Goldsmiths LGBT society says feminists should be sent to a gulag.

How long before the BBC and Guardian cotton on to this?

I think flipping Victoria Derbyshire the bird and shouting Fuck You at the end might start the ball rolling.

Toby Young is a direct reaction to universities being ultra left wing though.

It's not entirely obvious that Toby Young is wronger, unpleasanter or stupider than the LGBQT society of Goldsmiths, who probably think they are left wing. Progressives assume that the virtue of their friends is so obvious that their inanities are excused. From outside, a lot of the right looks and sounds sensible by comparison with the antics of the left.

Interesting slip of the finger there. I meant 'gate-keeper' but, bloody hell, 'hate-keeper' kind of works.

The left wing in the UK is currently a dangerous joke but part of that extremism is I think as a result of portraying anyone to the right of centre as a far right bogey man.

What's a dangerous joke? Nature abhors a vacuum.

Centre left, centre and right is currently without political representation apart from a few MP's who put their head above the parapet; apart from the dead in the water LibDems that is, who couldn't fill an empty condom.

Above the centre's listed above, it is visible within parliament now.

I can't even start with the problems around the Left, identity politics, and it's failure to actually, honestly, engage with the majority of people.

I don't see any of this ending well.

It's why I - like many others on this thread - just take it as a bad, bad sign that The Guardian (let alone key politicians and union leaders) are silent or collusive here.

It's handing something huge over to the Right - to the Far Right, in fact.

I honestly feel like crying.

And I know Red thinks much the same way. She posted a very coherent summary as to how identity politics isn't an accident, hindering representation and engagement in politics by people, but an actual hate-keeper, keeping them out.

It's just so, so fucked up.

Toby Young is a direct reaction to universities being ultra left wing though.

It's symptomatic.

Yes it's a small group, but reflects wider dissatisfaction and concern.

Someone with money has the opportunity to exploit fractures.

I think the Far Right have managed to weasel their way into government in a way I would never have thought possible a decade ago

I agree. But I think clowns like Toby Young are red herrings. More worrying is the complete failure of mainstream popular socialism, as it has been submerged by identify politics. That leaves the path open to right wing organisations which were always there, but are now able to sound like their concerns - dressed up with immigration, work, education, crime - are actually perfectly reasonable.

We on the left should think hard about why we use "populist" as an insult.

It's no accident that MrGoldsmithLGBTQ's twitter thread sounded like a try out for a job as an (unpaid) Novaramedia propaganda-rat.

Oh I don't know. I think the Far Right have managed to weasel their way into government in a way I would never have thought possible a decade ago. The street thugs are also back. And our culture has proved horribly porous to Far Right discourse.

They are a problem.

And something has gone badly wrong in the Left, with the hounding of moderates.

Politically, things are not great.

Toby Young and 'progressive eugenics' being discussed in a serious fashion at a London University?

I think you're stretching "serious" to breaking point. He gathered a bunch of non-entities and obvious fascists and held a meeting which is almost the definition of "echo chamber". They managed to blag a room at UCL on the basis of someone's honorary lectureship, but otherwise it was "serious" in the way that a lecture by David Irving was serious history: it had the look and feel if you didn't look or feel too carefully, but was obviously nothing other than a circle jerk by crazies. No-one's opinion was changed, because all the attendees were just as vile before as they were afterwards, and the benefit of them meeting in semi-public is that it's easier to keep an eye on them. Rather in the way that MI5 and MI6 funded a lot of communist organisations in the 1970s, in order to be able to know who was who. That said...

more having to be done by security forces to tackle far right extremism

Given the way in which the "security forces" used the most coercive and deceptive powers of the state to "tackle" amiable eccentrics like Helen Steel and obviously decent people like Doreen Lawrence, you'll pardon my scepticism at the idea that "security forces" getting involved is proof of much beyond the fact that the police do very bad shit on very flimsy legal bases. The investigation into undercover police investigations is completely dead, as they got a pliant rural plod in to "investigate it" and he is as expected doing nothing, but that was not a shining passage in British police history.

The left wing in the UK is currently a dangerous joke but part of that extremism is I think as a result of portraying anyone to the right of centre as a far right bogey man.

Toby Young and 'progressive eugenics' being discussed in a serious fashion at a London University?

Rosie Cooper and the plot to kill her?

I do not want to disagree with you, but there is a rise in the number of far right groups out there, the amount of support they have, more having to be done by security forces to tackle far right extremism and a greater tolerance and normalisation of far right politics and policies.

I do think that the centre and centre right (and even centre left) are being demonised by the left in the same breathe, but I do think it important to highlight how dissatisfaction and poverty are leading to an abandonment of main stream political parties and people seeking out alternatives.

There is also a political vacuum of responsibility that no one is stepping up to and filling that's a huge part of the issue.

Fear is driving things, with people afraid to say anything vaguely sensible. It needs more people to do it to break the spell.

