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Gary Robertson ⚽ Ronan Keating, the only member of the band “Boyzone” who along with the late Stephen Gately, had any discernible talent once sang “life is a rollercoaster” and it most certainly is if you’re a football fan.

I’ve gone through several drafts of this trying to express my disappointment without singlehandedly filling every swear jar from Dumfries to Donegal and John O’Groats to Mizen Head.
 
It’s been a trying time to say the least for fans of Scotland’s premier club.

Elated and riding high after a 3-0 home win Celtic managed to capitulate in scenes reminiscent to the Battle of Stalingrad.
 
The wonder goals scored at Paradise were of little comfort on a night that started so promisingly and ended up one of the worst, if not the worst, in Celtic’s illustrious history.
 
Captain McGregor putting the Celts 4-0 up with an early goal for the visitors and it should have been “Goodnight Vienna” but instead the Austrian side turned on a performance that fans will remember forever.
 
Wave after wave of attack, and when Usor scored in the 32 min to draw the teams level on the night no one in green and white could have imagined what lay ahead in the second half.
 
I won’t bore you with details, we’ve all seen it, whether to cry some more, to be enraged or to laugh the Keystone Cops of Scottish football had by the final whistle in 90 mins thrown away a 4-0 lead.
 
4-4 and as I wrote on Bluesky “awaiting the inevitable”. It didn’t take long for LASK to split Celtic wide open and score a fifth in the 109th minute.
 
Champions League dreams over for yet another year. A scenario that’s becoming all too familiar at Celtic Park and whilst dropping into the Europa League isn’t quite the end of days I’m struggling personally to find the necessary appetite to get excited at this when the holy grail for Scottish clubs of a place in the Champions League group stages was well within our grasp. Celtic’s to lose and lose they did.
 
Defeat is painful, incredibly painful, but I’d like to say to the morons who caused Luke McCowan to close his Instagram after abuse including those wishing him dead. Y you’re not football fans you’re idiots grow the fuck up. Sure have a moan, criticise but there’s a line you don’t cross and you did. Absolutely shameful.

So to Thursday and Rangers in Poland. Now after Celtic’s defeat I could make loads of jokes about H*ns in Poland, like the German guy who’s stopped at the Polish border and asked “occupation?” and the German replies “no just visiting” but I’m too depressed.
 
Even the joy of Rangers crashing out of Europe altogether, on penalties, hardly lifted my spirits. There’s no blue pill to raise this mood.

Others fared with mixed results - Hibernian just missing out with a 3-2 home defeat by Belgian side Gent, Hearts doing better in Austria drawing 2-2, with Rapid Vienna qualifying for the Conference League winning 4-3 on penalties.

So with that pain out the way let’s move onto the weekend.

Celtic at home to Falkirk on Saturday. A nervy 2-1 victory for the Celts with a double from Duran. As the old adage says it ain’t over til the fat lady sings and as she was limbering up to laud Celtic with praise a Donovan own goal made the final 20 mins or so agony for the majority of the almost 59,000 crowd.
 
Before the match a banner was unfurled that read “world class embarrassment” - it was hard to argue otherwise.

 ⚽ ⚽ ⚽ ⚽ ⚽

Other results in the SPL ⚽

A 2-1 victory at home for Hearts over St Johnstone and a 4-0 demolition of Kilmarnock, who sit routed at the foot of the table with a UK Eurovision score of Nul points, by the enigmatic Dundee United.

So to Sunday, and Motherwell throwing away a 2 goal lead at St Mirren found themselves 3-2 down after 3 quick fire goals in ten minutes from the Saints and only a late 93rd min goal from Kanga (a wonder strike by the youngster) rescuing a point for the Steelmen.
 
Elsewhere, Hibernian managed to hold on for a 2-1 victory over Dundee at Dens Park.

The game of the weekend, at least in terms of once former great clubs, saw McInness' Rangers face Robinson's Aberdeen. This wasn’t a game of high quality (I feel I made have said that before about Rangers) the 3 points returning to Glasgow courtesy of a Shankland penalty. Of course I’m sure Rangers fans won’t be too concerned - after all a victory is a victory but this was not a great advert for Scottish football. Sloppy passing, wayward shots and at times disinterested looking players - Gassama who one minute looks like a world class player then disappears from view - add in a card happy referee who issued 9 yellows - 6 to Aberdeen and 3 to Rangers - and what we watched was a game of bizarre decisions, yellows that should have been reds, bookings for innocuous challenges while worse were ignored. Referee Matthew McDermid was determined to make himself the centre of attention.
Aberdeen manager Stephen Robinson said after the match when asked for his thoughts said “if i tell you my thoughts I’ll get six match ban.” Well, no ban for me so I’ll say it instead. Appalling refereeing. Honestly the standards are slipping every week in Scotland and today’s showing was amateurish.

So that’s pretty much it for the summer - meteorological summer ends on the 31st August - it’s been a rough week but one we managed to navigate. Somehow.

So all that remains is for me to say thanks for listening to my moaning, have fun, stay safe be happy

Til next time ……

🐼 Gary Robertson is the TPQ Scottish football correspondent.

Goodnight Vienna

Barry Gilheany 🔖 Reviews an exploration of the history of Jew Hating. 


Part One

The history of antisemitism or hostility to Jews or representations of Jewry and contemporary attempts to define the phenomenon through means like the International Holocaust Remembrance Association (IHRA) definition have led to fierce scholarly and political contestation over, in particular, criticisms of the State of Israel and Zionism. 

