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TPQ
Gary Robertson ⚽ It’s that time of year again when newspapers are filled with stories and speculation re transfers, managerial appointments and in some cases club take overs.
 
At Celtic the long overdue announcement of Martin O’Neill as permanent manager finally put to rest the fears that Dermot Desmond had actually lost the plot and was ready to appoint Zionist rent boy Robbie Keane as manager. 

A collective sigh of relief among fans, podcasters, YouTubers and other Celtic affiliated media, the smiles returned to their faces. Of course with all things even tenuously linked to Israel not everyone was delighted with Keane being told to “trot off.” Billionaire Sylvan Adams Canadian-Israeli Zionist and President of the World Jewish Congress was appalled at the protests and demands for anyone but Keane, calling Celtic fans “bigots” and proclaiming they were “practising pure unadulterated bigotry dressed up as virtue.”
 
I note with interest he’s listed as a philanthropist pumping money into projects in Canada and of course Israel, the same Israel that celebrates the bombing of Palestinian refugee camps, the same Israel that celebrates rapists and child murderers, the same Israel who are guilty of numerous war crimes. This from a man who calls peaceful pro Palestinian protesters “terrorist supporters.”
 
So if his cage is rattled - Good. Celtic once again upsetting the right people.
 
Whilst O’Neill's appointment has been met with positivity in most quarters. While former players such as Chris Sutton and John Hartson have praised the club and Martin himself others have been less than impressed. Some claim it’s a sticking plaster covering the cracks which are becoming more evident by the day and in some ways I can sympathise with them.
 
A club the size of Celtic can surely attract a top manager. I’m not expecting Klopp or Guardiola but we really should be moving forward and looking for a young proven manager (is that an oxymoron? I don’t know) Sure, Martin will create stability and build a team ready to compete but where’s the long term vision?
 
Martin O’Neill is a Celtic legend. He’s part of the bricks and mortar, the history and the highs and lows of Celtic. His blood runs green,white and orange and his heart beats to the tune of the Celtic faithful. He was never going to say 'no' when asked “help us out Martin” but his appointment - whilst celebrated because well Martin O’Neill - does leave us asking where the boards long term vision lies or if they have any whatsoever.
 
We all accept that the appointment of Wilfred Nancy was a disaster and yes the club needs to get it right but look at the big clubs, massive clubs south of the border, Liverpool sack Slot, within days they have their new man in place, Chelsea too. Then there’s Man City. Again I’m not suggesting Celtic are perhaps as big a name as these but this is how football clubs should be run, not reliant on former managers deputising until a permanent manager can be secured.
 
Celtic need a forward thinking plan or soon our rivals will be racing ahead while we remain firmly rooted in the here and now.
 
Finally, before anyone says “O’Neill is permanent manager”, I’m aware, for a year. If you think that’s good enough then I’m delighted for you, but in my book it’s a quick fix by a vision less collective of custodians.

Til next time ….

🐼 Gary Robertson is the TPQ Scottish football correspondent.

The Merry Go Round

Fintan Drury 🔖will see his book on Palestine launched at two County Dublin events this month.


Genocide: Sponsoring The Destruction Of Palestine.


Venue: Hodges Figgis, Dublin

Date: 18-June-2026

Time: 1800

With: Frances Black

Venue: Dunlaoighre

Date: 23-June-2026

Time: 1830

With: Dion Fanning


Book Launch 📚 Fintan Drury

Barry Gilheany 🔖 “Bash The Fash,” “Nazi Scum Off Our Streets,” “No Free Speech For Fascists” have been common refrains for the Left on the street and in spaces such as student union debating chambers and artistic and cultural venues since the 1970s. 


David Renton, a British historian and barrister with an academic interest in the far right, in No Free Speech For Fascists explores the genealogy of this totemic demand and investigates its genealogy in law, history and politics. He explains the origin of the “No Platform” carrion call in Britain in the 1970s as a deviation from what was a cornerstone of left-wing credo – free speech. 

The book shows how the demand for No Platform was meant to have a narrow application, in relation to a far-right politics that threatened everyone else. It contrasts the rival idea of opposition to hate speech which emerged contemporaneously and which is now enshrined in European and British law and explains how the rejection by both bodies of praxis to the American First Amendment tradition of free speech differs according to their respective perspectives. It traces out the crucial differences between No Platform and Hate Speech; firstly while the former emphasised the qualitative difference of fascism as a political movement while the latter insists that speech must be restricted if deemed humiliating or offensive to the putative victim and, secondly, anti-Hate Speech advocates rarely distinguish between strategies to counteract fascism from below or above. 

The Hate Speech narrative emerged with the rise of the articulation of grievances from social groups outside the spectrum of race: sex, gender, sexuality, disability and so on. Accordingly, far right speech has expanded beyond its old ‘remit’ of race to often encompass a Christian nationalist ideology with explicit anti-Islam themes or anti-globalist rhetoric. Renton argues for a repositioning of “No Platform” in the context of the prevalence of social media and the plurality of far-right speech and for a strategy to identify fascism within this diversity.

