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TPQ
Labour Heartlands ☭ Written by Paul Knaggs.

 “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.
It was their final, most essential command.” - George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

How gender ideology, billionaire dark money, and authoritarian groupthink are tearing the Green Party apart…

Is it possible for a political party to claim it is saving the planet while simultaneously denying the most fundamental biological reality of the species that inhabits it?

The Green Party was once, however briefly, a genuine refuge for people who believed that politics ought to be grounded in material reality: in the physical world, in measurable consequences, in science. It believed in ecosystems and feedback loops; in the hard logic of cause and effect. It understood that you cannot simply wish away inconvenient truths, whether those truths concern carbon emissions or the biological distinction between male and female human beings. That, at least, is what many of its founding members believed they had joined.

What they discovered instead is something altogether more alarming: a party leadership so in thrall to a well-funded ideological orthodoxy that it is prepared to break its own rules, exhaust its own finances, and silence its own women rather than acknowledge what a unanimous Supreme Court has since confirmed in law. 

The Green Party’s War On Reality 🪶 Why Biology Is Not A ‘Fantasy’

Cat Boyd-Foley🔖 answers thirteen questions in Booker's Dozen. 

 Reading Aloud And Allowed


TPQ: What are you currently reading? 

CBF: I’ve just finished Abandon Me by Melissa Febos. 10/10 recommend. “Our favourite stories can be like lovers. Make sense to me, we ask them. Make sense of me. Here, fix these hurting parts. And stories do, sometimes better than our lovers.”

TPQ: Best and worst books you have ever read?

CBF: I once tried to read The DaVinci Code. Unbearable, although quite a good laugh for that very reason. Best? Unable to say!

TPQ: Book most cherished as a child?

CBF: My daddy read to me every night when I was a child. My most tender memory of this time is him reading the Winnie the Pooh books to me and I remember him crying at the end of The House at Pooh Corner, the one called In Which Christopher Robin and Pooh come to an Enchanted Place, and We Leave Them There. It begins with these lines: “Christopher Robin was going away. Nobody knew why he was going; nobody knew where he was going…But somehow or other everybody in the Forest felt that it was happening at last” and towards the end there’s a truly bittersweet exchange between Pooh and Christopher Robin about his going away and growing up, not being able to play anymore. Or as AA Milne puts it not being able to “do Nothing anymore”. I didn’t really understand why my father was so upset at the time. But now I have my own daughter, I realise how powerful an evocation it is of the end of childhood and how fleeting the years are where we get to play and live in imaginary worlds with our imaginary pals, without any desire to become “grown up”. Thanks to Bella, I get to live again in a world of imagination and play even when the pressures of reality and daily grind threaten to get in the way.

Around 7, I was totally in thrall to a book called The Suitcase Kid by Jaqueline Wilson. It’s about a lonely girl who lives between houses when her parents split up. I was hooked on it, although my family unit was completely intact, because Andy, the wee girl, finds that she does not fit into these new, strange adult worlds and instead finds most connection and comfort in her cuddly toy rabbit called Radish.

I read Tender Is The Night when I was about 15 and it had a huge impact on my aesthetic and cultural tastes; the quiet ruin and fragile glamour, decaying beauty and nervous breakdown. I have a lifetime obsession with trying to give form to people (mostly women) who are simultaneously there and not there, poking at the thin veil between presence and absence, sanity and madness, the real and the imagined.

TPQ: Favourite Childhood author?

CBF:  I read a lot of fairytales, myths and fables as a kid and still do. I think they are very revealing and I always want to know which one you remember most vividly so I can do some armchair psychoanalysis.

But as to favourite author, I have to admit, it was Enid Blyton. Specifically, her Amelia Jane stories. They’re about a naughty doll who comes to life in the nursery and wreaks havoc on the other toys. She always ends up getting punished and having to say sorry. I can’t imagine what this says about my own psyche . . .

TPQ: First book to really own you?

CBF: Ariel by Sylvia Plath. It was the first collection of poetry I read and remains the most influential. I can recite Daddy by rote, although it doesn’t make for a very good party piece at Christmas.

I think the first novel to really reach out and throttle me was Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates. In my early teenage years I was driven by an all-consuming obsession with the Velvet Underground, so I even read the non-fiction book the band got their name from (not age appropriate!) And it sent me on a path to read everything I could about the darkness that lies beneath the presentable or “desirable” American post-war normalcy. Similarly, this twist also propelled me into reading a lot of the Beat Generation. I’ve always loved Diane Di Prima: her poetry, the purportedly sexed-up Memoirs of a Beatnik and recently got my hands on a long-wanted copy of Recollections of my Life as a Woman. But Revolutionary Road did that thing that extraordinary books do - it lurched out from the page and into my Real Life. So, in predictable fashion, I broke up with my boyfriend and decided to change how i was living my life - at the time I read it and the age I was, it changed how I thought about normativity and social values, freedom, authenticity etc. And now, just as predictably, I live in the suburbs with my husband, haha.

TPQ: Favourite male and female author?

CBF: Very hard to pick one favourite! Women are a very long list; Sylvia Plath (particularly her diaries, or what remains of them), Elizabeth Wurtzel, Anais Nin, Mary Gaitskill, Lisa Taddeo, Joan Didion. There are lines from Play It As It Lays that loop through my brain on repeat: “I try to live in the now and keep my eye on the hummingbird” and "Maybe I was holding all the aces, but what was the game?” Although I like both male and female authors, when I rack it up in my mind, I generally read a lot more women than men. I made a list in my head and my favourite writers are those who create worlds at the extremes of both feminine and masculine archetypes. For example, I love Ernest Hemingway - I especially adore The Old Man and the Sea. But even Death in the Afternoon undoes me. I moved to the Basque Country when I was 20 and always had a preoccupation with the Spanish Civil War, which gave me my introduction to Hemingway and other writers like Orwell. I’m not a fan of bullfighting at all. In Bilbao, I lived close to a bullring for a long time, but I never once went there. How Hemingway could take something I found morally and politically objectionable and make it seem so beautiful, heroic, almost romantic continues to fascinate me.