Yes Lass. Or indeed anyone who is even vaguely centrist - I'm a classic liberal woolly centrist with slightly lefty tendencies, but apparently I'm a "Nazi" for not believing that women can have a penis and that it's necessary to have rules about who is and is not allowed into a country

We are moving towards a position where there are only two choices: firstly, an ultra-authoritarian left that punishes people for wrong think and actually isn't really joking about shunning and gulags; secondly, a far right that will take out all the gains we (women, gays and lesbians, black and brown people) have won with our blood and sweat

The left wing in the UK is currently a dangerous joke but part of that extremism is I think as a result of portraying anyone to the right of centre as a far right bogey man.

There’s no way anyone I knew, teachers or students (over 60% mature?) would back this nonsense.

There are a bunch of London colleges which historically were niche, and heavily dominated by mature and/or post-graduate (or people doing MAs without a first degree on the basis of experience) students. The obvious example is Birkbeck, but SOAS and Goldsmith are similar. They didn't, and don't, have a full range of subjects, but they were bloody good at the subjects they did have. The ones I've named happened to be validated by London, although in other parts of the country similar institutions were historically validated by the CNAA. Conservatoires. Teacher training. Jewellery and Silversmithing. Printing. Specialist places.

More recently, they have attempted to recruit a lot more 18 year olds, and to become more general universities, with their own royal charters. But most 18 year old students stay well away - they opt either for live away universities or for larger urban post-92s - and the postgraduates and the mature students aren't interested in SU wankery.

Even of the 18 year olds, a lot of them are there to do the thing the university is famous for - music and fine art at Goldsmiths, isn't it? - and similarly want little to do with the SU. They're doing top-rated courses at a place top-rated for that subject, and are too busy playing the piano, carving wood or whatever it is they are passionate about.

So Goldsmiths SU is ripe for entryism by a small clique of people interested enough to get involved, privileged enough to be able to afford to get involved, and dim enough that a poorly regarded course at a second- or third-tier university with no particular reputation for it is the best they can get onto. English at Goldsmiths? Why aren't you, well, anywhere else? But UCL, for a start off?

That's a perfect storm for entryism and stupidity.

Do you think the Marketing department might resemble an episode of 'The Thick of It'?

I bet

I still reckon it was a GC infiltrator wot dunnit to discredit the rainbow unicorn TRA brigade.

Some of the articles about this look to me like the beginnings of exactly the kind of backlash against gay rights as a concept that some of us were worried would happen. As the public starts to realize what total nonsense TRAs are peddling that's who they're going to blame (along with feminists).

Oh look, there appears to be an opening for a new person to lead the LGBTQ+ group at Goldsmiths.....

New Statesman coverage (brief, not in-depth):

What springs to mind when you think of Soviet gulags? Employment rights, freedom of expression and amateur theatre, surely?

This is the nostalgic alternative reality voiced by the students who run the official Twitter account of the LGBTQ+ Society at London’s Goldsmiths University.

www.newstatesman.com/politics/media/2018/09/compassionate-non-violent-course-action-goldsmiths-university-students-defend

Goldsmiths have shut the LGBTQ+ society and released a statement blaming it on a rogue student / group.

Why does this kind of stuff keep coming out of Gorldsmiths, though? They don't deal with that at all, or even acknowledge it.

Yesterday, Monday 10th September, a member of the LGBTQ+ Society with access to their Twitter account posted tweets containing offensive material. We condemn the abhorrent content of the tweets and they are in complete opposition to the views and values of the Students’ Union.

The Society have broken multiple Union policies and procedures, including failing to adhere to our code of conduct, and we have issued multiple requests for the group to delete the tweets. As such, the Society have been suspended and disaffiliated from the Students’ Union, pending investigation.

Societies are autonomous groups that operate with support of the Students’ Union, governed by our policies and procedures, but their views and behaviour is led by independent groups of students.

Following this, we will ensure that there is other support in place for LGBTQ+ students, including those starting at Goldsmiths later this month, by building networks and facilitating events led by our LGBTQ+ staff and students.

www.goldsmithssu.org/news/article/6013/Statement-on-LGBTQ43-Society/#.W5fVf0FjQDJ.twitter

I am impressed by the prompt attention given to the problem.

I was starting to think about taking my entire degree off my CV 😉

I did my MA there 10 years ago.
It was fun. There’s no way anyone I knew, teachers or students (over 60% mature?) would back this nonsense.

Left wing, right wing, they're both as mad as a box of frogs. Politics isn't a line from left to right. It's a circle where far left and far right meet in an orgy of imbecility.

That’s hardly fair.

I may reconsider in the light of the very prompt action from GSU.

My first consideration is always to the awesome people I already work with.

Goldsmiths has long had a reputation for allowing Islamism to flourish in their ISOC- so it's interesting that freedom of speech (which is how they defended the questionable speakers that the ISOC invited to events on the campus) is now apparently only relevant when it's the right sort of speech