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Gary Robertson ⚽ Of all the weird stuff I’ve been interested in throughout life public humiliation wasn’t one of them.
 
Yet here I am admitting I’m a Celtic fan and we’ve just been rodgered roughly by Sporting Lisbon,

First half, the home side should have been out of sight so when new bhoy Duran bundled the ball into the net hope rose in the hearts of the hoopites only for it to be extinguished mere seconds later as Lisbon went up the other end past the NPCs that were the Celtic defence and restored their lead. From then on it was all downhill. A final four one victory for Sporting is really kind on Celtic who on any other day could have been looking at a 7, 8 or more score line. I thank the Lisbon players for taking it easy.
 
Tuesday also saw the continuation of the League cup group stages with six Premiership clubs playing and a plethora of clubs from the lower leagues. There’s always the chance of at least one shock result so when I laughingly said to a friend on Bluesky (PJ-1965 Dundee Utd Fan) that Montrose would beat Dundee Utd, I didn’t think for one minute it would actually happen. I then said to Pat (ticgran45) I’ll be even more annoyed because I don’t have a penny on it when the results came through and Montrose had won by a solitary goal, Well, let’s just say that summed up my day perfectly. Sickener.
 
I mean, I like a wee flutter but I’m also a tight bastard so I wasn’t prepared to throw a fiver away. You live and learn apparently (I’m 56 this year so I’d better hurry the fuck up).

Thing is though I was thinking this the other day, are there too many leagues in Scotland? I mean can we really justify four leagues where clubs in the bottom division have only slightly more fans than Jeff the Christian? Crowds in the hundreds aren’t uncommon. I mean, economically these clubs can be barely breaking even, most must be running at a loss. So here’s my solution
 
Two leagues, Premier and Championship as one and League One and Two as another. A 22 team top league, a 42 game season. Drop the split idea and have three automatic relegation and one play off spot. It seems much more sensible to me. More competition for the Second Division: you could have teams like Spartans or Brechin fighting for a place for the chance to face Celtic & Rangers in the top flight. Of course this would mean stadium upgrades and cost but I could see it working. The SFA aren’t short of a few quid so they could help clubs out with long term loans (interest free of course). Other investment could come from local companies, businesses looking to promote to a bigger audience. TV deals could be struck and more money coming into the game and actually getting to the smaller clubs. Not the Tory version of the drip down economy but an actual system where money reaches these clubs.
I’ll give you an example - Livingston knew they’d never fill their stadium so instead of hundreds of empty seats they open three sides of their stadium to fans of Celtic & Rangers (possibly others) ensuring a full stadium and cashing in.
 
You’d fill stadiums. There would be financial rewards the higher you finish in the league. It’s a no brainer in my opinion. Promotion, relegation and play off spots, more competition.
 
It’s something I believe the SFA should look into.
 
They won’t though because rather like the FAI they’re too busy justifying playing matches against the murder machine of the Middle East, Israel.
 
Points deductions and financial penalties are, in my opinion, a small price to pay to remain on the right side of history.
 
So there you have it thoughts and ramblings on the world that is Scottish football. Hold onto your toories lads it’s almost kick off time so things are about to get a little mad.

Anyway that’s that. Whatever you’re doing do it well and do it safely, have fun.

Til next time ……

🐼 Gary Robertson is the TPQ Scottish football correspondent.

Prayers for PJ1965

The Empire Untold  ★ Recommended by Tommy McKearney.

One Indian soldier stepped from the ranks, raised his musket, and fired at his sergeant. Within months, half the British Army in India would be fighting for its life.

The parade ground at Barrackpore, just outside Calcutta. March 1857. A hot afternoon. The 34th Bengal Native Infantry stood in formation — sepoys who had served the East India Company for years, drilled to European standards, armed with British muskets. Among them: Mangal Pandey, a soldier like thousands of others. Until he wasn't.
He stepped forward. He raised his weapon. He fired.

The shot missed. But it struck something far larger than the British sergeant he aimed at. It struck the fragile compact that held British India together — the understanding that Indian soldiers would fight for the Company, take its pay, and keep its empire running. Pandey's defiance shattered that understanding in front of his entire regiment.

What happened next unfolded fast. British officers scrambled to regain control. Pandey stood his ground, reloading, shouting for his fellow sepoys to join him. None did — not that day. He was wrestled down, arrested, and court-martialled within the week. The sentence was death. He hanged before the month was out.

A Soldier Steps Out

Barry Gilheany ✍ A virtually fundamental tenet of the wellness woo world is the supremacy of natural healing processes. 

Opposition to vaccination is based on the belief that vaccines represent the violation of the body’s natural healing properties. Antivaxxers hold that good nutrition and environmental surrounds (no dispute there) and exposure to infectious childhood diseases such as measles and chicken pox (at the famed “chickenpox parties) builds up natural immunity to these maladies. The exposure of the body to “foreign” elements such as spike protein is thus a deliberate assault and has been held by opponents of Covid-19 vaccines to have been a major factor in the deaths from myocardial conditions that they attribute to the jabs. 