I would count Alasdair Gray in my favourite male authors. I think Lanark is a true masterpiece and bends so many genres - so dirty and glamourous and violent and beautiful. All the things I love in one crazy package. It contains one of my favourite lines ever, when Lanark reaches the depths of his complete social and emotional alienation and says: “I ought to have more love before I die, I haven’t had enough” I also really like J.G Ballard for his landscapes and atmosphere. I always think of him when I’m navigating motorways and underpasses.

TPQ: A preference for fact or fiction?

CBF:  I’ve read a lot of political non-fiction, but it’s probably not my preference. I do enjoy political history, like The Open Veins of Latin America by Eduardo Galeano, Fanon and so on. I also like reading depth psychology, these days I’m drawn towards Jung, Erich Fromm etc. There were a few years when I was very involved in socialist politics that I barely read any fiction. It’s a huge shortcoming in left-wing politics. Someone once told me that a particular French anti-capitalist group had abandoned the practice of educating new recruits using texts like Capital or Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks and instead pushed non-Marxist classic fiction like A Tale of Two Cities instead. I don’t know if this is actually true but I always loved the idea that fiction can speak louder truths about the world and force us to see the aspects of grey in between more black-and-white narratives about justice and how society functions. 

I get absorbed in reading a lot of poetry; the last collection I read was Tove Ditlevsen’s There Lives Inside Me a Young Girl Who Will Not Die, which I got from a friend for Christmas. It hits on all my favourite themes; childhood, motherhood, love, addiction, sadness and it’s genuinely, surprisingly funny. I am taken with women who write or make art as a way to survive. I find non-fiction that falls into exploring this category quite compelling. After my daughter was born, I had a huge personal and creative awakening. Reading Baby on the Fire Escape by Julie Philips was a big part of this. It’s a fairly provocative cultural critique of the invisibility of women’s creative and internal lives, and how social expectations place a huge burden upon them.

TPQ: Biography, autobiography or memoir that most impressed you?

CBF: A very recent read, but This Ragged Grace by Octavia Bright probably knocks previous favourites off the top spot. Until I read this, I’d have said Widow Basquiat by Jennifer Clement, maybe Prozac Nation (I love Elizabeth Wurtzel and will defend her and all her complexities forever!) or Nina Simone’s Gum by Warren Ellis (of Dirty Three/Bad Seeds fame) But this memoir felt really special. I’ve read a lot of ‘addiction fiction’ type stuff, but this was different. It’s about Octavia Bright’s recovery from alcoholism intertwined with her father’s spiralling illness after being diagnosed with Alzheimer's. It quotes Simone Weil, Louise Bourgeois, Jose Luis Borges and other very cool people from art and writing that I love. The threads running through touch on memory and forgetting and hunger and loss - it's the first book I've read in a while where I went mental with a biro, underlining bits and folding down corners of pages to come back to. This bit is underlined and highlighted in my copy:

I could build a whole castle out of my desire to be loved and I also wanted to be left alone. Sometimes it felt like there were no limits to my wanting, as if it were a devouring and insatiable force.

TPQ: Any author or book you point blank refuse to read?

CBF: I am nervous to admit this! But I have a general (but not absolute!) rule of refusing to read fiction over 600 pages! I think that’s partly just preference - I really love novellas, short stories, flash fiction. Having said that, I do like long-form poetry. I read The Long Take by Robin Robertson recently and it really got under my skin, it's in my top ten favourites now. But in terms of those giant tomes, embarrassingly, I just don’t have the stamina. I don’t know whether my attention span just gives out or I just really want to get to the end. Even objectively “good” books like A Little Life or The Goldfinch made me really sluggish by the end. I just want to know what happens! I also will not read Harry Potter. I hate its contribution to the Disneyfication of Edinburgh!

TPQ: A book to share with somebody so that they would more fully understand you?

CBF: Rumplestiltskin.


TPQ: Last book you gave as a present?

CBF: I gave some books to my brother-and-sister-in-law for Christmas. Dan has been writing a lot of his own stories and getting published too - he's got a real gift for dark and unsettling tales so we got him The King in Yellow by Robert W Chambers and my sister-in-law got a book about Irish history and language. Someone is about to get a copy of Abandon Me by Melissa Febos for their birthday too!

TPQ: Book you would most like to see turned into a movie?

CBF: Laidlaw by William McIlvaney. I am completely intoxicated by all of McIlvaney’s work and wish I could've met him. I love that he went from writing this critically acclaimed literary fiction masterpiece in Docherty and then followed it up with a novel in the so-called ‘pulp’ genre of crime fiction. Laidlaw is a magnificent book and contains the best line about Glasgow and all its contradictions: 

Glasgow was home-made ginger biscuits and Jennifer Lawson dead in the park. It was the sententious niceness of the Commander and the threatened abrasiveness of Laidlaw. It was Milligan, insensitive as a mobile slab of cement, and Mrs Lawson, witless with hurt. It was the right hand knocking you down and the left hand picking you up, while the mouth alternated apology and threat.

I read a while back that it would be made into a TV series, but I’ve always fancied having a go at adapting it into a neo-noir, Lynchian style screenplay!
 
TPQ: The just must - select one book you simply have to read before you close the final page on life.

CBF: Getting over my fear of long texts and reading all seven volumes of In Search of Lost Time (Remembrance of things Past) by Proust.

🕮 Cat Boyd-Foley is a writer, poet and artist working in the trade union movement in Scotland. She is interested in suburban foxes, domestic banalities, childhood fantasies, feral women and coal mining
.

Cat Boyd-Foley @ Booker's Dozen

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of One Thousand Nine Hundred And Three

 

A Morning Thought @ 3079

Christopher Owens  🎦 with a live review from the Waterfront Studios, Belfast, 27th February 2026.


At least it wasn’t raining.

I could actually walk to and from the venue without having to hope some energy drink fuelled taxi driver will take enough pity on you to accept your booking only to have him secretly curse you as you’re directing him out of the city centre for a few minutes.
***
For over 30 years, Conor Grimes and Alan McKee have been entertaining audiences around the country with their surreal, yet locally grounded, plays. Most people will know them for The History of the Troubles (According to My Da) but their GAA comedies surrounding the fictional team of St Mungo’s have amassed cult followings and their Christmas pantos in the Lyric Theatre are always a great way to ease into the season.