The book follows this thematic structure. The early chapters describe the discursive vicissitudes of “free speech.” The left until recently supported free speech in virtually all contexts, except fascism. The emergence of no platform in 1970s Britain in which it was conceived, and at a time of repeated street clashes between the right and left. However with the growth of the far right from the mid-1980s onwards, beginning with the breakthrough of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National in France, the right has become more experienced in claiming victimhood and has used its entitlement to free speech as a recruiting weapon. The far right’s support for free speech is, of course, self-limiting. For example, the far-right platform styles itself as “A social network that champions free speech, individual liberty and the free flow of information online” while hosting any number of militant opponents of free speech for defined ethnic or religious groups such as Jews and Muslims, including most notoriously Robert Bowers a Gab member and the perpetrator of the massacre of 11 Jewish worshippers at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in October 2018.[1]

Despite such atrocities, the relationship between freedom of speech and the far right has become an increasingly productive venture for the latter. Because of this, Renton devotes the middle chapters of his book to explaining why hate speech is an insecure basis to oppose fascist speech – or any form of hurtful speech. For the difficulty resides in the relationship between hateful speech and the particular victimhood status of the subaltern group targeted. As hinted at earlier the plurality and partial successes of previous struggles; there now exists an expanding vocabulary of concepts relating to marginalised or previously marginalised social groups: race, sex, disability, sexual orientation, age, or religious belief … Since nearly everyone occupies a subordinate position in relation to these axes and in recent years the far right has managed to position itself as the defender of the rights of one of these minority groups be it the late far right Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn who championed gay men against migrants or the British far right figure Tommy Robinson who poses as the hero of women and children against the imagined sexual depredations of Muslim men.[2]

In the online sphere, Renton argues that by campaigning against hate speech, left-wing radicals have unwittingly and unintentionally provided to the far right, censorship cause celebre martyrdoms. In the final chapters, the book argues that where a speaker belongs to a clearly non-fascist far right, the starting point should be to challenge the speaker’s view rather than to deny them a platform giving examples of activists succeeding in disrupting and mocking far right speeches, without having to their invitation to speak revoked. In short, the book argues for a strategic defence of no platform, as a necessary and limited incursion to free speech, a means of resisting groups with an identifiable imprint of fascist tradition.[3]

Chapter two describes how for roughly three centuries between the onset of the English Civil War in the 1640s and the formulation of No Platform in 1972, the defence of free speech was a fundamental liberal-left value. The left choose the side which best reflected its values – of equality for all and especially for groups such as workers or the poor who faced the greatest risk of being silenced. The right gave little or no support for campaigns for free speech. The basic dividing line was between those who wished to weaken the monarchy aristocracy while opposing censorship, and those who wanted the old rulers to remain in power unchallenged while opposing greater free speech. In the words of one historian of seventeenth century Britain, Sheila Lambert:

Attitudes to censorship have always been to some extent a matter of personal and political predilection … Writers who wish to champion the underdog and take the side of those who strive against authority find censorship everywhere, while those who prefer law, order and a quiet life are inclined to belittle the importance of occasional instances of repression, however ferocious those are shown to be.[4]

And right down to the last three decades of the twentieth century, that ideological division remained true in the Western world through the upheavals of the American and French Revolutions in the eighteenth century; the advent of the Industrial Revolution and the extension of the vote to the working classes in Britain, Germany and other emergent democracies in the nineteenth century; the cataclysm of two world wars in the twentieth century and the defeat of Nazism and Fascism and the anti-communist hysteria of the middle decades of the twentieth. In the United States, censorship in the 1950s was associated with a recognisably nativist, non-fascist far right American tradition (which in our times is being expressed by the MAGA movement) and was articulated in full by Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Senate sub-Committee on UnAmerican Activities which sought not only to blacken the reputation of prominent Democrat politicians and Hollywood actors as pro-Soviet Communist fellow travellers but to ban any writer speaking honestly about injustice in the United States. For example, Richard Wright’s novel Black Boy with its sympathetic depiction of a black man who escapes the Deep South before settling in Chicago was banned in Mississippi and its censorship was defended thus by the right-wing Southern Democrat Senator Theodore Bilbo:

Black Boy should be taken off the shelves of stores; sales should be stopped; it was a damnable lie; from beginning to end; it built fabulous lies about the South. The purpose of the book was to plant seeds of hate and devilment in in the minds of every American. It was the dirtiest, filthiest, most obscene [book], filthy and dirty, that came from a Negro from whom one could not expect better.[5]

In Britain, the deleterious effect of ‘obscene’ and ‘filthy’ literature on the minds of people was a similar preoccupation of a censorious establishment. Bear in mind, that at the start of the 1960s, the British Library still held a “Private Case” of 4,000 books considered so offensive that even bona fide researchers were refused access to them. In perhaps the defining case of obscenity in post-war Britain, the prosecution in 1960 of Penguin, the publisher of D.H. Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover under the Obscene Publications Act 1959, the prosecution counsel asked the jurors in his opening speech “Is it a book you would wish to have lying around in your own house? Is it a book that you would wish even your wife or your servants to read?”[6]

Fascist

But there was one period in this long durée, that the left permitted itself a partial derogation from free speech advocacy; this was, as Renton explains in Chapter Three, to counteract the threat of fascism either side of World War Two. As Denton explains, the left’s moral and ideological rationale from the 1920s onwards was that if fascism took power there would be the creation of a state in which all rival parties would be prohibited as duly transpired in countries such as Germany, Italy, Spain, and Romania. No platform in Britain meant physical resistance to Sir Oswald Mosley’s fascist Blackshirt movement. Their rallies would be disrupted by socialist and communist hecklers, forcing Mosley to cease speaking but also enabling his supporters to shine a spotlight on the hecklers so that they could be beaten as at the Olympia in 1934. Two years later came the iconic Battle of Cable Street when a crowd of 150,000 socialists and British Jews (alongside working-class Irish), summoned onto the streets by East End Communists, confronted Mosley, and the police, and prevented him from marching through the East End.[7]

The intellectual case for no platforming resistance to fascism was made by artists such as short story writer Thomas Burke who characterised fascism as “the regimentation of the people"; the novelist Storm Jamieson who maintained the “civilisation is incompatible with fascism” and the philosopher C.E.M. Joad who agreed that “Fascism suppresses truth”.[8] Likewise, for the anti-fascists of the 43 Group, a body of around 500 young Jewish men and women, many of whom had served in the British Army during the war and who arose to mobilise against the revived Mosleyites in 1946 and 1947, there could be no distinction between no platform and hate speech approaches (the theme of Renton’s book). For Mosley’s supporters were fascists, anti-black and anti-Jewish. Their speech was both fascist and hate speech.[9].