That a welter of medical trial and mortality data and peer reviewed studies has overwhelmingly confirmed the safety of vaccines does not and will likely never shift antivaxxer beliefs. Opponents of water fluoridation also see similarly malign threats to nature’s healing capacities by powerful forces like Big Pharma and an overweening state. Fundamentalist Catholic opposition to both artificial contraception and abortion is based on Natural law precepts and, like antivaxxers, deployed a corpus of pseudoscience such as supposed causal relationships between pregnancy terminations and breast cancer and infertility to bolster their arguments. 

Recently, in another fraught area of women’s reproductive health, birth and the scandals around the state of maternity services detailed most forcefully in the Ockenden Report on Nottingham Maternity Services and the Amos review on national NHS maternity care, ideological fixations with the desirability of ‘natural birth’ have been identified as inimical to pregnant women’s health. This body of work has also uncovered deep institutional racism over the experience of BME women in maternity care. Essentially contested views on pregnancy and birth have created space for bad actors to operate in; bad actors such as the Free Birth Society who were the subject of a previous TPQ article of mine and who have again featured in more baby deaths around the world.

Natural Birth Ideology

Natural Birth Ideology is the belief that physiological, low intervention birth is the ideal birth method. It emphasises vaginal birth without medical intervention such as induction, epidural or surgical procedures, viewing childbirth as a natural process, best supported by midwifery and minimal interference. Advocates argue that it respects the body’s natural rhythm, reduces unnecessary interventions and promotes maternal autonomy. The spectrum of this ideology ranges from informal, low-intervention birth to the Free Birth Society doctrine that all births should be physiological regardless of risk. Historically some beliefs about natural birth were influenced by moral or religious ideas, such as the notion that childbirth pain was a divine punishment. Modern natural birth ideology is grounded in the philosophy of salutogenesis and advocacy for physiological birth rather than moral judgment. It often advocates with midwifery led care models and home birth advocacy.[1]

Rigid adherence to natural birth ideology can conflict with medical care and informed patient choice. A particular imperative for supporters is the reduction of the need for caesarean sections to the bare minimum The prioritisation of ‘normal birth at call cost’ has had deleterious effects of standards of maternal and neonatal care within the NHS and its promotion has been identified by many of its critics as a significant factor in the series of maternity hospital care scandals that has riven the NHS in the opening decades of the 21st century, the most damning of which was senior midwife Donna Ockenden’s recently published four year report into the “cruel” and substandard care in maternity services at Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust. The ideological divide in the NHS over natural or ‘normal’ birth theory and practice has been acute. Amongst the numerous malpractices identified by Donna Ockenden that the “quest for normal birth” contributed to the avoidable harm and deaths of more than 500 women and babies. However in her national review of maternity care, Baroness Amos and her team “did not find that ‘normal’ birth ideology’ was currently widespread’. This conclusion led to the resignation of Bill Kirkup, one of her twelve clinical advisors and of Britain’s leading maternity investigators, from his role on the inquiry.[2]

NHS Maternity Services and Natural Birth Ideology

As alluded to earlier, caesarean or C-sections are a particular flashpoint in the Natural Births debate. From 2007 to 2017, the Royal College of Midwives advised that women should try to have a vaginal birth without surgical intervention, and NHS England told hospitals to try to reduce caesarean sections to about 20% of births. This “normal birth at any cost” culture was central to the scandal uncovered by Bill Kirkup in Morecambe Bay in 2015 where it was found that clinicians had ignored or failed to respond quickly enough to problems during childbirth. James Titcombe, whose son Joshua died of sepsis in 2008 after failures in the Morecambe Bay maternity scandal, said he believed natural birth ideology remained a “significant and widespread patient safety issue”, and that Amos’s review appeared to have “taken a superficial approach”.[3]

The hegemony of natural birth ideology and its effects on maternity patient care is laid out by Clare Wilson. She asserts that the best-known advocates of natural birth may be the National Childbirth Trust (NCT); she reports that those who attended NCT antenatal classes were discouraged by their teachers from seeking medical assistance. Less well known is that from the 1990s onwards the “natural” birth agenda was gaining ground among university researchers and campaigners and over the next decade it became baked into policy documents for midwives and doctors. A key development was the publication in 2012 of NHS guidelines produced in partnership with the Royal College of Midwives (RCM), the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG) and the NCT which encouraged to boost their rate of “normal” births[4].