This play, a fictionalised take on the two men’s youth, focuses on a period leading up to the 1994 ceasefire and the subsequent removal of the broadcast ban. Although a regularly derided part of life at the time, subsequent generations used to seeing Gerry as an eccentric grandad who loves rubber ducks have found this aspect of the conflict highly bemusing.

As McKee told Belfast Live:

We have a line in the play where we say that the British Government hadn't reckoned on the ingenuity and bloody-mindedness of the journalistic profession because they were outraged, I think as well by it, and so immediately there were people within the journalist profession who went, right, how can we sidestep this, how can we get around this? Because it was an imposition on them as well . . .  As young people, I think we were very aware of how anti-freedom of speech it was, and I was always sort of very proud to do them.

Although most people of a certain age associate Stephen Rea as the voice that would accompany Gerry on screen, McKee revealed that, to broadcasters Stephen Rea:

was too good, which meant then that [the broadcasters] tried to circumnavigate that by telling us not to be good and to be out of sync and all these sorts of things because they were going, if you do a perfect impression, it kind of defeats the purpose . . . 

***
From Laverys' back bar through to the Art College raves and having to explain murals on the Falls Road to American journalists, I Was the Voice of Gerry Adams offers up an evocative and funny snapshot of being an underemployed actor in Belfast in 1994 making a decent living off BBC cheques for overdubbing Gerry's voice, usually hungover! There are also the standard trials and tribulations of being a young man: trying to maintain independence from your parents, not getting lifted by the undercover cop for drug possession and negotiating your way through differing political opinions as the conflict was entering the endgame.

This wistful nostalgia works in its favour as it means the infrequent news reports of killings hit with the proper levity. All of this is sold to us thanks to the chemistry between Grimes and McKee. They’ve been at this for three decades and still play off each other with endless enthusiasm.

However, it never lets us forget that there was a war on and there are moments when the characters are forced to confront the differences between their upbringings as well as the contrast between conservative parents and their more liberal offspring. These moments give the play weight and force the audience to understand that such division would not be easily solved with a ceasefire.


It also occasionally hints that the memories under discussion may not be 100% accurate, therefore offering up a critique of self-appointed voices who harp on about how important a particular moment in the cultural zeitgeist was but are basing their information on second and third hand information.

One such example is at the end of Act One where our two protagonists find themselves at one of the famous Sugar Sweet raves at the Art College and ‘Insomnia’ by Faithless is the soundtrack. However ‘Insomnia’ was first released in November 1995 and didn’t become a big hit until a re-release in October 1996.

Funny, wistful, poignant and thought provoking. This was a great night at the theatre.


⏩ Christopher Owens was a reviewer for Metal Ireland and finds time to study the history and inherent contradictions of Ireland. He is currently the TPQ Friday columnist and is the author of A Vortex of Securocrats and “dethrone god”.

I Was The Voice of Gerry Adams

Gearóid Ó Loingsigh ☭ writing in Substack on 25-February-2026 about State Terrorism in Colombia.

Photo: From right to left Man with Child (pixelated) Ramiro with hat murdered
in 2000, myself, Jaime Ortiz and Margarita Guzmán murdered in 1997.

On February 23rd, whilst I read the Spanish press on the failed 1981 Coup d’Etat and how President Sánchez was going to declassify official files on the event the news came through that the Inter-American Court of Human Rights had laid the blame for the May 2000 murder of Ramiro Zapata in Segovia on the Colombian state. Once more it was clear why there had never been a coup in Colombia: They never needed one and the archives on State terrorism continue to be hidden.

I met Ramiro in 1995, when along with my then partner I went to live in Segovia for some seven months to work with the Human Rights Committee of the North East of Antioquia that Ramiro was president of. Ramiro didn’t delay in showing what he was made of, he was upfront and faked nothing. A police officer approached us as we entered the Municipal Palace in the centre of the town and said “Ramiro, once again with the Swiss” mistaking us for the Red Cross. Ramiro didn’t miss a heartbeat and replied “We don’t work with the Red Cross, they only make recommendations, we denounce”.

Later he explained that a Red Cross delegation had arrived in Segovia and asked for the Committee to vouch for them and accompany them. But the Colombians couldn’t travel in the Red Cross vehicles, protocols they claimed and neither were they willing to pay the cost of the transport, but like feudal lords they demanded that those they saw as their serfs, bowed down to them. They quickly learned that Ramiro wasn’t like that.

I came to hate that international structure of human rights with its well-paid functionaries living luxurious lives whilst they talked for protocols to justify their lack of action. That delegation visited a family whose house was riddled by the Bomboná Batallion of the Fourteenth Brigade, injuring a child in the foot. The Red Cross interviewed the family but did nothing. I can’t recall why, but it had to do with whether the incident was an act of war or not. Years later I experienced that condescending attitude in person in Barrancabermeja when an inter-institutional delegation was going to the Ciénaga del Opón to inspect the area from which many families had fled, and took refuge in the abandoned former secondary school in Barrancabermeja. Whilst we ate well in the Ciénaga the displaced went hungry as the functionary from the Mayor’s office explained that he had a lot of things to do before the mission and he hadn’t time to give to the order to send food to the school. Some live well in the midst of the conflict, others live well off the conflict.

Then the paramilitaries disappeared the comrade Manuel Navarro and an extraordinary meeting with the police Colonel, whose name I have forgotten and Colonel Ibarra from the Nueva Granada Battalion. None of the functionaries from the United Nations and other bodies criticised the state forces. The functionary who left the displaced without food looked down at the floor. They barely managed a couple of questions, not even recommendations. The only two to raise their voice was a female member of the team and myself. I vividly recall the astonished stupid look on their faces when I explained the reality of Manuel’s disappearance and the lack of action by the state forces. They didn’t move a finger, not even when we told them where the paramilitaries were holding him. I also recall the furious look on Colonel Ibarra’s face.

