On May 19th...

Greens win Hackney!

@zoegarbett.bsky.social Congratulations on a stunning victory.

When my father bought our first stereo, he also bought a fairly random selection of classical LPs, permanently forming my taste for the great Romantics. Brahms Third was one of the first works I became obsessed with.

My first book apart from anthologies.

I feel your pain. Once at a lunch party, I gleefully described how unfilmably queer, big screen and blasphemous my Rhapsody of Blood books are to a sympathetic American called Jason. He turned out to be one of the senior production team on both The Expanse and The Witcher. #nrgativeelevatorpitches

If you're a cis person who thinks that Starmer and his government being appalling on trans human rights is a non-issue because 'nobody's perfect', rather than a telling insight into a fundamental lack of respect for basic human rights law, and a necessary warning for all people to heed...well.

There needs to be forthright condemnation of Stonewall's new chair'svsucking up to Rowling from her predecessors and a majority of the organisation's leading figures. This betrayal of trans people is utterly unforgivable cowardice.

If Trump wants to influence the Hungarian elections, picking a huge fight with Catholicism was probably not the way to go. Vance saying he knew nothing about it was a huge display of his usual spinelessness.

HONOURED to say my work campaigning for NHS reform has gotten me nominated for Amnesty’s People’s Human Rights Champion 🏳️‍⚧️ I’m genuinely just honoured to be featured alongside these names but if you’d like to vote for me you can here www.amnesty.org.uk/forms/people...

There are four living ex Presidents. Whatever their own past sins and crimes, they have a moral responsibility to attempt stopping Trump and Hegseth.

It's now been 3 hours since our supposed "ally" Donald Trump threatened genocide on a country of 93 million people. We've had absolutely nothing from the UK government. This doesn't come in a vacuum either - every day the US & Israel have been murdering innocent people.

I don't know what the British government can do to stop US planes flying from US based to commit war crimes over Iran - but whatever it can do it should do. Of course it would probably mean violent confrontation with Trump and Hegseth threatening reprisals. Nonetheless...

Like a number of other people - more than I would have dreamed possible when I first met Rachel Pollack and the GLF TS/TV/DQ group 55 years ago this September- I'm having my contribution to the community recognised today. #TDOV

I am not now, nor have I ever been, a member of the Underground Trans Mafia. I've always been visible almost to the brink of tediousness. Happy #TDOV

Though for various reasons I never finished my thesis, the two years I spent working on the Morris papers were a happy time in my life, partly because I got to spend time with that lovely, generous, occasionally infuriating soul. Who taught me that you can be a lot of things at the same time.

There are a lot of issues here. Clearly the school was operating it's own Clause 28 and using safeguarding as a pretext, but it was also trying to impose a milk and water world view on adolescents who really don't need it. In a lot of discourse people of 14 and 15 are referred to as children...

Looking at some of Bindel's recent screeds...it ill becomes someone whose feminism largely consists of telling other women what they should or shouldn't do, yet is weirdly happy allying with critics of reproductive freedom to accuse any group of being parasitic on a larger community

I'm always amazed by the lack of self-respect and what used to be common decency shown by the current UK Right even on what used to be their own terms. They are cheerleading a US President who has started a war, illegally in both US and international law, that threatens to smash the world's economy

This is potentially important in a 'more joy in heaven over a sinner who repents' sort of way. Hopefully something of the sort will start among rightwing women here. nymag.com/intelligence...

If we are all living in a simulation, it's one designed to torture us with moments of hope.

This is terrifying www.advocate.com/news/crime/b...

Given some of the stuff in the Epstein files, the bonus for the Predator Elite of making trans lives really difficult is that, while some trans kids will kill themselves, others will just accept sexual availability/ servitude as the price paid for being able to transition at all.

Of all the SF novels I read as a teenager, Spinrad's BUG JACK BARRON turns out to be the one that got the future right. With Pohl and Kornbluyh's GLADIATOR AT LAW and Brunner's three dystopias - JAGGED ORBIT, STAND ON ZANZIBAR and THE SHEEP LOOK UP -running it close.

Starmer was Mandelson's creation to finish destroying Left Labour - even centre Left figures like Rayner. How can the puppet be left in place now the puppet master is finally gone?

Just a reminder that my In Conversation event at Peckham Library is tonight at 6.

We need access to Mandelson's financial affairs to check that eg Government contracts with Palantir were not entered into because he was paid to lobby for them.

Get Palantir out of the UK. Protect our NHS. Protect our country. www.thenational.scot/news/2582860...

Mandelson was known as the Prince of Darkness and Starmer believed he was telling the truth?

There is no reason for a General Election if Starmer goes. The Right will push for one in the hope of installing Farage as PM before people realise how badly he is compromised with Epstein, Bannon and Russia. The next Labour PM must put the boot in hard.

When Starmer goes - by the weekend? - who's the Stop Streeting candidate? I guess it's probably Rayner. She's a bit tarnished and compromised but she'd knock spots off Badenoch and Farage. Trump would hate her so much.

It was nice to see Corbyn putting the boot into Starmer and Mandelson. At long last. Revenge is a dish best served cold. LBJ and the camel...

Remember this forgotten bit of history. Starmer and Corbyn negotiated a possible very soft Brexit package with Tusk that Corbyn tried to sell to May only to have Starmer pour cold water on it in the meeting with May, The source for this is May's Chief of Staff Barwell. .

Coming this Friday...please come!

At what point did Starmer decide that Mandelson had become so compromised that he should no longer take his advice? Clearly not during the period when the entire Labour Right were plotting against Corbyn even if it meant a Johnson government and a much harder Brexit.

Might we tactfully point out that to obsess negatively with trans people when the richest and most powerful men in the world are trying to reverse centuries of humane progress and equality to acquire impunity for rape and murder shows a weird sense of priorities?

If you are close friends with a notorious trafficker of young victims of abuse and joke that he 'likes them on the young side', it at the very least calls your judgement into question. If you go on to joke about sharing a wonderful secret, it at the very least implies complicity.

One of the significant takeaways from the Epstein files is that Epstein was also catering to members of the elite like Gates who weren't paedophiles, but must have known or guessed what else was going on at those parties or on the island but chose to ignore it.

Various people mentioned this without explaining why it was important. Now I get it.

A cynical view is that Trump is sending a carrier group to attack Iran in order to divert attention from ICE and Epstein. A more cynical view is that he is sending a carrier group into harm's way to whip MAGA into a vengeful frenzy when Iran manages to use drones to kill US soldiers while boosting..

Fourteen years ago I wrote a sonnet sequence. THE POET TO HER YOUNG COMRADES about the coming of Fascism, and some possible futures. It gives me no pleasure that I was Cassandra. www.facebook.com/share/p/1ByP...

I have an event with @tgirlsonfilm.bsky.social this coming Saturday afternoon at the ICA. www.shortfilms.org.uk/programme/tr...

Presumably all the BBC nreds to do to stop Trump's absurd libel case is announced that they will call Jack Smith as a witness.

Another event I'm doing...so busy

It's disturbing in the extreme to hear the Today programme presenter move from enabling a Tory shadow minister's Islamophobic conspiracy theories to asking him leading questions about whether Kemi Badenoch's Tory party is transphobic and by implication homophobic enough?

One of my upcoming History Month events...

Me and Charlie Jane...

Upcoming event...