Called Focus on normal birth and reducing Caesarean section rates, it highlighted the UK’s rising C-section rates – 24 per cent in 2006 – and offered hospitals a range of measures to try to reduce them to 20 per cent and ideally 15 per cent. It claimed – without good evidence – that this would reduce rates of death and harm from childbirth as well as bringing the NHS financial savings. While the supposed premise of these guidelines was that it was better for mothers and babies to deliver vaginally, it was in reality a cost-cutting exercise according to an anonymously quoted former obstetrician.[5]

Wilson then details how the successive incidences of NHS maternity scandals took place in hospitals which had striven hardest for low C-section rates. First up was at Furness General Hospital in Morecambe Bay where 11 babies and one mother were found to have died needlessly the inquiry reported in 2015. According to Dr Bill Kirkup, one of the country’s leading maternity investigators, who led the inquiry “There was a growing mood amongst midwives to promote natural childbirth”[6]

Next came two similar maternity safety scandals at two linked hospitals in East Kent and Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital which for years had publicised its low C-section rate of 14 per cent compared with the national average of 23 per cent at the time. One East Kent mother said “I felt that … I was made to have a natural birth when an emergency C – section was more appropriate, just so they didn’t dent their precious natural birth rate”. Emily Barley whose baby Beatrice died at Barnsley Hospital in 2022 reported that every concern she raised was met with the rejoinder “It’s just normal birth, everything is OK”.[7]

Further evidence that ideology rather than patient health drove decision making especially in hospitals with extremely low C-sections but with higher rates of still births and neonatal deaths is provided by Dr Nadeem Maghal’s analysis of the ills at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust. This Trust had the lowest rates of C-sections in the country between 2012 and 2023 but over the same period, its rate of stillbirths and newborn baby deaths were the worst nationally. Its own 2015 maternity strategy expected all parts of the service to actively promote “normal” birth ‘The home births team’s language emphasised that “birth” is a natural and physiological process.’[8]

Despite the mounting evidence of the harm being caused by the prioritising of “normal birth” at all costs culture, the ! newspaper revealed in November 2024 that NHS hospitals were continuing to place job adverts for midwives who will “promote normality”, eight of which were placed in 2024. It also reported that safety investigators were expressing alarm that potentially dangerous attempts to discourage women from medical assistance during childbirth are widespread.[9]

In 2022 Gill Walton, head of the RCM apologised for its part in promoting “normal” births that contributed to the deaths of mothers and babies admitting that some midwives had promoted an ideology that had gone too far. However belief in the superiority “normal” births under different guises such as the recommendation of ineffective alternative or complementary therapies in lieu of standard medical approaches; for instance offering aromatherapy if labour isn’t progressing which is contrary to medical guidelines.[10] The most high profile use of alternative therapies involves Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in London whose maternity department states that staff use reflexology and aromatherapy to avoid medical induction of labour. It asserts that such treatments are non-invasive and rarely cause the unpleasant or long-lasting side effects that can be associated with medication’

Nottingham

The nadir of NHS maternity care was, of course, the scandal in Nottingham NHS Trust uncovered over four years of investigation and delivered in coruscating detail and tone by Donna Ockenden in Juhne 2026. About 2,500 families and more than 800 members of staff contributed to the inquiry over that time period. Overall, experts concluded, there were “potentially avoidable” outcomes for mothers and babies in 444 maternity cases leading up to May 2025, alongside 76 neonatal cases. All these cases were graded as two or three for harm – with grade two representing “significant concerns” and grade three “major concerns” over care. Different care may have altered the outcome for 260 babies who died or were harmed. Of that number, 155 babies died, while 105 suffered serious injury due to substandard care, with some left with permanent brain damage.[11]

Experts found adverse outcomes were linked to multiple factors including failures in the monitoring of babies; poor interpretation of heart monitoring; a failure to recognise babies were in distress during labour and a failure to escalate some cases to senior clinicians. Systems of oversight “were no longer fit for purpose” and there was a toxic and bullying work culture. Women in the middle of labour were told to “pull themselves together” while another submission from a mother recalled being told to “wait their turn” as there were “other women they had to sort”.[12] These problems had been known about since 2010.

Natural birth ideology was likely a major contributory factor some of the mistakes that occurred, according to the husband of Sarah Hawkins whose baby Harriet died in childbirth in 2016. A telling of the whole harrowing experience that Sarah suffered leads to that unavoidable conclusion. Despite pleading on the phone repeatedly with her midwives during her six days of labour, she was told not to come to hospital and on the one occasion that she did come in, she was given analgesic medication and sent home. After parts of the membranes covering the baby started being expelled from the womb, the midwives on duty failed to treat this development as an emergency. Rather than being examined in order to determine if the membranes were concealing a trapped umbilical cord which would have cut off Harriet’s oxygen supply and so signalling the need for an emergency C-section, Sarah was taken to a midwife led birthing pool intended only for women at low risk. While the bath was being prepared for a water birth and the midwives were discussing what aromatherapy oils to add to the water, Harriet was probably dead or dying. She was delivered stillborn nine hours later.

An external review of the case found that staff had made 13 errors and concluded that the death was “almost entirely preventable”. A few weeks before this tragedy, a doctor had told the couple “Don’t let anyone medicalise your birth”. A clearer exposition of the promotion of ideology over the safety of mother and baby could be made.