Quoting the historian Evan Smith, Renton in Chapter Four traces the origins of No Platform to a single source: a front-page article in Red Mole, the newspaper of the International Marxist Group, published on 18 September 1972 “No Platform for Racists.” Written by the IMG’s John Clayton, the piece began, “Up and down the country, fascist activists are organising racist agitation on a scale not seen since the 1930s.” Clayton identified the problem as the National Front and its allies, described by him as “fascist organisations” and the “extreme right.” The piece though was vague about the answer: “The pernicious activity of the extreme right must be knocked on the head.” As the decade progressed, this came to mean that, rather than physical confrontation with the far right, non-fascist organisations (unions, schools, universities) should refuse a platform to them. However there was strategic ambiguity over how to apply “no platform” In May 1974, the National Union of Students (NUS) at is spring conference passed a motion which recognised:

the need to refuse any assistance (financial or otherwise) to openly racist or fascist organisations or society[ies] … and to deny them a platform

But also found it:

necessary to prevent any member of these organisations or individuals known to espouse similar views from speaking in colleges whatever means are necessary (including disruption of the meeting).[10]

Renton points out that the NUS definition of “racist organisations” had a more specific reason than may be apparent in that it ignored institutionally racist speech as television shows like Till Death Us Do Part and The Black and White Minstrel Show and the anti-migration scare stories put out by the mass circulation tabloid press concerning the mini-waves to Britain of migration by Kenyan, Ugandan, and Malawian Asians. The NUS did so because the principal justification for the motion was not the racism of the National Front but the risk it posed, as a fascist organisation, to democracy and free speech. There were in fact two distinct justifications given for no platform. The first rested on “the anti-fascist wager” i.e. an analysis that fascism had greater potential for rapid growth and for violence than other right-wing movements, and that unless the fascists were prevented from organising, the risk of their eventual victory would cancel free speech for everyone else. The second variant of no platform was based on the primacy of anti-racism. It was based on the idea that racism was a kind of politics which asserted the superior moral worth of one individual over another, and that it was hurtful and caused suffering; and that the closing down of racist speech was necessary in order to make universities a space in which everyone could flourish.[11] All racism was, in this approach, equally abhorrent. One can see a forerunner of today’s definition of hate speech and the disparaging terms used by its detractors; “hurty words,” “snowflakes” and so on.

The strict anti-fascists were insistent that more moderate tactics were needed for the fight against racists with non-fascist politics: they could be heckled and embarrassed, but no further. They did not call for the likes of Enoch Powell to be banned from speaking as, no matter how abhorrently racist his “Rivers of Blood” speech was, he stood for the maintenance of parliamentary democracy and the toleration of views opposite to his own whereas the National Front sought a one-party state and the submission of the populace to a single leader. In the words of the left-wing journalist Nigel Fountain in The New Society magazine in 1969, it was “a formative fascist party”.[12]

The strategic duality of No Platform is reflected in two mass movements of the mid to late 1970s: the Anti-Nazi League (ANL) and Rock Against Racism (RAR). RAR was launched in winter 1976-1977 and over the five years of its existence, it organised more than 500 gigs and around a dozen carnivals (300 of the former alone in 1978). RAR was joined in 1977 by the ANL which at its peak had 50,000 members, sold some 750,000 badges and distributed 9m anti-fascist leaflets. Both campaigns grew in response to the sharp rise in racism following the press reporting of the arrival of Malawian refugees in Britain. RAR set out to challenge this racism’s vibe in popular music. The ANL, by contrast, had a singular campaign to stop the National Front, which in 1976-1977 seemed poised to oust the Liberals as the third main party in British politics. The central objective of the ANL was to prove that the National Front was a fascist party. The RAR was a movement of fans and musicians against all forms of racism, not merely fascism. Because the target of RAR was institutional racism rather than fascism, its publications largely abjured the phrase “no platform.” As a mass movement with tens of thousands of members, the ANL could realistically set itself the ambition of defeating the National Front in elections and preventing its speakers from being heard. The logic of no platform was to distinguish between fascists whose platform should be removed and racists who should be challenged but not prevented from speaking.[13]

The term “fascism” like its antonym “communism” is often abused by those who employ it to denigrate those who they disagree with. This statement is a shorthand summation of the central theme of David Renton’s book: that no platform is justified only by the fascist nature of the politics at which it is addressed. Renton argues that the tactic loses its legitimacy when it is applied to non-fascist speakers or groups, even they are relatively close to fascism. For the further a person is from fascism on the political spectrum, the less likely is that no platforming will be a principled or effective tactic against them.[14]

Accordingly, it is necessary for progressives to install a definitional firewall between the meanings of fascism and democratic right-wing discourse.

Thus Renton distinguishes fascism from conservatism as follows:

  • Fascism seeks a counter-revolution against the existing state and the creation of a one-party state; while conservatives will tolerate a greater range of voices, and while they might on occasion restrict speech, they do not share fascism’s totalitarian ambition.
  • Fascism rejects parliament and elections; conservatism upholds them.
  • Fascism employs street violence against its opponents; conservatism expects the existing state to deal with its enemies in the street.[15]

That said, for many liberals and leftists the boundaries between fascism and the contemporary far right may be rather more porous. Renton explains that because the term far right is defined relationally – i.e. in contrast to centre-right – it is always, potentially, an extremely vague and amorphous term. And, he, elaborates, it has only become broader in recent years as different kinds of right-wing groups have emerged.[16] Indeed, the term “far right” itself could conceivably fall into the same linguistic category of overreach as “fascism” as critics and targets of “far right” accusations reply that they only use the label to stigmatise those who they disagree with. Hence anti-immigration protestors increasingly proclaim *No Far Right But Right.” Alt-Right and radical right are possible alternative descriptors.

