by a member of Community Solidarity Stroud District

“The Light” sets itself up as an alternative paper, but what is it really pushing?

Over the last year, the Light has generally promoted:

“traditional families”, men being “allowed to be men”, women having “lots of children”, and “faith, flag and family”. 

It has also started promoting anti-abortion activists and the “rights of the unborn”, and sought to justify men’s “domination and rage”. 

So that’s what it promotes and defends. What does it attack?

In the last 6 months or so, The Light has published numerous articles opposing:

• “Gender equality” (compared to “evil”)
• “Equality of opportunity” (which it compares to “the Spanish Inquisition and the Salem Witch trials”)
• ““Family law” (elided with “child abuse”)
• Abortion and contraception (which it repeatedly equates with “eugenics”, a common Religious Right trope)
• “The massive use of contraceptives” (“clearly unacceptable”)
• “Sex education” (which it refers to as “taking control of our children”)
• “Role reversal” in which women don’t accept traditional gender roles (behaviour which The Light says is “communism and insanity”)
• And (my personal favourite…) strong female leads in films and TV (not only are all these strong female characters “miserable” and with “no personalities” but their existence in film is a “woke agenda” which wants to “destroy society”. Poor old Galadriel and Princess Leia! Who knew?!)

And what does it ignore?

Notably, whilst it’s got space to fulminate about fictional characters, the Light *doesn’t* show much interest in the need for more childcare, better welfare benefits, employment rights for parents and carers, ending child poverty, or anything that would help those who still bear the brunt of responsibility for most caring – women – to do the job.

In more detail: The Light’s views on women (from recent issues)

July 23 issue

Claims that contraception charity “Planned Parenthood = Abortion/sterilisation; depopulation agenda”

June 23 issue

“Role reversal – Whilst it is true that some women are better than many men at some things, the aggressive push towards everyone ignoring their own biology smacks of communism and insanity. In professing to give the right to choose, this is doing the exact opposite”

May 23 issue

Highly sympathetic interview with a former Fathers 4 Justice activist in which he talks about “family law child abuse”, and promoting his book.

A page-long article presenting the views of a Conservative Spanish bishop who claims the UN is anti-family and encourages abortion. Says it also encourages “the massive use of contraceptives” which is “clearly unacceptable”, as well as “so-called gender equality”, tolerance of which is comparable with tolerance of “evil”. Women should get married young and have three or more kids, he says. The Light author concludes, “It is refreshing to see a man of God standing up for what is right”.

April 23 issue

“[O]n the surface, the idea of equality of opportunity irrespective of gender can be pitched as a noble cause, but then so were the Spanish Inquisition and the Salem witch trials.”

This is in an article which suggests “the fairer sex” are not having a great time of it, any more than men – but the article goes on to suggest that the only thing harming women these days, is the behaviour, not of men, but of transgender people (for example, entering beauty contests). Probably most women have bigger concerns than transgender people entering beauty contests, such as why women still do most housework, caring work, and other work, are paid less, have less wealth, and experience so much violence and sexism from men. But none of that is mentioned in the Light’s article.

March 23 issue

In an article titled “The War on Masculinity”, the paper states that “the System’s war against humanity” includes a war “being waged against men”. It suggests that “toxic masculinity”, “domination and rage”, “could also be understood as men resorting to their innate biological responses in trying to cope when they find themselves trapped in an insane society.” It goes on “Why make men more feminine? We might even wonder whether the obvious war against meat could even be a cover for the drive to subvert manhood, with… emasculating phytoestrogens [in soy]”. 

It goes on “God did not create women to do everything men can do. God created women to do everything men cannot do” and that “Maybe the goal is not to make us like women, but rather like infants, dependent and very little threat to them”. It says (at some length) that the only “toxic masculinity” is that which is exercised by the 1% of “psychopathic men” that are running the world. Which is sadly against all the evidence – and what women know – that men of all social classes perpetuate violence towards women.

Another article holds up as evidence of Bill Gates’s world domination, the fact that his father was “head of the abortion industry in the USA (Planned Parenthood)” and a “eugenicist”. There’s no evidence for the latter claim, and the equation of contraception and abortion advice with “the abortion industry” and “eugenics” is a classic Religious Right, anti-women, trope.

January 2023 issue

A page-long article headlined “Volunteer arrested for silent prayer near abortion facility” about the head of an anti-abortion group who had been arrested for protesting outside an abortion clinic in Birmingham. The article’s author is given as ‘ADF-UK’. ADF are a Religious Right American anti-abortion group. The article presents the anti-abortion activists as only having “tirelessly served…providing charitable assistance to” and “supporting” women, and anti-abortion protests outside abortion clinics, as “free speech” that must be protected from “censorial” restrictions.

Another article suggests that “faith, flag and family” are all that protect us from the Chinese-style totalitarianism that Western governments would otherwise want to impose.

December 2022 issue

A long article equating concern about climate change, and the promotion of birth control, with eugenics and “the greedy termination industry”, whose cause has been “cemented to the core of feminism”, the author bemoans. (Just because some early twentieth century birth control advocates endorsed eugenics, clearly does not mean that the two are the same a century later, but this is a popular trope amongst the Religious Right).

November 2022 issue

After a long rant about how the latest Star Wars film features “a strong female lead with no flaws…and weak, clumsy idiotic men” as part of a “political agenda”, the article goes on “The agenda of making men weak and women strong is not only visible on the big screen, but also occurs in Disney’s TV shows [where Obi-Wan Kenobi, a male] is bossed around by young Leia, who is 10 years old”. Disney, we are told, is cashing in on our nostalgia to fund its “homosexual, social justice propaganda shows”. The article’s author is also upset that Natalie Portman has a strong character in the latest Thor film, and that the Rings of Power (Amazon’s Lord of the Rings prequel) contains similar “woke themes”, with Galadriel, alarmingly, an “independent, all-empowered woman” (actually she’s an elf, but let’s not split hairs). All of these peskily strong female characters are then summed up as “strong, miserable female leads with no personalities”, brought to us by sinister forces who want to “destroy society, confuse and blur gender roles, eradicate traditionalism…” and other nefarious purposes.

