Kate Grimes

I’m sick to death of Lib Dem’s in particular saying trans identifying men are no risk to women. Official MOJ statistics show over 60% of trans identifying men in prison are there for sex offences against women or children. In mens prisons is 18%. Yet we understand why we keep men out of private spaces for women. Safeguarding. That’s over 3x times a higher risk. Stats are stats. Even if you don’t like them. Check out this figure yourself. Next time someone spout this nonsense I will endeavour to give the actual official stats. It’s time we work with truths & not fluffy fantasy.

This is Kemi Badenoch at her best. Hits precisely the right tone here.

Ed Davey has written to Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson demanding she WITHDRAW official EHRC guidance protecting female-only spaces in toilets and changing rooms. Let that land. The Equalities and Human Rights Commission — a statutory body — has produced legally grounded guidance telling employers and public bodies that biological men should not access women’s single-sex spaces. This is not opinion. This is not politics. This is the settled legal position following the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling on the meaning of “woman” under the Equality Act. And Ed Davey wants it gone. His stated reason? The guidance is not “compatible with long-standing British values.” British values. He used those words to argue AGAINST protecting women’s single-sex spaces. The same Liberal Democrats who lecture the country about tolerance, inclusion and human rights are now lobbying a Labour minister to tear up statutory guidance that protects every woman in Britain who walks into a changing room, a refuge or a hospital ward. This is not a fringe position within the Lib Dems. Their leader wrote the letter. The party has chosen its side. It is not the side of women. Repost if you think women’s single-sex spaces should be protected.

“In a free society, people can believe whatever they want. If you want to believe men can be women or you’re a man who wants to call himself a woman, that is your business. What you cannot do in a free society is force anyone else to accept it. What is at stake here is the ability to lawfully acknowledge reality. If you care so much about “trans rights” you can work out a way to get them without destroying the category of women in law, female spaces, sport, services, the entire reality of lesbianism, and punishing citizens for acknowledging reality. The fact that you haven’t even tried makes it appear that destroying the rights of women is the goal. Any politician who will look an Australian citizen in the eye and tell them that a man can be a woman is admitting that they will lie about anything and everything because the most obvious lie has already been told. If no one in this room can acknowledge reality and fix an obvious problem you are either malicious or incompetent. The days of dismissing this issue are over. This is not a culture war. It’s reality.” - my words, read by Alison Penfold MP, in parliament today. Contact politicians are tell them to BACK THE BILL - “Sex Discrimination Amendment- sex based rights bill 2026”

“What kind of a depraved monster slices off a woman’s breast while she is being gang raped, and throws it into the dust to be used as a plaything? What kind of a twisted pervert turns rape into necrophilia by shooting a woman in the head while he is still defiling her? What kind of ‘freedom fighters’ go into battle with a set of handy Arabic-to-Hebrew phrases, including ‘take off your pants’, ‘lie down’, and ‘spread your legs’? What self-respecting human being presses nails, scalpels, a hammer, an axe, screwdrivers and other household tools into a woman’s genitals? How hard do you have to rape someone, and with what, to shatter their pelvis? Who shoots a young girl in the face and then films her mutilated corpse on her brother’s mobile phone? The answer is: Hamas terrorists. This is the stark reality of what they did to men, women and children on October 7, 2023. And the world must never forget.” @WestminsterWAG

2 Green Party candidates, Saiqa Ali & Sabine Mairey, were arrested by the Met Police this morning for posting antisemitic comments online. A post read: “ramming a synagogue isn’t anti-Semitism, it’s revenge”. @ZackPolanski get your own house in order before criticising Reform.

Pass it on if you feel the same.

