Clare Baker

After 15 years living in Turkey now settled in Deal with the lovely Linds. Struggling with MEcfs but so lucky in so many ways. Sex matters - in life and law

[Pat Marsh @patmarsh]

Did you know that each of the suits on a deck of playing cards, represented the four major pillars of the economy in the middle ages?

The Hearts represented the Church; the Spades the military; Clubs agriculture; and the Diamonds represented the merchant class.

#PatsFridayFacts

[Andrew Neil @afneil]

T Blair is smart. This is drivel. Macron is a lame-duck president. Merz is the most unpopular Chancellor in the history of the federal German republic. Meloni is PM of Italy. So exactly who is going to spearhead this radical reform? It’s fantasy.
And who comes next? The AfD is outpolling the CDU/SPD combined. Le Pen wins every generic poll to be next President of France. Another four European countries will go Right in the next 12 months.
Mr T Blair and the British Left in general are in la-la land when it comes to Europe. They don’t read the foreign pages of our own press, never mind the foreign press.
That will also become apparent if you watch the Lib Dem on @bbcquestiontime tonight. Total failure to address the points I made to him.

[Clare Baker @kokokopek]

@detoff @InstituteGC No

[Clare Baker @kokokopek]

@CapelLofft @Madz_Grant Maybe they could tackle some Angela Thirkell?

[DJ Lippy @JocastaMoney]

They're doing to English ethnicity what they did to womanhood. Pretending that unless you have a PHD in DNA you can't have an opinion. That because nation states are mixtures of ethnic groups that intermarried thousands of years ago, you cannot make any claims to your land and must accept infinity immigration from hostile, alien clans, forever.

"What's an Englishman" is the new "What's a woman" and the fact that the Tories are pushing this rhetoric tells you all you need to know about them.

While it's not as black and white as sex, nearly all of us know where our grandparents came from. If they were living in England before 1945 you can be 99% sure they're British or from a nearly identical ad-mixture of culturally similar tribes.

Don't even debate with them. It's a tactic designed to deny you your rights. That which cannot be defined in law cannot be defended in law.

It's not acceptable for people who have 0 English ancestors to claim to be English. This is genocidal, coloniser talk. The only people who make such claims are engaging in bad faith. This rhetorical slight of hand is intended to create two class of English men: cis English and trans English. Why not ask women how consenting to become a sub-sect of their own sex worked out for them?

You don't need to let them box you into their ethno-Nationalist box. It doesn't make you a Nazi because you think that the English exist. It does not follow that anybody who isn't English should be stripped of their rights and deported. That the English must remain racially pure and that people with mixed heritage are mongrels or racially inferior outcasts.

Does this feel familiar? Like TRAs who pretend women aksing men to stop wanking in the ladies are committing a literal trans genocide.

But to pretend that culture exists free floating from ethnicity and that we're all blank slate automotons is patently ridiculous. Just look at the ongoing animosity shown to the English by our British compatriots. They seem to loath us even though we have shared this land for thousands of years. Romani gypsies immigrated out of India nearly 1000 years ago, have they integrated into any European nation?

What I fear more than anything is that we have created the social conditions for a hundred year civil war in Europe. This is an unprecedented social experiment and we have no idea what the outcome will be

But can we have any kind of public debate about this? Can the people who already live here say - stop, we don't want this? Our leaders do not recognise any tangible differences between us and them. Now they are even trying to gaslight us that actually, the English don't exist and only a Nazi would think they do.

I had a premonition of this during the debate about the difference between British and English and the notion that one was a civic category tied to citizenship and the other an ethnicity. It reminded me of debates around 2017 where women were told to cede the word woman to men. Because woman was a "social" category and female the biological category we should use female and let men have the word woman. But what happened when women budged up and gave men the word woman? The pushed forward and demanded they be referred to as biological females.

We gave them British and accepted that anybody who came to these lands and was granted citizenship by the state could become a member of the English, or Scottish or Welsh tribe. That you can come from anywhere in the world and be British.

But a few months later they come for English using the exact same logic as TRAs who say "if we can be women why can't we be female?"

If you give them an inch they will take a mile. And then Luton, Birmingham and Bradford. Right now it feels like for every Frank Bruno there are ten more Jihadi al-Shamies. There is a kind of body horror for the English when the state insists those who want to annihilate everything about us are actually us. If you're a terf you should have felt this all before.

[Clare Baker @kokokopek]

@DamianGreen Not to mention exasperated labour voters!

[Clare Baker @kokokopek]

@HarryOneNine @simonmontefiore I think someone has given it to me for my birthday but mustn’t unwrap early 😬

[Clare Baker @kokokopek]

@hselftax @forwardnotback 😱

[ISRAEL FA @ISRAELFA]

We have contributed to the world and humanity in countless fields, earning an impressive number of Nobel Prizes along the way. Unfortunately, we have not yet found a cure for stupidity, ignorance and hypocrisy displayed by @IrelandFootball team coach. We’re not playing with ignorance, hypocrisy and stupidity, We’re playing against the coach who embodies them.