Ramiro was joyful but at the same time serious. He carried a copy of the Colombian Constitution on him and in the Army’s checkpoints he would quote it to the soldiers, giving out to them for their non-compliance or clear violation of it. He was not afraid of them. One night we were having a drink in the main square of Segovia. It was not a bar, it was a shop, belonging to Don Hector if I am not mistaken. A couple of tables and plastic chairs in the street, it was hardly a terrace. But I loved it. It was the 8th of October and the distance we could see the ELN’s urban militias paint the town with slogans to mark the last battle of Che. With their poor spelling they painted. One piece made us laugh - instead of painting Long Live the 8th of October, Day of the Heroic Guerrilla, they had put erotic guerrilla instead on the house of the Mayor’s bodyguard who was murdered some years later by the paramilitaries. Yes Che was fond of women, heroic and maybe erotic as well. But that night when they painted the town we were relaxed, when we saw the police pass by and shortly heard the sound of gunfire. Everyone ran inside the shop, except for my partner and Ramiro. When I asked her why she told me that she saw Ramiro so calm that she thought it was much ado about nothing. Ramiro interrupted her and said “No young woman, don’t pay any heed to me, I don’t flee, they can kill me where they find me!” That’s what Ramiro was like.

When they murdered him those words came to mind. That last time I saw him was in 1998 in Medellín. He said he was tired of the city and wanted to go back to the town, that the Ministry had tried to relocate him in very dangerous areas and it was better to be in Segovia rather than areas he did not know. I told him not to go. But he returned and survived for a while, but they were never going to forgive his tongue. Ramiro did not know who to keep quiet in the face of injustice and as soon as he arrived he took up his activities in defence of human rights again. One night they dragged him out and took him outside of the town in car. According to locals he didn’t keep quiet in the car either and let them have it.

His murder was not an isolated incident, but rather part of a continuum of murders in the northeast of Antioquia. We left Segovia in February 1996 and in April the military butcher, Captain Cañas carried out the Pool Hall Massacre in which 14 people were murdered. Cañas was sentenced to 50 years in jail for that. His place of confinement was the military base Tolemaida. We don’t know how long he spent there, perhaps he never set foot place in it as some victims lawyers went there and couldn’t find him and the military gave no explanation. The real response of the state to that massacre and wave of murders in Segovia, was on the one hand to declare Remedios and Segovia to be a Special Public Order Zone, thus strengthening the military and paramilitary control and to tap Ramiro’s phone and raid his house, in addition to repeatedly trying to put him on trial. They filed six criminal cases against him.

Later in 1997 a wave of murders in Segovia and the neighbouring municipality of Remedios began with 250 people murdered in the first six months of the year. Amongst those who fell under the bullets of state terrorism were Margarita Guzmán, who put us up, Jaime Ortiz - our right hand man and the trade unionist Nazareno Rivera, all of them linked to the Human Rights Committee. Those from the committee who survived the state terror onslaught took refuge in Medellín. Ramiro’s decision to return to the town was very brave, perhaps imprudent, but no more imprudent than accepting the state’s ill treatment in trying to relocate him to very dangerous zones he did not know. At least he knew Segovia well and his return was in line with his character and commitment to the struggle.

The court’s finding reminds us that Ramiro’s struggle against state terrorism still continues. The struggle against the half-hearted that only make recommendations is also valid, one lot depend on the non-committal responses of the other lot to act with impunity.

Photo: Neither forgive nor forget the
 murderers of Segovia. Graffiti 1995.

I left Segovia in February 1996 and I have not gone back. I may never return. I don’t even know whether I want to. Segovia was a watershed in my life. It is also the beginning of my long journey writing about Colombia. They say the pen is mightier than the sword, but when I think of people like Ramiro I would like to have the hatchet men of Segovia in front of me with that sword to hand. I don’t know what I would do, as I am not violent by nature. But I would like to think that I would dare to try the sword instead of the pen. Justice is not a judgement of an international court, it is the truth and punishment of state terrorists. And so far we don’t know the truth and they haven’t convicted anyone for the murder of Ramiro and other members of the Human Rights Committee. Meanwhile I continue to write for everyone, for Ramiro for a victory over state terrorism and over those who only make recommendations.

⏩ Gearóid Ó Loingsigh is a political and human rights activist with extensive experience in Latin America.

Remembering Ramiro Zapata

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of One Thousand Nine Hundred And Two

 

A Morning Thought @ 3078

Maryam Namazie ☭ This essay responds to critics of my 12 January 2026 Freethinker article Neither turban nor crown but Woman, Life, Freedom and of the FEMEN topless protest in Paris, during which photos of Ali Khamenei and Reza Pahlavi were set alight.

Photo by Amaury Cornu



Its aim is not to defend a slogan or an action, but to expose the political project this refusal disrupts, a project already working to reassemble authority in advance of the Islamic regime’s collapse. What is at stake is whether authoritarianism will continue to be organised through clerical or inherited patriarchal authority or dismantled altogether.

Revolutionary moments are not defeated by repression alone; they are also derailed through political engineering. The active production of meaning from above is interpreted, managed, and narrowed until what remains no longer threatens the foundations of power.

This is the situation facing Iran’s current revolution. The revolt against authoritarianism, patriarchy, and the control of women’s bodies is being systematically reframed within the context of a choice between two familiar forms of authority: the Islamic regime or monarchy. This reframing is a political intervention designed to empty the revolution of its emancipatory content and redirect it toward a pre-defined and pre-authorised outcome that preserves existing relations of power.

‘Neither turban nor crown but Woman, Life, Freedom’ seeks to defend the revolution against political engineering from above while preserving space for critical dissent. Any discussion of strategy, transition, or political futures in Iran takes place over a landscape marked by mass killings. Thousands have been killed, imprisoned, tortured, or disappeared in the last few weeks alone. Honouring them is not only a matter of commemoration, but of refusing any political outcome that reproduces the conditions that made such crimes possible.

Rejecting the Binary

When people are being slaughtered for refusing authoritarianism, the question of what political alternatives are being offered in its place is not theoretical, but urgent.

The rejection of both clerical and monarchical rule is often dismissed as ‘collapsing differences’, though this misidentifies the argument. The assertion is not that these regimes or powers are identical. They differ in ideology, historical moment, and degree of repression. These differences, however, do not alter the structural fact that both organise authority through patriarchal succession, sanctified through religion and inheritance, standing above society and unaccountable to it.

This matters because every modern revolution encounters this pressure point. Either hierarchical power is dismantled, or it is reassembled under a new name, often through ‘transitional’ figures who promise stability while suspending popular control. The latter rarely presents itself as counter-revolution; it appears instead as pragmatism, stability, and political sensibility or realism.