That said, Renton sticks with the appellation “far right” and maps out how the political far right has been able to draw on the energy of the cultural right i.e. through a gamut of online practices ranging from trolling, the emergence of video-blogging celebrities, many with audiences of hundreds of millions and who use the iconography of the far right such as Pepe the frog memes and the retweeting of far right accounts. He also traces out the “solidarity,” cross-national nature of far-right political organising though money, speakers, and the myths of white suffering. 

A key node in this network has been Tommy Robinson or Steven Yaxley-Lennon as a local expression of a pan-European and worldwide movement for free speech against Islam.[17] Tommy Robinson first emerged as the leader of the English Defence League (EDL) in 2009 a street movement comprised largely of football hooligans (“Tommy Robinson” was Yaxley-Lennon’s Luton Town hooligan moniker) and other fissiparous groups of alienated young men “radicalised” by the jeering of the returning Royal Anglian Regiment in Luton by the later-to-be-banned Islamist extremist group Al-Mujarahoun. A self-styled citizen journalist, Robinson went onto be a UK figurehead for the pan-European anti-Islam network, PEGIDA, and has been a central organising figure in the Unite the Kingdom demonstrations which have brought tens of thousands of marchers onto the streets of London. While Tommy Robinson and other far right leaders have explicitly distanced themselves from inter-war racism (Robinson has tattoos of Churchill on his arm), and style themselves as “Patriots”, his role in the online mobilisation of violent response to events in Southport in 2024 and, in the last fortnight, in Southampton and Belfast, (on top of his criminal record for violence, fraud and contempt of court) raises conundrums about No Platform that go to the heart of Renton’s book.

For although Robinson and those who he radicalises may not be fascists in a totalising ideological sense, his anti-Islam and anti-immigrant standpoints are little different from the explicit racism of the National Front of the 197Os. The Christian Nationalism which he has begun to espouse with its patriarchal views about the threat of Islam and of immigrants from “alien cultures” to “our women and children" while not a throwback to the 1930s has incipient totalitarianism to it and thus could pose a long-term threat to democracy. The explicit racial targeting that has been a feature of the riots in the UK in the last three summers negates any free speech rights which Robinson and kindred ideologues may claim.

For, ultimately, as Renton puts it, the best evidence of fascist intent is where a party or a speaker has a repeated history of using violence, where they have done this against a wide range of opponents (i.e. not just anti-fascists, their other racial/religious enemies), and where they make that threat within a structure which bears a recognisable comparison to fascism. It is at this juncture that its opponents can successfully label an opponent fascist and refuse them a platform.[18]

Should Tommy Robinson continue on this trajectory, and indeed others on the more ‘inside’ far right like Rupert Lowe MP and his Restore UK party (a breakaway from Nigel Farage’s Reform UK) who also stoked up the X storm that led to people of colour being burned out of their homes in Belfast last week, then the time will come to regard him as a fascist and no platform him and his retinue on that basis.

Likewise, across the Atlantic, while Donald Trump may not be a fascist in the inter-war European sense, a similar case can be made for no platform of the Proud Boys and the militias which have provided Trump and the MAGA movement with their muscle on the ground. For they have progressively shifted from threatening liberals, socialists, and anarchists to physically attacking anti-racists and those who were involved in the Black Lives Matter movement. With their propensity for violence, their belief in the immutable subaltern status of racialised others and an organisational structure based on battalions of young males and a leadership cult they resemble the social movements which formed the wellsprings of interwar European fascist movements.[19]

To conclude, this book is a valuable source for those wishing to understand the shifting terrain of the contemporary far right and provides a strategic guidebook for activists for appropriate resistance that draws upon the history of fascist movements and the journeys of the modern far or Alt Right. Written as it was in 2021, I feel that it could do with an update to cover the transformative moments of this decade – Covid; wars in Ukraine and the Middle East and the almost perpetual falls in living standards and how they feed into the mix. An update would also need to analyse the second election of Trump and the erosion of democratic standards and values in America; the electoral rise of populist nationalist right wing parties and their possible symbiosis with street level proto-fascist movements. But for now a valuable addition to anti-fascist and anti-racist literature.

References

[1] Renton, pp.5-6

[2] P.6

[3] P.7

[4] Pp.11-12

[5] P.25

[6] P.39

[7] P.35

[8] P.36

[9] pp.38-39

[10] P.41

[11] Pp.44-45
 
[12] Pp.44-46

[13] Pp.47-49
 
[14] p.150

[15] P.155

[16] P.154
 
[17] P.154

[18] Pp.158-59

[19] Pp.159-60 

David Renton, 2021, No Free Speech for Fascists: Exploring ‘No Platform’ in History, Law and Politics. Routledge. ISBN-13: ‎978-0367720629

⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter. 

No Free Speech For Fascists

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of Two Thousand And Four

 

A Morning Thought @ 3177

Frankie McKillen ✍ I am writing this because I have exhausted every proper channel available to me and the campaign against me continues.

I want to be clear from the outset. I am not writing this out of anger. I am writing this because what is happening to me deserves to be on the record — and because it raises questions that go beyond my own situation.

Belfast has watched in recent months as immigrants and newcomers have been forced from their homes by intimidation campaigns. The city expressed outrage. Rightly so. People who had done nothing wrong were targeted, isolated, defamed and driven out.

I am white. I was born and grew up here. And I am facing the same playbook — in the New Lodge.

I have lived in the New Lodge for eight years. Eight years without incident, without complaint, without dispute. I am known here. This is my community.

I should tell you something about myself. I was raised a Catholic. I was an altar boy. But I left organised religion behind long ago and I do not care about a person’s religion or their skin colour. I never have. What happens to one of us can happen to any of us. What is happening to me now is proof of that.

That changed only in the past two to three months — and the reason it changed is this: I moved old furniture and appliances out of my flat and new ones in. Oak furniture, a washing machine, a fridge. Most of this was done between 9am and midnight. I will be honest — it is possible that during March this caused some noise disturbance. I accept that. What I will not accept is what followed.

Because since the end of March I have not moved anything. The noise stopped. The campaign did not.