[Masih Alinejad @AlinejadMasih]

Hello everyone, this is a message from inside prison, from a young Iranian woman who is about to be executed. Please help me to amplify her voice before they hang her. 💔

«Remember my name, maybe I will not be able to speak again.»

This is the voice of Najmeh Amini, a 23 year old accounting student, speaking from Vakilabad Prison in Mashhad. In her voice message she says: «Be my voice. I am an innocent girl, a young woman full of hopes and dreams.»

Najmeh is one of the detainees of the January uprising .

She spent months in detention without a verdict, denied access to a lawyer of her choice and pressured during interrogation. In August, her trial was held at the Revolutionary Court of Mashhad on charges of «assembly and collusion» and «insulting sacred values.»

She said in her voice message that her death sentence was issued on September 16, 2026.

In her own words: «People, I only want justice and the chance to defend myself.» And this is her dream: «Before the rope ends my life, let me see my Iran prosperous and free.»

Be her voice and all of political prisoners, especially those at risk of execution.

#NajmehAmini
#StopExecutionsInIran

[Clare Baker @kokokopek]

@WhatNowDoc What a bonny lass!

[Ex Businessman @ExBusinessman]

GAZA
150,000 to 400,000 dead. Thirteen million people out of their homes, five million of them children. 825,000 kids under five who will die this year without treatment. Famine officially declared. No ceasefire. The UN appeal is sixteen percent funded.
Oh wait that's Sudan.. now

[Eitan Fischberger @EFischberger]

So it turns out that Hamas runs a WhatsApp group with all of Gaza’s journalists, where Hamas “managed the discourse and the narrative.”

These outlets have "journalists" in Gaza:

Reuters, AP, NYT, CNN, Wapo, PBS, NPR, BBC, The Guardian, Al Jazeera, and Drop Site News

[Ruth Paterson @mrsruthpaterson]

A law that criminalises people who cannot know the crime is incompatible with ECHR Article 7.

If MLAs will not define gender identity, they cannot vote for a bill they or their voters cannot understand. And they shouldn’t jail people under it.

It cannot be waived through - it needs to go back to the drawing board. 8/8

[Dr. Maalouf ‏ @realMaalouf]

It has now been confirmed that the Islamic regime in Iran has murdered at least 100,000 civilians, half of them under 18, whose sole crime was protesting for freedom.

Macklemore and Ms. Rachel haven’t said a single word.

Weird.

[Clare Baker @kokokopek]

@MaddyViews Don't be ridiculous

[Clare Baker @kokokopek]

@fugitiveink @AmandaPCraig @leakylike If you don’t already, do look at Benenden’s membership offer. They’re really good on cataracts. Your piece on the Tapestry has encouraged me to plan a visit!

[Clare Baker @kokokopek]

@WhatNowDoc Hope your night is peaceful 🌒

[Taylor Smith @itstaylorsmith9]

there is a political paradox that nobody in the western press is writing about clearly enough.

Erdoğan has won.

not partially. completely. he controls the courts, the central bank, the military, the television networks, and the constitutional ledger. he eliminated every institutional check, jailed his most dangerous rival, and rewrote the rules so thoroughly that opponents must ask his magistrates for permission to exist.

by every classic metric of political science, the palace should be invincible.

and yet the regime has never been more fragile.

this is what foreign analysts consistently misunderstand about authoritarianism. they assume that capturing a state means controlling it. it does not.
it means inheriting all of its structural crises with none of the shock absorbers that democracies use to distribute blame, absorb discontent, and self-correct.'

in a democracy, when the economy fails, voters change the government and the system resets. in a personalist autocracy with no independent institutions, every failure flows directly back to the palace.

the lira, the inflation, the grocery bill, all of it points at one desk.

with no institutional release valves left, the paranoia inevitably turns inward. that is why prosecutors are now pursuing the regime's own former prime minister, Ahmet Davutoğlu, for critical tweets. when a machine runs out of enemies, it starts eating its own architects.

Western leaders pretend the foundation is solid because they need the migration gates closed and the NATO southern flank secured. they are ignoring the pressure building inside the boiler.

Erdoğan won everything.

that is precisely why he can never afford to stop!

[Women's Policy Centre @womenpolicyctr]

At the Women’s Policy Centre, we strongly oppose the decision of the Archbishop of Canterbury @ArchbishopSarah to award a man who subjects his wife to abuse by concealing her identity in such a barbaric manner. No religion can permit anyone to deny the dignity and freedom of women. Centuries of gradual adaptation and applied theology have established gender equality in the Church of England, with a woman now holding the highest office. Yet the same woman allows a man from another religion to deny his wife the same rights. This is unacceptable. No awards should ever be given to such men in the UK. We shall not normalise the subjugation of women, for any reason, whatever the religion.