Another article contains a glossary of supposed “old speak” (as opposed to Orwellian ‘newspeak’, the graphics make clear) which claims that the phrase “white male privilege” is merely a “racist AND sexist insult” (though white men own most of the world’s wealth, guys, so actually it’s a material fact). “Patriarchy” is another phrase that is nothing but a “sexist insult”, the Light tells us, rather than a way of examining the continued evidence and experience of women having less wealth and experiencing more violence, both at home and abroad.

Another article in the same edition is headlined “New abortion law in Hungary gives unborn babies a chance for life”. The article is about a new Hungarian law “requiring women who are seeking an abortion to listen to the baby’s heartbeat before termination”. The objections by Amnesty, amongst others, that this move makes it much harder and more traumatic to access abortion, The Light disdains as “predictable”. The Light goes on to praise the Hard Right Hungarian PM, Orban, as a champion of “traditional family values”, and concludes “It is hoped that many thousands of lives will be saved in Hungary because of this new law. With the overturning of Roe vs Wade, and the new decree in Hungary, the fight for the rights of the unborn baby appears alive and well”. (No mention is given to the rights of women to determine their own bodily autonomy without these traumatic restrictions).

Another article in the same issue entitled “Profit the driving force of healthcare” again suggests access to contraception and abortion are merely “euphemisms” for eugenics.

A short history of bigotry… and what do we do about it?

The Light appears to have the same attitude to women as reactionaries always have done. That is to say, women are most valued when they are barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen. Despite The Light’s supposed focus on bodily autonomy in relation to vaccines, it presents all the other things that give women autonomy and choices over their bodies and lives as overwhelmingly negative – be that access to contraception, abortion and education; the right to choose a different sexuality; the right to choose different partners; the existence of strong female role models in the media; a welfare state that supports women by taking on some of the caring responsibilities; even the existence of convenience food. This is also why you basically never hear The Light advocating for better childcare provision, anti-poverty measures, protection from discrimination (unless it’s to do with vaccines), or other key feminist demands. 

The Light’s reactionary world view disempowers women. Even when women are interviewed as political actors (as they sometimes are), they are mostly portrayed as pure, “fair” vessels, whose main agency, as far as they have any, is to protect the borders of the nation and people’s bodies (mostly their own and their families) from a variety of supposed incursions. To police what people take into their bodies. 

Many women (and men) do have rightful concerns about issues like health, food, and so on. But The Light exploits these concerns, stokes paranoia around them, attaches a historically illiterate view of ‘tradition’, and weds this toxic mix to an altogether uglier agenda. It’s a technique that has a long history on the far right, as many of you will know, from early twentieth century ‘volkisch’ messaging in Germany, to ‘eco-fascism’ and body fascism.

Those women who don’t focus on bodily purity ‘correctly’ (in The Light’s eyes), can expect to be vilified and dehumanised in words and in pictures, too – from the NHS nurses whom The Light wants to subject to Nuremburg trials and even execution, to the ugly, classist and misogynist centre-page cartoon of a heavily pregnant woman vaping, in last month’s issue.

It’s an agenda in which women are also portrayed as victims – of the penetrating “jab”, as well as of trans people, and in particular, of migrants. The idea that migrants (ie, men with darker skin) are “endangering women and girls” is repeated throughout recent issues of The Light, explicitly and implicitly. 

This shouldn’t surprise us. Racism and sexism have tended to march (literally) in lockstep, from the murderous Ku Klux Klan lynch mobs of segregation-era America, through to the UK tabloid press and EDL thugs like Tommy Robinson and beyond. Racist propaganda has frequently portrayed white women (and the white babies they are, in this world view, supposed to produce) as needing protection from dark skinned men. In truth, in today’s Britain, the overwhelming majority of sexual and other violent crimes against women and girls are perpetrated by assailants who are the same race/ethnicity as their victims. Nonetheless, the racists always love to portray white women as needing protection from darker skinned men, both through segregation, and by the (sometimes violent) actions of heroic ‘white knights’. 

In this vein, revoltingly, a few months ago The Light published an article invoking these ideas to strongly defend the men – many suspected of being associated with far right groups – who had carried out a violent attack on a migrant hostel, an attack in which police vans were set on fire and migrants were terrorised. Ongoing protests by far right groups at the hostel have seen migrants punched. Last month The Light ran another article suggesting that the government was ignoring the “safety” of female “citizens” by housing refugees in hostels, claiming their presence is “potentially endangering women and girls” (this article, incidentally, was written by someone who was filmed abusing a black anti-Brexit campaigner and poking a union jack flagpole at his face). 

As a woman, I’ve found that when I try to talk to any of the people handing out The Light on the High Street, however calmly, it’s fairly pointless. They don’t have answers beyond interrupting me to say that the BBC is as bad (guys, two wrongs don’t make a right!), or shouting “Lies”, or “Sheep”, or something like that.

But whether it’s on the role of women – or on racism, antisemitism, climate change, homophobia, transphobia, or a whole host of other things, The Light’s content is not just right wing (many of its articles are actually quite similar to those in the Daily Mail, except much more poorly written). It is also, more worryingly, deeply reactionary, and in places, frankly crypto-fascist. I don’t want it on our streets. And what I’ve learned lately is that calmly taking a copy and then scrunching or ripping it up in front of them is most satisfying. Make sure you recycle!