This is how emancipation is politically contained. A binary is imposed that demands alignment with one elite against another. Once accepted, popular agency disappears from view altogether. Politics is reduced to a managed choice between rival authorities, while the idea that people, particularly women and the working class, can dissent and exercise collective self-rule is dismissed as reckless, premature, or dangerous.

This logic is not unique to Iran. It operates wherever people are told that opposing one form of domination requires silence about another. Criticism of Hamas, for instance, is framed as alignment with Israel; opposition to the Islamic regime is framed as complicity with Western or Israeli militarism. Power differentials are selectively invoked to compel loyalty upward. Because one force is stronger or more visibly violent, the other is treated as deserving of political protection or recognition. In every case, solidarity is redirected away from the people and toward states, armies, or ruling elites (see my ‘On Israel, Hamas, and Refusing the Binary’).

The same mechanism now structures the debate over Iran’s political future. The binary is posed as cleric or king, Islamic regime or monarchy, Khamenei or Pahlavi. Once this framing is accepted, the revolution is reduced to a question of succession and reconstituting power rather than transformation. The underlying assumption is that power must be embodied in guardians, saviours, or transitional managers while democratic control and liberation are deferred indefinitely in the name of transition.

Woman, Life, Freedom continues to disrupt this logic at its root. It does not demand inclusion within an existing order, nor does it postpone emancipation until after victory. It asserts that life, bodily autonomy, and collective self-determination are not promises to be granted by a future state but the foundation of politics itself.

Transition Politics

Critics argue that Reza Pahlavi is merely symbolic or transitional. History, however, shows that those who position themselves as facilitators of transition rarely remain outside power. Transitional authority is a strategic location from which the political future is shaped. The 1979 revolution offers a direct precedent. Ruhollah Khomeini initially presented himself as a moral guide, not a ruler, promising to retire to Qom after the transition period. During the transition, however, moral authority was converted into political power.

Across the world, ‘guided transitions’ have repeatedly preserved core state structures, deferred redistribution of political and economic power, and replaced mass participation with delegated authority. The language of transition conceals a transfer of power upward: collective self-rule is displaced by an elevated figure who claims to govern in the name of ‘the people’. Because this role is overwhelmingly male, dynastic, and unaccountable, it is structurally incompatible with any emancipatory project. In the absence of a collectively articulated political programme, like the Woman, Life, Freedom Charter, popular power is easily displaced by transitional figures who present themselves as necessary mediators, allowing authority to be reconstituted in the very moment it is said to be suspended.

Transitions led from above preserve not only political authority but also existing economic power. Control over production, labour, and wealth is rarely democratised. Capital remains protected, even as political forms change. The working class is asked to endure austerity, instability, and repression in the name of national ‘unity’ or political expediency.

Women’s unpaid and underpaid labour, including care and social reproduction, becomes even more central in these moments. This is why women’s bodies and autonomy are so fiercely regulated. Control over social reproduction stabilises ruling power during political upheavals.

Urgency, Unity, and the Policing of Dissent

Perhaps the most common objection to rejecting turban and crown is urgency: people are being killed in the streets and prisons; this is not the time for ideological debate; unity must come first.

Urgency has always been the language through which emancipation is postponed. When repression intensifies, we are told there is no time for democratic politics, no time for women’s freedom, no time to question who will rule. Yet history shows that moments of extreme violence are precisely when authoritarian power is most effectively consolidated, often in the name of security or survival.

Monarchist ‘unity’ and ‘rallying around the lion and sun flag’ is not unity around the people or shared goals, but loyalty to authority and its symbols. Dissent is branded as betrayal. Debate is treated as sabotage. Calls for unity enforced through threats, misogynistic abuse, and intimidation, particularly against women, are early warning signs of authoritarianism to come. Those who cannot tolerate disagreement before taking power do not become tolerant afterwards.

Women are targeted first because they disrupt the symbolic order on which inherited authority depends. Misogynistic abuse is not a breakdown of unity; it is how ‘unity’ is enforced. Women’s demands are cast as divisive, not because they threaten cohesion, but because they threaten hierarchy and the political justification of hierarchy. Liberation postponed in the name of unity rarely arrives at all.

‘They are not the same’

FEMEN’s topless action in Paris on 17 January, during which images of both Ali Khamenei and Reza Pahlavi were burned with cigarettes (in an attempt to recreate photos from Iran of women burning photos of Khamenei), is criticised on the grounds that the Pahlavi monarchy and the Islamic regime are not the same

Photo by Amaury Cornu
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As a political argument, this does not take into account the fact that revolutions are not judged by moral comparisons between regimes but by whether they dismantle the structures that reproduce domination.

Reza Pahlavi’s father and grandfather both ruled Iran as an authoritarian monarchy that systematically suppressed political dissent and curtailed basic civil liberties. Under his father, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, repression intensified through the secret police, SAVAK, which became notorious for arbitrary arrests, torture, and the crushing of political pluralism. Nor was the monarchy secular. Religion was mobilised for nationalist legitimacy.

Women did gain important legal reforms under Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, including the Family Protection Laws. These gains were not benevolent gifts from above, however, but were concessions extracted through women’s organising, rising education, global feminist pressure, and the need for greater labour participation for capital. The rise of women’s education or political participation today in the Islamic regime likewise reflects women’s organising and refusal; they are not benevolent gifts from above.

Authoritarianism did not begin in 1979. Under the monarchy, religious institutions received vast resources to counter progressive and leftist movements, while Islamism was treated as a bulwark against communism within US Cold War strategy. The Islamic regime later intensified repression through religious ideology and sex apartheid, but it did so by inheriting and reconfiguring an already authoritarian state apparatus.

Nostalgia for monarchy confuses capitalist modernisation under authoritarian conditions, long the dominant global pattern of the twentieth century, with emancipation. The relevant question, therefore, is not whether the two regimes are identical, but whether replacing one with the other, or with its heir, constitutes liberation. Reza Pahlavi may not hold office, but he represents a ruling class project; his role lies precisely in preparing the ground for the reconstitution of elite authority while popular power is deferred. Revolutions that substitute rulers rather than dismantle authoritarianism reproduce the conditions of their own defeat.