The Ethnicity Pain Gap

Over and above these multiple failings in maternity care is a metric of institutional racism known as the ‘ethnicity pain gap’. Experts have found that skin pigmentation often determines whether one is offered in all areas of healthcare, not just maternity care. For example, according to top public health academic Devi Sridhar, in the domain of cancer treatment patients from Black, South Asian and mixed ethnic backgrounds received fewer and lower doses of pain-relieving medication than people from white European backgrounds, even after controlling for patient age, cancer type, health condition, deprivation and other variables that could affect that decision.[13]

On maternity care, Guardian research has established that black women in England are almost twice as likely to have their births investigated for safety failings compared with their white counterparts. Black women in the UK are almost three times more likely to die during childbirth. An interim report published by the National Maternity and Neonatal Investigation included accounts of Asian women being stereotyped as “princesses”, with the implication that they were too demanding or unable to cope with pain, while black women were seen as having “tough” skin and able to tolerate pain.” The report also heard from black women who described experiences of being stereotyped as “the angry or aggressive black woman” which in turn affected their care. For example, in the words of one woman during a family evidence panel: “I feel like, for us black ladies, they feel like we can handle the pain, even when we are complaining we are in pain.”[14]

At the extreme end of the natural birth ideological continuum is the Free Birth Society (FBS), a multimillion-dollar organisation linked to baby deaths around the world, but whose founder Emilee Saldaya claims that during her time at the helm, she had “never heard of a woman dying in childbirth in the sovereign birth world”. Ten months after she made this grandiose claim in December 2024 on The Way Forward podcast, 30-year-old nutritionist, wellness influencer and first-time mother Stacey Warnecke, died from complications of a massive postpartum haemorrhage after a free birth attended by a Melbourne-based birth attendant or in FBS terminology “birth keeper” and friend and student of Saldaya, Emily Lal. It was one of two deaths in her five years as a birth keeper that Lal was to be named in; the other was of a newborn baby in 2022.[15]

Previously, a year-long Guardian investigation had identified 48 cases of late-term stillbirths or neonatal deaths or other forms of serious harm involving mothers or birth attendants who appeared to be linked to the US-based FBS. These cases were found in the US, Canada, Switzerland, France, South Africa, India, Australia and the UK. Now it tells the story of how Lal, a former insurance worker with no medical qualifications. She was trained by Saldaya and her business partner Yolande Norris-Clark, through their Radical Birth Keeper (RBK) school through a three month Zoom course where as one of 850 RBKs that they claim to have trained she was instructed in the art of brand-building through social media through the fog of scientific inaccuracies and dangerous misinformation.[16]

Among the pearls of wisdom inculcated to the students were that neonatal resuscitation can be a form of “sabotage”; that bacteria may not cause infection and that life-threatening pregnancy complications can be “variations of normal”. Norris-Clark and Saldaya have also, respectively, questioned the existence of gravity and whether the Earth is round. Experts who have reviewed the basic advice on dealing with emergencies given by FBS to trainee RBKs say it contains inaccurate, misleading and dangerous information. However in interviews on the Matrescence podcast in 2021 before the death of Ms Warnecke she appeared to suggest that she had the requisite lifesaving skills for emergency situations stating that:

If there was excessive bleeding or something out of the ordinary occurred that we considered to be a variation of normal, I’ve got the skills behind me to help the woman to birth her baby if she wants my help[17]

These stories of catastrophic midwifery misadventures are salutary tales of what can happen when ideology trumps medical care prerogatives. The saga of the use of puberty blockers in the Tavistock clinic is another. Medical dilemmas and controversies should always be framed and solved within a public health discourse. It is to be hoped that Nottingham and other maternity health scandals in the NHS will lead to a definitive step change in that direction.

References

[1] Copilot

[2] Hannah Barnes, 2026. Out of the Ordinary. The Amos Review cannot fix our broken maternity system. I’m not sure what can, The New Statesman 3-9 July p.31

[3] James Tapper, 2026. Maternity crisis: calls to investigate if ‘natural birth ideology’ has put mothers at risk. The Observer 5 July pp.6-7

[4] Clare Wilson, 2024. How the battle over ‘normal’ births is still damaging NHS maternity care. The I Paper 25 September.

[5] Ibid

[6] Ibid

[7] Ibid

[8] Dr Nadeem Maghal, 2025.  Natural Birth at All Costs Is an Ideology, Not a Care Model. Strasys 29 November.

[9] Wilson, op cit

[10] Ibid

[11] Gavin Bevis, 2026.  Baby deaths and toxic culture – the Nottingham maternity report at a glance BBC News Nottinghamshire. 24 June 2026.

[12] Ibid

[13] Devi Sridhar, 2026. The ‘ethnicity pain gap’ is real and fixable. The Guardian Journal. 3 July.


[14] Tobi Thomas, 2026. From birth until death. How the pain gap lasts for a lifetime. The Guardian 3 July 2026 pp. 14-15

[15] Sirin Kale and Melissa Davey 2026. Freebirths. How a ‘birth keeper’ was named in the inquests into two deaths. The Guardian 1 July pp.30-31

[16] Ibid, p.30

[17] Ibid

⏩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.