The Man Nobody Is Talking About. His Name Is Sir Philip Barton. Buried inside Tuesday's committee testimony, beneath the headlines about constant pressure, bullying and secret job searches, is the detail that may prove the most consequential of this entire affair. It concerns not Olly Robbins, not Morgan McSweeney, not even Keir Starmer. It concerns the man who was there before all of them. The man who said no. The man who then left his post eight months early. Sir Philip Barton was the Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office when Peter Mandelson's appointment was announced in December 2024. He was, in other words, the most senior civil servant in the building at the precise moment the machinery of state was being directed to place a man with documented links to Russia and China into the most sensitive diplomatic posting in the Western alliance. What Robbins told the committee on Tuesday is this. Barton pushed back. When the Cabinet Office argued that vetting Mandelson was unnecessary, that a peer and Privy Councillor did not require developed vetting, Barton refused to accept it. He insisted that vetting was a requirement. He had to be, in Robbins's own words, very firm in person. He also voiced reservations about the appointment to Jonathan Powell, the National Security Adviser, reservations that were noted and not acted upon. He was worried, Robbins suggested, about exactly the same reputational risks that had been detailed to the Prime Minister before the appointment was announced. Then Sir Philip Barton left his post. Eight months before his tenure would otherwise have concluded. The question Richard Foord put to Robbins on Tuesday was the right one. Why did Barton's tenure end early? Robbins said he did not know. He suggested ministers may have felt it was time for a change. That answer is not an answer. It is the absence of one. Consider what the timeline now shows. A senior civil servant pushes back against the appointment, insists on vetting when the Cabinet Office wants to bypass it, raises reservations with the National Security Adviser, and departs eight months ahead of schedule. His replacement arrives to find the appointment already treated as a fait accompli, the vetting process under constant pressure from Downing Street, and the question of outcome entirely subordinate to the question of speed. If Barton was removed because he stood in the way of this appointment, then Robbins was not the first civil servant sacrificed to protect it. He was the second. And the question of who else was moved aside, overruled or silenced in the months between December 2024 and the moment the security services finally said no, becomes the most important question this affair has yet produced. Starmer sacked Robbins for following the rules. The Foreign Affairs Committee will now call Barton to give evidence. What he says will either confirm what the timeline already suggests or provide an alternative explanation that the evidence does not currently support. There is a pattern here that goes beyond process failure. Process failures are random. They point in different directions. What this affair has produced is a series of events that point consistently in one direction. Officials who comply are retained. Officials who push back depart. The security services are bypassed. The vetting is treated as an administrative inconvenience. And the one question nobody at the top of this government will answer is why this appointment, this man, this post, mattered so much that every obstacle was removed to make it happen. Barton apparently asked that question. He left eight months early. The country deserves to know why.

Today marks one year since the Supreme Court clarified beyond all doubt that in law, sex means biological sex. That means that men are men and women are women. Most of us have known that all along – not least Kemi Badenoch who has been a vocal critic of radical gender ideology for years. Yet led by a Prime Minister who struggles to define what a woman is, the Government have been asleep at the wheel, failing to do the most basic part of their job to protect women’s rights. The sad truth is Labour – and the Greens and Lib Dems for that matter – are completely captured by the religion of diversity, which says a transgender person’s right not to be offended trumps the rights of women to safety, dignity and privacy. This is not just about toilets and changing rooms. It’s about hospital wards, girls' sports, prisons, care homes, and even rape crisis centres. For years Labour MPs have turned a blind eye to the women and girls who have suffered from having the needs of biological men placed above their own. Of course we should make provision for all, but provision does not mean open access. We must have boundaries that protect women and girls from harm. The Supreme Court ruling, brought about by the courageous grassroot activists For Women Scotland, was meant to put an end to this madness. At the time Bridget Phillipson, the Minister for Women and Equalities, said she accepted the ruling and pledged action to enforce it. But in the 12 months since, she has done everything in her power to avoid doing anything at all. She has been sat on guidance from the equalities watchdog since last September. Who has been held accountable for the political witch-hunts started by the NHS against hardworking nurses who stated that biological sex is real? No-one. Who is making sure sexual predators are recorded accurately by sex? No-one. Who is ensuring there are no biological men in women’s prisons or on women’s hospital wards? No-one. At the very least, one year on, you would assume that the Minister for Equalities had ensured her own Government was compliant with the Supreme Court ruling. Alas, after persistent questioning by the Conservatives, not a single Government department could confirm that it was. Cowardice, obfuscation, and a complete lack of grip. That is all the Labour Party has to offer women’s rights. If Bridget Phillipson won’t act to protect women and girls, we will. Conservative-run councils will publish clear policies and withdraw funding from organisations that do not protect single-sex spaces.