There is a fair degree of consensus around the amoebic, shape shifting nature of antisemitism with differing meanings and interpretations depending on the motive and ideological hue of the particular antagonist and its conspiratorial, cabalistic themes. Professor Sander L. Gilman takes a novel approach this ancient hatred with the clue very much in the name. He takes issue with those scholars and writers who trace an unbroken and almost primordial lineage of antisemitism from ancient history by conceptualising it in the plural; namely antisemitisms. He sets out his case throughout his book by contending that defining antisemitism is intrinsically linked to their function in time and space, and also in the reactions it engenders from those who identify as Jewish. He argues that the distinction between ‘right’ and ‘left’ antisemitisms, or ‘Islamic’ and ‘Jewish’ antisemitism, or ‘Western’ or ‘Asian’ antisemitism, freezes moments in time and space. He therefore redefines antisemitism in the plural as antisemitisms, for as they are always situational, every specific manifestation of an antisemitism must be understood not as a link in an unbroken chain but is part of a series of isolated moments dependent on their complex formation. Therefore it is impossible to map out a coherent, chronological ‘history of antisemitism’.[1]

So antisemitisms, like all forms of xenophobia, creates their own object, in this case ‘the Jews’ – and this often-contradictory category is then projected onto people who may or may not identify as Jewish, however defined, but who may then respond to such labels as Jews.[2]

As stated already, Gilman challenges the received wisdom of the singular and indivisible accounts of the persecution of the Jews by historians like Robert Wistrich, who developed a unitary concept of antisemitism as the ‘longest hatred,' the title of his 1991 book, to differentiate it from all other manifestations of xenophobia. For Wistrich, antisemitism is ever ‘static and unchanging’ and proves that specific forms of ‘religious or ethnic hatred (are) inevitable’, if contingent. Wistrich’s version of antisemitism became the overdetermined and constant node in public discourse that ‘produced a ‘largely monolithic picture of both the perpetrators and victims of antisemitism’ and homogenised the ‘dominant attitudes of non-Jews towards Jews (as having been) unremittingly hostile.’ [3]

For Hannah Arendt, the idea of an eternal antisemitism resembled the idea of the eternal Jew:

The notion of an unbroken continuity of persecutions, expulsions, and massacres from the end of the Roman Empire to the Middle Ages, the modern era, and down to our own time, frequently embellished by the idea that modern antisemitism is no more than a Secularised version of popular medieval superstitions, is no less fallacious (though of course less mischievous) than the
Corresponding antisemitic notion of a Jewish secret society that has ruled, or aspired to rule, the world since antiquity.[4]

Gilman does explain that Wistrich’s schema was reactive to the challenging of such views after the Holocaust by protagonists such as Arendt. However he emphasises that making this simply reactive, as does David Nirenberg’s 2013 Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition and describing it as an unmediated phenomenon that can be traced as far back as ancient Egypt (and the writings of the third century BCE priest Manetho) or ancient Greece and Rome and culminates and is consummated in the Holocaust, does not afford any more clarity. He critiques Nirenberg’s notion of anti-Judaism as ‘evoking the imagined figure of the Jew as an absolute contrast to whatever problems or discomforts that the non-Jewish world needs to resolve.' For, just as in Arendt’s syllogism, by anti-Judaism Nirenberg, ibn Sander’s estimation, means evoking the imagined figure of the Jew as an absolute contrast to whatever problems, crises or discontents that the non-Jewish world needs to resolve. The catchcry  that ‘it is always the Jew’s fault' always receives the mirror image of a rigidly reactive response from scholars writing in thematic unitary accounts of Jewish disadvantage and suffering.[5]

Gilman begins from the premise that when xenophobia becomes concrete in contemporary prejudices, it requires a fixed, unchanging object: a stereotype. For stereotypes reflect the need to concretise our fears of difference and thus reflect our wobbly sense of our Now. There are fewer examples of how glaringly obvious this truism is in the reaction of European and North American populations to the waves of mass migration that are the consequences of globalisation and its malcontents and the multiple returns of the repressed for the colonial empires of the past. Our current temporal-spatial moment implores us to take on board the understanding that regardless of how homogenous or consistent antisemitisms look, this one-dimensional rigidity is a property of the study of antisemitisms which commenced in the age which witnessed the self-conscious move from theology to science. Both these worlds created their own ‘imaginary communities; whether national or religious or both, into which human beings seamlessly insert themselves.'  However, both worlds demand, each in their own way, clearly defined borders, specific ideas of consistency and clear statements of the nature of evidence, all of which simply obscure the innately wobbly nature and lack of certitude of both science and theology.[6]

Throughout the 81 page Introduction to his book (which deserves to have the status of a free-standing piece of scholarship in its own right), Gilman navigates the description of the ‘longest hatred’ from the emergence of the pseudoscience of race which bowdlerised the works of genuine scientists such as Charles Darwin and Louis Pasteur to formulate the idea that the Jews were a homogenous category and that all individuals labelled by the ethnography and race science of the day were of a single stock. Most historians of antisemitism trace the origin of the word ‘antisemitism’ itself as arising in the science of the 19th century as a marker of the break between European Christian religious views of the Jews (none of which were ever monolithic) and the new scientific (read: biological) discourse. The common wisdom is that unitary antisemitism evolves from the ethnology of the Enlightenment, where the term ‘Semite’ became a designation of a language group. By the time it appeared in the 19th century with the philosopher Ernest Renan and the Sanskrit scholar Christian Lassen, ‘semitic’ had been converted from a linguistic category into one weaponised by the new science of race. Like many of his contemporaries, Renan argued the language of a people or collective is moulded by their fixed mentality. Such claims on linguistic competence and reductionism came to be the driver for later fantasies of limitations to citizenship, such as in Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel’s notion of national Geist (spirit).[7]