On 10 April a neighbour from the flat below confronted me. He threatened to get his nephews involved, offered me outside for a fight, and told me — in these words — to “get that fucking woman from your flat.”

It took me twenty to thirty minutes to work out what woman he meant. Then it dawned on me. He was referring to my oldest daughter. She had come to Belfast at the end of March — the 26th — for my birthday. She lives in France.

I do not know what he knew or thought he knew about her. I do not know that it matters. What I know is that a man who had never spoken to me before, who does not know me, chose those words about a woman who was visiting her father for his birthday.

On 2 May he forced his way into my flat, physically assaulted me, smashed a mirror and told me he would use the broken glass to cut my throat. He said he would gladly do life for it. I have a photograph of the smashed mirror timestamped that morning. I have text messages sent to my best friend immediately after. A friend who lives in the same block saw me shortly afterwards and observed that I was visibly shaken.

I reported this to NIHE. I was contacted by CRJ and attended mediation. I engaged fully and in good faith. I said that if my neighbour genuinely believed noise was coming from my flat at night he could be given my number to contact me directly. He never called.

On 27 May his family came to my door and threatened me. I called police. Police attended.

On 29 May police came to my flat unprompted, gave me a personal safety booklet and informed me there was a community threat against me — that people wanted me out of my flat. They advised me to install a camera at my front door.

On 5 June I met with NIHE. I brought my full timeline and supporting documents. No Anti-Social Behaviour Warning was issued. The NIHE officer stated that I should not have to leave my flat.

Three days later, on 8 June my neighbour saw me in the Tesco car park. He pointed directly at me and shouted — twice — that I am a paedophile and a tout. In public. In broad daylight. In an area covered by CCTV.

I did not respond. I walked on.

On 10 June I returned home to find a target — a crosshair sticker — placed on the exterior of my front door, directly beneath the peephole. I have photographs.

By 12 June a resident in the block was telling my friends to stay away from me.

I am not a paedophile. I am not a tout. I am a man who moved some furniture.

What is being done to me follows an identical pattern to what this city condemned when it was done to newcomers and immigrants. The accusations are designed to make a community hostile. The isolation is deliberate. The goal is to make life so unbearable that I leave.

I have lived in the New Lodge for eight years. I grew up in Belfast. This is my city and this is my community. I am not leaving.

I have engaged with NIHE, with CRJ, with the concierge, with police. I have documented everything. I have been patient and measured at every stage. That patience has been met with a target placed on my front door.

I am putting this on the record publicly because the proper channels, while not entirely without sympathy, have not stopped what is happening. The Tesco CCTV footage exists. The police records exist. The photographs exist. The timestamps exist.

My name is not what he is calling me in car parks and on stairwells.

I am Frankie McKillen, grew up in Ardoyne, lived in France a couple of years or so and now live in the New Lodge - people can call me a "cunt" all day long and if you are a friend, I will probably shake your hand and agree. A Paedophile and a Tout - No -An "Ardoyne Rockabilly, living in a New Lodge penthouse"?- 100 %.

🕮 Frankie McKillen is a Belfast Rockabilly

They Called Me A Paedophile And A Tout 🪶 In My Own City

Maryam Namazie ✊ Writing in Workers Liberty 31-March-2026.

On 1 March 2026, the day before she was killed, Yanar Mohammed called for accountability for sex trafficking and for ISIS crimes against women at a conference in Baghdad.

The next morning, on 2 March, she was assassinated at her home.

Part of her human-centred politics was a rejection of the false choice between external bombing and war and internal Islamism and authoritarianism. A false binary of “choice” that aims to remove people’s capacity to determine their own future.

Whether war, authoritarianism or Islamism, power always reliably relocates onto controlling women and is formalised into law, family structures, and the public space. The Personal Status Laws in Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan or compulsory veiling are not trivial. They are declarations of how authority will be organised through the regulation of women’s bodies, for the control of social reproduction itself.

Yanar Mohammed knew this and did not treat women’s oppression as one issue among many. Control over women’s bodies is not one mechanism of control. It is the mechanism through which power is made durable and stabilised and reproduced.

Structures

She understood that any movement that postpones women’s liberation is not delaying it but preserving the structures it claims to oppose.

Yanar Mohammed built shelters, networks, a generation of activists, and a body of thought as politics itself, not alongside it.

For decades, she built structures that made it possible for women to live outside systems of violence in conditions where the state and its institutions refused protection.

She stood against all forms of power that depend on women’s oppression under occupation, under Islamism, under constant threat and risk in Baghdad.

The people of Iran are now presented with a familiar false “choice” — external bombing or internal repression.

This is not a real choice but a political construction that removes society, workers, students, ethnic and sexual minorities and women as a third force, which Yanar represented.

Control

Bombs do not dismantle oppression. They rearrange it under new conditions. Internal authoritarianism maintains itself most visibly and fundamentally through the control of women as a means of controlling society.

Both depend on the same condition: the removal of social and political forces as actors. The state claims there is no alternative to its rule. Trump and Netanyahu claim change cannot happen without them.

Yanar Mohammed’s life and struggle, like Woman, Life, Freedom, rooted in Kurdish struggle, shows a third way. It identifies where power is reproduced daily, through the control of women’s bodies as a means of organising society.

Women are central because the system depends on their regulation. Therefore, women’s liberation is a condition of the liberation of our societies.

The beloved communist and feminist Yanar Mohammed was assassinated because this is the site of struggle at which oppressive systems are most exposed.

What she built was material, deliberate and revolutionary. It is what a better world is built on.

We commemorate her life and her struggle.

We and the world have lost a fierce and beloved comrade. The world was better with her in it; it is poorer now without her.

But her struggle continues. Long live Yanar Mohammed!

Maryam Namazie is a  is a British-Iranian secularist,
communist and human rights activist, commentator, and broadcaster.