I’ve written to every Member of Parliament today. Proposals before Parliament would remove jury trials from offences carrying up to three years in prison. Freedoms rarely vanish overnight. They are chipped away in the name of efficiency. Juries did not cause the crisis in our courts. Removing them will not fix it. When the state seeks to take someone’s liberty for serious offences, the judgment of ordinary citizens should never be optional. This is close to becoming law. Please read the letter. Contact your MP now.

Has @nhsfife learned nothing about the dangers of gender ideology? "“…. anyone with a cervix” can get smear testing" Are they unaware of the negative consequences of using such obscure language? nhsfife.org/news-updates/l… #SandiePeggie 1/2

Eventually, my brother happened to mention that his sister “looks after my money” (I have financial power of attorney). Fortunately, one - and it was only one - of the police officers twigged what that might mean and called me

Some basics about Chagos for BBC reporters, Sky anchors and others coming new to the debate. 1. The Chagos Islands lie half-way between Africa and Indonesia, and host a key Anglo-American military base on the main island, Diego Garcia 2. France ceded the archipelago to Britain in 1814 separately from Mauritius; the islands were always a distinct territory, though, lacking suitable facilities, their administration was sited in Mauritius 3. To put the issue beyond doubt, Mauritius permanently renounced any claim to the islands in 1965 in return for a cash payment from Britain 4. It eagerly trousered the money, its first post-independence PM, Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam, explaining that he had been glad to sell any theoretical right to “territory of which very few people knew, which is very far from here, and which we had never visited” 5. Mauritius is indeed 1337 miles from the islands, and began to press its claim again only when it grew closer to China in the early 2000s 6. The barrister it hired was Philippe Sands, a co-founder of Matrix Chambers and a close friend of Keir Starmer’s, who has always been cagey about what conversations they have had about Chagos 7. Far from providing a mandate for the deal, the Labour manifesto explicitly promised the opposite (see graphic) 8. Starmer justifies the surrender by pointing to a non-binding resolution by a UN court, which included a Russian and a Chinese judge, and whose jurisdiction had been expressly denied in disputes between Commonwealth or former Commonwealth states 9. In November, a different UN body issued another non-binding resolution, this one ordering the transfer to be halted, but Labour did not change direction 10. The party may have a guilty conscience, for it was Harold Wilson’s government that removed the 1800-odd inhabitants from the islands after 1968 to make room for the base 11. Chagossians, who now number around 10,000, do not see themselves as Mauritians and overwhelmingly oppose the transfer 12. British and American generals have expressed reservations about the deal, warning that a future Mauritian government might lease adjoining islands to unfriendly powers 13. The base has proved its strategic value many times, lying as it does lies within reach of four of the seven global choke points that funnel maritime traffic: the Bab-el-Mandeb, the Straits of Hormuz, the Malacca Straits and the Cape of Good Hope 14. Mauritius has no navy and admits it cannot protect the territory 15. At the same time, it wants commercial fishing in the matchless marine conservation zone around the islands 16. A Freedom of Information Request shows that the payments to Mauritius will total £34 billion 17. Mauritius says that this money will wipe out its national debt and still allow tax cuts 18. Opponents of the Bill want Chagossians themselves to decide the issue in a referendum 19. If the deal falls, Britain will be under a moral obligation to allow Chagossians to settle the outer atolls (see video in next post) 20. Providing for a permanent settlement will cost (on the government’s figures) one sixth or (on the actual figures) around one fiftieth as much as Labour wants to hand to Mauritius 21. The transfer cannot go ahead without both parliamentary ratification and the formal approval of the US, neither of which has been secured

