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Showing posts with label Heartlands Tribune. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Heartlands Tribune. Show all posts
Heartlands Tribune ☭ Written by Paul Knaggs. 

MPs have defeated the assisted dying bill by 286 votes to 270, a majority of 16. Support fell by 44 as Andy Burnham faced his first big Commons test.

MPs rejected a fresh attempt to legalise assisted dying on Friday, defeating the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill by 286 votes to 270.

Support for the bill fell by 44 MPs on last year’s vote. Three Labour opponents, including a minister who resigned after her own terminal diagnosis, said the result reflected a bill that was “unsafe and unworkable”, not a change of heart on the principle.

The result brings to an end, at least for this Parliament, a two-year campaign to change the law. MPs had twice backed the legislation before: at second reading in November 2024, by 330 votes to 275, and at third reading in June 2025, by 314 votes to 291. Both times the bill, sponsored then by the Labour MP Kim Leadbeater, went on to the House of Lords. Both times it stalled there. An unprecedented number of amendments from peers meant it ran out of parliamentary time before the 2024 to 2026 session ended, and the bill fell without becoming law.

Assisted Dying Bill Falls As Support Collapses

Heartlands Tribune ☭ Written by Paul Knaggs. Recommended by Mark Hayes. 

Broken Rules, Silent Leaders: The Institutional Rot Inside UNISON

When UNISON allowed a biological male to stand for a seat reserved for disabled women, it broke trade union law and its own constitution. When seven nurses were harassed in their changing room, it looked the other way. Britain’s largest union has not merely lost its way; it has actively turned on the female members who fund it.

An institution is never truly tested by the glossy rhetoric of its annual conference, nor by the high-sounding platitudes of its press releases. It is tested by its rulebook. We understand instinctively that when a person breaks a solemn promise, that failure becomes the measure of their character. Yet we extend a strange, forgiving leniency to our institutions, whether they are governments, churches, or trade unions. We allow them to wrap themselves in the language of moral righteousness while ignoring the binding contracts they wrote when nobody was striking a pose.

UNISON, a union built on the dues of more than 1.3 million members, three-quarters of whom are women, wrote its constitution with unusual precision. Its drafters knew exactly what they were doing.

Continue @ Heartlands Tribune.

The Ideological Capture Of UNISON 🪶 A Crisis Inside Britain’s Trade Unions

Heartlands Tribune ☭ Written by Paul Knaggs.

The Met Commissioner called it a mistake. Four months spent investigating Jack Grove, a journalist for asking questions of a Cambridge professor, Jason Arday and never once speaking to him, tells a different story.

Scotland Yard Didn’t Drop the Ball. It Picked a Side.

Sir Mark Rowley went on LBC this week and said the quiet part out loud. Asked why the Metropolitan Police spent four months investigating a journalist for the crime of asking questions, the Commissioner told Nick Ferrari: “We dropped the ball on that one, let’s not beat around the bush.” He added, more revealingly, that the complaint should never have got past the front desk in the first place.

It was meant to sound like candour. It reads more like a confession.

The journalist is Jack Grove, a reporter at Times Higher Education. His offence was emailing Professor Jason Arday, a sociology of education professor at Cambridge, with questions about his academic record, after academics tipped him off to apparent similarities between parts of Arday’s PhD thesis and another student’s work. Grove also asked about Arday’s claimed fundraising total and his ultra-distance running feats. Ordinary reporting. The kind of thing journalism exists to do.

Somebody, and it still isn’t clear exactly who, rang the police. Cambridge University has since said flatly that it never made a complaint and wasn’t aware of one being made. Whoever it was, the Met treated a plagiarism inquiry as a potential crime and sat on it for four months. Grove was never interviewed. He learned he’d been under investigation only when officers rang to say the case was closed, and told him not to contact Arday again because the professor’s “mental health” had been affected. Arday’s lawyers, Carter-Ruck, then wrote to Grove’s editors suggesting the paper’s scrutiny of a Black academic “may be” racially motivated, a charge that dissolves the moment you notice the questions were about a PhD thesis, not his skin colour.

Continue @ Heartlands.

The Case Of The Journalist, The Professor And The Police Investigation

Heartlands Tribune ☭ Written by Paul Knaggs.

From Cradley Heath to Liverpool: The History of Unions Betraying Female Workers

UNISON, ASLEF, USDAW and the Musicians’ Union are boycotting Labour’s Women’s Conference because its formal proceedings are reserved for women.

The Oldest Story in the Labour Movement Has a New Chapter, and It Stinks…

In 1874, a bookbinder named Emma Paterson founded the Women’s Trade Union League because the unions of her day would not organise women. This is not a new story. It is, if anything, the oldest story in modern history, and not only in the labour movement. Men shut the door. Women build their own room.