The Third Force 🪶Workers, Women, And More

Dr John Coulter ✍ There was a lot of well-worded rhetoric of condemnation of the race riots which erupted in parts of the Province following an alleged stabbing incident in north Belfast.

But the vast majority of these carefully drafted press statements seemed to avoid the crucial ‘elephant in the room’ - what will be a workable, long-term solution to the illegal immigration crisis sweeping the UK?

This month’s riots were a mirror image of the race riots which engulfed my home town of Ballymena last year, where - as in the recent situation - a water cannon was deployed by police.

Whilst rightly condemning the mindless violence, the PSNI Chief Constable did make mention of the peaceful protests which had also taken place in areas such as Coleraine, but were vastly overshadowed by the rioting elsewhere.

Th trigger for the current racial unrest is the belief that illegal migrants and asylum seekers are sneaking into the UK via the open border with the republic.

The underlying problem is that when violence takes centre stage, all migrants are tarred with the same brush. Racial rioters do not take notice of the many folk from the ethnic communities who, since 1945, have integrated successfully into Ulster society.

Rioters do not distinguish between genuine legal migrants who are making a positive contribution to the economic life of the UK - especially those who work in the NHS - and the illegal ‘benefits brigade’ who see the UK’s benefit system as an easy ticket to manipulate.

Then there’s the asylum seekers who have genuine reasons, too, for being in the UK because of religious or political persecution in their home lands, such as Christians who have fled Nigeria or the Middle East.

Analysing the causes of the riots recently in my commentating on GB News TV, I emphasised the point that for a long-term solution to the immigration crisis to work, it required radical political surgery, not a sticky plaster.

For Northern Ireland, the problem - ironically since partition - has been the existence of the common travel area between the six counties of Northern Ireland and the 26 counties of Southern Ireland. A generation of folk in Northern Ireland still remember how the south was used as a springboard for the genocide and ethnic cleansing of the border pro-Union community by republican terrorists during the Troubles.

If any flow or even a trickle of illegal migrants coming from Southern Ireland into the UK is to be halted, then manned border posts and check points must be introduced.

That sounds like a very radical option, but there’s a perception that many politicians, community groups and places of worship are afraid to address the immigration ‘elephant in the room’ for fear of the current woke snowflake society branding them as racist, fascist, Nazi or Far Right.

However, given the recent riots - and the fact that next May voters in Northern Ireland will go to the polls in local council and Stormont Assembly elections, political parties will have to seriously address the immigration issue.

However, the real immigration issue is in mainland Britain where the so-called small boat crisis is perceived to be out of control, hence the recent surge in support for the Right-wing Reform UK party with some opinion polls predicting leader Nigel Farage MP could be a future holder of the keys to 10 Downing Street.

The root cause of the UK’s seeming inability to get control of the small boat crisis, which has seen tens of thousands of illegal migrants cross the English Channel to Britain, has been the UK’s lack of an iron wall of ships across that particular sea border.

If ever that point was being rammed home, it was the recent resignation of the Labour Defence Secretary John Healey who cited that military spending ‘fell well short’ of what was needed.

Put bluntly, the Royal Navy simply does not have the ships to create that iron wall across the English Channel which would force the small boat armada to turn back - and we are still not in the teeth of the summer months when the weather in the channel is expected to be better, thus encouraging more migrants to risk the crossing.

Even if a budget was magically approved to build more ships and train more sailors, that development will not become a reality within the next few months.

Put bluntly again, the real problem is the inability of the French authorities to stop the armada of small boats leaving French shores in the first place. If the French security forces were doing their jobs competently and effectively, none of the illegal migrant boats would leave the beaches.

Mind you, the inability of French authorities to control their own borders comes as no surprise. They could not do this in the Great War and they could not do it in the Second World War, so why should we in the UK be so surprised that France cannot hold sway over its own beaches!

Even if the French could gain control of their beaches, what about the tens of thousands of illegal migrants who have already arrived in the UK and have been housed in hotels before being moved into the community? What is radically required in an isolated holding centre along the lines of the American Camp X Ray, which existed in Cuba’s Guantanamo Bay.

Such a detention camp would be policed by the intelligence community so that every migrant or asylum seeker would be vetted to ascertain if they were genuinely fleeing persecution, or had the view - ‘we’re on our way to benefits Britain!’

The genuine migrants seeking political or religious asylum could be integrated into the community while the illegals would be deported to their countries of origin. But no one leaves the UK’s Camp X Ray until their identity is confirmed.

Integration must be the key to migrants and asylum seekers remaining in the UK. In this respect, the Christian Churches have a major role to playing in educating migrants in Western Christian values.

Last year, I attended a Presbyterian missionary rally at which a woman spoke passionately about how her church was assisting such integration in Northern Ireland. However, she emphasised one of the main difficulties they faced was these new comers’ views on women. To migrants - legal and illegal - from some cultures, women are viewed as second class citizens or sexual play things.

Likewise, many migrants arrive in the UK with little more possessions than the clothes they are wearing. Given that migrants have been housed in hotels where they get regular meals and clothing, the perception has been fuelled that UK authorities take the view - migrants before locals.

This perception has fuelled an anger and fear in some communities that migrants are being given preferential treatment especially as many local families are struggling with a cost of living crisis, having to rely on food banks, or even deciding if they can either heat their homes or cook a meal - the so-called ‘heat or eat’ dilemma.

One fact is certain in Northern Ireland. The current political parties will have to radically address the immigration ‘elephant in the room’ before next May’s elections, otherwise the door will be opened electorally for the real Far Right parties to enter the political arena with their hard line solutions.

Time is not on the side of the current local government and Assembly establishment parties if they want to avoid another repetition of this month’s horrible rioting.

Follow Dr John Coulter on Twitter @JohnAHCoulter
John is a Director for Belfast’s Christian radio station, Sunshine 1049 FM. 