The popular usage of the word ‘antisemitism’ in the political context that is familiar to today’s audiences in 1879 after the political journalist Wilhelm Marr in his widely read pamphlet attacking the Jews, Der |Weg zum Siege des Germanenthuns uber das Judenthum (The Way to Victory of the Germanic Spirit over the Jewish Spirit, 1873). That year Marr founded the League of Antisemites to combat Jewish influence in Europe. His deployment of biology, not language, as a marker of Jewishness laid forth in his Der Judenspiegel (The Mirror of the Jews, 1862) prefigures the discourse and practice of Jew hate that was to climax in the European continent-wide auto de fe of the Nazi Shoah/Holocaust in the 1940s:

It is a fact that every social relationship, in which the Jews get a kind of preponderance over the Christians, cannot persevere. The reason is not religious hatred from one side – such hatred does not exist among educated people; it is, however, the very alien character of his very being, which is – if we may say so – ‘chemically’ unbearable, and which leads to the resolution of the body through, if we may say so, an ‘inorganic process … We can turn the issue around or toss it as much as we would like, yet we’ll always arrive at the point where we must admit that it is not a specific Jew but the Jews as a collective (Judenthum), which is disgusting from our perspective. [8]

Gilman argues that the desire to distinguish modern antisemitism is not only ahistorical but futile, For if antisemitisms are opportunistic, they avail of the underlying belief systems of those who articulate such positions and are congruent with the belief system of their audiences. Religious ‘anti-Judaism’ may well have arisen out of the splintering of religious sects that defined themselves obsessively as not Jewish, in their claims to being a universal, not a sectarian, religion, developing into Christianity (with Paul) and with Islam (with Muhammad). All defined themselves in opposition to their fantasy of a homogenous Jewry rather than to the multiple strands of Jewry and Judaism operating in their time. Antisemitisms in the ancient world, in the world of Islamic expansion and in the explosion of Western colonial expansion were never homogenous, even while relying on conflicting images of economic competition (which linked the Jews as merchants and moneylenders in the image of the covetous ‘Greek’ or ‘Armenian’ as well as local Christian traders and usurers) and blending it when needed with theological claims about the nature of money.[9]

The overarching theme in Gilman’s book is the need of antisemites to define the Jew in such a way that that image could operate in their construction of their ever shifting but supposedly homogenous world view. But another countervailing theme is the dynamic of the responding redefinition not only of Jewishness but of Judaism in modernity and latterly the emergence of Zionism and the role of the State of Israel as the arbiter of who is Jewish. During the upheavals of the early stages of the Enlightenment and the emergence and expansion of modern nation states in the 18th century, three radically different approaches to Jewish religious practice arose in the Global North in response to the diasporic state of Jews: Moses Mendelssohn, the Vilna Gaond the Bael Shem Tov. For Gilman, the antisemitic complexion of antizionism was the denial of the possibility of nation-building to the Jews while other diasporic groups like the Poles, Irish (and later the Armenians) had their historic homelands.

Antizionism was also Jewish when acculturating forces within established Jewish communities from Berlin to New York to Hong Kong saw Jewish state-building or the Yishuv in Palestine as inimical to their own ideological projects whether socialist Bundist, the seeking of Jewish autonomy within European states or participation in global proletarian revolution, at least until the literal incineration of these projects in the Holocaust. Contemporary far-left Jewish antizionist groups like Jewish Voice for Labour in the UK or Jewish Voice for Peace are echoes of this contra-Zionist past. In post-Holocaust Jewry religious Zionism, hitherto a minority voice among political and cultural Zionists, came to define both postwar Judaism as well as postwar Zionism in the Diaspora, but not in the new State of Israel, where legal definitions remained vague notwithstanding the Law of Return in 1950, which states ‘every Jew has the right to come to this country as an oleh (immigrant). This led to constant revisions always juggling evidentiary categories (religion, peoplehood, ethnicity, ancestry) employed to define or exclude who was to be defined as a Jew. Simply ‘believing’ oneself to be a Jew as an ethnic identity, according to the Israeli Supreme Court, without also claiming to be a follower of Judaism, however defined, was not sufficient. Yet rarely did the courts base their interpretation on any claim that being Israeli was rooted in the divinely sanctioned culmination of biblical prophecy as came to be accepted in the Diaspora among all forms of Judaism, from Reform to Ultra-Orthodox. In addition, the widely internationally criticised re-labelling of multi-cultural and multi-ethnic Israel as a nation-state of the Jewish People in 2018 (a Jewish version of Hegel’s Geist) begged the question of the meaning of Jewishness within Israel; from the ultra-Orthodox to the secular, from the ‘Arab’ (Mizrachi) to the ‘European’ (Ashkenazi) to the radical secular but nevertheless Jewish Israeli.[10]

Gilman then introduces two further faux popular and faux philosophical dimensions to antisemitisms and various contingencies; namely lumping and love of imaginary Jews or philosemitism. Lumping entails the collapsing of ‘lumping’ of all shades of Judaism and Jewish identity into one amorphous and undifferentiated mass. Who is Jewish enough to decide who is a Jew? Are Jews adherents of a religion or a theology; are they an ethnicity or have they a shared ancestry; are they are a historical or national entity (this particular question animates Shlomo Sands’ seminal but controversial 2010 work The Invention of the Jewish people and his advocates and detractors; Gilman does not engage with Sands’ enquiry); are they a peoplehood (advocated by Mordechai Kaplan in the 1940s) or pariahs (proposed by Hannah Arendt at the same moment); do they share a collective identity (at the heart of post-Holocaust religious Zionism as claimed by Joseph B. Soloveitchik in the 1950s); are they a genetic cohort (pace Isabel Wilkerson reanimating Hannah Arendt and also evoking the widely disproved Kathar hypothesis about the genetic origins of East European Ashkenazi Jews), or indeed are they all or none of the above. This question is essentially the sub-text to Antisemitisms. And for Gilman, the core is that individuals believe the definition that they ascribe and act upon it. Therein lies plural, not singular definitions of antisemitism(s).[11]