My monologue on what the new world order means for Britain, from @TimesRadio today: For those of you who’ve not yet copped that we’re at a watershed in global politics I suggest you have a read of Mark Carney’s speech in Davos yesterday. It’s not often a Canadian prime minister charts a seminal change in world politics. But Carney, a former governor of the Bank of England, has.  This is the key passage: “Over the past two decades, a series of crises in finance, health, energy, and geopolitics have laid bare the risks of extreme global integration. And as a result, many countries are drawing the same conclusions—that they must develop greater strategic autonomy: in energy, food, critical minerals, in finance and supply chains. And this impulse is understandable. A country that can’t feed itself, fuel itself or defend itself has few options. When the rules no longer protect you, you must protect yourself.” Coming from a fully-paid up member of the liberal global elite, this is dynamite. Carney says the era of global integration is over and that what he calls ‘middle powers’, like Canada and the UK, who benefitted from it and got used to working through global institutions — like the WTO, the UN, COP, NATO, the EU — need to realise the game is up.  If you can’t feed, fuel and defend yourself in this new world of rupture you’re finished. So these are his priorities for Canada. He’s junked a lot of his net zero baggage to increase Canada’s energy security. He’s moving from multilateral to bilateral deals he thinks will benefit Canada, most recently with China. And he’s doubling spending on defence.  The British government should take stock. Carney’s world of rupture has been brought about by Donald Trump’s wrecking ball approach to the rules-based world order that has served us so well these past 80 years.  It’s played into the hands of the autocrats of Moscow, Beijing and elsewhere who want to replace that world order with a system far more attuned to their interests. Trump is obliging them.    Food. Fuel. Defence. These are Carney’s watchwords for a scary new world in which middle powers need to seek strategic autonomy when old alliances and multinational institutions no longer work. They should guide British policy too.  We need to be able to feed ourselves better. To be able to count on cheap, secure sources of energy. And to be able to defend ourselves from multiple and growing threats. At the moment the Starmer government is doing none of the above.  Instead it is lumbering business with the most expensive energy costs in the world and households with the second or third most expensive domestic energy in the world.  It is pursuing a multi-billion pound dash to net zero while adding only a few crumbs to the defence budget.  And it’s covering good farming land with solar panels.  It would be hard to think of a set of policies less designed to give us the strategic autonomy Carney thinks middle powers must strive for.  Britain needs a step change in its energy, food and defence policies. The billions earmarked for net zero need to be diverted to rearming the nation.  We need an energy policy that couples secure supplies with lower prices so that we can start to rebuild some of our heavy industry, essential to defence.  And we need a farm policy that champions growing food once more rather than prioritising various fashionable environmental wheezes.  None of this is likely to happen under the Starmer government. The PM has no vision or aptitude for such a strategy. His party is a prisoner to old 20th century ways of thinking, as is much of British politics on the left and right.  But unless the Carney challenge is recognised and policy changed in radical ways to meet it, we risk not only further economic decline in the rest of this decade but growing vulnerability to the evil intent of our enemies. And without America at our back to protect us.

Finally, the Darlington nurses have won their case. This is a victory for the safety and privacy of women and girls. Never again should biological men be allowed in female only spaces. The fight isn’t over: Head to SaveJennifer.com to find out more.

There is something rotten in a system when the obvious becomes a provocation, and the most basic boundary a punishable offence. Sandie Peggie did not storm a barricade, preach revolt, or defy science. She did the simplest, most human thing: she objected to undressing in front of a male colleague in a female changing room. That ordinary act of self-respect triggered a two-year campaign of harassment by NHS Fife, a tribunal, and a bureaucracy determined to break the woman who dared to say no. On Christmas Eve 2023, Sandie walked into a women's changing room and found a biological man inside – a doctor who identified as a woman, and who later told the tribunal he was "biologically female." She complained. Within hours, the doctor accused her of bullying. Within days, she was suspended. Within weeks, the NHS was smearing her as a threat to patient safety. There was no attempt to resolve the issue. No recognition of her right to privacy. No interim measure to separate them. Only punishment and accusation. The tribunal has now ruled that she was harassed by her employer because she expressed a lawful belief – that sex is real. It reveals a public institution acting as if women's rights were a nuisance to be overridden, and dissent a form of misconduct. The hospital initially claimed she was the lone objector. But evidence showed many women disagreed with mixed-sex changing and were too scared to say so. A workplace where women whisper their boundaries because speaking them aloud is career suicide is not "inclusive." It is authoritarian and hostile to the very people it claims to protect. This was not medicine. It was orthodoxy. The NHS behaved as if its first duty was to enforce a belief system, not uphold the law. Sex was treated as negotiable. Reality as optional. Women's privacy as offensive. The institution did not merely mishandle a complaint – it enforced a dogma and punished a dissenter. It even smeared her as a risk to patients, ordered her not to speak about her own case, and dragged the ordeal out for two years in the hope she would break. That is not safeguarding. That is bureaucratic sadism dressed as equality. And here is the central, nauseating truth: Sandie did not challenge the system. The system challenged her, because it could not tolerate a woman saying the simplest, most ancient word in the human language – no. A nurse asked for privacy. The NHS tried to destroy her. Not because it had to, but because it wanted to – because it has become a system incapable of recognising the difference between a boundary and a threat, between truth and ideology, between a woman asking to undress in peace and a heretic who must be punished. If this is what "inclusion" demands, then inclusion has become the enemy of women – and the enemy of truth. "And here is the central, nauseating truth: Sandie did not challenge the system. The system challenged her, because it could not tolerate a woman saying the simplest, most ancient word in the human language – no."

