My review of 2024s key Brighton moments certainly throws up some highs and lows. Are we winning the battle against the gender identity cult? Actually, yes, maybe. The publication of Hannah Barnes’s Time to Think in March and the ground-breaking Cass Report in April added weight to the case put by many of us in Brighton a year earlier. Brighton is no different to the national picture: the UK is living through years that have witnessed a tell-tale spike in the numbers of teenage girls (often autistic, often same-sex attracted) identifying as trans and seeking medical transition. In as much as our council leaders look at this phenomenon at all, their default position is that progressive innovations like the Trans Inclusion Schools Toolkit are helping children to discover ‘who they really are’.

While the near total ideological capture of the city council (both its elected and senior executive layers) is formidable, the cracks began to emerge across 2024 and we suspect a national press article in December gave a clue to how these cracks will widen in 2025 (in short, a Brighton father of a 16-year old will bring a High Court case against the NHS arguing a certain Brighton GP defied Cass Review guidance). Other Brighton parents are minded to do the same. A prediction for 2025? – never make predictions, but rats off a sinking ship comes to mind.   

INTRODUCTION

We entered 2024 having endured six months of a new Labour administration under the strict supervision of Bella Sankey. Elected in May 2023, an early indication of the gender-ideology stance taken by Labour in Brighton came when I wrote to every councillor. I asked if they were aware of an anonymised case reported in the national press that appeared to describe the experiences of a Brighton family. The Sunday Times had interviewed the parents of an autistic girl who had been socially transitioned by her secondary school without informing them. A reply from Labour’s Cllr Mitchie Alexander suggested she was not privy to the fact that Sankey and senior officers knew all about this case. Mitchie Alexander doubted the press article was referring to Brighton but her reply revealed the council group-think that we encounter all the time. Echoing the guidance that the council recommend (the ‘Trans Inclusion Schools Toolkit’), Cllr Alexander’s view of social transitioning appeared to equate ‘coming out as trans’ with past debates around Section 28. For Mitchie, kids come out as trans just as they come out as gay (they’re just discovering ‘who they really are’). As with Sankey’s proclamations on protecting “our precious trans children” against those awful people who would deny their existence, Mitchie imagines the parents as cruel and bigoted: “Wanting to change your name, wanting to be referred to as a different gender, wanting to bind your breasts is not anything to be ashamed of”, wrote Alexander. Unsurprisingly, her standpoint points the finger at parents who block a child’s desire to be who they really are. As the actions of Brighton social workers described in the Sunday Times article demonstrate, the council simply brands these parents as bigoted and cruel. With reference to the article, Cllr Alexander was keen to reinforce the gender-activist view that ‘young trans people’ simply need and deserve their parents support: “Too many young trans people take their own life, as the people who they love and others around them, do not tolerate/acknowledge their identity”. Perhaps 2025 will be the year news of the suicide-myth reaches Brighton and Hove?   

My public question to the equalities committee (11/07/23) asked the new Labour administration to confirm it fully embraces and abides by all nine of the protected characteristics as laid out in the Equality Act (the council answered, yes it does). However, the council’s answer to my next question on whether BHCC agree that Gender Critical belief is worthy of respect in a democratic society was the first indication that the council will pick and choose if it abides by the Act. The answer given by Cllr Pumm (emailed to me) presented the council’s caveat that it “reserved the right to challenge any expression of beliefs which causes harm or undermines the dignity and safety of others”. For Pumm and the BHCC senior execs/lawyers who approved his answer, GC belief that causes “harm” (or makes trans persons feel ‘unsafe’) appear to justify their unlawful discrimination of Allison Hooper. (See a Freedom of Information response on this here.) As has been correctly noted by legal experts “Asserting biology shouldn’t be deemed hateful by any rational person. Disagreement – espousing beliefs that are themselves lawful – is not hate. Seeking to manufacture a situation in which non-hate is deemed hateful acts against the interests of trans people; alienates the general public; and is itself harmful”.

Ten days later, the very first Full Council meeting of Sankey’s administration made its extreme views on gender identity abundantly clear. This time, I put questions to Bella Sankey that so enraged her she even surprised her supporters by branding the parent-concerns about social transitioning I had raised as “baseless smears” (1).

JANUARY

Jan 27^th – Julie Burchill strikes!

In this annual review, a high point can include an article that simply lets the world know about Brighton’s all-round horror show of ideologically driven governance. One of these appeared in the Spectator. Titled ‘Brighton shows why you shouldn’t vote Labour’, Julie Burchill’s acerbic description of the mess we’re in surely spoke for many a fellow resident who had initially celebrated Labours routing of the awful Greens: “It’s like there’s an ongoing competition between the Greens and Labour to see who can finish off B&H in the shortest time”. This paragraph was especially prescient:

“Next week, Sankey will host another of her patronising ‘Reimagine Brighton’ events, where the public show up believing that they can have their say. This time the idea is to ‘brainstorm’ on the theme of ‘safety in the city – how can we ensure women and girls feel safe?’ Well, ensuring only women – rather than men who think they are women – can access Brighton’s rape crisis centre might be a good start”.      Julie Burchill, The Spectator, 27/01/24

Jan 29th – a shocking incident at the ‘Reimagine Brighton’ event.

And so it was that two days after Burchills piece appeared in the Spectator we witnessed the first low point – very low. With Sankey herself present at the event (as if to ensure maximum impact), the actions that took place at ‘Reimagine Brighton’ were grotesque. One way of making Brighton & Hove “a safer city for women and girls” was to perform, it seemed, a live enactment of what council bullies traumatising rape victims looks like (this blog entry by FiLiA CEO Lisa Marie Taylor describes what happened). Of course, in the warped world of Brighton & Hove, the lessons of the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre debacle become inverted and female survivors who think biological sex is real and the provision of female-only counselling matters absolutely should be denounced as bigots. 

   
The confiscation of her handout at the ‘Reimagine Brighton’ event began a harrowing year for survivor Allison Hooper for whom the trauma of past sexual violence was compounded by the re-traumatising experience of having her experiences and concerns, which she had expressed on a single page handout, snatched from the hands of attendees by angry council officials. For Allison, right across 2024, it must have felt like Sankey’s council set out to deliberately silence her every attempt to be heard. Read the council’s VAWG strategy here.

FEBRUARY

Feb 1st: At the first Full Council meeting of 2024 a question from Bev Barstow asked why it was that the council imagines the notorious Trans Inclusion Schools Toolkit to be lawful when it plainly isn’t and the government draft guidance unlawful when it plainly is. “Surely it is time to suspend the toolkit and defer to the draft guidance?”, Barstow asked (Cllr Helliwell confirmed that the council will continue to recommend use of the Trans Toolkit). February also saw the local LGBTQ (but increasingly TQ) activist group Allsorts Youth Project hold parent sessions advising on how to challenge the draft government guidance. We quickly learnt that Allsorts were being very careful who it allowed in to these sessions. Predictably, the purpose of these sessions was to reinforce the message that the government guidance must be rejected because it “seeks to deny the existence of transgender pupils, discouraging them from coming out and being their authentic selves”.

Feb 26^th: Allison Hooper’s heartfelt letter to new CEO Jess Gibbons: by classifying the letter as a complaint, the council was able to use a notorious twist in it’s procedure. Numerous complaints from residents attending the Reimagine event (we know of six) were simply determined by the Monitoring Officer as having no “merit”. All of the complainants later appealed to the ombudsman but of course it is not part of the ombudsman’s role to challenge decisions made by the Monitoring Officer

MARCH

March saw some excellent developments. March 27^th 72 pages of legal advice were published by KC Karon Monaghan (read about this here) and a day later we saw the publication of a paperback version of Time to Think by Hannah Barnes. This contained a completely new chapter and several pages exposing the rogue Hove GP Dr Sam Hall. A day earlier Jo Wadsworth broke the story with a very welcome piece in Brighton & Hove News. It was alleged that Dr Hall was using a loophole in the NHS rules in order to give children cross-sex hormones without proper clinical assessment

In the same paper, a piece by Jean Calder appeared on March 3rd titled ‘Does our council have a woman problem?’. Jean’s piece returned to the Reimagine Brighton incident and traced the roots of the council’s silencing of gender critical women (most notably the ongoing Sarah Summers case and the physical ejection of a woman from the council chamber in October 2023).

APRIL

April 10^th was a high point for Brighton and the whole country. The final report of Dr Hilary Cass detailing her recommendations to NHS England following her review of gender identity services for children and young people. Cass was a vindication of all those voices arguing that social transitioning kids in school was not a neutral act and in many cases harmed children by placing them on a pathway to medical and surgical changes

April 13th – Brighton and Hove women protest outside the WellBN clinic. Their action was covered by the Sunday Times in its article ‘Doctor exploits NHS loophole to prescribe hormones for children’ (subtitled, ‘Despite a warning against the controversial drugs in the Cass report on transgender care, a Brighton GP is still handing them out’). Eight months later, news of the alleged actions of Hove GP Dr Sam Hall resurfaces in a December Telegraph story on a father taking the NHS to the High Court over actions taking place at the WellBN clinic.

April 13th also saw a very welcome Guardian article on the Toolkit and the legal opinion by Karon Monaghan of Matrix Chambers which, wrote the Guardian, “concludes that schools and councils using the toolkit are very likely to be in breach of equality and human rights legislation, and at risk of being sued by unhappy parents”.

“Hall, who transitioned as an adult having been married and had three children, is a revered figure in Brighton. Posters celebrating him as a “trailblazer” were seen around Brighton during last year’s Pride parade. He works closely with the local trans youth charity Allsorts, dubbed “the Mermaids of the south coast” — the trans charity that lobbied doctors at Gids and supports the use of puberty blockers — and is a prolific blogger who has talked openly about how his practice is guided by his beliefs”.

MAY

The month of May began with by-elections in east Brighton following the suspension and resignation of two Labour councillors for alleged electoral fraud after their success the previous year.

May 2^nd – For our timeline of highs and lows the significance of these by-elections was the attempts I made as an independent candidate to highlight the emerging schools safeguarding scandal. As I told Julie Bindel (who devoted a whole episode to Brighton in her podcast series ‘Julie in Genderland’ – see episode 5), the more that parents sounded a safeguarding alert the more this was presumed to be baseless and driven by the malign desire to propagate anti-trans rhetoric. The attacks on me by Green and Lib-Dem candidates were predictable but who knew that local MP Lloyd Russell-Moyle would go to the trouble of standing outside a Polling Station to warn voters that Hart is “anti trans” (later when I confronted Lloyd he argued that his criticism of me was accurate because I’d challenged the Labour council’s “work on trans rights”. Unlike Sankey’s ‘Baseless Smears’ accusation when I’d raised the safeguarding issue a year earlier, LRM’s outburst was particularly ill-judged coming as it did barely a month after the Cass Report and Wes Streeting’s unequivocal embrace of the report as a “watershed moment”. Captured by the gender identity mind-virus he may have been, but LRM was a hard working constituency MP and the manner of his removal as a candidate in the July General Election was wrong.