Seeing Jews and Jewry through the frame of ethnicity as defined by Max Weber therefore solidifies the one-dimensional discourses around them which so bedevils the pluralist and historically contingent analyses of antisemitism(s) to which Professor Gilman’s makes such an original and vital contribution. Weber’s 1922 explanation of ‘ethnicity’ is ‘the belief in group affinity, regardless of whether it has an objective foundations’ has significant consequences especially for the formation of a political community and the solidification of amative identity within it. For Gilman, the keyword is ‘belief’. If one believes that they are part of a community, no matter how one chooses to identify it, there is an affective property to one’s identification that then defines the group. Conversely, constituting or ‘othering’ a group to which one does not belong, defined in equally affective terms, as a collective that is one’s antithesis (antisemitisms) or with which one closely identifies (philosemitisms). Neither ethnicity, nor history nor biology, nor national boundaries is primary; belief is core.[12]

In his critique of philosemitism(s) (romantic and projective identification with the Jew or Jews as a collective), Gilman stresses that it is not the automatic antonym to antisemitism(s). Hatred of the Jews is not offset by the love of the Jews. Both lump all individuals adjudged by the speaker or writer as Jewish (enough) into a single, unidimensional category that aids the designs of the anti- or philosemite. In his book Smart Jews: The Construction of the Idea of Jewish Superior Intelligence at the Other End of the Bell Curve, Gilman drew attention to the drawbacks of such claims that Jews were (and are) smarter than everyone else particularly in pecuniary matters. Philosemites in the words of the historian Daniel Goldhagen are ‘antisemites in sheep’s clothing’. To this may be added the notorious ‘chosen people’ trope or calumny. These are the claims, made in falsely benevolent ways, that the Jews as a philosemitic category are more moral or more than just a collective or that they are ‘chosen’ in the sense of being superior or uniformly burdened by their chosenness; a blade that cuts equally in opposite directions: it is a claim on obligation as well as on difference.[13]

Some clarification is needed on the genealogy of the ‘chosen people’ notion. The “chosen people” refers to a group of people selected by God for a special covenant, mission or purpose, most prominently the Jewish people in Judaism. It is rooted in the Hebrew Bible, particularly the Books of Deuteronomy and Genesis, where God establishes a covenant with the Israelites, promising them a unique relationship and responsibility. Chosenness is not about privilege and superiority but about responsibility; Jews are called upon to uphold ethical teaching, pursue justice and serve as a moral example to the world. The historical experiences of exile, persecution and resilience illustrate the burdens and responsibility associated with this calling.[14]

The ethical imperatives of the Covenant no doubt motivate the opponents of the injustices foisted upon and the war crimes committed against the Palestinian Arab peoples in the West Bank within Judaic traditions.

‘Philosemitism’ as a term had been coined in Imperial Germany in the 1880s as the obverse of political antisemitism but by the 1920s a Jewish reference work, the Judisches Lexikon, recognised that the defenders of the Jews were ‘generally free from an appreciation of Judenthum as such. Rather, philosemitism too had a catalogue of prejudicial positions:

  1. the negative understanding of Judentum implicit in all discussions
  2. the lachrymose language regarding the Jews’ real and purported failings; 
  3. the critical role of the Christian or German Self -preservation in all pro-Jewish discussions
  4. the ambivalent attitude towards positive Jewish characteristics.[15]

The false logics of philosemitisms are illustrated in our times by the ways in which after the Hamas attacks on 7 October 2023 and the consequent brutal onslaught on Gaza by the Netananyu administration in Israel where the charge of antisemitisms became a weapon to attack any and all institutions and individuals especially by the second Trump administration in the US deemed to be hostile to Israel even though opposition to the Gaza war often did not come from an antizionist or pro-Hamas standpoint. 

As a result of the effective right-wing usage of the rigid equivalence between antizionism and antisemitism in the IHRA’s definition of the latter which became state policy, everyone, especially Jews, supporting any of the positions on the spectrum of Palestinian activism, no matter how pacifist and anti-Hamas, became ‘part of a highly organised, global Hamas Support Network and therefore effectively a terrorist support network.' The Trump administration translated these claims into action by arresting and detaining the most outspoken pro-Palestinian activists, especially those on academic visas, as undesirable aliens. Trump also used supposed antisemitism to suspend grants to medical research institutes, which has no conceivable connection to antisemitism as well as to demand the dismissal of members of academic Jewish studies departments whose views his administration found  unpalatable (The Good Jew/Bad Jew dichotomy or binary constitutive of both anti and philosemitism(s) discourse.[16]

The wobbliness of philosemitic and philoIsrael stances on the part of particular adherents is illustrated by the deconstructed belief systems of Christian Zionism. This ostensible anti-antisemitism is in reality a modern evangelical fantasy which sees the ingathering of the Jews, a return to their biblical rootedness in Israel, as the essential stage for the second coming of the Messiah, heralded by the destruction of the Jews (or at least those who do not convert to Christianity). But, of course, it is these Jews who must undergo conversion because of their guilt for the crime of regicide i.e. the crucifixion of Christ. The universal lesson that Gilman asks us to take on board that when people fall in love with collectives, as there are always ulterior reasons for doing so. In the words of Jean-Paul Sartre antisemites invent their own Jews and then map their Judeo ego ideals on complex, real, flesh and blood, living cohorts of individuals, with all the complexities of the human condition.[17]

Another complex set of relationships but which are absolutely crucial to the understanding of Professor Gilman’s antisemitisms schematics is that between antisemitism, antizionism and the spectre of the ‘self-hating Jew. This will be the subject of Part II of this review which I intend to publish next week.