Time To Tackle Immigration ‘Elephant’ Head On

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of Two Thousand And Three

 

A Morning Thought @ 3176

Anthony McIntyre 🔖 As a lover of television crime drama, the lure of good police investigations is magnetic. 


Even without the screen, where they have all featured, Harry Hole, Carl Morck or Harry Bosch have come up so often in crime novels I have read, the ground is more than adequately covered. 

If asked to pick a favourite investigator, it would be Sarah Lund from The Killing, arguably the best crime drama ever made. The Scandinavians can do it like no others. The actress who played Inspector Lund in The Killing, Sofie Gråbøl, featured in a drama I just finished watching three days ago. This time, in Chestnut Man: Hide And Seek, she was not a detective but the mother of a murdered teenager. 

When, in the past year, I read Night Train by Martin Amis, and was accosted by the statement from Detective Mike Hoolihan, a woman, I Am Police, the thought occurred that the time had come to once again pick up literature outside the novel sphere and read the account of someone who can authentically say I am Police.

Pat Marry, whom I had the pleasure of meeting once, served in An Garda Siochana for thirty years, reaching the rank of Detective Inspector. His police career began at twenty five, eight years after his application to join the force was turned down because he was too young. The young man refused to give up, and forty years ago stepped out from Templemore Garda College and onto a path that would lead him to marry murder, in that he became wedded to solving some of Ireland's most brutal killings. Regular news watchers of a certain age profile will readily recall the high profile murders of Rachel O'Reilly and Adrian Donohue, both of which ended in convictions and life sentences for those found guilty.

Marry takes the reader on a well plotted course while emphasising that at the start of his own career there was no such thing as a well plotted course. Detectives simply had to learn on the job where 'the dead became a natural part of your world.' As a murder detective death by natural causes was not his speciality. Overcoming his natural misgivings about a close proximity to death was solved by 'spending a night with a corpse' and the 'loud farts' that the recently deceased emitted. The author has the knack of making death if not murder per se morbidly entertaining. 

The technical evolution of An Garda is revealed through successive investigations. More science-driven expertise became available, the heavy gang tactics being displaced by forensic scrutiny. Whereas the Heavy Gang adopted the motto of the Saigon police - if a suspect is innocent beat him until he is guilty - Marry had neither the need nor the inclination to apply the heavy hand. There would be few scandals flowing from the laser light touch of DNA.

The book covers crimes I no longer remember, if I ever knew about them to begin with. In December 1995 in Belfast, where I lived, the IRA was killing people it viewed as being inhabitants of the world of illicit drugs. So while the killings of  Christopher 'Syd' Johnston, Martin McCrory and Fra Collins made the daily news bulletins and updates, the rape-murder in Blanchardstown of Marilyn Rynn the same month may not have registered. Partition had succeeded in ways possibly not conceived of at its inception, placing ear plugs and eye masks along the border. 

Whether investigating Mary Gough's death or that of Rachel Callely, Marry enters into a friendship with the deceased, believing they hold the answers to their own murder. The logic, when narrated, induces a chill:

. . .  there is a particular silence at a murder scene, one you don't hear anywhere else in your life. It's the silence of goneness, of someone suddenly ripped out of the world when they didn't want to go.

They can't speak but Marry sets out to become the ventriloquist through whom they can detail to the world what caused their demise. A scientific eye might raise a quizzical brow thinking it is a style that places too much emphasis on the subjective. Yet there can be no quarrel with success which is frequently guided by the hunch that interacts with rather than behaves independently of the lab. 

Marry is not a firm's man and is unafraid to speak out about the culture and hierarchical deficiencies that in his view prevent the force from achieving better results. Like many bureaucracies, An Garda seems staffed by too many who fail to see what is in front of their noses because their position within the hierarchical structure depends on them not seeing. That failing prioritises loyalty over ability leading to an inhibition of initiative 

Pat Marry rings authentic in a way that his colleague on the force, Gerry O'Carroll, never did, either in his columns or media interviews. Brawn over brain, intimidation before intellect led to huge embarrassment for O'Carroll particularly in the Kerry Babies case. Nothing like that dogged Marry's career.  Despite my curiosity in the genre, I don't intend picking up O'Carroll's autobiography The Sheriff. Fiction presented as fiction is great. Fiction dressed up as fact - the sort of book that finds its true use value in stabilising an old settee that has lost a caster.

As for the literary output of Pat Marry, told matter of fact, bereft of self serving waffle, the average reader and criminology student will find plenty in these pages to prompt them to go for the remainder of Marry's books. Just don't expect to find them stamped 'Remainder.' 

Pat Marry, 2020, The Making Of A Detective. Penguin. ISBN: 978-0241985311

⏩Follow on Bluesky

The Making Of A Detective

Zeteo UK ★ Written by Owen Jones.

An attempted beheading in the street. Yet no incendiary front pages followed. No politicians issued statements inciting fury. There were no riots, no pogroms.

This was a terror-related attack by a white neo-Nazi, Alina Burns, against a Kurdish barber last year. Similarly, when two teenagers stabbed to death a random British Asian father as he delivered groceries to his mother in Wales, Nigel Farage did not demand “pure, cold rage.” When a white British man raped a Sikh woman, believing her to be Muslim, the Daily Telegraph did not ask if the UK had “descended into anarchy.”

And when a white man stabbed a Saudi student to death in Cambridge, GB News didn’t host a segment headlined, ‘British people are fed up!’ Indeed, there’s no evidence it covered this hideous murder at all.

Belfast burned this week. The direct culprits were racist thugs who set fire to homes they believed migrants lived in. Families with little children had to be rescued from the flames. Businesses and cars were burned. Vehicles were stopped so the mobs could search for migrants. We have a word for this: it is a pogrom.

None of this can be divorced from Northern Ireland’s own history. In the summer of 1969, loyalist thugs burned one in 20 Catholics out of their homes in Belfast – the biggest act of ethnic cleansing in Western Europe since World War II. Perhaps some of their grandchildren continued this hateful tradition.