May 3rd saw the first PSHE Brighton parents drop-in. By this time PSHE Brighton (the parents group I am part of) had been contacted by a number of families in the city and this was a chance for us all to meet. Drop-in events continued bi-monthly throughout the rest of 2024.

JUNE

June 23^rd – The Brighton ‘Let Women Speak’ (LWS) rally held on the grassy area at Grand Parade was (once again) impressive for its defiance in the face of large numbers of pro-gender ideology activists who came to hurl abuse at women but also for the failure of police to protect attendees as the rally came to a close. That women were chased by gender activists though nearby streets, surrounded on street corners, forced to shelter in shops as mobs screamed ‘fascists!’ and ‘No Terfs on our turf’ was troubling enough. But the fact that police were indifferent when women pointed out that one of their tormentors was Alan ‘Sarah-Jane’ Baker, was shocking. Baker had spent 30 years in prison for kidnap and torture and later for attempted murder. He openly advocated for violence against gender critical women. Read press coverage on the LWS rally here.

The fact that you had to be brave to come support the LWS rally in the face of such visceral  hatred; and the fact that the police, at best, seemed to regard the LWS women as provocateurs (and no better than their tormenters) says something about the hyper-woke atmosphere engulfing Brighton. The hostile environment that greets anyone defending the sex-based rights of women and girls links directly to Bella Sankey. Her outspoken contempt for those who expose the harms of gender ideology, her administrations support for gender affirming schools guidance and her cold-blooded indifference to rape survivors requesting single-sex counselling serves to green-light the kind of ‘no Terfs on our turf’ manifesto so enthusiastically embraced by the likes of ‘Sarah Jane’. Arguably, open season on terfs had already been declared 12 months earlier when Cllr Pumm declared that the council ‘reserved the right to challenge’ terfy beliefs that make the likes of Pumm feel unsafe. No surprise then that zero tolerance on anyone who appears to be criticising gender ideology emboldened management in a discussion on schools safeguarding held at the Southern Belle pub (see SEPTEMBER below).

June also saw the first of Allison Hooper’s deputations to council submitted for approval (the council’s procedure allows short speeches from the public to be read out at a committee meeting). Allison’s deputation presented the original concerns outlined in the confiscated handout. The response to her formal complaint following the confiscation incident on January 29^th made the platform offered the public via deputations the obvious route to getting her concerns heard. The council response had made clear: “The complaints procedure is not the appropriate means by which to raise or discuss wider political or social issues, or the council’s approach to them”.  However, Sankey rejected the deputation because “Cabinet is not the correct forum for this to be raised” informing Allison that it had already been dealt with by the Council’s complaints process (which, of course, it had not).

JULY

A version of the deputation was re-submitted in July by Julia Basnett. It made clear that the ‘political or social’ issue of survivors forced to self-exclude from services unable to guarantee a male will not be present had explicitly not been dealt with by the complaints procedure. However, the exact same excuse (essentially a fiction pretending that this had been dealt with) was given by Mayor Asaduzzaman.

  
July 11^th: A question to Full Council by resident Gary Vallier asked if the council accepted that Karon Monaghan KC was correct in her finding that the Trans Inclusion Schools Toolkit is in breach of numerous Acts of parliament; that it flies in the face of government guidance and that it rides roughshod over  multiple instances of binding case law in both the domestic and the supranational courts. The robot-like Sankey loyalist and deputy council leader Jacob Taylor ducked the question by claiming that the guidance is “non-prescriptive” and is, in any case, under review (2).

July 23rd – The council launch a public consultation on the Toolkit.

Also in July: Resident Julia Basnett receives a reply from senior council officer Emma McDermott confirming the council’s definition of ‘woman’. Julia learns that the council “defines woman/girls as women/girls in all their diversity” (from Enquiry # 587678) (see note 3a). Her question on how the council understands the Forstater Ruling was not fully answered until November (3b).

AUGUST  

(a quiet month!)

————————————————————————————————————————————————————–

SEPTEMBER

Sept 5th – PSHE Brighton write to Labour Cabinet member and gender identity activist Cllr Tristram Burden. Cllr Burden (who is one of my ward councillors in Queens Park) had told me that a PSHE Brighton letter to all councillors had not been received by him. PSHE Brighton, therefore, responded by re-issuing the letter and re-emphasising that a meeting with Cllr Burden would be very welcome in order to discuss with him the voracity of parent-concerns raised. He did not reply.

Relations between Tristram and myself had deteriorated by this stage. This councillor is one of the few who, in June 2023, had listened to my detailed account of the suffering of a Brighton family caught up in the schools safeguarding scandal. I stressed that BHCC leaders knew instances of children socially transitioned at school without the parents knowledge. I pointed out the role played in schools by Allsorts Youth Project and the Toolkit (both posing a risk to children who are ushered on to a ‘conveyor belt’ toward medical interventions without proper clinical diagnosis). Tristram’s response was to firmly deny that any such safeguarding breach exists (a position that he has maintained ever since). I asked him to check my claims with Bella Sankey and senior officers such as Deb Austin. A few days later he emailed me: “We won’t be taking this question any further. Rest assured the well-being of children and young people is hugely important to us as councillors, as it is to the committee”. On January 13th 2024 I went to Tristram’s surgery to raise the safeguarding issue a second time. He told me that he and his administration do not accept that there are any safeguarding breaches arising from schools who follow the ‘trans toolkit’. Nor were there schools failing to safeguard in relation to ‘social transitioning’ or any risks from deploying council recommended third party providers such as the activist group Allsorts Youth Project.

To have a ward councillor rebuff such a serious safeguarding alert was astonishing and, despite the pointlessness of issuing a Standards Complaint about this, I registered one anyway. His September 5th 2024 email to me ended with the line “The same questions you’ve been asking have been thoroughly answered and nothing has changed. Further cyclical correspondence on this issue will be ignored, Adrian”. The BHCC decision to regard all citizen concerns about a schools safeguarding breach as “baseless” has been the hallmark of the council for 18 months (from July 2023 to present). Despite the October 2023 Brighton & Hove News article Parents seek apology from council leader for calling their concerns ‘baseless smears’ (subtitled: ‘Head teacher accepts teachers knew their child used a breast-binder in school but kept it from them’), it seems that every Labour councillor has been instructed by Bella Sankey to refute such claims or say absolutely nothing. As the parents state, “Rather than admit the significant safeguarding issues exist, Bella Sankey doubled down in the full council meeting on Thursday 19 October. She said “I don’t recognise any of the concerns’ that we have raised”.

While it may be the case that Labour ‘backbenchers’ simply believe that the concerns are merely ‘smears’, Tristram Burden and other Sankey loyalists selected for her ‘cabinet’ know the truth but look the other way. The line that stood out in the press article was when the family of the child given breast-binders made clear that the council had full knowledge of the matter. In fact, “they [the council leaders] provided lawyers to the school to help them respond to it” [i.e. to the parents complaints]. An insight into how the Labour administration had chosen to silence the public – by claiming their concerns were ‘not recognised’ (or by avoiding engagement altogether) – came in the response to my August 2023 Subject Access Request (SAR):

Sept 10th – A new podcast series from Julie Bindel includes a whole episode devoted to Brighton & Hove. Episode 5 of Julie in Genderland meets parents and campaigners in conflict with the council over its gender affirming ‘Toolkit’ guidance for schools. Rachel Cashman of PSHE Brighton, researcher and campaigner Helen Saxby, parent and ex-teacher Julia Basnett and myself all take part. I’m really grateful to Julie Bindel and producer Samantha Smith for this series of nine episodes. Earlier episodes include contributions from Stephanie Davies-Arai of Transgender Trend, therapist and campaigner James Esses, and ex-BBC Newsnight journalist and author of Time to Think Hannah Barnes alongside the harrowing accounts of parents caught up in the nightmare.

Sept 13th – Brighton & Hove News publish this article outlining some of the objections to the Toolkit presented by PSHE Brighton. ‘New school trans guidance ‘worse than ever’, parents’ group says’ also made reference to the letter PSHE Brighton sent to schools detailing the many flaws of the Toolkit. “Governors are not asked to consider safeguarding in the list of responsibilities set out in the revised toolkit and the accompanying consultation”, stated the letter, “This is a key omission, as safeguarding should be one of the central planks on which the toolkit is based”. The letter warned governors that they will be liable should any risks transpire.

Sept 17^th – The council receive more questions from Julia Basnett intended to clarify the council’s stance in relation to the precise facts of the Jan 29^th confiscation incident (see the council’s November reply below).

September 17^th also witnessed the Southern Belle pub incident where a meeting of Free Speech Brighton was shut down by security guards. The landlord objected to a talk by a retired teacher arguing that children should not be subject to gender ideology in schools. The speaker, along with the entire audience of this pre-booked event were ejected. Shocked, they reassembled at a nearby pub only to have the same Pagoda security guards follow them – and they were ejected again!

As luck would have it Julie Burchill attended this event; see her eyewitness account in the Daily Mail here.

OCTOBER

Oct 17th – Finally, a deputation to the council’s Oct 17^th Cabinet meeting, submitted by Allison Hooper was accepted for reading. The reading and the reply given by gender identity activist Cllr Emma Daniel has been covered by Wall of Silencing on X (see the clip here: tps://x.com/BrightonWoS/status/1859573384318689739). Every one of Allison’s points were deflected. Instead, Cllr Daniel pretended that the deputation was about something else. Later, when challenged on this, Cllr Daniel replied, “I honestly engaged with the point that I felt was at the heart of the deputation which was your access to a service to work through the trauma you have experienced and my genuine regret at the length of the waiting lists for women who need services”. Of course, Allison’s point touched on a raw nerve for this Labour administration. They must never speak of their cult-like devotion to gender identity ideology which demands strict adherence to the belief that “transwomen are women” even if that leads female survivors to self-exclude from trauma services or the council’s VAWG strategy to erase all mention of female spaces. We await Cabinet 23/01/25 to see if the strategy is signed-off unchanged (see note (5) below for an update after that meeting takes place).