References

[1] Sander L. Gilman, Antisemitisms. A History of Jew Hating. London: Reaktion Books pp.12-13

[2] Ibid, p.13

[3] Ibid, p.14

[4] Hannah Arendt (1973), The Origins of Totalitarianism (San Diego, CA, New York and London) p.xi

[5] Gilman, op cit, p.15

[6] Ibid, p.16

[7] Ibid, pp.19-20

[8] Ibid, p.23

[9] Ibid, pp.25-27

[10] Ibid pp,27-35

[11] Ibid, pp. 39-40

[12] Ibid 99.41-42

[13] Ibid 42-43

[14] Copilot

[15] Gilman, pp.44-45

[16] Ibid, pp.51-52

[17] Ibid. pp.54

Sander L. Gilman (2026) London: Reaktion Books 309pp Ills Index
⏩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. 

Antisemitisms 📚 A History Of Jew Hating (1)

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of Two Thousand And Seventy Nine

 

A Morning Thought @ 3251

People And Nature ☭ Written by Simon Pirani.. Reposted from the Fare Free London site.
 
20-August-2026


This summer’s heat waves have hammered home the reality of climate change, and highlighted, again, the gulf between the government’s timid efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions and what scientists say are needed.

We desperately need policies that simultaneously point the way to reduce emissions, and address the cost-of-living crisis and the other miseries inflicted on people by crisis-ridden capital and its pliant politicians. Without such an approach, to galvanise collective responses, we are left with despair at the scale of the problem on one hand, or hopelessly inadequate gesture politics on the other.

Transforming the cities we live in is a key part of this, and public transport is one of the key issues. Making it free would empower people who live in cities – and help to slash emissions, by moving away from car-centred transport systems. So here, as input to discussions about climate action, is a recent article reposted from the Fare Free London site. Simon Pirani.

Free bus travel is making a world of difference to under-22s in Scotland, opening access to jobs, education and social life – but privately-owned transport companies are creaming off profits from the scheme.
At Govan bus station in Glasgow, a statue honouring Mary Barbour, an early
20th century socialist and city councillor, who supported rent strikes and campaigned
for welfare services. Photo: Alan Murray-Rust / wikimedia commons

Campaigners in Scotland are calling for public ownership and control, to stop exploitative over-charging and poor service by the private companies.

We could learn from Scotland’s success with free public transport, while avoiding the nightmares brought on by privatisation, Fare Free London says.

Free bus travel for the under-22s was introduced by the Scottish government on 31 January 2022. More than 300 million bus journeys have been taken by 838,900 young people who have the National Entitlement Card that you need to use the scheme.

The benefits were spelled out in a report by Young Scot, a charity, which surveyed more than 650 22-25 year olds who had benefited from the scheme up until their 22nd birthday.

🚌 More than 91% of survey respondents said the scheme had increased their access to work, education and leisure;

🚌 Free bus travel helped improve young people’s independence, confidence and financial stability;

🚌  Focus groups run by Young Scot highlighted the positive impact on mental health, reducing isolation and increasing social participation.

One survey respondent said:

I’m from a low-income family. Sometimes I would use the lunch money my mum gave me to get the bus. … My sister is 13 and now she has the free bus travel. I am so happy for her that she doesn’t need to make that choice.

Another said free travel gave them:

a sense of independence and adventure – no matter where you were, you knew you wouldn’t have to worry about the travel cost.

And a third said:

It drastically improved my mental health, and social life, as it meant I was not worried about spending too much on travel.

After their 22nd birthday, scheme respondents used buses more than other travel modes, with 52% taking five or more bus journeys per week.

But car usage increased: while still on the scheme, only 4% of people used a car five or more times per week, but after it, 25% did.

Young Scot’s report also showed that the scheme influenced how people chose to travel.

Nearly two thirds of respondents (63%) now consider public transport more often in their decision making, and more respondents used active travel – walking, wheeling and cycling – after reaching their 22nd birthday.

In Glasgow, Scotland’s largest city, where bus fares are extremely expensive – more than £3 each for many journeys – there has been a big ramp-up in cycling infrastructure.

The city council has committed to build 270 kilometres of segregated bike lanes, of which they are now promising 50 km by 2030.

The age limits on the free buses scheme is one obvious problem. Paul Shaw of Better Buses for Strathclyde, a coalition campaigning for franchising and public ownership, said: “As things stand, your 22nd birthday is a cliff edge. All of a sudden you could be paying more than £6 for two journeys, or £12 for four journeys – patterns that are quite common for people to get to work and back.”

The prospect of free public transport for all has been discussed by Glasgow City Council. In 2024 it commissioned a report that made a strong case for it. A pilot scheme followed – an unambitious model, offering free passes to 1000 residents for seven weeks. Any assessment of that has not yet been made public.

Meanwhile, national legislation has opened the door to local authorities outside London getting a foothold for publicly-owned bus services, by setting up municipally owned bus companies.

In Scotland, private ownership of bus companies has actually stopped the free-fares scheme reaching its potential, Paul Shaw argues.

This is due to the way the free travel is paid for. The bus companies charge the Scottish government for the cost of the fare, at a pre-agreed percentage of an adult single fare for the same journey.