Those rooms worked. Mary Macarthur built the National Federation of Women Workers for the women the established unions would not take, and in 1910 the women chainmakers of Cradley Heath struck to force employers to honour a minimum wage the law had already granted them. They won. The movement absorbed their victory into its mythology and has been proud of it ever since. That is the pattern, and it repeats: women organise separately because the general movement has neglected them, they win something nobody else was fighting for, and afterwards the movement discovers it had always believed in equal pay. 

Continue @ Heartlands.

The Empty Delegation 🪶 How Four Trade Unions Sold Out Their Female Members

Heartlands Tribune ☭ Written by Paul Knaggs.

On This Day In History . . . 
Paris 1889: The Second International’s Founding Principle

On 14 July 1889, socialist delegates from across the world gathered in Paris to form the Second International. Their principle was simple: “The worker’s struggle has no borders.” because capital crossed them too.

Modern liberals have spent decades twisting that principle into an argument for the unrestricted movement of cheap labour. They are wrong.

Ask them what internationalism means today and you will hear about open borders, labour mobility and the free movement of people as an unquestionable good. What you will rarely hear is the word that mattered most to the socialists who met in Paris: capital.

Nearly 400 delegates from around 20 countries attended the founding congress. They did not meet to abolish nations. They met to stop capital using nations, and the workers within them, as weapons against one another.

That distinction has been buried. The left has paid dearly for it.

Modern internationalism asks workers to celebrate a system in which corporations move money, factories and labour wherever wages are lowest. When that movement drives down pay and weakens unions, we are told the resulting competition is solidarity.

Continue @ Heartlands.

Internationalism Was Never About Open Borders

Heartlands Tribune ☭ Written by Paul Knaggs.

It Took Geneva To Remind Westminster That Women Have Rights

Women’s rights in Britain are not owned. They are held on licence, revocable whenever a man claims the female identity. July 2026 was the month the licence nearly got called in.

On 14 July, in an office in Geneva, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls sat down and drafted a press release about the United Kingdom.

Not about Afghanistan, where girls are barred from school. Not about Iran, where women are beaten for their hair. About Britain, the country that gave the world the suffragettes, the Equal Pay Act and the Sex Discrimination Act.

Reem Alsalem’s statement urged British politicians to uphold a ruling of their own Supreme Court, and observed that the backlash against it showed “how fragile the protection of women’s rights remains”. She closed by calling on the Government and the devolved administrations to state clearly that the law is clear and must be complied with.

The law is clear and must be complied with. A UN official had to say that sentence to the British Parliament. Every word of this article exists to explain why she had to, and to name the people responsible.

Continue @ Heartlands.

The UN Had To Tell Britain, Women Have Rights

The Heartlands Tribune ☭ Written by Paul Knaggs
21-June-2026.

Ten Years On, We Are Changing Our Name. Here Is Why.

We did not change our name because we changed our politics. We changed it because the name no longer tells the whole truth.

We have chosen this day deliberately. Midsummer is the old turning point, the longest day, the moment the year tips and the light begins its slow return journey toward winter. It is a day for letting go of what has run its course and turning to face what comes next. That is what we are doing.

Labour Heartlands was born in a very particular moment. It came out of the political wreckage after the EU referendum, when millions of working class people across the old industrial towns, mining communities, coastal seats and forgotten regions spoke clearly, only to be treated as fools, racists, dupes or embarrassments by many of the people who claimed to represent them.

That was the gap we stepped into. Labour Heartlands was never created as a house journal for the Labour Party. It was created because the people in the heartlands deserved to be heard in their own voice.

Continue @ Heartlands Tribune.

Ten Years On 🪶 Labour Heartlands Becomes The Heartlands Tribune

Heartlands Tribune ☭ Written by Paul Knaggs.


“No self-respecting woman should wish or work for the success of a party who ignores her sex.”
– Susan B. Anthony, suffragette, 1920

MPs from five parties have signed a motion to kill the EHRC’s Code of Practice on single-sex services before it can come into force. Labour supplies the largest bloc. They call it inclusion. It is ideological capture. And the working-class women they claim to represent will remember who stood where.

The Motion That Reveals Everything

On 1 June 2026, a formal parliamentary motion was tabled by Nadia Whittome MP to disapprove the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s statutory Code of Practice for services, public functions and associations. The Code was laid before Parliament on 21 May. Under the procedure that governs statutory instruments of this kind, Parliament has 40 days in which to raise objections. If no objection is passed within that window, the government sets a date for the Code to come into force.

That is the mechanism. Those are the facts. What lies beneath them is something more troubling: a cross-party faction of MPs, organised within days of the Code’s laying, channelling the energies of a professional activist lobby rather than the interests of the constituents who sent them to Westminster.

Continue @ Heartlands.

Betrayal By Motion 🪶 Parliament Moves To Kill Women’s Rights Code

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