Oct 24th – Bev Barstow asks a question to Bella Sankey at Full Council. Bev made the point that while it was the case that Allison Hooper had finally achieved an opportunity to read her deputation, the reply Cllr Daniel gave sidestepped every single point Allison had raised. She asked, “does this administration accept that the Wall of Silencing vigil taking place outside this building right now is brave and principled leaving you all feeling just a little ashamed?”. Asserting the fictitious council line that all Allison’s points had been thoroughly answered, Sankey added, “I don’t accept that characterisation of silencing”.

Outside Hove Town Hall as the Full Council meeting of October 24^th took place, a Wall of Silencing vigil unfurled a banner and held speeches. See the coverage here: https://x.com/CashmanRachel/status/1849705583848435716

NOVEMBER

Allison’s letter to Cllr Daniel 15/11/24 soon became an Open Letter to all councillors.  On November 28^th Cllr Daniel replied but the gaslighting of Allison was so stark it warranted a response (5).

In November senior council officer Emma McDermott replies to Julia Basnett’s follow-up questions (6). The reply is extraordinarily candid. McDermott clarifies the council position on the ‘Reimagine’ incident. For survivors like Allison Hooper to uses phrases such as ‘men who identify as women’ is to commit the act of misgendering: “this phrase misgenders trans women by implying they are men who identify as women rather than women. [    ] Women are women, regardless of whether they are transgender or cisgender. [    ] The vocalising of an argument should not nor does not require the use of language that harms and impacts on the dignity of other people”.  On the Forstater Ruling, McDermott’s earlier emphasis on how the judgment does not mean that those with gender-critical beliefs can ‘misgender’ trans persons with impunity becomes clearer in relation to Allison Hooper. Ignoring the fact that the Equality Act protects Allison using necessary language (7), McDermott recites the council’s mistaken view that the treatment of Allison Hooper was justified because of ‘harms’ inflicted on the ‘dignity’ of trans persons who are left feeling ‘unsafe’.

DECEMBER

If we thought December would be a quiet month we were proved wrong!

This Daily Telegraph piece appeared on December 22nd. ‘NHS faces High Court legal fight over cross-sex hormones prescribed to boy‘ described a Brighton father who is bringing legal action against the NHS after his 16-year old son was given cross-sex hormones (despite the NHS accepting the advice of the Cass report on prohibiting the use of these drugs). He will seek a judicial review in the High Court of the decision allegedly made by Hove GP Dr Sam Hall to prescribe powerful medication blocking male testosterone and adding female oestrogen (which impacts on brain development, fertility, and sexual function) without, states the article, “any diagnostic process compatible with the Cass Report nor NHS England’s clinical commissioning policies”. “One community group, PSHE Brighton, raised concerns about what it described as a “pipeline of vulnerable, traumatised, often autistic and same-sex attracted children in Brighton and Hove being fast tracked for irreversible sex-change treatment”.

(Left, Dr Sam Hall) Dr Hall is alleged to have prescribed cross-sex hormones to the boy, identified in the Telegraph piece as as Child O. Dr Hall was mentioned by Hannah Barnes in a new chapter in the paperback version of Time to Think. Read Hannah’s Dec 22nd post on X here: “I wrote how demand for WellBN’s service is down to long waiting lists for gender clinics. The practice sees ‘bridging prescriptions’ as a way to relieve distress & improve lives of trans people. But it’s not at all clear 16 year olds meet any of the criteria for such prescriptions”.

The year ahead

January looks like being an interesting month with Cabinet and Full Council meetings scheduled. These meetings are likely to see attempts made to approve both the BHCC official VAWG Strategy and the Trans Toolkit (following a public consultation ending Oct 10^th). The Full Council meeting on January 30^th will come exactly one year on from the infamous ‘Reimagine’ incident and councillors (the vast majority of whom have been silent on this issue and the schools safeguarding scandal) will be confronted by our second Wall of Silencing vigil.    

As I complete this review of 2024, just 3 days into 2025 and we’ve been met with a proliferating national and international resurgence of reporting on the UK rape-gangs scandal. The story was triggered by the Labour government’s decision to reject the request of Oldham council for a national public inquiry into historical child exploitation in the area. Of course the rape gangs scandal isn’t just an issue local to Oldham. It stretches right across the UK and back through the decades. The abomination it represents is, broadly speaking, analogous to the UK-wide safeguarding scandal driven by extreme gender ideology. As with the reality of rape gangs in Oldham, Rotherham, Rochdale, Telford, Oxford and elsewhere, individual councillors, social workers and school leaders across the country were soon made aware of vulnerable girls falling victim to gender activists but they chose to look the other way. Like the rape gangs horror, those who knew included a significant number for whom it was politically more important to avoid presenting a gift to bigots or ‘fueling the far right’ than it was taking action to stop the ongoing abuse of children. Similar parallels have been drawn between aspects of the findings of the Cass Review and what Professor Alexis Jay found in Rotherham.

At Brighton and Hove City Council, alongside former and current CEOs and Monitoring Officers and alongside the various relevant senior executives who promoted gender ideology, every single one of our 54 councillors elected in May 2023 became aware of the safeguarding breach in schools this past year. None among this cohort can claim they didn’t know. All of the 2023 intake of councillors were briefed on the Cass Report and on the KC advice prepared by Karon Monaghan, and all were sent a copy of Time to Think. Every headteacher and chair of governors were made aware. While 2025 is likely to see many councillors and officials resolutely continuing to place their ideologically correct desire to never appear ‘anti-trans’ above their duty to keep children safe, we can only hope that most will jump ship.

Similarly, in the case of women survivors denied single-sex services, we hope councillors will feel ashamed of the treatment dealt out by leaders to Allison Hooper. To those councillors who have reached out to the likes of Allison Hooper and who have engaged with PSHE Brighton we commend you and hope others follow your lead.

This review has been prepared by me (Adrian Hart) in a personal capacity rather than as part of or on behalf of any campaigning group I’m associated with. However, Wall of Silencing (@brightonWoS, #wallofsilencingbrighton) are happy that anyone wishing to contact me or Allison Hooper does so using wallofsilencingbrighton@gmail.com – Thanks!

Notes:

1. Baseless Smears. Question to Full Council, 4.30pm 20^th July. (Adrian Hart)“In recent years, Council officers recommended third party providers to schools. Some conducted classroom lessons and staff training. Groups such as Allsorts and Race Matters advised on procedure and future strategies.Criticism has been made of certain groups that the materials delivered in schools are contrary to or misrepresent the law, national standards, guidelines, policy and evidence. It seems these groups are not regulated to ensure materials provided appropriately reflect law and national standards. Can Council reassure parents that it will stop recommending such providers and implement quality assurance measures to ensure compliance with national policy, law, regulation and guidance?” Cllr Sankey’s reply (see BHCC minutes for 20/07/23) ran to 500 words. It included, “The council does not recommend or work with any third party nor recommend resources that breaks or misrepresent the law and so these claims and accusations are baseless smears. [ ] On a personal note, I am disappointed to see these baseless attacks on providers of education in our schools…”. Hart’s supplementary was: “To be clear – parents require reassurance that third party providers are suitably qualified, that these organisations have the in-house expertise to operate within the boundaries of government guidance and the law for example safeguarding and recognise the limitations of their proficiency. For example, parents have described charity organisations in the city (who have no staff clinically qualified in gender dysphoria) affirming a child’s gender, which according to the NHS is not a neutral act, and facilitating referrals to GPs who are known to prescribe cross sex hormones to children without specialist diagnosis of gender dysphoria. Indeed one charity organisation, present in most schools in B&H, are listed as an official partner of Gender GP, who have previously been subject to investigation by the General Medical Council and medical tribunals processes.Does the Chair agree that any individual or organisation working in local authority schools (or funded in any way by the council) who promotes gender ideology and affirms the gender of individual children must be suitably clinically qualified to do so or otherwise risk a catastrophic failure in this council’s safeguarding duty?  
2. Resident Gary Valier’s question to July 11th Full Council: Gary Valier asked: “Does the council accept that Karon Monaghan KC is correct that the BHCC Trans Inclusion Schools Toolkit is in breach of the Human Rights Act 1998, the European Convention on Human Rights, the Equality Act 2010, The Education Acts of 1996, 2002 and 2006, the School Premises (England) Regulations 2012, departmental statutory guidance including Keeping Children Safe in Education, EHRC Guidance (both Statutory and Technical) and multiple instances of binding case law in both the domestic and the supranational courts?”. Councillor Taylor, Deputy Leader and Cabinet Member for Finance and City Regeneration replied on behalf of Councillor Daniel, Cabinet Member for Children, Families, Youth Services and for Ending Violence Against Women and Girls: “Thank you Gary for your question. Councillor Daniel would ordinarily answer but is unwell today, so I’m responding on her behalf. And thank you for the correspondence that we’ve had over some months on this important subject. The first thing to say is the toolkit is not prescriptive and it encourages a case-by-case approach, which takes into account the needs of the student, their family and the school community. It does not and could not seek to override statutory guidance or binding statutes. The second thing to say is that the Council is in the process of reviewing the toolkit and will be launching a public consultation on the revised version very soon. Potentially as early as next week. Thank you.” Gary Valier asked the following supplementary question: “When you say, Councillor Taylor, that the toolkit is not prescriptive, it does not prevent any school from taking decisions in the best interest pupils. This is a deliberate phraseology from the Council, I believe, to expose each school to legal risk should any parent or teacher undertake legal action. How on earth is this shifting of the blame without tackling the root cause of concern and the failures, in my opinion, of the toolkit protect and safeguard children in the city, or indeed protect the interests of schools and prevent taxpayer money being spent on legal fees and court action?” Councillor Taylor replied: “Thank you, Gary, for your follow up question. As I say, the document has always been clear from its inception, its introduction, that it is not prescriptive, it is guidance. I think the best thing to say is that, as I’ve said, we will very shortly be publishing a new version of the toolkit and have a full public consultation. I fully understand you have strong views on this as to many others across the city. I think that consultation will be a really important chance for everyone to feed in their views and evidence to that process for the Council to consider.”
3. (a) Extracts from the July 2024 BHCC answers in response to Julia Basnett’s questions asked on Julia’s behalf by her ward councillor: (i) Please clarify the definition of female/woman/girl as used in the BHCC VAWGDASV strategic direction. [ANSWER] “Brighton and Hove VAWGDASV strategic direction document defines woman/girls as women/girls in all their diversity. [ ] VAWG is the umbrella term that describes the wide range of abuses that predominantly and disproportionately impact upon women and girls but can be experienced by all genders. (ii) Could you also kindly; Set out how our VAWGDASV strategy consultation and drafting processes have fully explored provision of female only counselling services to rape survivors. [ANSWER] This appears to be a question about commissioning intentions rather than the strategic direction document for VAWG shared at Cabinet and detailed explorations will be conducted at the point of commissioning. The Council jointly commissions counselling services to rape survivors in partnership with pan Sussex partners. These arrangements are in place until 2026 with an option to extend until 2028. Partners follow consultative processes to agree what will be commissioned in any future service model. (iii) & (iv) These questions sought confirmation on the BHCC position in relation to the protected characteristic of sex given that the BHCCs VAWG (including domestic abuse) strategy fails to include it and states, “In summary, VAWGDASV can take many forms which include physical, sexual, psychological, and economic abuse and can happen to anyone regardless of age, ethnicity, religion, gender, ability or disability or sexual orientation”. Clarification was also sought on BHCCs understanding of the Forstater Ruling: Julia asked, “in reference to her gender critical beliefs, it is my understanding that Maya Forstarter v CGD Europe and Others: UKEAT/0105/20/JOJ established that gender-critical beliefs, including a belief that biological sex is real, important, immutable and not to be conflated with gender identity, are protected under the Equality Act and the European Convention on Human Rights. It would follow, then, that nobody should feel silenced, intimidated or denounced for holding them, regardless of how they have been arrived at. In writing this I find myself wondering if it also follows under the Public Sector Equality Duty that it could be considered the Council’s responsibility to foster good relations between individuals holding gender critical beliefs and those who do not”. [ANSWER] “Females represent the majority of victims, and the needs of women/girls is incorporated in all our strategic intentions related to VAWG. However, we recognise that VAWG does not only affect women/girls. BHCC seeks to ensure that everyone who is affected by VAWG is supported irrespective of their sex or gender. [ ] This does not conflict with single-sex space provision where appropriate with suitable safeguards in place. It also does not prevent provision of spaces that are inclusive on the basis of non-binary sex and gender. [ ] The right to hold gender critical beliefs is protected, but as above there are significant restrictions on what this means in practice. There is the situation therefore of balancing rights of all and this will often be determined by the precise facts of a case. It is agreed that as part of the PSED ways of reconciling differences are an objective even where this is very challenging”. (v) This question asked if BHCC could confirm that “Protection for the expression of gender critical beliefs is recognised by BHCC and as such individuals in our City should not feel silenced, intimidated or denounced for holding them” and “Whether under the Public Sector Equality Duty the Council has a responsibility to advance equality of opportunity and foster good relations between those holding gender critical beliefs and those who do not?”. [ANSWER] “An authority may be allowed to restrict freedom of expression if, for example, someone expresses views that encourage racial or religious hatred. Like the right to freedom of expression, the right of each person to be protected from discrimination and violence are fundamental human rights.The expression of gender critical views may amount to discrimination/harassment if it manifests and has the effect of violating an individual’s dignity or creating an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment. The expression of gender critical views may meet this criterion even if they are not directed at a specific transgender person”. [on PSED] “having due regard to the PSED] “does not require council to achieve the above as you will appreciate that reaching consensus on very polarised views, on any matter, is a difficult task and possibly unachievable. However, we remain committed to ensuring that we provide safe space for all residents to give their views to the council about services needed in the city and we then must balance for diverse people’s needs equitably within the resource constraints we operate”. (b) Extracts from the September 2024 BHCC answers in response to Julia Basnett’s questions asked on Julia’s behalf by her ward councillor: (i) pt1 [Julia asked] The confiscation of Allison’s handout was justified by Ms Glossop in an email to me (23/02/24) stating, “they were experienced as offensive by other participants and were proving to be disruptive to the event”. In her handout, Allison uses phrases such as ‘men who identify as women’. Does the council perceive these phrases to be ‘misgendering’ (and the cause of “offensive”) and therefore reasonable grounds for confiscation? [ANSWER] “Yes – this phrase misgenders trans women by implying they are men who identify as women rather than women. The more respectful and accurate phrasing would simply be “trans women” or “transgender women” when relevant to specify, or just “women” in most contexts. Women are women, regardless of whether they are transgender or cisgender”. [(i) pt2] Further to your previous response to Cllr Gauge (Enquiry 587678) please tell me whether the council regards its action to confiscate Allison’s handout (because it was experienced by a participant(s) as offensive) to be a proper balancing of the protections accorded to Gender Critical Belief with the protections accorded to trans persons? (I refer to your replies on p3, a, b and c). [ANSWER] “It was determined that on balance the removal of the handout was proper to balance the protections accorded to people with different intersecting identities. The vocalising of an argument should not nor does not require the use of language that harms and impacts on the dignity of other people. As the note was being received by some attendees on that basis, it was removed. While the right to hold gender critical beliefs is protected, there are restrictions on what this means in practice/how it manifests. Those with gender-critical beliefs cannot ‘misgender’ trans persons with impunity. The expression of gender critical views may amount to discrimination/harassment if it manifests and has the effect of violating an individual’s dignity or creating an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment. The expression of gender critical views may meet this criterion even if they are not directed at a specific transgender person”. 
4. “Nov 28th
   
   Dear Allison,
   
   Thank you for coming to present your deputation and for this letter by way of follow up to the deputation. I understand this is a deeply personal matter that deserves careful consideration. In my response to you at Cabinet, I sincerely and honestly engaged with the point that I felt was at the heart of the deputation which was your access to a service to work through the trauma you have experienced and my genuine regret at the length of the waiting lists for women who need services. Our approach to service provision is guided by evidence-based best practices and focuses on ensuring all survivors can access the trauma-informed support they need. The women’s sector in our city has a long-standing track record of managing services safely and effectively for all women, including those with gender-critical beliefs.  We recognize that survivors have diverse experiences and needs. Our commitment as a Council is to ensure compassionate, inclusive support that prioritises individual healing and recovery. Service decisions are based on professional standards, community needs assessments, and contemporary research on trauma support. I share your concern about service accessibility.  We are actively working to:  Optimize use of existing funding; Increase investment; Reduce waiting lists for trauma support services.  The upcoming Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) strategy, developed through extensive consultation with survivors, support organisations, and healthcare professionals, will further strengthen our commitment to supporting all individuals who have experienced gender-based violence. My focus remains on ensuring fair access and expanding service provision to prevent domestic violence and sexual abuse. I value your engagement on these important issues.  Sincerely, Emma“

Dec 6th Dear Emma,
Thank you for your Nov 28^th reply to my Nov 15^th letter/Nov 25th Open Letter.
I had hoped that you would accept the seriousness of the issues I attempt (and keep on attempting) to raise but alas these issues seem to elicit such contempt within the council that, once again, you make no reference to them at all. I must say, it takes some effort on your part to tip toe around the questions I asked in my letter:

·         I responded to the matter of the council consulting with Women’s Aid asking “if this will result in the delivery of future and current services that appoint staff using the protected characteristic ‘sex’?”, but you side-stepped this completely.

·         I gave you an opportunity to reassure female survivors like me that you support Labour minister Anneliese Dodds when she said that government “will protect single-sex spaces for biological women” and that you confirm BHCC will do the same. I quoted three other Labour ministers too. But you side-stepped these points completely.

·         I asked you to correct me if I am wrong to imagine my council regards ‘gender critical’ belief to be false, bigoted and unworthy of respect. And you side-stepped this too.

At the end of my Nov 15^th letter I tell you that “I’m not sure what it will take for the gaslighting to stop”. I can’t quite believe that you would openly taunt me on this point. Yet, in your Nov 28^th reply you refer to my deputation to cabinet and have the audacity to write “I honestly engaged with the point that I felt was at the heart of the deputation …”. You then write, “… which was your access to a service to work through the trauma you have experienced and my genuine regret at the length of the waiting lists for women who need services”.

For the record, the substantive issues I raised in January and on numerous occasions since (as you, your fellow cabinet members and certain senior officers know full well) have never taken the form of a complaint about lengthy waiting lists. For you to openly and publicly pretend that my access issues boil down to this – to evade the questions I ask and the issues I raise as you have – takes ‘gaslighting’ to new heights. That you/BHCC have engaged in this technique is not only deeply distressing for me, it is the antithesis of a trauma-informed approach and brings both the council and its VAWG strategy into disrepute. I might add that I’ve researched the law on this matter and on five separate occasions since the January confiscation incident, and culminating in our exchanges, BHCC’s responses to my attempt to be heard meet the standard for harassment as defined and prohibited by s.26 of the Equality Act 2010.   

For the record, the substantive issues I raise are and have always been:

·         the desperate need of female survivors of sexual violence in Brighton & Hove to have their council address the absence of single-sex trauma provision within the two publicly funded services that exist;

·         and to have our council engage with the problem of survivors self-excluding from services (the problem being that those services openly state that they cannot guarantee a male will not be present in the spaces provided for trauma counselling);

·         And to have our council justify the explanation it has given to women for aggressively confiscating my handout, which they were offering to attendees of the ‘Reimagine Brighton & Hove’ event. This public event purported to be an opportunity for residents to discuss issues around the theme of safety for women and girls. The explanation eventually given to them for snatching my words on a page (written because I could not attend) from attendees hands was offense caused by “misgendering”. My crime was to use the words ‘men who identify as women’, which, according to BHCC officers, were “offensive” and required sanction because they “misgender trans women by implying they are men who identify as women rather than women” (1).

It is very plain to see that, when interacting with survivors who believe biology is real and that female-only spaces matter, the council’s idea of a trauma-informed approach is to bully, intimidate and insult in the hope that we fall silent. When that fails, Emma, you harass me with replies that deliberately evade every one of our concerns.

Upholding extreme gender ideology appears to be BHCCs official approach. This stance is unlawful because it supports an openly hostile response to women who dare to express the sex-realist views council dogma opposes. Despite the fact that our views exist as a protected characteristic (those who hold ‘gender critical belief’), the council choose to defy the law. Your leaders stand up in this chamber and mock the Equality Act by pretending to support this protection of belief while instantly withdrawing it when these beliefs are expressed out loud (2).  BHCC seem unaware that survivors like me need to use clear language when describing our concerns and the law permits this. Yet BHCC condemns our language as “offensive”.  

In this grotesque misunderstanding of the Forstater Ruling, BHCC brand the concerns of women as false, bigoted and unworthy of respect. It then seeks to punish survivors like me who speak out.