In 2025-26, for older and disabled users, the bus companies charged 52.9% of a single fare, for a young person aged 16-21, 72.4%, and for 5-15 year olds, 47.9%.

That means, for example, that if a 16-year old takes four journeys in a day, the operator First Bus is paid £9.40 by the Scottish government (four times 72.4% of an adult single).

“This is despite the fact a First Bus all-day ticket is £6.30”, Paul wrote in a recent substack post. Does that make First Bus no worse off? “That sounds quite a bit better off if you ask me.”

If that 16-year old is travelling with their grandma, and a younger sibling, First Bus would collect £22.49 from the government – while two adults and one child all-day tickets would cost just £15.70.

Paul Shaw wrote:

This system incentivises the operators to design bus routes which requires passengers to take more than one bus per journey – and since it is tied to the cost of an adult single fare, it keeps those high . . . This is why two singles are more expensive than an all-day ticket.

Bus fares – and political attitudes to them – are changing nationwide. The cost of living crisis, and war-related fuel price increases, are forcing rethinking all round. Andy Burnham has ordered a £2 bus fare cap in England. Millions of school-aged children have been offered free travel deals over the summer by local authorities.

In London, where we already have public control of bus services – which are franchised to operators by TfL – many of the problems suffered by the under-22s scheme in Scotland can be avoided from the start.

On the other hand, we have a two-tier public transport system, with relatively cheap bus fares (capped, for now, at £1.75 for a single adult journey) and some of the most expensive tube fares in the world.

Fare Free London says it is time for the Mayor to look at the options for TfL, including the universal free public transport that we favour, and any number of steps towards it.

□ On Tuesday 29 September, at our public event, “How to make public transport free”, we will consider our next campaigning steps. All welcome – just register on eventbrite.

The event, at 7.0pm at the Golden Lane community centre in the Barbican, and on line, will hear a talk by Julie Frêche, vice-president for transport and mobility of the Montpellier metropolitan area in France, which introduced universal free public transport in 2023.

🔴Linked article: Effective taxes on wealth could fund abolition of bus fares

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Dixie Elliot ✊What really really pisses me off are gobshites like this boyo Jim Flynn from Newry.


Who come on social media and attack Brendan Hughes with crap like . . . 

not really the actions of a volunteer' and 'a true volunteer would keep his stories and names to himself . . . 

I have it on good authority that Jim Flynn from Newry was never an IRA volunteer himself.

My response to him . . . 

Jim Flynn, I notice that you didn't respond to my question as to what was the difference between The Dark naming names of those who were dead and Gerry Adams naming colleagues of his, who are still living, for the killing of the screw Brian Stack in an email to the Garda Commissioner?
 
I'm not surprised as you have a mindset like those programmed answering machines you get put on hold with when you phone a doctor's surgery etc... 'you are now 10th in the queue.'

What annoys me about nobodies like you is that Brendan 'The Dark' Hughes was a courageous IRA leader who led from the front at all times.
 
He escaped from the Cages in the back of a bin lorry.
 
He led the Blanket Protest along with Bobby Sands and he went on hunger strike. The men under him loved him and still do. I should know as I was and still am proud to have been one of them.
 
As for you mouthing off about this great man, I have been reliably informed, from several sources, that you hadn't the balls to join the IRA. You stuck to Sinn Féin at a time when it was seen by active IRA volunteers as being a place for draft dodgers to hide while pretending that they are something else.
 
You were one of those draft dodgers so you are in no position to speak about anyone, especially not Brendan Hughes.

On here slabbering about 'not really the actions of a volunteer' and 'a true volunteer would keep his stories and names to himself . . . '

But you were never a fucking volunteer yourself!!

Now crawl away off somewhere and hide . . . 

Thomas Dixie Elliot is a Derry artist and a former H Block Blanketman.
Follow Dixie Elliot on Twitter @IsMise_Dixie

Gobshite Flynn

Dr John Coulter ✍ The Orange Order must use its tactical victory over the Parades Commission to reassert its influence among pro-Union voters ahead of next year’s Stormont and council elections.

The Drumcree dispute has hung over the Order specifically and the wider Protestant Unionist Loyalist (PUL) community like a political open wound for decades.

The High Court ruling quashing a Parades Commission decision to bar Orangemen from part of the flashpoint Portadown route provides the perfect opportunity for Orangeism to finally lance that troublesome boil.

The last time the Order got to march home from its Somme commemoration service in Drumcree Parish Church via the Garvaghy Road was 1997. The dispute had begun two years earlier in 1995 and saw thousands of loyalists from across the Province converge on the road beside the Church of Ireland building.

Perhaps the real low point in the campaign came in 1998, ironically the year of the Good Friday Agreement and the supposed commencement of the peace process.

At that time, my late dad, Rev Dr Robert Coulter MBE, was a North Antrim Ulster Unionist Assembly Member and firmly in the UUP’s Yes camp on the Agreement and a supporter of party leader David, later Lord, Trimble.

However, that Twelfth Drumcree protest was vastly overshadowed by the killings of the three Catholic Quinn brothers in an arson attack in Ballymoney in the heart of dad’s constituency.

Interviewed at that time about the murder of the three Catholic brothers, dad said:

We are burning our children on the altar of our hatred. This is the harvest of inflammatory speeches and intransigence on both sides.

When dad and two other senior Loyal Order chaplains called on the Orange Order to leave Drumcree hill as a mark of respect to the dead brothers, they received death threats from a breakaway loyalist death squad, the Loyalist Volunteer Force (LVF).

That 1998 Twelfth, dad was to preach the religious sermon at one of the main demonstrations in Co Fermanagh at Irvinestown. Such was the concern for dad’s safety following the LVF death threat, that the police met us at the Ballygawley roundabout and gave us an escort into Irvinestown.