Au Naturelle 🪶Pain, Pregnancy And The Sanctification Of The “Natural” Over Women’s Health And Welfare

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

 

A Morning Thought @ 3212

Tommy McKearney ☭ The recent rioting and pogrom in Belfast was met with the trite, facile interpretations and responses we have grown all too used to hearing.


Proffered explanations ranged from attributing the violence to trouble-stirring social media postings, to loyalist paramilitary intervention, to lax border controls accommodating freeloading, dangerous foreigners (invariably dark-skinned).

The responses that followed were as predictable as they were anodyne. Every political party in the Assembly condemned the disturbances, although unionism qualified its criticism. At the same time, the other political parties made little effort to analyse the root causes apart from the safe option of rejecting racism and violent protests.

Missing from all this was a properly penetrating analysis as to what caused the disturbances to reach the intensity they did or, more significant still, what are the possible consequences of what happened.

Let’s not forget that, in the days preceding the Belfast pogrom, there were several racially motivated incidents. A disused premises on Belfast’s Shankill Road, being converted for use as a grocery shop by an Indian businessman, was burned out in an arson attack. In Mid-Ulster, Moygashel loyalists continuously displayed an anti-Muslim poster, deemed illegal by the PSNI. While in County Down, the DUP’s Carla Lockhart MP was joined by several elected representatives from the Ulster Unionist Party and the TUV to take part in a gathering hurling abuse at people demonstrating against the Zionist genocide in Gaza.

Against this background and in spite of some reporting, the June pogroms were clearly not spontaneous. There can be little doubt that the rioting was organised and led by loyalist groupings. Moreover, contingency planning to take advantage of any opportunity must have been in place for some time prior to the brutal attack on Stephen Ogilvie. The fact that, within hours of the knife attack, lists of names and addresses of migrants were distributed to hordes of young men dressed and ready to wreak havoc indicates the degree of preparation.

Lending a measure of spurious legitimacy and encouragement to those involved in perpetrating the pogrom was political unionism. In a well-practised routine, unionist politicians spoke from both sides of the mouth. Following their ritual condemnation of violence, they began pointing at supposed lax immigration control at Dublin airport and an open border resulting from the Common Travel Area.

Making sure there would be no mistaking the underlying racist message coupled with demands for a fortified border, Jim Allister’s TUV produced a hideous cartoon. The offensive piece was illustrated by a bus, apparently loaded with dark-skinned people including women wearing hijabs, all displaying banners proclaiming access to: free housing, free money, free healthcare and free benefits.

Whether consciously designed to do so is difficult to say, but by underlining the supposed economic objective of the so-called migrant invasion, the message resonated with many in working-class unionist areas. Globalisation has now resulted in the deindustrialisation of what once was a source of relatively well-paid employment for a majority of working-class unionists. Currently, the scene is one of unemployment and hardship, exacerbated by criminals exploiting the misery with drug dealing and extortion. All of which contributes to fuelling anger leading to the inexcusable victimisation of migrants living in predominantly loyalist areas.

There is, of course, a long and cruel history of such loyalist offensives in the North, until more recently directed against inhabitants of Catholic districts, especially in Belfast. To a certain extent, this bitter experience of previous persecution goes a certain way to explaining the very obvious absence of anti-migrant violence in republican working-class districts. In fairness too, it has to be said that Sinn Féin activists on the ground have used their influence to prevent anything similar developing in areas where they have a presence.

Nevertheless, there is no room for complacency or self-congratulatory applause. While the relative peace in non-unionist areas of the six counties is to be welcomed, there is disturbing evidence that elsewhere across Ireland, the ugly face of anti-migrant racism is all too prevalent. For three years running, 2023–25, Dublin was the setting for violent far-right racist rioting.

Last month witnessed several hundred demonstrating outside the Dáil against the EU Migration and Asylum Pact. Many protestors carried tricolour flags, others were shouting the lie that ‘Ireland is full’ and several repeated the loaded slogan, ‘Tiocfaidh ár lá’.

More alarming still was an event in Belfast, staged in August 2024, when far-right elements from the Republic joined loyalist thugs in an anti-migrant demonstration. An event made truly remarkable by the flying of both the tricolour and the union jack together, fronted by a banner reading, “Coolock says No”.

While both reactionary loyalist elements and their southern Irish counterparts remain, for the time being at least, on the periphery of mainstream society, there is cause for concern. Loyalism, while not abandoning religious sectarianism, is adopting a distinctly racist position. Coupled with a developing racist far-right presence in the Republic, there is the basis for a dangerous and potentially powerful fascist movement emerging across the island.

For centuries the empire used religious sectarianism to divide Ireland’s poor and working class and thereby facilitate its controlling stake in the country. Should a referendum, in decades to come, result in reunification rendering sectarianism ineffective, might a dark hand promote fascist-supervised racism to fill the place vacated by religious antagonism? Imperialism has for long maintained itself by practising a strategy of divide, conquer and rule.