In my case, the whole of 2024 witnessed the council mounting a sustained wave of harassment against me. I suffered the humiliation of my words on a page being vilified and confiscated in public. My heartfelt letter to the CEO about that experience was ignored and two separate deputations were rejected on the spurious grounds that my issue had been dealt with.

Emma, I have been shaken by every step of this ghastly interaction with my council. The deputation which you replied to in chamber presented an opportunity for this council to apologise and resolve, henceforth, to demonstrate to female survivors what a trauma-informed approach looks like. My letter to you (now an Open Letter) presented another opportunity. It saddens me that you chose not to take these opportunities and instead continue onwards with the council’s contemptuous, gaslighting response.    
 
Regards,
Allison Hooper.

Notes:

1.  Quote from detailed response from BHCC Head of Communities, Equality and Third Sector, to resident follow-up questions via ward councillor enquiry 587678.

2.  Reply given by Cllr Pumm to public question, June 2023: “We respect everyone’s right to hold their own beliefs and the Council acknowledges that the Courts have deemed gender critical beliefs to be a protected characteristic under the Equality Act. The council recognises that a person holding gender critical beliefs may or may not be transphobic. It is not possible for a public body to know the motivation of a person who holds gender critical beliefs. However, we reserve the right to challenge any expression of beliefs which causes harm or undermines the dignity and safety of others“.

5. [Watch this space – I will provide a footnote summarising what happens in relation to the VAWG strategy and the Toolkit at Cabinet on Jan 23rd and Full Council on Jan 30th (along with any media coverage of the Wall of Silencing vigil).

END.

Dear Labour, Green and Conservative By-Election Candidates and party chairs,

For me, and most who take note of this matter, the Lib Dem decision to denounce me as “transphobic”, even if it became a local news story, is a storm in a teacup. Its just name-calling, no one really cares (on one level I don’t care either).

Indeed, I’m sure you will agree, at election time, party tribes have a long history of utilising anything about their rivals that they think “voters would like to know” (as Lib Dem candidate Robert Brown recently put it).   In the excitement of performing this important task, they occasionally veer into defamation and factual inaccuracy and have to retract and apologise.

In this case, there is a different reason why I want to describe to all candidates in these by-elections what happened (which will become clear by the end of this letter).     


The Lib Dem candidates post on Nextdoor (05/04/24)
At first, it was just a series of comments by a local Lib Dem candidate/activist on the neighbourhood social media site Nextdoor denouncing me as a transphobe.

The Chair of Brighton & Hove Independents emailed the Lib Dem chair objecting to Brown’s unfounded claims, asking that the comments be removed. Quite reasonably, she pointed out the recent embarrassment for Lib Dems nationally where they’d been obliged to take down an article slating the Cass Report. “The Lib Dems locally, particularly Robert, really must learn to read the room on this issue which has nothing to do with being anti-trans and everything to do with child safeguarding”, she said. Surprisingly, the Lib Dem chair responded by confirming he would discuss B&H Independents chair’s “threatening email” with his candidate.

The comments (that had been live on Nextdoor for 16 days) were then deleted with a typical ‘non-apology’ apology added (see footnote). But almost immediately Robert Brown doubled-down on his claim that I am transphobic with a 4-page letter to B&H Independents sent by his chair/agent – which I attach. He is of course free to send me his views and I do not wish to curtail anyone’s criticism of me. All of us must be free to express what we believe to be true. I suspect that the content of this letter is what Brown and the Lib Dem chair genuinely believe to be true (less a ‘smear’, I think, more of an innocent ‘what voters would like to know’ expressed (post Cass Report) from what most would now describe as an ignorant ideologically captured standpoint).

I intend to place the 4-page Lib Dem letter in the public domain alongside this letter – which helps with context (an ‘open letter’ to you) partly because I suspect the Lib Dems are not quite finished with me yet. However, I share their 4 page letter with you today because it illustrates the dogmatic mind-set that caricatures opposition as automatically “transphobic”.

In Brighton & Hove, these by-elections take place at an extraordinary moment. We are in the early stages of a dawning realisation that our schools have breached child safeguarding in relation to the ‘toolkit’ guidance issued on ‘gender questioning’ pupils. In short, some children – we don’t know how many yet (some are autistic and/or same sex attracted) have been harmed.

This context, in which the by-elections haphazardly take place, is all the more extraordinary because the safeguarding scandal correlates with the recent publication of the Cass Report. If that wasn’t enough, we also had (on April 14^th) shocking revelations about Brighton in the Observer and Sunday Times. You have to ask: Do the Lib Dems read the papers or listen to the news? The Lib Dem ‘gender identity’ activists must be among the last who still imagine the unfolding child safeguarding scandal is simply ‘anti-trans rhetoric’. I don’t care that the Lib Dems are so tone-deaf and so bizarrely out of touch that they have yet to discover recent changes to the Equality Act (2010). When they finally do catch-up with the real world they will see that what has become known as ‘gender critical belief’ is now a protected characteristic. ALL the views that Robert Brown thinks he has discovered on my twitter/X account in a series of ‘gotcha’ moments (the retweets of Linehan, LGB Alliance, Sex Matters, Transgender Trend and Helen Joyce) are deemed worthy of respect in a democratic society (see the Forstater ruling). The Lib Dems (in Brighton at least) also misrepresent the Cass Report and seem to imagine evidence exists that the report lacks rigour. On the bogus sources and other misinformation being peddled by the Lib Dems and many others, Hiliary Cass does not mince her words:

“If you deliberately try to undermine a report that has looked at the evidence of children’s healthcare, then that’s unforgivable. You are putting children at risk by doing that.

I don’t care about the Lib Dems. They are irrelevant (last year voters had no-idea if their Queen’s Park candidate was alive or dead – with Robert Brown turning up at the QP hustings imagining he might be allowed to answer voter questions instead). But I do care that their misinformation sways voters who regard this long established party as trustworthy. For this reason I invite all the candidates of Labour, Green and Tory parties to join me (before polling day, on Tue 30th please) in condemning the shoddy and shameless attempt to insult and demean a fellow candidate who is merely supporting, in good faith, parents trapped inside this unfolding child safeguarding scandal.

Kind Regards,

Adrian Hart
(Brighton & Hove Independents)
[Postscript: I asked local Labour, Conservative and Green parties to say something to me about this matter by 5pm Tues 30th but heard nothing. On Nextdoor I have suggested to Robert Brown that we debate these matters at a public event which we organise together.]

  https://nextdoor.co.uk/p/W2tZdjFgW8B-/c/17592281409507

The two by-elections in Brighton on May 2^nd are an embarrassment to Labour. It was only one year ago that the city held its local elections resulting in an unpopular Green Party being swept aside by a tide of red rosettes. The reason for these by-elections is that two of their newly elected councillors (one in Queen’s Park, the other in Kemptown) were expelled by the party – allegedly for electoral fraud and for living in Leicester – and they later resigned.

Of course, the overwhelming vote in 2023 for a Labour majority council had a strong undercurrent of public discontent with the Tory government. In the days running up to the vote the clarion call for all the anger and disappointment in both local and national governance created a swing to Labour that took it by surprise. The ‘ladies from Leicester’ weren’t the only parachuted candidates who weren’t quite ready to become councillors.

One year on, voters in these two by-elections – if they vote at all – are faced with a very different political landscape. One more Green councillor won’t alter the fact that the Labour majority will steam on to at least 2027 (unless it hits an iceberg that is – more on that later). And of course the Tories in Westminster are, I’m happy to say, toast.

This was the backdrop for recent by-election Hustings events in the wards of Kemptown and Queen’s Park. Living just over the border I attended the Queen’s Park hustings on Monday night.
You won’t be getting an unbiased account of the hustings from me, though I’ll do my best. This is because I stood in the ward of Hanover & Elm Grove for Brighton & Hove Independents last year. My friend Adrian Hart, our candidate for the Queen’s Park by-election, forms one of 5 voting choices vying for the seat vacated by 20 year old Chandni Mistry.

Brighton & Hove Independents make three straightforward appeals to the electorate. First, we already have the remaining (not expelled) Labour councillor so in a 2-seat ward we don’t need another one. Far better to have an independent working alongside as its well known that a party duo becomes a job-share. Second, the Labour and Green councillors do not live in the ward (we think that matters). Despite their claims to be intimately involved in the life of Queen’s Park, we’d say that at best that’s a recent thing. Even the ‘ladies from Leicester’ had to establish a few choice one-liners like “befriending isolated residents” and “providing mindfulness training to schools and youth groups”. Third, Labour will steal this vote by hoping for a low turnout which they will populate by mobilising their lists of party-faithful urging them to get to the polling stations on Thursday.

To Queen’s Park voters we’d say – regardless of whether they voted last time – grab your right to have a say next week.

So this is my summary of the hustings event organised by the always impressive St Luke’s Residents Association (SLRA). The 5 minutes allotted to the opening remarks of each candidate saw each making their pitch one by one. Most offered a CV style summary. However, Adrian Hart’s was different in two ways. He begun by thanking the audience for coming (there was over 100 people with standing room only) and asking if they would put their hand up if they were a voter (just under half raised their hand). He put his hand up too and reminded Conservative Sunny Chowdhury (the only other candidate living in the ward) to raise his hand. That so many party activists had trooped in from across the city to clap and cheer for red and green was telling.

Adrian Hart’s opening remarks departed from the typical ‘I’m, an academic, I’m a magistrate, I’m a charity worker, school governor, NHS manager …. and so on) by raising what might’ve been the issue Labour and Green’s are in complete denial about. “As it turns out, there’s a grim upside to this by-election”, said Hart. He pointed to the revelations about our council exposed in the Observer a week earlier. Referring to a 70 page KC analysis (the ‘Monaghan Advice’) sent to council leaders by one of the families devastated the schools safeguarding breach, Hart disclosed something shocking to any resident who had yet to hear of it. He said, “Our council leaders are in a blind panic”. This is the iceberg I mentioned at the start. Post Cass Report some of them can see it looming large out of the mist now. In short, the family have given the council a deadline of April 26^th to either concede that its ‘trans toolkit’ guidance for schools is unlawful or show why it thinks it is. “The guidance hasn’t been withdrawn”, said Hart, “…leaving schools legally exposed”.  Adrian made mention of how he had disclosed what he knew of the unfolding scandal to his ward councillors at a surgery in June but Labour leaders told them to back away and do nothing (a Subject Access Request proves this). He said, “I think it illustrates why we need independents”.