The modern British state has discovered a new method of control: if it cannot beat a man in court, it will reclassify him as a danger to children. Not because he harmed a child, or poses any risk, but because his words cut against a policy that depends on silence and fear. The case of Jamie Michael shows how far the system has decayed. A Royal Marine, cleared by a jury in minutes, is now banned from coaching his daughter's football team and marked with a stigma that can haunt a man for life. Not for abuse or violence, but for speaking too harshly about illegal migration. Safeguarding, created to stop the next Ian Huntley, has been twisted into a tool for policing thought. It no longer protects children from predators, but protects the state from dissent. A man who spent a decade building clubs for local boys and girls is treated as a latent threat, his name blackened, his presence "monitored." He is not punished for an act, but marked for an opinion. He is not judged on evidence, but ideology. The British state cannot close the border or deport criminals, but it can hunt down a father who ranted online after watching little girls stabbed in a dance studio. The sickness is not administrative incompetence. It is moral inversion. The harmless man is punished with zeal while the dangerous man is ignored with indifference. The state has "misplaced" 53,000 illegal migrants and 736 foreign offenders. It has lost them in the housing estates, car washes, takeaway kitchens, and cash-in-hand underworld it pretends does not exist. It can neither find them nor remove them. It cannot track them, cannot police them, cannot even answer basic questions about where they are. Yet it has the time and the will to brand a decorated veteran a threat to minors and bar him from his own child's football pitch. This is not safeguarding. It is the laundering of political punishment through child protection bureaucracies. The trick is cunning and cowardly: do not criminalise the speech directly, because juries might refuse to convict. Instead, tarnish the speaker by branding him "unsafe" around children. You do not silence a man by proving him wrong. You silence him by making decent people recoil from him. You do not argue with him. You make him untouchable. A jury listened, weighed the evidence, and dismissed the case in under twenty minutes. The bureaucratic state ignored the verdict and imposed its own sentence in secret meetings. No discussion of the facts. No review of the video. No right to defend himself. No pretence of fairness. A closed-door verdict delivered by officials who answer to nobody and never have to explain themselves. Britain now runs a shadow justice system where acquittal in court does not save you from conviction by committee. The deeper truth is plain. A government that cannot control its borders turns inward and seeks to control its subjects. When you fail to stop criminals coming in, you start treating your own citizens as criminals. Patriotism becomes extremism. Anger becomes danger. The father who coaches children becomes a suspect while actual offenders walk free and vanish into the country without consequence. The state is not protecting children. It is protecting its political narrative, even if it means destroying the life of a man who did more for his community than any of the cowards who condemned him. The real threat to children in Britain is not a father who shouted into a phone. It is a government that has lost control, lost confidence, and now punishes those who notice. A society where ordinary parents must watch their words while tens of thousands of unknown men roam unchecked is not a society in good health. It is a society that has surrendered its borders, lost its courage, and turned its police powers inward to hide the shame. The message is simple and vicious: stay silent, or we will ruin you. "The case of Jamie Michael shows how far the system has decayed."