We have a proud history in Ireland of resistance to oppression, but it is essential that we don’t let our guard drop. As Rosa Luxemburg told us, it’s socialism in a workers’ republic or barbarism under racist fascism.

Tommy McKearney is a left wing and trade union activist.
He is author of The Provisional IRA: From Insurrection to Parliament.
Follow on Twitter @Tommymckearney

Sectarianism And Racism 🪶 A Poisonous Cocktail

Dr John Coulter ✍ I’ve no doubt that as the electoral clock ticks down to the May 2027 council and Assembly polls, DUP strategists will be burning the midnight oil to assess the political damage which the conviction of their former leader Jeffrey Donaldson will have on the party’s performance.

Since its formation in 1971 by the late Rev Ian Paisley, the DUP has always prided itself in being the political voice of the so-called ‘church vote’ in Northern Ireland, especially those from the evangelical and fundamentalist wings of Christian theology.

Indeed, Paisley senior’s initial foray into politics before 1971 was under the banner of the DUP’s forerunner, the Protestant Unionist Party. Two decades before he founded the DUP, Paisley senior - later Lord Bannside - had formed his own fundamentalist denomination, the Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster.

Founded in 1951 and dubbed ‘the Free Ps’, the denomination was often later viewed as the DUP at prayer. During the early decades of the DUP, many Free Presbyterians held positions within the party and being a born again Christian believer, or ‘saved’, was a prerequisite for getting your name on the DUP electoral ticket.

The rival Ulster Unionist Party was perceived by many in the DUP to be theologically liberal. But ‘Big Ian’ or ‘The Doc’ as he was affectionately known in the ranks of the DUP is no longer here to guide the party through its latest political storm - how to keep its traditional broad evangelical and fundamentalist Christian support base in the wake of the Donaldson saga.

The former Lagan Valley MP was seen as the ideal Christian politician complete with the symbolic lapel fish badge - until his conviction last month as a sex offender and child rapist.

Since his conviction, more allegations concerning his behaviour have emerged. The key question DUP election strategists will be asking - by the time those 2027 elections come around, will folk have forgotten about Donaldson or has trust from ‘Church folk’ in the party already waned substantially and irretrievably?

More importantly, will the current DUP leadership be able to pull some electoral rabbit out of their canvassing hat which will guarantee that the majority of the party’s Christian church vote remains with the DUP?

Is there the danger many evangelical and fundamentalist Christians, spiritually disillusioned especially with what emerged from Donaldson’s trial, could shift their voting allegiances to the more hard line Traditional Unionist Voice party fronted by North Antrim MP Jim Allister?

Could the Donaldson saga convince many Unionist voters - who switched their preferences to the DUP from the UUP when Donaldson quit the UUP for the DUP - to return to the new-look UUP under leader and former top cop Jon Burrows?

And then there’s the third route. Voter apathy among the pro-Union community has been growing over the years. Gone is the era when a Unionist elected representative could boost a 30,000-vote majority.

The so-called ‘stay at home’ brigade is costing Unionism seats at all levels. Pro-Union voter apathy has become just as big a barrier as infighting among Unionist parties.

Could many evangelical and fundamentalist Christians - sickened by what they heard from the Donaldson court case - show their revulsion by ignoring the ballot box, or by spoiling their votes?

Given the increasingly theologically liberal views being expressed by the Alliance Party, the chances of these same Christians opting for Naomi Long’s party as a protest vote are decreasing rapidly.

Alliance is now seen by many in the pro-Union community as an integral part of the pan nationalist front. It is not the so-called ‘middle ground’ which will dictate the outcome of the 2027 elections, but the voting intentions of the silent majority in the Christian church community.

In spite of Northern Ireland being portrayed as an increasingly secular society, there are still tens of thousands of folk who are still affiliated to a place of worship or who regularly attend church.

And while mainstream Protestant denominations, such as PCI, the Church of Ireland and the Methodist Church, have seen memberships dwindle over the years, some evangelical and fundamentalist denominations - such as the Baptists or Pentecostalists - have seen their numbers maintained.

Whilst they may garner a lot of publicity on social media, Hell-fire street preachers with their ‘pump up the volume’ public address systems do not represent mainstream thinking when it comes to open air evangelism. Church-based summer schemes, Bible weeks, and the youth outreach by organisations, such as the Children’s Special Services Mission (CSSM), continue to be as popular in 2026 as they were in 1976.

Granted, fundamentalist pressure groups, such as the Evangelical Protestant Society and the Caleb Foundation, may not have the influence they one enjoyed around the era of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, but clerics of all Christians denominations should be encouraging their flocks to vote come May 2027.

There is no use Christians huffing about the state of society if they will not get out of their pews and into the polling booths. If the Christians churches and places of worship wish to halt the tide of the so-called secular or pluralist society, then they have the ability to do so by voting in candidates who share their theological beliefs.