Continue @ Zeteo UK.

But there is another context for this pogrom. For years, British media and political elites have portrayed Britain as descending into violent mayhem because of immigration.

That’s all based on a lie. There has unquestionably been a huge increase in immigration over the last two decades, and it has made Britain far more diverse than it was. Yet by any measure you pick, violence in Britain has plummeted over that same period. Overall surveyed crime is about a third of what it was in 2002. The murder rate in England and Wales is nearly half what it was in 2003. In London – the UK’s most diverse city – it is at its lowest ever recorded level. Hospital admissions caused by assault, knife assault, bodily force, blunt objects and firearms have all fallen sharply.

Detailed research by the Oxford Migrant Observatory finds no significant relationship between immigrants and crimes. Foreign nationals are underrepresented when it comes to violent offences and robbery.

The Belfast Riots Are An Anti-Migrant Pogrom 🪶 And The British Media Has Serious Questions To Answer

Ukraine Solidarity Group ✊ A Digest of News from Ukrainian Sources ⚔ 8-June-2026.

In this week’s bulletin

⬤ More evidence of Russian torture.
⬤ Russian “Double-Tap” Strikes.
⬤ Discontent with Putin.
⬤ Russian socialists’ solidarity with Ukraine.
⬤  Comment: Andriy Melnik.
⬤ Ukrainian Children’s Rights Violated.
⬤ Russia Persecutes Crimea Media.
⬤ Interview: Ukrainian on Sumud Flotilla.
⬤ Russia’s unlawful deportations

News from the territories occupied by Russia

Journalist’s Day: How Russia Persecutes Media in Occupied Crimea (Crimea Platform, June 6th)

Faces of Resistance: Artem Herasymov, a Political Prisoner from Crimea (Crimea Platform, June 5th)

12-year sentence over abduction and savage torture of slain Euromaidan activist Yury Verbytsky (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, June 5th)

Five Ukrainians tortured for ‘confessions’ because the FSB couldn’t catch the partisans who killed a Russian-installed traitor (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, June 4th)

Unholy order: Russia building system of religious control in occupied Ukraine (The Insider, June 3rd)

Violations of Ukrainian Children’s Rights in the Context of War: A Publication by ADC Memorial Brussels and KHPG (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, June 3rd)

Russia imprisons Crimean political prisoner 2,200 kilometres from her infant daughters (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, June 3rd)

Weekly update on the situation in occupied Crimea (Crimea Platform, June 2nd)

61-year-old Ukrainian tells Russian court how he was forced to listen, while bound to a chair, as his wife was tortured (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, June 2nd)

New propaganda film on how Russia ‘protects’ the Ukrainian children whose lives it destroyed (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, June 1st)

Widow of Mariupol defender sentenced by Russian occupation ‘court’ to 14 years for ‘spying’ (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, June 1st)

ZMINA took part in a meeting with UNESCO and human rights defenders on growing repression against journalists in occupied Crimea (Zmina, May 28th)

News from the front

Russian advance stalls, Ukraine holds Kramatorsk (Meduza, 6 June)

An Italian veteran of the Kurdish resistance fell defending Ukraine (Facebook, May 29th)

News from Ukraine

Cedos Studies Gender Equality and Inclusion in Ukrainian Schools (Cedos, June 4th)

Ukrainian ombudsman reports on the State of Human Rights in 2025 (Zmina, June 4th)

How to build an effective social protection system: Cedos and UNICEF in Ukraine held an expert workshop (Cedos, June 2nd)

Senior Care in Wartime Ukraine: A Fragmented Continuum of Arrangements Inside an “Unpromising Sector” (Social Inclusion, 2026)

War-related news from Russia

Gini and his master: How Russia manipulates statistics to conceal inequality (The Insider, June 5th)

‘We won’t give up’: OVD-info responds to “foreign agent” status (Meduza, 5 June)

Economic forum underway, drone strikes on St Petersburg (Meduza, 4 June)

“You are not Russian any more”: daughter of Putin lieutenant convicted for supporting Ukraine (Mediazona, 4 June)

Fake foreigners, fugitive criminals, and Holocaust deniers: Who ended up in Moscow’s “international tribunal on crimes of Ukrainian Nazis” (The Insider, June 4th)

Three causes of Russia’s demographic crisis (Posle Media, 3 June)

War, economic crisis, and discontent in Putin’s Russia (Tempest, June 1st)

Inside Russia’s system of torture – YouTube Documentary (Kyiv Independent, 2026)

Analysis and comment

High time to think differently about Ukrainian nationalist leader Andriy Melnik (John-Paul Himka / Ukraine Solidarity Campaign, 3 June)

Russian socialists: “Solidarity means accepting Ukrainians’ pain and suffering as our own” (People and Nature, June 3rd)

Interview with Andriy Movchan, who sailed to Gaza with the Global Sumud Flotilla (Transnational Institute of Social Ecology, May 27th)

Combatants, Mercenaries or Human Trafficking Victims? (Intn’l Fed’n for Human Rights, April)

Research of human rights abuses

The Russians’ “Double-Tap” Strike Tactics (Tribunal for Putin, June 5th)

KHPG, Memorial & OVD.info added to ‘List of terrorists & extremists’ for reporting on repression in Russia and occupied Ukraine (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, June 5th)

Russia Unlawfully Deported Ukrainian Prisoners to Its Territory (Dignity, May 2026)

International solidarity

Help Ukraine’s children learn in safety: aid appeal (Ukraine Solidarity Campaign, 3 June)

Fundraising for combat medics (Solidarity Collectives)

   

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Have you seen TRY ME FOR TREASON yet?

Free to watch and download on Youtube. Russian anti-war protesters’ speeches in court. More information at Try Me For Treason

YouTube

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🔴This bulletin is put together by labour movement activists in solidarity with Ukrainian resistance. More information at Ukraine Information Group.

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News From Ukraine 💣 Bulletin 199

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