But the splits within Unionism over the April Agreement were already rife by the Twelfth. As well as dad, the other platform speaker that day was his fellow UUP MLA and Trimble supporter Sam Foster from the Fermanagh and South Tyrone constituency.

The Drumcree dispute had also spawned a militant pressure group within Orangeism, the Spirit of Drumcree. As soon as Assemblyman Foster stood up to speak, he was hit with a constant barrage of heckling from Spirit of Drumcree supporters. Dad and I feared the worst for his sermon.

But it was like the Old Testament Biblical character Daniel in the lions den. The Spirit of Drumcree supporters did not utter a sound and dad was able to preach his Gospel message unhindered.

In spite of the high tension circumstances of that specific Twelfth demonstration, there was an amusing incident just before dad delivered his sermon.

Dad had handed me his chunky mobile phone as he could not fit it in his pocket and did not want to preach with a bulging pocket. He told me to phone mum and inform her that as soon as the platform proceedings had finished, we would be heading back home to north Antrim.

In the late 1990s, mobile phone reception in Irvinestown was not the best! I was standing at the side of the platform trying to get a signal to ring mum. I made several attempts without success. Sam Foster was bravely trying to deliver his speech amid the intense heckling.

Suddenly, I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned around to find a very senior local Orangeman, who said: “Can we deal with this situation before you bring in your people!” My immediate reaction was: “People, what people?”

The Orangeman responded: “You’re a police officer. Give us a chance to calm this down before you order in your riot squad!” Now I’m only five foot, four inches, bald, specky-four-eyed and was then quite skinny built. So in spite of the tension, I was rather chuffed that this senior Orangeman should think I was a potential riot cop supervisor!

But after the 1998 Twelfth rioting, and especially the deaths of the three Quinn children, many middle class Unionists literally walked away from the Drumcree protest. During my time as Northern Political Correspondent for the Irish Daily Star, I once wrote that Drumcree had become Unionism’s Vietnam.

The bitter medicine which the PUL community has had to swallow is that the Orange Order has been steadily losing its influence within Unionism - until the High Court ruling.

Orangeism has been handed a gift horse on a silver plate - so don’t blow it! For generations, the Order was the cement which held the various elements of the Unionist community together.

The Right-wing Presbyterian Unionist businessman could sit in the Orange lodge room with the working class, socialist-leaning Church of Ireland loyalist and both could call themselves ‘brother’. All classes and creeds within Protestantism were equal in the lodge room.

The Order was also a communication vehicle whereby the ruling Unionist elite could pass their views to the pro-Union grassroots. This vehicle now needs a strong political MOT.

With allegations that there is a political disconnect between the Unionist parties and the loyalist working class, and especially with voter apathy among the pro-Union community, there is a real opportunity for Orangeism to mobilise pro-Union voters ahead of next year’s elections.

Unionism has come a poor runner-up to nationalism in past elections. That situation can be reversed if the Order would embark on a voter registration campaign in the pro-Union community as well as ensuring Unionist voters actually come out to the polling booths on election day and transfer among pro-Union candidates.

For the first time since that horrendous summer of 1998, Orangeism now has a golden opportunity to get off the back foot and show constructive leadership to the pro-Union electorate. It is an opportunity which must be seized and not missed.
 
Follow Dr John Coulter on Twitter @JohnAHCoulter
Dr Coulter has been a journalist since 1978 and is currently a political commentator with GB News.

Orangeism Must Now Take The Moral High Ground Within Unionism

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of Two Thousand And Seventy Eight

 

A Morning Thought @ 3250

Fírinne McIntyre ✒ writing in  Being Human.

★★ for Jacobi Jupe’s performance, and ★ for the witchiness (and the sound design was great).

The impact of Hamnet hinges entirely on its ‘reveal’ - which is, in fact, revealed in its synopsis, and tends to be common knowledge if one has studied Shakespeare. If you are going to tell a story that is commonly known, you must be able to make it interesting, and I personally felt that Hamnet failed in this. I felt little connection to the characters, and from the ‘reveal’ onward, everything played out as one would expect, except for some moments of hit-or-miss cheese.

This suggests, to me, that the film’s impact is entirely dependent on the viewer knowing nothing of Shakespeare’s biography, which isn’t a very reliable hinge. I think of Titanic - everyone knows that this boat sinks, and James Cameron made one of the best films of the 90s.

The first half of Hamnet was great - the family dynamics, the strange but instant connection between Jesse and Paul’s characters, the witchiness of it all - it had set itself up to be amongst my favourites. The film seems to abandon all of its exposition from the first half in favour of its big reveal and neglects any further development. It felt to me like two separate films, and not in the Lynchian way that I enjoy.

A highlight is Jacobi Jupe’s performance. Having studied acting for a short period, I marvelled as I watched each thought of the character cross the actor’s face before speaking. Jupe seems naturally capable of something that takes years of study, and I felt like I had witnessed something special. Given the slew of nominations at the time of release, I went in with the expectation that Buckley would bring me this feeling - thanks to Jupe, I did not leave entirely disappointed.

Fírinne McIntyre of synth-pop duo “mischa and the bear”

Hamnet

Byline Times ★ Written by Nafeez Ahmed. Recommended by Barry Gilheany. 

The media’s coverage of the academic’s life was fuelled by the campaign of an established far-right network

Jason Arday, a 41-year-old academic who resigned as Cambridge’s Professor of Sociology of Education, was found dead on Friday following intense scrutiny of many aspects of his qualifications and personal life by the majority of the established press.

His coordinated targeting by an explicitly anti-black race science network did not come out of nowhere, Byline Times can reveal.