In bygone days, it could be a vote winner for candidates to have their election literature include their church work. But has the Donaldson saga poured cold water on that tradition where publicly proclaiming you are a Christian candidate will actually become a vote loser?

Perhaps the DUP may need to have a quiet word with Sinn Fein and ask the question - in spite of all the clerical abuse scandals in the Catholic Church, how did Sinn Fein manage to still electorally eclipse the SDLP?

The real challenge - not just for the DUP, but for all pro-Union parties come May 2027 - is will the silent majority church vote still have faith in the electoral process?
 
Follow Dr John Coulter on Twitter @JohnAHCoulter
Dr Coulter has been a journalist since 1978 and is currently a political commentator with GB News.

Where Will Church Vote Go Amid Donaldson Saga?

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

 

A Morning Thought @ 3211

Anthony McIntyre ☠ Courtrooms are not the type of places we head off to in search of some relaxation.


I have spent so much time in them that I began to think my name was either 'the accused' or 'the defendant.'. Impersonal, formal and rushed places, business moves at the frenzied pace of a New York moment.

It was a beautiful sunny day when I accompanied Drogheda Stands With Palestine activist Siobhan to Dundalk court. It was the second time in a matter of months that we had made the short train journey to the town. She had been summonsed because she had refused to pay her licence fee. For her it was a matter of conscientious objection towards paying anything to RTE whose coverage of the Israeli genocide in Gaza, she felt, fell far short of what a national television station should be serving to the society that finances it. Her view was simple: how can citizens be well-informed if RTE does not inform them?

The court building felt like a furnace on a sweltering hot Tuesday morning. Not enough seats for the people gathered we stood in the hallway awaiting the court to start while people fanned themselves down with legal papers and summonses, as legal eagles crisscrossed the building seeking out their clients and talking with their opposite numbers. At times a prisoner handcuffed to a guard would walk across the room, the cuffs guaranteeing him attention whether he wanted it or not. I made a point of following the eyes as they followed him. Having been in handcuffs hundreds of times, most of them for court appearances, it felt better to be brought to court by Siobhan who didn't need cuffs to get me there.

Last time up the case was adjourned. The An Post official we met in one of the court building's consultation rooms said at the time he would like to give her more time to pay the licence. Something she had not requested. On this occasion when we entered the room he fully expected Siobhan to have paid, leading to him being able to withdraw the case. She explained she hadn't paid and would not be paying due to the coverage of the Israeli genocide. He informed her that the case would have to proceed and that he could not enter into further conversation with her as it could be prejudicial to the outcome. He was formal but courteous.

I asked Siobhan if she was concerned about getting a record if convicted. No was her brief reply. She was good to go. We bantered about her going to jail as the Termonabbey One. Not that we had any concerns about that. The judge would have to fine her first and when she refused to pay that then the possibility of jail might loom down the line.

Inside the courtroom the judge was moving through cases at lightening speed and giving short shift to those who were not moving as quickly as she felt the imperatives of a busy court schedule required. As we awaited our turn, we watched other cases. In one, a black Garda was giving evidence. I didn't envy him, thinking he must get more abuse than most gardai given the racism that on some occasions has taken to the streets of Dundalk. It brought to mind an incident from Drogheda where a young ban garda of a colour other than white left the force after being threatened and abused by a drunken racist thug. A single black Garda contributes more to the society we live in than a regiment of racist hate vendors.

When Siobhan was called I walked up to stand behind her as she made her case, honoured to be with her as a colleague from Drogheda Stands With Palestine. We had stood together in West Street weekly vigil for almost three years and our court outing was hardly breaking our stride. It was the same journey, standing for the same thing. Most important of all, Siobhan could have restricted her evidence to simply stating that she did not have a TV, and was not in possession of one at the time of the TV licence inspector's visit. That was enough to win her an acquittal. She didn't take the easy way out, but instead made what for her was the foremost point, that she would not be paying RTE anything because of her conscientious objection to its coverage of Gaza. The judge noted it and then moved to strike out the case.

We emerged from the courtroom to a North Louth sun to make our way back on the only good thing ever to come out of Dundalk - the train to Drogheda!!

Siobhan's act of civil disobedience could have cost her. But consequences did not dissuade her from pursuing what she believed to be the proper course of action. Contrast her stand with that of the FAI or the Dublin government and their role in legitimising the rogue state of Israel. Wolfe Tone's people of no property or no power are willing to do the right thing when those who have both property and power use every evasive tactic in the book to dilute, defer, derail doing the right thing, and then deny having done anything wrong.

In the overall scheme of things actions like Siobhan's can appear small particularly when considered against soccer internationals or the Occupied Territories Bill. Yet their significance lies in the message they transmit: that individuals prepared to be disobedient, in a way that their governments and sporting authorities are not, is the grit that sticks in the wheels of the genocidal juggernaut. Siobhan's action was much more than a refusal to pay a TV licence. It was a statement that Irish society should not be complicit at any level in giving Israel a licence to kill. No matter how small it might seem or as torturously slow as progress appears, it is actions such as this which help build the momentum towards a situation once summed up by VI Lenin: There Are Decades Where Nothing Happens and Weeks Where Decades Happen.