Symbolic Offence, Material Harm, and the Politics of Protest

Critics argue that under conditions of repression, activists must avoid actions that risk ‘blurring lines’, ‘confusing the public’, or providing opportunities for state propaganda. Within this logic, maintaining focus on the regime, the primary enemy, is treated as a security necessity, and dissent is cast as a threat to the movement’s survival rather than a necessary condition of revolutionary politics itself. Historically, this language of security and discipline has been used not to protect movements from repression, but to police dissent and preserve emerging hierarchies of authority.

The Paris action’s burning of the image of Reza Pahlavi has also been cited as a form of violence, an act said to harm the person represented and incite hatred (interestingly, this argument has not been made with regard to the burning of Khamenei’s photo). This framing collapses a critical distinction: the difference between symbolic offence and material harm. Without this distinction, dissent itself becomes unintelligible.

Burning a photograph of someone in power is not an attack on a person. It is a rejection of authority. Like caricatures of Mohammad, Islam’s prophet, or acts such as flag burning, it operates in the register of symbolic negation. It does not coerce, injure, or dispossess; it communicates refusal. To describe such acts as violence is to redefine violence so that it no longer refers to force exercised over bodies and lives, but to discomfort experienced by power.

This conflation has become increasingly common in a political climate where offence is treated as harm and harm is detached from material conditions. The symbolic injury of those who rule is elevated above the real injuries inflicted on those they govern and exploit.

Under this logic, protest is disciplined not because it endangers people, but because it disrupts authority’s claim to legitimacy. (See monarchist threats around flag burning and topless protest.)

This is not new. Ruling classes have always sought to recast challenges to their authority as forms of disorder or violence. What has changed is the language. Where dissent was once criminalised as sedition or blasphemy, it is now policed as harm.

This dynamic is especially familiar to women’s liberation struggles. Women who violate norms of ‘respectability’ are routinely accused of provoking backlash, undermining the cause, or providing opportunities to the regime. Responsibility is displaced downward. Power is absolved. When women engage in acts that desecrate symbols of patriarchal authority, whether it be compulsory veiling, women’s bodily erasure, moral reverence, or inherited leadership, the outrage is not about violence. It is about insubordination.

The burning of images of Ali Khamenei and Reza Pahlavi does not threaten their safety. It threatens their sanctity. It rejects the demand that authority be treated with reverence. That is precisely why it provokes such an intense reaction: not because it endangers lives, but because it desacralizes power.

Speech that offends authority is not equivalent to speech that incites violence against people. The former challenges power; the latter mobilises it against people. Conflating the two does not protect the vulnerable; it protects those already insulated by power. Moreover, incitement involves a call to harm, exclude, or attack people; symbolic protest targets authority and legitimacy, not populations. To erase this distinction is to collapse all radical dissent into a moral violation, leaving only compliant forms of opposition intact. And compliant opposition is no opposition at all.

When symbolic protest is redefined as violence, the threshold for repression drops. Any act that disrupts authority’s image of itself can be treated as illegitimate. This logic is disproportionately deployed against women, whose bodies and actions are already framed as sources of disorder. The message is consistent: dissent is permitted only if it remains respectful, regulated, non-disruptive, and deferential to power.

Revolutionary movements have never advanced under such conditions. They have always involved acts that violate the norms through which authority sustains itself, burning flags and effigies, toppling statues, and refusing reverence. To defend them is not to celebrate offence for its own sake, but to insist that emancipation requires the freedom to negate authority symbolically as well as materially.

To equate the burning of a photograph with violence against a person is a political move that shifts attention away from prisons, executions, and repression and toward the wounded sensibilities of the powerful. No emancipatory politics can accept this inversion. A movement that cannot tolerate symbolic offence against authority has already accepted the moral framework of submission that it claims to oppose. (One need only read George Orwell’s Animal Farm to appreciate this point.)

Respectability, the Body, and Feminist Revolt

Nude or topless protest continues to face the criticism that such actions reproduce objectification, reduce politics to spectacle, and prove the regime’s point that women fighting for liberation just want to be naked. This misunderstands how power operates.

Women’s bodies are not merely symbolic terrain; they are material infrastructure for the reproduction of power. The Islamic regime does not repress women because of their actions. It represses women because control over women’s bodies is central to its mode of rule. Compulsory veiling, modesty laws, and sexual apartheid are not moral policies; they are methods of governance.

Women using their bodies as sites of refusal against a state that governs through bodily control is not reproducing objectification; it is exposing the mechanism of rule.

Nude protest is not a claim that nudity is inherently liberatory, nor a prescription for all women. It is one tactic among many, deployed precisely because women’s bodies have been constructed as sites of danger, shame, and disorder through which social control is enforced. By reclaiming the body as a site of resistance, such actions disrupt the ideological core of religious and nationalist authoritarianism.

Both clerical and dynastic authority depend on disciplining women, not only symbolically, but materially, through control over sexuality, reproduction, and public presence. The regulation of women’s lives is not an auxiliary feature of these systems; it is one of the primary means through which authority is naturalised and reproduced. Any political outcome that preserves this structure, regardless of its ideological packaging, restores the conditions of domination.

Calls for respectability reproduce the same premise as religious control: that women’s bodies must be managed for a larger political goal. History shows that ‘respectability’ and compliance have never protected women from repression. Postponement functions structurally: emancipation is always deferred because the political order being assembled cannot survive it.

Conclusion

Across Iran’s modern history, authoritarian rule has reproduced itself through the elevation of guardians, the inheritance of authority, and the regulation of women’s bodies as a means of controlling society. Each time mass struggle has approached a break with this order, pressures have emerged to postpone emancipation, discipline dissent, and substitute popular power with a patriarch.

The rebranding of the Woman, Life, Freedom revolution as a ‘national revolution’ follows this established trajectory. Calls for ‘unity’ that require silence, transitions that concentrate authority, and critiques that seek to regulate women’s autonomy do not safeguard the revolution. They delineate its limits in advance.

The central question is not whether an alternative regime might govern more efficiently or appear less brutal, but whether the relations that sustain domination—patriarchal authority, inherited leadership, and the management of social reproduction—are being dismantled or merely reorganised.

What provokes hostility to rejecting both crown and turban is the prospect of a revolution without saviours, guardians, or patriarchs. Such a revolt insists that freedom is not a promise to be delivered after order is restored, but the substance of struggle itself.

