents. We should be winning cases for women discriminated against because of menstruation or the menopause and fighting for improved facilities for women and girls dealing with those physical realities in the public sphere. Instead, rather than fighting for further advances for women as females, we are fighting a rearguard action against the ‘gender’ cult and accusations of ‘transphobia’. This is a fight that we must win.

When the Equality Act and the Gender Recognition Act were drafted by the last Labour Government, there was the assumption that there would be a small number of people who suffered from a mental illness that made them believe that they were ‘really’ the other sex and, for whom, medical professionals had decided that cosmetic surgery to ape the physical attributes of the other sex was appropriate treatment. There were also people with genuine, physical intersex conditions who had been brought up as one sex but had later discovered, or decided, that they were ‘really the other one.

People were prepared to be tolerant and accepting of these people because they were anomalies, outliers. The binary sexual distinction, which everyone knew applied to humans along with all other mammals, was not under threat. ‘Gender’ ideology changed all that.

This ideology; now widely accepted in universities and public sector bodies, tells us that sex is a social construct and that regressive ‘gender’ roles are what matters. People are no longer allowed to rebel against stereotypes as themselves, but are expected to have themselves mutilated to fit another set of oppressive cultural stereotypes.

Rather than being split along a physically determined binary, but with equal rights for both sexes, the ‘gender’ cult wants a culturally determined binary with those who don’t fit the rules on one side forcibly pushed over the line into the other team. Needless to say, those who least fit the culturally determined binary are often gay men and lesbian women. Taken to its logical conclusion, the ‘gender’ cult outlaws homosexuality.

Equality, in law, began as creating a level playing field for people who were disadvantaged because of physical attributes over which they had no control; sex, race and disability. It became generally accepted across society, certainly by the 1990s, that such equality was right and desirable.

Once ‘identity’ rears its head, however, the concepts of ‘equality’ and ‘a level playing field’, are called into question. If women (or those who ‘identify’ as women) are naturally more nurturing and domestic, for example, perhaps they should be corralled into low-paid, domestic jobs, or expelled from the workforce altogether. Echoes of The Handmaid’s Tale. And, it is impossible to ascertain whether equality, as currently required by the law, is being practised when statistics are gathered on the basis of ‘identity’, rather than physical reality.

A young woman said to me recently that ‘transgenderism’ was a good thing, because it ‘allowed women to identify out of oppressive gender roles’. What?! The brave women who set up the first Women’s Liberation Conference didn’t want to ‘identify out of oppressive gender roles’, they wanted to fight and overturn them; as women, for women. If the suffragettes had ‘identified as men’, women wouldn’t now have the vote.

‘Gender’ ideology, and its bastard child, the ‘transgender’ cult, are an evil, right wing, misogynistic, homophobic men’s rights movement, funded by the American Christian Right and pharmaceutical companies. It is the duty of every feminist on the Left to fight them with every fibre of our combined being. Everything that happened in The Handmaid’s Tale was an abuse that had already been perpetrated against women somewhere in the world. The ‘gender’ cult is ours.

Useful Links:

www.womenarehuman.com

womansplaceuk.org

March: Take action for Women's Rights, Israel & Tibet!

Over the last couple of months or so I have allowed politics to take a back seat and have kept my blog ticking over with mostly book, audio and music reviews with just a few political interventions over Iran, Tibet and a couple of posts outlining my disdain for the current state of affairs.

The voting has opened on the battle for the leadership of what was the Labour Party and although I seriously considered getting involved indirectly by joining the Jewish Labour Movement and becoming a "supporter" I decided that since my choice of candidates ended up being "none of the above" didn't bother.

Besides towing a party line isn't really my style and frankly my recent involvement in the failed Change UK project has left me really cynical about prospects for a political vehicle suitable for government  for the time being.

However I continue to take an interest in a variety of issues and have remained active and belligerent where necessary on Facebook and in the variety of FB discussion groups I belong to. I managed to get kicked out of one for being a "TERF" by which they mean standing up for women's sex based rights against this new wave of trans-fascism and male entitlement. 

The guardian has reported that an anniversary meeting of Women's Liberation overturned a decision by their "woke" leaders to ban feminist  lecturer Eva Poen for daring to say "only women menstruate". The revisionist horror!

We live in a world where ideology and theology are taking over from science and common sense so it's time to fight back.

Over the next month both on this blog and across social media I will be promoting a number of campaigns.

This will begin with supporting Women's Place UK (and the LGB Alliance) in their defence of both Women's sex based rights and Gay Rights against the mysoginistic and homophobic tendencies of the trans-movement that has poisoned debate.

More info: womansplaceuk.org  & lgballiance.org.uk

Next up up is a week of action for Tibet as Free Tibet will be organising a picket march and rally in London in London plus Manchester on the 61st Anniversary of the Tibetan uprising against the Chinese occupation of their country.

I will be attending the picket outside Downing Street and encourage as many of you as possible to attend. I cannot physically join the subsequent march (due to disabilities) but hope it is a success. Tibet is an issue where you won't find the "anti-imperialists". It's an issue ignored by far too many and I will do my best to help promote their cause.

More info: www.freetibet.org

Last but but by no means least is the need to respond to the anti-Semitic "Israel Apartheid Week" supported by the worst politics has to offer including supporters of not just the far-left and the so-called Palestine Solidarity Campaign but by supporters of the Iranian dictatorship, Hamas terrorists and Islamist extremists & supremacists of all kinds.

It's time to stand up for the worlds only Jewish state and the sole true democracy across the whole region. The anti-imperialist brigade call themselves anti-Zionists but opponents of Israel from Tehran to Gaza call for genocide of the Jews. This campaign is backed by those who ignore the oppression of women and non-Muslims in the Middle east by the Iranians, Saudi's and others.

Israel is not an apartheid state. Watch out for responses to the accusations and get involved in this and the other campaigns I will be promoting over the coming month.

More info: www.israelbritain.org.uk

It's time to fight back against the falsehoods promoted by the far-left. Islamists, trans-activists and their allies.

Watch this space!