Later in the hustings, when Adrian turned to Labour candidate Milla Gauge urging her to offer a Labour viewpoint on whether the Monaghan Advice will be accepted or rejected, the existing Labour ward councillor for Queen’s Park (sitting in the third row) loudly interrupted with an objection. I couldn’t quite decipher what it was because the Chair requested that he be quiet (especially because, as a non-resident, he isn’t even a voter!). 

As the hustings meeting proceeded we heard questions put by residents ranging from the problem of cars speeding on Freshfield Road to the plight of St Lukes primary school who are fighting a proposed cut in the number of year forms from three to two. The vexed issue of how replacing the Palace Pier roundabout with traffic lights will, according to the council’s own consultants, cause unspecified years of “journey disbenefits” (that’s ‘severe congestion’ to you and me) seemed to baffle the Labour and especially Green candidates. On the utter wrong-headedness of ‘Valley Garden’s Phase 3’, Brighton & Hove Independent councillors and members joined residents, small traders, cab drivers and Buswatch way back in 2019 and been pushing to stop the madness ever since. Sadly Labour and Green are welded to realising this idea no matter what the evidence is of its sheer folly. Some Labour councillors have spoken off the record to our independent councillors to say they agree that VG3 is madness, but they are ‘whipped’ to support it.

For a completely unbiased stenographer-like set of notes about the hustings there is no better place to go than the numerous live tweets on twitter/X by Local Democracy Reporter Sarah Booker Lewis. For a 90 minute meeting of such intense discussion I would refer readers to Sarah’s record, and recommend the video of the event by Latest TV.

Let me return to my unashamedly partisan account of Adrian’s key message that night. I make no apologies for prioritising my report back from the hustings around Adrian Hart’s decision to raise the unfolding child safeguarding scandal wherever he could. He and I have been working on this for most of last year. Consistently our attempts to sound an alert have been met with a deeply troubling response. At council it is to dismiss the concerns as “baseless smears”. This is despite the fact that council leaders know full well what is going on.  We will see what happens next with the council. My guess is that school governors will realise that their trust in this and successive councils was misplaced. The unlawful guidance authored by the council and a third party organisation, which the council has been recommending to schools since 2013, makes governors legally responsible. They wont tolerate being thrown under a bus like that.

Back at the hustings a question from the audience asked if, in the light of the Observer revelations, the Labour candidate Milla Gauge would apologise to Adrian Hart for Labour leader Bella Sankey’s public vilification of the extremely serious parent concerns he put to her (Hart’s statement was denounced as “baseless smears”). Milla swerved the question by stating that she felt it was not her place to apologise for her leader as she is not yet a councillor (eh? she represents Labour!). But it was Luke Walker for the Greens and Dominque Hall for the Lib Dems who made their objections to Hart’s child safeguarding alert explicit. In Walker’s case he seemed to inadvertently veer into debates over adults making their own decisions on social, medical and surgical gender transition. But a comment from the otherwise affable and sensible (on so many issues) Dominique Hall was stinging. By describing Hart’s concerns over child safeguarding as “anti trans rhetoric’ she exemplified, perhaps innocently, the extremist view that anyone raising a safeguarding alert about children (for whom it is far from clear that their ‘gender confusion’ means they are a ‘trans child’) is automatically transphobic. I could’ve given Hall the benefit of the doubt on that – Lib Dems dont read the news anymore – when she then alluded to how attitudes like Hart’s have been seen before (such as the objections to Section 28 in the1980s) but the recent actions to smear Hart by her local party make it seem as though the Lib Dems have planned their attack. On this I will simply defer to Adrian who has written about the bizarre Lib Dem decision to damage his election prospects by accusing him, without a shred of evidence, of transphobia.

To end – a brilliant Hustings in many ways. A hustings Chaired efficiently and fairly by Simon Charleton and which owes its existence to the good citizens that make up St Luke’s Resident’s Association.

Well, the story – first raised by parents at Cllr Sankey’s very first Full Council meeting in July 2023 – hit the national news in no uncertain terms.

Yesterday (Sat 13th) The Guardian ran ‘Schools in England and Wales using ‘gender toolkit’ risk being sued by parents’ and then today (Sun 14th) the Sunday Times ran Doctor exploits NHS loophole to prescribe hormones for children.

1. The first moment in this year long unfolding was in June when the Sunday Times ran this feature which we couldn’t help thinking had Brighton & Hove in mind when it spoke of an horrific case taking place in a southeast city. (If you have pay-wall problems I will link you to a summary at the end of this post). This article was brought to the attention of all our city councillors but the story was ignored by them and drifted into the mist.

2. On behalf of parents, I read the now infamous question to Cllr Sankey in July 2023. The question didnt become infamous (my list of parental concerns about safeguarding in schools in relation to extreme gender ideology were best described as shocking), ‘infamous’ described Bella Sankey’s description of these concerns as “baseless smears”. My question mentioned the third party provider Allsorts Youth Project.

3. In October B&H News (fearless on this issue compared to The Argus who ignored it), published ‘Parents seek apology from council leader for calling their concerns ‘baseless smears’’.
From then on a series of extraordinary and shocking incidents took place that showed how our council regards safeguarding alerts and how they feel about women. In short, safeguarding alerts on this issue = transphobia and female survivors of sexual violence who want a return to same-sex trauma counselling services = bigots. A brave article in B&H News by Jean Calder describes all these incidents in detail.

4. The publication of the ex-BBC Newsnight reporter Hannah Barnes’s paperback version of Time to Think (about the collapse of London’s Tavistock Clinic) contained an incendiary new chapter with several pages focussed on Brighton. Again, nothing from the Argus, but Jo Wadsworth at B&H News broke the news in ‘Brighton GP is using loophole to prescribe hormones to kids, book claims’.

BREAKING NEWS
On Monday April 15th Brighton & Hove News published this article.

Hello Queen’s Park voters – here we are again!

Local groups Amex Area Neighbourhood Action Forum and White Street Community Garden have, like last year, created a non-partisan info-poster.

The other candidates who want your vote call our area    ‘Queen’s Park Ward’.  I call it ‘where I live’!          

I walk the same pavements as you, I look at the same tagging, the same overflowing bins. The emails I send to our local ward councillors don’t get answered either!

My son went to Orchard Day Nursery and Queen’s Park Primary. He played in the park. Now age 20, will he ever afford to live here? In 2019, I established the thriving White Street Community Garden – with no support from our elected Councillors.            

I’ve been active in our community for years, and I’m not being parachuted in by a political party.

Do you ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?  

A year ago Labour parachuted their young hopefuls into Queen’s Park. Smiling candidates sporting red rosettes assured us that once  elected they would “get the bins sorted” and “crack the whip” on a long list of resident concerns from drug dealers and needles in the park to pot holes in the roads. “Other councils do this routinely so why can’t ours?”, they said. One year on, maybe Labour can answer that question for us?

In Brighton & Hove’s May elections, 40 percent of the electorate made it to the polling stations and gave Labour 38 out of the 54 seats available (the city has 204,255 residents registered to vote). It was a Labour landslide that sent more than a few Labour newbies into a panic (oh no! I’ve been elected). Those of us who fought the election as candidates for Brighton & Hove Independents sensed what was happening in the minds of voters. Yes, the Greens needed to be sent packing but it was the need to send a message to the universally disliked Tory train-wreck of a government that rocked the vote. And so the Green administration went from 20 to 7 seats, Labour went from 16 to 38. On election night, even before the final result had been announced, a new Labour leader was crowned. It is said that a gathering of victorious councillors (including some extremely young and starry eyed) squeezed into a side-room of the Brighton Centre to anoint Bella Sankey as their new leader.

Back in the town, the morning after election night achieved excitement levels of around zero amongst the 120,000 or so citizens of B&H who didn’t vote (many of whom neither knew nor cared that there’d been a frenzied effort to wheel the council back from Green to Red). I doubt more than a handful of Labour voters – most doing their bit to assist the ‘Tories are toast’ war-effort – had ever heard of Bella Sankey. Think about it – around 39,000 citizens eligible to vote – out of an electorate of 204,255 – cast their vote for a Labour candidate. Picture the scene in Queens Park ward ‘we need to vote Labour!’, ‘but who is Tristram Burden?’ (never heard of him), ‘who is Chandni Mistry?’ (never heard of her), ‘its okay, it doesn’t matter, just tick the box! only good will come of it!’.

But let’s be fair to the 39,000 who voted Labour. Almost one year on, we might imagine all but a few Labour die-hards are absolutely feeling like they’ve been cheated. They certainly do in Queens Park, where no-one seems to know what happened to the 19 year Chandni who won her seat with 1700 votes only to be expelled by the Labour Party in December along with Cllr Gajjar in Kemptown. 

Assuming the public know or care about these matters, voters and non-voters alike (and let’s face it many have bigger problems to attend to), look on in a state of bemused resignation – a mixture of shock and ‘reality check’. What were we thinking!  Exactly how many rounds of Green/Labour musical chairs do we need for the penny to drop? As Julie Burchill wearily commented: “It’s like there’s an ongoing competition between the Greens and Labour to see who can finish off B&H in the shortest time”. In Sankey’s race to the bottom, it started well. The first dog out of the Labour traps appeared to be heading for a ‘review’ of the Green insanity that regarded ripping out the roundabout opposite Palace Pier a thoroughly good idea. Good! we thought, Sankey’s team have finally twigged that the Valley Gardens Forum campaigners were not car loving lizards who love pollution but rather a savvy group of residents and traders who had noticed how the council’s own consultants were warning that replacing the roundabout with traffic lights will cause unspecified years of “journey disbenefits” (that’s traffic in plain English). Luckily (we thought), Labour have understood that the wide-eyed Green belief that “traffic evaporation” (plain English = when everyone gives up driving in despair) will vaporise the local economy too. No such luck. With Labour’s announcement in January that the final phase of the Valley Gardens phase 3 project will go ahead as planned, policy greyhound #1 raced to the finish line just as the officer elite required.

The second policy-dog was released out of the traps by Sankey herself. This concerned the threat posed by extreme gender identity theory to pupil safeguarding in schools. Our questions seeking reassurance on this (that is, questions submitted to the first full council in July by Bev Barstow and myself) were either ignored or responded to with Sankey’s notorious accusation of “baseless smears”. Brighton & Hove News readers can make their own minds up about this controversy by recalling Frank Le Duc’s even-handed reporting in an October article. Suffice to say that, once again, the ideological zeal of our local political class is startling. At the risk of exhausting our greyhound metaphor or stating the obvious, the rabbit ‘lure’ is, of course, carefully set in motion by our ideologues-in-chief, the executive-elite. It’s less a race course metaphor than an XL Bully on the loose because this salivating dog isn’t nearly finished yet.