This is neither an abstract concern nor unique to Iran. The sustained assault on Rojava, north-east Syria, where Woman, Life, Freedom was first articulated not only as a slogan but as a governing principle, demonstrates what happens when women’s liberation is treated as non-negotiable. Grounded in women’s autonomous organisation, collective self-rule, and the rejection of patriarchal sovereignty, Rojava has been targeted precisely because it refuses inherited authority and the subordination of women’s autonomy to state power. Its repression is not a failure of realism, but the response of a regional and global order unable to tolerate a revolution without patriarchs.

Iran now confronts the same historical threshold. The struggle is not over which authority will rule in place of the Islamic regime, but over whether the revolution will succeed at dismantling authoritarian power or whether authoritarianism will once again be preserved through transition, inheritance, and control over people’s lives.

Maryam Namazie is a political activist, campaigner and blogger

Iran 🪶 On Power, Inheritance, And The Disciplining Of Women’s Bodies

Open Democracy ★ Written by Diana Cariboni.

Proposed new law increases likelihood of both female genital mutilation and suicides among trans youth, experts warn.

In December last year, the US House of Representatives passed the “Protect Children's Innocence Act”, a bill introduced by Republican representative Marjorie Taylor-Greene. 

If the title of the bill sounds Orwellian, it is because it is. A close reading of H.R.3492, as the bill is also known, indicates the proposed legislation wilfully conflates gender-affirming healthcare for young trans people with the harmful and outlawed practice of female genital mutilation and cutting (FGM-C).

If passed, experts told openDemocracy, the legislation will increase suffering among two vulnerable groups: women and girls at risk of an extreme form of gender violence and trans young people, who are already more likely to experience suicidal thoughts and attempts than their cisgender peers.

Under the bill, medical staff providing such care can be punished with up to 10 years in prison. Parents will be charged only in cases relating to FGM-C, not gender-affirming care for trans youth.

The bill was passed 216 votes to 211 on 17 December, mostly on party lines, although three Democrats voted in favour and four Republicans voted against.

Continue @ Open Democracy.

How FGM Victims Got Caught In The Crossfire Of Trump’s War On Trans Kids

Caoimhin O’Muraile  ☭ The British Labour Party came together in 1900 as the Labour Representation Committee consisting of the Fabian Society, the Independent Labour Party, social democrats and democratic socialists, and the largest organisation, the trade unions.

The LRC went on in 1906 to become the Labour Party standing in elections but, at the time, the Labour Party were in the shadow of the Liberal and Conservative parties. The hardy Scotsman, James Keir Hardie, was the party’s first parliamentary leader from 1906-1908 and the name ‘Keir’ is where any similarities with the present leader ends!

In those days liberal democracy was in its infancy and labour parties around Europe were considered revolutionary. Much early socialist thinking was based on the teachings of Karl Max and people like London Dockworkers Union and socialist organiser, Ben Tillet, flocked to the new party.

In 1917 the party inserted the fabled Clause IV into their constitution which made a commitment, on paper at least, to the common ownership of the means of production. Labour enjoyed electoral success in 1924 forming their first minority government under Ramsay McDonald. In 1929 McDonald and Labour won the election but failed to gain an overall majority and relied on Liberal Party support. In 1931 McDonald led a ‘National Government’ leading to his expulsion from the Labour Party. It was not until 1945 did the Labour Party under Clement Atlee enjoy real parliamentary success, defeating Winston Churchill and the Tories and for the first time implementing parts of Clause IV. The Atlee administration nationalised chunks of British industry, introduced the Welfare State including the National Health Service, unemployment benefit (though unemployment was virtually zero until Thatcher then all these hitherto hard-working people decided they would kick their jobs and go on the ‘dole’) and social security payments. Also introduced was the ‘pluralist’ system of industrial relations giving trade unions a greater say.

The party was part of the post war consensus in British parliamentary politics which lasted until the election of the right-wing Margaret Thatcher in 1979 finally ended this consensus. Callaghan was replaced as leader by a labour traditionalist, Michael Foot, who was persecuted by the right-wing media but stuck rigidly to his politics. Most of those principles the party was founded on are no longer present in today’s variant calling itself the ‘Labour Party’. It is not the party I grew up with when socialists and trade unionists were regular visitors to our house.

Labour enjoyed success in 1964, 1966 – some argued on the back of England’s World Cup success – under Harold Wilson. Wilson went to the polls again in 1970 calling a ‘snap election’ and lost to Edward Heath's Conservative and Unionist Party. Just as some claimed World Cup success guided Labour to victory in 1966 the reverse could be said – and was claimed by some – in 1970 after England crashed out of the competition to West Germany. Some claimed at the time this exit from the competition cost Labour the election? 

In the 1974 (ironically another World Cup year) general election Heath was booted out and Wilson was back in Number 10. He retired surprisingly in 1976 and Jim Callaghan assumed the leadership and role of Prime Minister. Callaghan lost the 1979 election and Thatcher became the first female – of sorts – Prime Minister in Britain. The Labour Party would not see parliamentary power again until 1997 under Tony (Tory) Blair. He was nicknamed this because he implemented many policies which would be associated with the Conservatives. Blair with his ‘Spin Doctor’ Peter Mandelson implemented many changes within the party supposedly making them “electable” - meaning betraying all Labour’s values and principles. Nobody told these that the art of politics certainly in their parliamentary sense is to persuade the electorate your policies are correct, not move towards the right. Blair and Mandelson, the latter being around chipping away at Labour values since Neil Kinnock's (pillocks) leadership, who had replaced Michael Foot after the 1983 election, advised Blair to abolish Clause IV and continue with the red rose instead of the red flag. This was the end of the British Labour Party despite winning the 1997 general election by a landslide. The party was now Labour in name only. When Blair got rid of Clause IV miner’s leader, Arthur Scargill, announced; “that man in there has just declared war on the working-class” and left the party as an individual, though the NUM continued to affiliate and contribute money to Blair's Labour Party as did and do many trade unions.

