Ministers should consider proscribing a militant transgender activist group which has targeted the offices of MPs, the government’s former adviser on political violence has said.
Writing in The Times, Lord Walney said the conduct of the group Bash Back “deserves far more serious attention than it has so far received” and that ministers should test it against the same threshold that led to the proscription of Palestine Action.
Bash Back is a transgender-led direct action group which vandalised the office of Wes Streeting in July last year when he was the health secretary, and it has pushed for a “new era of trans rage”.
It’s not really a good fit, is it. The rhetoric doesn’t mesh with the cause. Passion and anger can work when the cause is righteous enough – stop the mass slaughter, end the torture, do away with the system that subordinates millions of people. When the cause is “fawn over men who insist that they are women” it doesn’t work so well. It’s too trivial, too niche, too fictional, too childish, too silly. The result is that demands for rage come across as entitled and coercive.
The Times previously revealed that the group had produced a guide for members urging them to arm themselves and carry out repeated illegal attacks on MPs and organisations.
There again, a flimsy and inherently narcissistic cause stumbles at the first step. If you’re going to go all militant you want to have a decent reason for it.
It told activists to form “independent local cells”, “identify a target” — including MPs, organisations and political party conferences — and “ensure your target can be hit repeatedly until they desist” from their “transphobic” activities.
It’s not accidental that that looks like telling people to resort to physical violence against people while leaving room to say “Oh no, we mean their offices and organizations.” Please. If they really meant that and only that, they would have said that and only that. The not doing so is absolutely intentional.
Walney stressed that he made no suggestion about who was responsible while proceedings were active, but said it was “a fair observation” that Bash Back had withdrawn none of its material since her death.
“Not one image of masked, hammer-wielding activists. Not the guide instructing supporters to select political targets and strike them until they desist,” he said.
The implications of which, I repeat, are extremely obvious.
“An organisation genuinely committed to non-violence, watching the country absorb the killing of a public figure in her own home, would have paused. This one did not.”
Let’s be real here. An organisation genuinely committed to non-violence would not have said all that about striking targets until they desist.
In a statement posted on social media, Bash Back said: “We completely reject the idea that we are a ‘terrorist’ group. We are a non-violent direct action group that demands the total liberation of trans people, and opposes the rising tide of anti-trans bigotry.”
Nope. All those threats, all those images of snarling men brandishing hammers, are not “non-violent”. It’s violence by wink wink nudge nudge.
Leave a Reply