At the October 19th Full Council resident Kay Lyons was, without warning, physically ejected from the council chamber midway through a question to Sankey. Instructed by the Mayor in the Chair to stop reading, Kay had continued with her question. Apparently, this question (which was the brief follow-up the pesky public are allowed) had not been “relevant” to the first. Some observers would contend, however, that the rampaging dog entered the chamber that day, precisely at the moment Kay Lyons uttered the words “child protection”. The follow-up had begun with “As outlined in my first question, more space for public engagement will give vital expression to widely held views and serious concerns which the council seem oblivious to”. The ‘child protection’ example she then tried to give (presumably as a preamble to the ‘not relevant’ question she didn’t get a chance to ask) was never heard because a senior officer switched off her mic. On the webcast we just about hear “… I believe Brighton & Hove City Council have been acting illegally in promoting extreme gender ideology in schools ..”. The proceedings immediately descend into a serious of interruptions from the Mayor and the eventual ejection of Kay by security men as a sizeable group of councillors laughed. Of course, the council will argue that the unprecedented manhandling and ejection of a woman as she tried to complete her question was nothing to do with the issue she was trying to raise (rather, it was based on a rule that says the second question must be relevant to the first). We gather she has complained on the basis that she hadn’t had a chance to ask her question, but the council has rejected her complaint. But if anyone is in doubt about the council’s attitude toward those who dare to question gender ideology in its schools, Sankey was on hand to describe Kay Lyons as “aggressive”; a person with an “agenda” making a “protest” that in some way (Sankey did not explain), threatened “our precious trans kids”.

On Monday evening January 29^th, fellow Brighton & Hove Independent party member Bev Barstow and I attended the third in Bella Sankey’s ‘Re-imagine Brighton and Hove’ public engagement events – this time on the subject of ‘how we can make Brighton & Hove a safer city for women and girls’. When a council senior officer (the Assistant Director for Policy & Communications no less) saw the content of a leaflet that had been passed around she set about confiscating it – including snatching it from the publics hands. Because the leaflet, written by a survivor of sexual violence unable to attend, had raised the issue of single sex counselling services, the officer condemned it as “offensive”. Labour councillors at the event dutifully backed up the official ruling that this survivor’s desire for women-only services was transphobic. The BHCC message is truly chilling: rape survivors who don’t want men in women-only spaces are bigots. You can read about this incident in Jo Wadsworth’s report here.

Before being physically ejected from October’s full council as a result of her follow-up comments, Kay Lyons’s first question had asked, “In the light of Cllr Sankey’s commitment to widen public participation will she agree to either monthly full council meetings or a new, radical and additional forum for direct democratic engagement?”. Pleased with Kay’s question, Sankey chose this moment to announce ‘Re-imagine Brighton & Hove’. This initiative would, Sankey assured Kay, “set up regular public forums for direct democratic engagement similar, I think, to the type you foresee …”.  Yet from the very first of these events, held in November (on the scourge of tagging), ‘Re-imagine Brighton & Hove’ deployed the PR methods favoured by city developers. Maxine Horn from the group BRAT (Business and Residents Against Tagging) went along expecting the council to finally present for discussion its strategy for combatting the problem. “Instead, it was a pens and sticky note workshop, stage managed, themes pre-determined”, Maxine told us, “table by table controlled feedback ate into the session leaving the minimum time for open questions”.

Whichever method we use to try and engage with our council we sure as heck know it when the questions we ask are unwelcome. So long as entirely reasonable and often extremely well-informed and well-argued public concern is treated this way, any claim that this administration is committed to widening public engagement is just a figment of Labour’s political imagination. We don’t need a council that treats citizens with contempt, we need a democracy… Re-imagine that!

Contact me below if you’re affected.

Green Party candidate Mark Strong said this:

“I’m a transport planner and use data all the time. The data shows that the roundabout has the highest level of killed and seriously injured…”.

(Mark Strong, speaking to residents at the SLRA hustings April 24th 2023)

This assertion of fact chimes with the council’s official response offered to the press last year:

“This junction remains the most dangerous in the city and reductions in accidents remains a central component to the business case”.

(Brighton & Hove News: June 26 2022)

This statement followed a question to committee from Independent councillor Bridget Fishleigh noting how the council continually repeat a myth about the roundabout being the most dangerous junction in the city and one of the most dangerous roundabouts in the country. At the same committee meeting on June 21st, Green councillor Steve Davis, who chaired the session doubled-down on the councils preferred truth:

“It is, without doubt, the most dangerous roundabout in the city. I can say that as a resident. I can say that as a member of the committee and a driver.”

The question of how clever it is to remove the Aquarium roundabout (the small roundabout on the A259 opposite the Palace Pier) and replace with traffic lights triggered a standoff between residents/traders and the council in 2019 that has never been resolved. The Labour council and transport officials argued that removal of the roundabout was necessary in the context of realising their active travel vision for the Valley Gardens area. However, the claim the council made then and the Green administration continues to make is that the roundabout is so dangerous removal is a no-brainer.

Last June, when I brought this question to the ETS committee (see p5 of the September 20th minutes), the response from Green Party Councillor Jaimie Lloyd was contemptuous. For Cllr Lloyd the matter had been settled and the facts hopefully end this debate “as it’s really getting quite boring”.

My question had echoed an earlier FOI request asking to be sent … “any evidence the council holds to suggest the Aquarium Roundabout is one of the UKs (or even Brighton’s) most dangerous roundabouts or in fact any more dangerous to road users and pedestrians than numerous traffic light junctions?”

The council accepted that “references had previously been made about the danger of the junction in a
national context [ ] based on a journalist’s independent analysis” (an analysis, I might add, contradicted by another Daily Mirror report last year in which the Aquarium roundabout does not feature). However, the council then doubled down on the ‘most dangerous junction’ assertion by stating:

“The council’s own past and recent analysis of data for the city has shown that, out of 81 sites which included a number of traffic signal junctions, the roundabout had the highest number of collisions during those periods”.

And so my follow-up question to ETS was this:

“[The assertion] that the Aquarium Roundabout has one of the highest number of collisions in the city is false. No amount of slicing and dicing the stats can alter the fact that the roundabout through which 18 million journeys are made every year has entailed zero fatalities and an average of five injuries per year since March 2000. Rather than impart false facts to this committee would it be better that the Chair and Green Party try to stick to the environmental arguments for Phase 3?”

In other words (and its really only a GCSE level point) to answer this question vehicle flow-rate data must be factored-in. Determining how dangerous a junction is requires an analysis of risk. As the Road Safety Foundation state:

“The risk is calculated by comparing the frequency of road crashes resulting in death and serious injury on every stretch of road with how much traffic each road is carrying. For example, the risk on a road carrying 10,000 vehicles a day with 20 crashes is ten times the risk on a road that has the same number of crashes but which carries 100,000 vehicles”.

When this roundabout was last assessed by the council it had an average yearly flow-rate of 18.25 million vehicles. Of those handful of accidents that took place none were fatal and many were slight injuries on approach roads away from the roundabout itself and involving cyclists. With cyclists re-routed the argument for roundabout replacement based on it being excessively dangerous vanishes. Indeed, one might point to the roundabout and describe it as one of the city’s safest junctions. All the serious injury accidents (including fatalities) have occurred at other junctions.

Moreover, the council’s own consultants for the project (Mott Macdonald) warned them of significant “journey disbenefits” (aka traffic jams) once the traffic light T-Junction is in place.

So why is this matter so important to Queens Park ward and this election?

A schoolboy-level misunderstanding of traffic-flow is damning enough of our well-paid council executives (and certainly damning of teacher and transport professional Jamie Lloyd) but to sweep aside all attempts to correct it suggests something far more sinister. It begins to look like a lie deliberately repeated in the hope that it maintains its hold while gaslighting critics as either fools or malign forces of some sort.

After the hustings I asked Mark Strong if he agreed that our dispute over what is or is not a fact concerning the dangers of the Aquarium roundabout needs an immediate clarification. He agreed that we should go head to head on this if only via an email exchange where we present our different readings of the data. I’m certainly happy to be proved wrong (and in this sense I’d concur with Cllr Lloyd that the debate, inasmuch as there is a debate, is really getting quite boring). Mark later clarified that he’d prefer to discuss who is right or wrong on the matter after the May 4th election.

It matters, though, because the voters of Queens Park ward, already concerned about ill-conceived LTN proposals that make traffic congestion worse and disadvantage residents and traders in a host of ways, are left perplexed by two candidates clashing over fact. If I’m correct (and if Mark Strong accepts that I’m correct) then the whole city needs to know that our party administrations (Labour and Green) have hid behind a lie. It is indeed baffling that the Green Party (advised by high paid officers) would not have concluded it far better to stick with the truth.

The truth about the consequences of roundabout removal had previously been openly and innocently stated by at least one Green councillor back in 2019. After listening and nodding to my points on traffic flow-rate he leaned toward me as if revealing a secret and said “its all about traffic evaporation”. The unspecified period of “journey disbenefits” that consultants warned of is in fact exactly the outcome Greens are so relaxed about. This is because they feel certain that making life miserable for motorists will cause car journey’s abandoned and a switch to better forms of transport like walking or cycling.

Leaving that dream aside, the vital issue at hand that residents like me want addressed is have Brighton’s Greens got trapped inside a big fat lie? (aside from their sales patter on LTNs, ULEZ and Net Zero that is). And why would anyone vote for a party (sorry Labour, this means you too) that would knowingly engage in falsehoods in order to ‘sell’ us their policies? The gold medal for Green Party councillors playing fast and loose with the truth was previously held by former mayor Cllr Pete West who, excited by the Daily Mirror’s league table, said this to the Argus in September 2019: “Just last week the Department of Transport released figures showing that this roundabout ranks among the top 20 most dangerous in the UK”. Yet, that same week the DfT confirmed “The Department for Transport does not have a leader board for the most dangerous roundabouts in Great Britain” and told me that I “need to discuss the methods with the analytics team who made this assertion”. It seems Pete West may have to hand the gold medal over to the Green Party’s data expert Mark Strong. What’s that old saying about three kinds of lies?

The data:

For anyone interested in drilling down into the data on accident causalities at the Aquarium roundabout there are two sources of information that help. First is my own freedom of information request (FOI 11412385) from August 1st 2022. If you scroll up the page you will find links to documents sent to me that show tables of accident cluster reports compiled by the council.