When Labour lost the 2015 election the then leader, Ed Miliband, stood down to be replaced by Jeremy Corbyn. Corbyn offered some hope at revitalising the party and wanted to shift back to Labour values and principles. Corbyn was elected three times as leader by the then over 500,000 members despite the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) not wanting him. The 2017 general election saw Corbyn and Labour cut the Tory majority to just four. Tory leader and Prime Minister, Theresa May, was in tears as she had before the election a huge majority which she had now lost at the hands of Corbyn! Some Labour MPs, like Stephen Kinnock (son of Pillock) were in tears, not tears of happiness, but tears of sorrow because Jeremy Corbyn, and despite their best efforts, was proving popular among the electorate. If the PLP had got behind their leader as they should have done instead of undermining him at every opportunity then Labour could well have won the 2017 election. The PLP then set about a hatchet job on their leader who would have more knives in his back than did Julius Ceaser. Instead of Brutus and the Senate Corbyn had Margaret Hodge and the PLP out to get him. With their help the Conservative and Unionist Party won the 2019 general election by a landslide. Corbyn resigned as leader and was replaced by the two-faced Keir Starmer. Starmer had claimed he supported Corbyn when under attack but did not hesitate to expel the former leader from the party. Jeremy now stands as an Independent and holds his seat in Highbury and Islington, and continues to support Arsenal – good luck this year, anyone but City or Scousers!

Starmer and the party calling itself the ‘Labour Party’ won the 2024 general election with a record number of seats. Starmer was taking the party further to the right than did Blair and has betrayed even further the basic principles of the one-time Labour Party. Labours popularity with the electorate appears, in a short period of time, to have gone from an all-time high to a record low under Starmer. Despite this apparent decline in popularity Starmer continues with his policies. He is giving money to Ukraine to fight its war with Russia while, at the same time, implementing cuts in social security to the poor at home. In order to feed the Ukrainian war machine he proposed cuts in pensioners' heating allowance and despite how much many people support Ukraine in the war they do not expect to fund it through cuts to their own living standards, already at rock bottom! 

Starmer is also supplying arms to Ukraine under the false illusion Russia is a threat to Britain and the rest of Western Europe, which they are not, all of which cost money. He is talking about a ‘coalition of the Willing’ sending troops to aide Ukraine which would put Britain in a state of war with the planets largest nuclear power, Russia! Who is this fucking idiot? As the party continues to fall in the polls Starmer refuses to step down despite requests by some trade union leaders to do so. He believes his policies will bear fruit. But if things continue in this vein with support crumbling, even within the trade union movement, the Labour Party could well suffer the fate of the old Liberal Party, near extinction without actually dying! 

Never has a party lost support so rapidly as his government. With a huge majority, largely now on paper, they should be able to push policies easily through Parliament. The reason for their inability to do this comes not from Kemi Badenoch’s Tory opposition - they were nearly wiped out in 2024 - but from his own MPs. This is creating more than an illusion the party in government is split and fragmented. Despite all the signs Starmer continues his charge to the right trying to beat Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, a far-right party, in the right-wing race to the bottom. Starmer has become obsessed with these fascists and instead of beating them with left-wing ideology he is trying to emulate them. Could Starmer, like Blair before him I suspect, be an establishment mole in there to destroy the Labour Party from within? He has expelled anybody who holds traditional Labour left-wing views including a former leader!

On February 26th 2026 a by-election was held in Gorton and Denton, a seat held by Labour for almost a century, and Starmer’s Labour Party were humiliated into third place. The Greens, who now hold the mantle of ‘left-wing’ ideologists something Labour lost many years ago, won the seat with a landslide. They received 14,980 votes easily enough to see their candidate Hannah Spencer take the seat. The electorate, certainly in Gorton and Denton, voted for left-wing policies rejecting Starmer and his right-wing one-time Labour Party. The Labour candidate, Angeliki Stogia, came a humiliating third place behind Reform UK with 9,364 votes. Reform Candidate, Matt Goodwin, came second with a respectable 10,898 votes. Labour are already making excuses about ‘mid-term governments always suffering setbacks’ which is true but not to this extent. This was a humiliation, a hammering, a shattering blow for Starmer’s party. Reform are also looking for excuses as to why, as their leader Nigel Farage expected, they did not come first. Claims by party Chairman, David Bull, on BBC2 News on 27th February; “you saw around 12% of Muslim voters entering the polling booth with their wives which is illegal”. Could Reform’s major gripe be these voters voted Green and had nothing to do with so-called ‘family voting’? Either way Starmer has just suffered another crippling blow and the question must now be asked, what is the state of the British Labour Party? In a separate opinion voiced on the same programme it was claimed by a so-called political expert that the Greens could not “win a general election because their extreme policies include withdrawal from NATO”. Surely this would be a matter for the British electorate not the BBC? Or was this a subtle hint if they did win a general election their leader, Zack Polanski, could suffer the fate of Marxist Salvador Allende in Chile back in 1973 if Polanski became PM?

This defeat in the Gorton and Denton by-election is just another humiliation for Keir Starmer. He has been forced to U-Turn on so many occasions and this is the second by-election he has lost. Two safe Labour Party seats lost to either Reform UK or the Green Party. Reform UK won by just six votes the Runcorn and Helsby by-election beating Labour. On the same day Reform also swept the board in the council elections as the number of Labour Party councillors dwindled. All bad news for Starmer. 

The irony is it was Starmer who expelled former left-wing leader, Jeremy Corbyn, and it was the PLP who stabbed the same man in the back. The voters of Gorton and Denton voted for Corbyn policies, could this be repeated nationally? Not if the BBC and, I dare say, MI5 have their way! It was the polices similar to those of a former Labour leader expelled by Starmer which the electorate of Gorton and Denton voted in their droves for. Could there be a subtle message in this result? 

There is still time for the Labour Party to pull itself out of the ashes but not, I suspect, under this leader. Urgent repair work is needed and traitors like those who stabbed Jeremy Corbyn in the back, including Starmer, would have to go or take a back seat. Perhaps a think-tank could be organised consisting of sensible left-wing government MPs, Rachel Maskel MP for York comes to mind, starting by reducing money for Ukraine and spending on the home front. People want to see an improvement in living standards, safer working terms and conditions and a lot, lot less grovelling to US President and far-right nutter Donald Trump. Remember Britain has a Labour Government not a right-wing republican one based in Washington!!!
 
Caoimhin O’Muraile is Independent Socialist Republican and Marxist.

The State Of The British Labour Party!

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