Hello, all. An important post. Please read this document. This is what institutional antisemitism looks like. In Dublin, there is a park named Herzog Park. It is named after Chaim Herzog (1918-1997), an Irish-Israeli man, born in Belfast and raised in Dublin, who went on to be Israel’s 6th President. Chaim was the son of Yitzhak HaLevi Herzog, who was Chief Rabbi of Ireland and Israel’s first Chief Rabbi. He was a firm friend of Eamon De Valera, Ireland’s most famous political leader, and strongly supported the Irish Republican cause during our War of Independence. Dublin City Council has made an antisemitic decision to change the name of Herzog park, a blatant attempt to erase Irish-Jewish history. Last year, I wrote in the Irish Times: ‘now that the Jewish population in Ireland has been reduced to the smallest fragment, my great fear is that in 20 years it will be reduced to nothing at all: due to this lack of welcome in a land that purports to offer a thousand of them. Irish people will follow the well-paved path of the citizens of so many nations before them: walking through quarters where the whisper of Jewish memory lingers, a memory that may, over time, also be erased.’ This erasure has not come gradually over 20 years as I anticipated. No—it has come a mere 1 year later, purposefully and maliciously by Ireland’s political class. Ireland is an institutionally antisemitic country. To deny it in the face of such overwhelming evidence is pure folly.

A Billion Pounds Lost – And a Nation Walking Away The BBC has just confessed to losing more than a billion pounds in a single year. Millions of households have cancelled their licence fees. Two million enforcement visits yielded almost nothing. The public isn't forgetting to pay – it's walking away. That's the story behind the numbers, and it's far more serious than anything the BBC will admit. Because there comes a moment when a nation stops arguing with an institution and simply withdraws its consent. Britain has reached that point. You don't lose that kind of money through clerical mishaps; you lose it because trust has died. And trust, once spent, does not return because the BBC sends more officers to knock on doors. The BBC can blame "evasion" all it likes. It can scold the public about fairness, brag about audits, and pretend its enforcement is "efficient, fair and proportionate." None of it matters. A broadcaster that once held the country together now finds itself shut out – literally – by millions who no longer want to hear its voice. The harder it pushes, the clearer the truth becomes: people aren't opting out of the licence fee. They're opting out of the BBC. This is a moral reckoning. A state-backed institution that doctored a President's speech, amplified Hamas propaganda, edited reality to fit an agenda, and buried stories that clashed with its ideology has forfeited the right to call itself impartial. It behaves like a political NGO with a broadcast licence – preaching, filtering, choosing sides – then acts wounded when the public rejects the sermon. Bias wasn't a glitch. It became the culture. And that rot hollowed the BBC from within. The numbers are the verdict. Younger viewers have vanished. Older viewers feel dumped in favour of TikTok gimmicks and ideological posturing. The leadership has collapsed. The scandals keep coming. And the funding model – the sacred cow of the establishment – is now bleeding out in front of them. The BBC still clings to "universality," but universality cannot be enforced. It has to be earned. A broadcaster that treats half the country as a problem to be handled cannot claim to speak for the whole. A broadcaster that demands loyalty while showing none has no future. The licence fee rested on a covenant: we fund you; you tell the truth without fear or favour. The BBC broke that bargain. The country is now breaking the licence fee in return. This isn't decline. It's consequence. A once-trusted national institution, captured by an ideological caste, has finally met a public that refuses to be captured with it. The BBC can call it evasion. The Government can call it reform. But the truth is plain: the public has delivered its verdict, and it rings louder than anything the BBC can broadcast. The age of deference is over. And the BBC, for the first time in its history, is being forced to live in the country it helped create. "This is a moral reckoning. A state-backed institution that doctored a President's speech, amplified Hamas propaganda, edited reality to fit an agenda, and buried stories that clashed with its ideology has forfeited the right to call itself impartial."

Dame Jenni Murray: I left #womanshour due to the trans issue. I said I rejected the word cis and wanted single-sex spaces to be maintained. As a result, I received threats of violence. The BBC responded by: Telling me I must not talk about this issue again dailymail.co.uk/debate/article…