Backed by the pro-Trump Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, this network has spent a decade penetrating Cambridge University before reaching Reform UK, Restore Britain, and the pan-European far-right.

This phase of the campaign against Jason Arday began when academic and anti-black racist Nathan Cofnas raised claims of plagiarism in Arday’s work in a Substack post last month.

The story it fuelled was then dissected in more than 200 articles across the majority of the British press in the weeks that followed, both in print and online.

It was striking that many of these articles did not acknowledge that the central accusations were being made by a man who believes that inherited racial differences make black people less intelligent . . .

Continue @ Byline Times.

The Peter Thiel-Linked Race Science Network That Penetrated Cambridge University And Targeted Jason Arday

Ukraine Solidarity Group ✊ A Digest of News from Ukrainian Sources ⚔ 24-August-2026.

In this week’s bulletin

⬤ Surviving war in Crimea/.
⬤ Occupied territories: Ukrainians lose homes.
⬤ Report: Russian attempts to legitimise occupation.
⬤ Ukraine cultural policy.
⬤  Russia torture evidence.
⬤ Myths about Ukraine rebutted.

News from the territories occupied by Russia

Mariupol homes only for Russians, Ukrainians to lose even ‘compensation homes' for those Russia bombed (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, August 21st)

Russians abduct former teacher from occupied Kherson oblast and torture her husband (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, August 21st)

‘I don’t think beyond tomorrow’: surviving the war in occupied Crimea (Meduza, 21 August)

Donetsk teenager forced to ‘repent’ and sentenced to 12 years for ‘spying for Ukraine’ (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, August 20th)

Health condition of political prisoner Lenur Halilov worsening (Crimea Platform, August 20th)

Appaz Kurtamet’s Birthday: 5th Year Behind Bars (Crimea Platform, August 19th)

Russians abducted 71-year-old Serhiy Yeriomenko and sentenced him to 13.5 years for his defence of Ukraine (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, August 18th)

Death is Russia’s only limit in torment of Crimean Tatar political prisoner Tofik Abdulgaziev and his family (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, August 17th)

Ukrainian Baptist pastor faces deportation from occupied Luhansk oblast for refusal to take Russian citizenship (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, August 17th)

Life Under Occupation (Alter Pravo, July 2026)

News from Ukraine

Russian forces continue to target Ukrainian workplaces and workers (Confederation of Free Trade Unions of Ukraine, August 23rd)

Fahrenheit 451: Russia destroyed one-third of the books printed in Ukraine in 2026 (Ukrainska Pravda, August 22nd)

‘Double strike’ attack on Kriviy Rih shopping mall (Meduza, 21 August)

Drop the charges against Maksym Shumakov (South London Socialist, August 21st)

Creative Crisis: Cultural policy, precarity and European integration (Commons.com.ua, 18 August)

Degeneration of power: How Zelensky topped out & gov’t machinery bottomed out (zn.UA, 17 Aug)

‘The FSB is blackmailing me’: how the Russian secret services tried to recruit a volunteer through his son (Ukrainska Pravda, 17 August)

A 27-year-old communist from Pervomaisk was convicted of treason (Intent, August 11th)

War-related news from Russia

How men in Penza region are being abducted and sent to war (Meduza, 21 August)

Vote with your ruble: Russian stock market rejects Putin’s official optimism (The Insider, August 17th)

Politician Lev Shlosberg sentenced to 11 years following a defiant stand in Pskov court (Mediazona, August 17th)

Alexander Skobov: ‘I am the accuser here’(free-skobov.now/en/, March 2025)

Comment and analysis

Fourteen claims that circulate, and what the evidence shows (Anti Capitalist Resistance, August 20th)

Excellent response by Findlay Young, convenor, SNP Ukraine Solidarity Caucus in The National to Stop the War (Facebook, August 20th)

Shouldn't the left be against the military? (Facebook, August 17th)

The price is not high enough (International Politics and Society, August 11th)

By hook or by crook: Russia’s Attempts to Promote the Legitimisation of the Temporarily Occupied Territories (Alter Pravo, July 2026)

The empire keeps striking back (The Radical, July 6th)

Research of human rights abuses

Legal Assessment of an FPV Drone Attack (Tribunal for Putin, August 20th)

The search by Ukrainians for their relatives in Russian captivity (Mediazona, 19 August)

Filip Siman Case (Tribunal for Putin, August 17th)

Over 16,000 civilians detained by Russia during the war in Ukraine are still held, UN estimates (AP, August 11th)

Voislav Torden Case (Tribunal for Putin, August 10th)

Upcoming events

Thursday 27 August, 5.45pm. Free The Zaporizhia 15 – Ukrainian trade unionists speak in London. UNISON national office, 130 Euston Road, London, NW1 2AY (ground floor). Eyewitness reports by Khrystyna Levchenko, union representative at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant and Ivanna Khrapko, Deputy Chair of the State Employees’ Union of Ukraine. Register here

Saturday 29 August, 2.0-4.0pm, in London. Screening of “Akishina. Speak Not Silence” (documentary about Marina Akishina, artist and theatre director, in Russian, with English subtitles) and Q&A with the Director, Maria Sandler. At Theatreship, South Quay Plaza, London E14 9SH. Organised by the Russian Democratic Society. Buy tickets here
🔴This bulletin is put together by labour movement activists in solidarity with Ukrainian resistance. More information at Ukraine Information Group.

We are also on twitter. Our aim is to circulate information in English that to the best of our knowledge is reliable. If you have something you think we should include, please send it to 2U022ukrainesolidarity@gmail.com.


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News From Ukraine 💣 Bulletin 209

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