Flow-Rate

According to the DfT 91.25 million vehicles flowed through this roundabout from 2013-2017 (18.25 million per year). The Road Safety Foundation advise that existing flow data relates to the route so will not include turning movements around the roundabout from the other route. Data on turning counts on the roundabout would help. I have requested this from the council.

Transportation:

Question to Adrian Hart #1: “You mention ‘constant tinkering’ with roads and I assume you mean the LTN here? I’m neither for or against it and I also don’t want to see “tinkering” – there are far too many cars coming into Brighton and feel a big overhaul is needed rather than tinkering – particularly making public transport a much better option for locals and visitors alike. What are your plans for transport in this area?

My answer: When B&H Independents talk about the constant tinkering with roads we refer to various of the ill-considered plans that have received considerable public opposition. The city has been through transport turmoil under the Greens and Labour eg  COVID bike lanes, clumsily introduced under Labour and blamed on Greens. We need a period of calm to assess where the pinch points and problems are. No more plans until this is done!

[Clumsy interventions: Since 2019, the main cycle routes implemented have been on the A259 – Palace Pier to Fourth Avenue and on Madeira Drive with an estimated annual loss of £640,000 parking income combined].

The proposed (and temporarily withdrawn) Low Traffic Neighbourhood (LTN) for part of our area is one of the ‘tinkering’ issues I have in mind. The proposals triggered an extraordinary reaction from residents and businesses which united large numbers of in-principle supporters of traffic reduction (the views are well described on the ‘Improve or Stop’ FB group). In my own neighbourhood of Carlton Hill residents (including Green voters) were unanimous in their opposition. One resident echoed many when saying “this makes no sense at all, blocking north bound traffic up Carlton Hill puts more traffic on Edward St, and having to circle the area to find parking will only add to the congestion and pollution…”.

As I say on the front of my leaflet, this council must – absolutely must – listen to this opposition. The opposition is so evidently pro reducing traffic but sadly the Green administration is tin-eared and seemingly indifferent preferring a bludgeon like approach irrespective of the cost to lives and livelihoods. I fully agree with Labour candidates Tristram and Chandni’s call for lowering car use via park and ride schemes (though the practicalities of these are proving hard) and low emission public transport. [See my position on the ULEZ policy here].

But the other glaring example of bad transport policy (tinkering doesn’t quite cover it!) is the plans now underway to remove the Aquarium roundabout. Even the consultants appointed to the scheme (known as Valley Gardens Phase 3) warned their council clients that replacing the roundabout with traffic lights will create excessive congestion (they call it ‘journey disbenefits’). The off-the-record explanation Green councillors put forward when we corner them on this is that by making life miserable for vehicle users will cause unnecessary car use to fall away (they call it ‘traffic evaporation’). Yet, for every car journey that ‘evaporates’, more delivery vans and busses will take their place. Buses will resort to diesel back-up engines as they shunt through stop-start congestion (and there’ll be more PM 2.5 emissions from braking).

Our council have lied to the public about the roundabout, declaring it (without evidence) as one of the most dangerous junctions in Britain (see my Question to ETS Sept 20th 2022; see minutes p5). Independents would do everything to stop this scheme but emphasise that we (like most objectors) are FOR the overall revamp of Valley Gardens as a car-reduced, people/cycling-friendly area.

Brighton & Hove Independents would:

• Review Valley Gardens phase 3. This is the controversial part of the overall project which will see the roundabout by the pier replaced with traffic lights and will create more traffic congestion. Estimated cost: £13m of which £1.5m is BHCC money, £5m is a loan and 6 million is a grant.

• Introduce Shuttle buses from train station to i360, pier and Black Rock.

• Stop all projects and take a holistic view of the whole city as tinkering in one area most had unintended consequences elsewhere

• Review usage of all existing bike lanes – and plans for future ones.

• Introduce shuttle service from the train station to i360 and Madeira Drive.

• Park & Ride. So far this has never happened as political parties can’t find suitable locations.  We have two location suggestions that have never been discussed: Building additional levels on car parks at Hollingbury and at M&S/Tesco retail park in Shoreham.  We will also discuss with South Downs National Park where they might accept one to the north of the city.  Fast non-stopping buses are key to the success of park and ride.

• It is vital that we listen to the groups that represent less able people in the city. They have repeatedly been ignored by political parties and BHCC officers (the pedestrianisation of Gardner Street is a case in point).

Housing.

Question to Adrian Hart #2: “I wasn’t aware the gasworks site was even up for development- that is good news. Can you share a link to the alternative, low-rise, resident proposal you mention? This site does however seem ideally suited to high density housing – it has good transport links, close to two supermarkets, close to the hospital, easy walking to the seafront and into Brighton, straight onto the A259 if cars are needed. There is no reason why high density housing can’t also be people friendly“.

My answer: You are absolutely right that there is no reason why high density housing cannot also be people-friendly. I’m involved with the Brighton Society and my colleague Jeremy Mustoe has written extensively about the opportunity for low-rise, high density housing the Gasworks site offers. However the overdevelopment contained in proposals put forward by Berkley for the Gasworks site are truly dreadful. I agree with the detailed case put forward by Mustoe and the Coalition of residents and amenity groups. You can read about this via various articles on the Brighton Society website, notably this one.

Another must-read article by Jeremy Mustoe exposes the shocking amount of obfuscation by council planning officials.

I’ve been asked a housing question by many residents over the last few years. In essence the question is why is are city planners allowing developments containing new homes that virtually no-one in housing need can afford. The question comes from people (including whole families) trapped inside over-priced, insecure from no-notice eviction and often dilapidated rented accommodation. But also people luck enough to have housing security but are saddened that their children or grandchildren will seemingly never be able to one day live in the city in which they were born. Add this to the obvious issue of homelessness and it feels like the over-riding question of what is the housing “crisis” and how can it ever be solved needs an answer. I’m no expert but this week, after a long time puzzling it through, I’ve attempted an answer in my essay Housing Held Hostage. You can read it here.

Resident questions assembled by Sarah Booker-Lewis (Local Democracy Reporter) for publication in B&H News/Argus:

1 Why do you want to be a councillor?

I am proud to be part of a new movement of independents. As your Independent Councillor, free from the control of national party machines, I will exclusively focus on constituents and the task of restoring good governance to Brighton and Hove. If elected I had hope to raise at committee level neighbourhood concerns built up over recent years. The housing crisis is one: We have residents in private accommodation facing exorbitant rents and young people unable to live in the city in which they were born. It is a national scandal. BHCC should be on the forefront of demanding change. 

2 Why do you want to stand in this ward?

I have lived on Carlton Hill for 20 years.  In 2018, alongside many local residents, I opposed the ‘Edward Street Quarter’ overdevelopment. Despite the lack of affordable housing, Labour, Green and Tory Councillors ensured the scheme was approved. In 2019, I helped establish Amex Area Neighbourhood Forum which secured the lease for our thriving White Street Community Garden on Edward Street (local ward councillors had told us it wasn’t possible).  I stood as an Independent for Queens Park in 2019. I remain convinced that our Green, Labour and Tory ward councillors fail electors by prioritising the needs of party.      

3 What are the key issues specific to this ward?

The council need to get back to basics and provide efficient, well-run services for the ward. Removing the Aquarium roundabout will cause congestion and air pollution in our area, as will plans for an LTN. Local businesses and residents will suffer but too often their objections are ignored. Lets have ward councillors who listen to residents. Like so much of the city, the ward looks dirty and run down. The proliferation of spray-can tagging, the failure to deal with drug dealing, overflowing bins, proliferating weeds symbolises a ‘no-one cares/no-one’s in charge’ environment and will simply invoke more of the same.

(Above) The proposed LTN (back on the table soon)

4 What will you do to make the area safer for people with protected characteristics (eg, LGB, trans, non-binary and intersex)?

Residents repeatedly raised safety issues with police/local councillors. I’ll endeavour to demand improved public safety for everyone; better street lighting, ‘bobby’s on the beat’, action on assaults. In September, we attended a rally and were horrified that police stood by watching women being verbally abused by mobs of masked men. Drowned out by chants of ‘No TERFs on our Turf’, women held firm as they attempted to address the rally despite smoke bombs thrown at them. Holding gender critical beliefs is a protected characteristic, yet our council leaders seem to agree with the ‘No TERFS…’ chant. It’s called misogyny. Shameful. 

5 Too many drivers ignore double yellow lines, creating a parking free-for-all. How will you deal with this?

I’d seek to assess the extent of this problem in our ward and find out why enforcement officers are not tackling this (though it’s right to allow delivery drivers a few minutes to go about their work). We need more (not less) parking spaces and charge residents, visitors, commercial vehicles less. No spaces mean care workers and other services forced to risk parking on yellow lines. Flagrant yellow line abuses ignored by enforcement flag up a general failure at council level that relates to the topic of question (6) on tagger vandals identified to council officers who take no action.

6 What will you do to reduce vandalism and graffiti?

Along with fellow residents, I’ve taken action on one prolific tagger who promotes his brand both on social media and the walls, post-boxes and shopfronts he vandalises. The council/local media discovered this tagger hiding in plain sight only when @BHIndies pointed it out. Our investigation uncovered the extraordinary indifference of council/police enforcement. They seem to tolerate talentless ‘tagging’ while bluntly threatening shopkeepers with penalties if tags are not removed. Independent councillors will expose this failure, relentlessly demanding competent and coordinated police/council action. So abjectly let down by our salaried officials, businesses and residents have organised citywide community resistance (www.brat.org.uk).

[More questions the questions put directly to me will appear below]

[This essay was originally published by the Brighton Society]

Nationally, the ‘build more homes’ mantra sidesteps the issue of affordability. Britain needs to build council homes by the 100s of thousands. In Brighton & Hove, as the birth-rate drops, as half the population is swapped out by those who can afford to come and live here, as school leavers realise they’ll have to leave the city to have a home of their own…a coalition of citizen campaigners wrestle with harsh realities.

Adrian Hart, April 2023.

It’s a damp mid-October Wednesday in the city and I’m attending an Action on Homes one day-conference organised by Brighton & Hove Housing Coalition. Apart from the campaigners and various expert speakers scheduled for the opening sessions, there is only a handful of attendees sitting in the large hall of the Brighthelm Centre.

It’s a shame. Given all that is said on this subject by the political left very few Green or Labour councillors attended the event (I counted three out of a combined 36 who dropped by for a short while). Do our elected representatives feel the problem is so intractable there’s no point discussing it anymore?

[Read on]