Nothing will happen if citizens like ourselves, through actions, big and small, don't make them happen.

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The Courtroom

Ukraine Solidarity Group ✊ A Digest of News from Ukrainian Sources ⚔ 13-July-2026.

In this week’s bulletin

⬤ 100,000+ Russian war crimes.
⬤ Russian indoctrination of children.
⬤ Torture of Ukrainian journalists.
⬤ Putin’s ties to Israel.
⬤ Elite Ukrainian regiment torture allegations. 
⬤ Ukraine Recovery Conference.
⬤ Russia fuel crisis/

News from the territories occupied by Russia

Russia passes revenge life sentences against a Hero of Ukraine and three other marine commanders for defending Mariupol (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, July 10th)

Russians sentence terrorized 20-year-old Mariupol woman to 13 years on ‘treason’ charges (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, July 10th)

Civilians Trapped in Occupied Khersonska Region (Human Rights Watch, July 9th)

52-year-old Ukrainian political prisoner Ibragim Kudzhanov dies in Russian captivity (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, July 9th)

Weekly update on the situation in occupied Crimea (Crimea Platform, July 8th)

Crimeans given long sentences for ‘calls to terrorism’ – comments on social media in support of Ukraine against Russian aggressor (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, July 8th)

Russia ignores urgent medical condition and increases monstrous sentence against 68-year-old Halyna Bekhter for supporting Ukraine (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, July 7th)

Ukrainian journalists unlawfully imprisoned by Russia (Zmina, July 6th)

‘I will never betray my faith’: Artem Gerasimov, a political prisoner from Crimea, has served his sentence and been released (Crimea Platform, July 6th)

Russia to indoctrinate children in occupied Ukraine with invented ‘history of Donbas & Novorossiya textbook' (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, July 6th)

Ukrainian Jehovah’s Witness faces 6-year sentence on charge of ‘financing extremist activities’ for shared worship (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, July 6th)

Report: Life Under Occupation (Alternative Human Rights Centre, June 2026)

News from Ukraine

Commander of scandal hit Ukraine brigade wanted for murder (Kyiv Independent, July 12th)

‘Educational conversations’: rioters and recruiters in Lviv (Meduza, 10 July)

For second time in 4 days, Russia targets Kyiv with mass missile attack, killing at least 26 (Kyiv Independent, July 6th)

Russian missile hits residential building in Kyiv: 9 killed, 46 injured (Ukrainska Pravda, July 6th)

The “Skelya” assault regiment has combat merits. And, according to eyewitnesses, they torture and beat people to death there (Babel, June 23rd)

A soldiers’ union is formed in Ukraine (International Viewpoint, June 14th)

War-related news from Russia

More than 230,000 Russian soldiers killed in Ukraine (Kyiv Independent July 12th)

Russia restricts foreign SIM cards, blocking censorship circumvention (Ukrainska Pravda, July 12)

Investigation: how severe is Russia’s gasoline crisis? (Meduza, 10 July)

Russian anti-war activist deported from Turkey and detained (Meduza, 10 July)

Crimean artist and political prisoner Bohdan Ziza transferred to a penal colony in Ulan-Ude (Crimea Platform, July 9th)

Drone deference: firms fined for failing to protect employees from attack (Mediazona, 9 July)

Pump fiction: queues and empty tanks in Russian petrol stations (Mediazona, 8 July)

“Russian Houses”: Russia’s Instruments of Influence on Youth Abroad (Crimea Platform, July 8th)

Urban scholars write: Participatory governance, à la Russe (Posle.Media, 8 July)

Putin’s ties to Israel: Best Frenemies Ever (Radical Dumpling, July 8th)

Comment and analysis

Who Is Ukraine’s Recovery Really For? (Jacobin, July 11th)

Podcast: the Russia-Ukraine war and the Left (Victor’s Children / Soundcloud, July 8th)

Who Pays for Ukraine? Debt, Conditionality, and the Limits of European Solidarity (Europe Solidaire Sans Frontieres, July 8th)

Soviet Romanticism (161 Crew, January 19th)

Research of human rights abuses

More than 100,000 documented incidents of international crimes: how civil society organisations are bringing justice closer (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, July 7th)

Ukrainian journalists unlawfully imprisoned by Russia (Zmina, July 6th)

Torture, isolation and fabricated cases: Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry urged the release of Ukrainian journalists unlawfully imprisoned by Russia (Zmina, July 3rd)

Calling Russians to account, caring for victims, establishing truth, and providing guarantees: four pillars of transitional justice. Interview with Maksym Yeligulashvili (Babel, June 24th)

Also not to be missed

64-page zine about cultures of remembrance (Solidarity Collectives, 10 July)

France denies asylum to journalist who exposed Russian operations in Africa (iStories, 9 July)

The communist menace (The Russian Reader, 6 July) 


🔴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 203

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