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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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In times past, people in these islands went to great lengths to conceal that their ancestors were “lowborn”, or non-prestigious foreign, or, worse yet, unknown. Social climbers would frequently change their names to something more aristocratic and perhaps pay some impoverished scholar to fake them up a coat of arms and insert a fictional ancestor or two into the historical record. Then along came steam engines and trousers and we moved to saying that a man or woman should be judged on their own deeds, never mind who their ancestors were. I thought we all agreed this was a good change.
So why have we gone back to acting as if having upper class ancestors who lived here is an important component of a modern British person’s status if that person happens to be black – so important that it needs to be lied about?
BBC Told To Avoid “Clunky” Color-Blind Casting & “Preachy” Anti-Colonial Storylines In Drama Series
The BBC has been urged to rethink color-blind casting “tokenism” and “preachy” storylines about the UK’s colonial history in scripted series, according to a major study commissioned by the broadcaster.
Conducted by former BAFTA chair Anne Morrison and ex-Ofcom executive Chris Banatvala, the thematic review of “portrayal and representation” across BBC output found that “clunky” depictions of race can cause more harm than good.
The 80-page report revealed audience complaints about Doctor Who casting Nathaniel Curtis as Sir Isaac Newton in the 60th anniversary special “Wild Blue Yonder,” as well as the 2023 Agatha Christie series Murder Is Easy, which featured an allegory on colonialism.
The review noted that color-blind casting was a matter of controversy for commentators and some viewers. Urging commissioners to “consider their choices carefully,” the report said that good intentions to increase diversity can lead to inauthentic outcomes — outcomes that can sometimes be damaging to the communities they are attempting to serve.
“In depicting an anachronistic historical world in which people of colour are able to rise to the top of society as scientists, artists, courtiers and Lords of the Realm, there may be the unintended consequence of erasing the past exclusion and oppression of ethnic minorities and breeding complacency about their former opportunities,” the review said.
“What needs to be avoided is ethnic diversity which looks forced and tick box, and we found our interviewees of colour as emphatic on this point as those who were white.”
Good.
However, the writers of this review made an argument in defence of the black Newton that shows they don’t understand science fiction:
Though Doctor Who was referenced, the report raised an eyebrow about the specific concerns regarding Curtis, saying that a mixed-race Newton “seems much less of a stretch” in a universe in which the central character is a time-travelling extra-terrestrial, who regenerates into different actors.
It doesn’t work that way. In a genre such as opera that makes no attempt at realism (read a plot summary of The Love of Three Oranges sometime), or in much of Shakespeare, the extra degree of divergence from reality involved in having the passionate soliloquy in which a nominally European character pours out his heart in rhyming couplets be delivered by a black performer really is trivial, but the whole point of science fiction is that the premise can be as wacky as you like, but the consequences of that premise are worked through with rigour.
OK, maybe not with rigour in the case of Dr Who, but certainly with an attempt at naturalism.
I have no complaints about the acknowledged alternative universe of Bridgerton. (“The series is set during the early 19th century in an alternative London Regency era, in which George III established racial equality and granted aristocratic titles to people of color due to the African heritage of his wife, Queen Charlotte.”) With all the dystopian alternate timelines out there, it makes a nice change. In a similar way, the Doctor meeting the black Newton of a Bridgertonesque timeline wouldn’t have bothered anyone. Five seconds of script and the word “quantum” would have been enough to avoid the collective national wince when viewers realised they were having that line of false history pushed at them again.
Sometimes the Twitter and YouTube algorithms send me grainy film clips of life in Britain many decades ago; street scenes with policemen directing traffic, workers leaving factories, and the like. One notices several differences from the present. Working class women are wrapped in shawls. Every adult male, however poor, is wearing a hat. And, of course, everyone in sight is white. There is no logical reason why knowledge of this obvious historical truth – the fact that the vast majority of British people were white as late at the 1960s – should cause hostility to present-day black British people, but these days the comments to those historical clips quickly fill up with variations on the words “Notice anything?” I notice that human beings dislike being lied to.
As I said in a post called The Great Retcon,
This desperate retconning of the odd Phoenician, Libyan or Egyptian who turned up in British history as “black”, and the whole trend to exaggerate the number of black people in British history, has two effects, both of which increase racism. White people from the majority population resent seeing the history of their ancestors falsified and even erased, as the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, did when he said that “This city was built by migrants.” For black people, and indeed anyone of any colour whose ancestors did not come from these islands, it cements the idea that a person cannot truly be Welsh or British unless they can point to examples of people with enough genes in common with them having lived in those places centuries ago.
So why was the UK, US and European media so obsessed with this one shooting? Because it was done by an ICE officer, and ICE has been painted as Donald Trump’s personal law enforcement agency, ignoring the fact that it was created by George W Bush in 2002.
I make no defence of Donald Trump. I make no defence of the violent actions of ICE in so many US cities, but to pretend that this one incident was more important than the nascent revolution going on in Iran is laughable. And that’s what too many media organisations were doing.
I can look myself in the eye because almost from the start of the protests, I was covering them on my LBC show. Indeed, we’ve devoted hours and hours to them – more I suspect that any of the 24 hours news channels up until the last couple of days.
If you wanted any real-time coverage of what’s happening in Iran you had to go to live Youtube channels, like Mahyar Tousi’s TOUSI TV, which has been brilliant at informing people about what’s really going on.
– Iain Dale
The future is choice.
The BBC hates choice — because choice exposes irrelevance.
No more reverence.
No more compulsory funding.
No more pretending this is about anything other than control.
– Russ
The BBC really are a preposterous news organisation. On their website there are currently six stories about the killing of one man in Minneapolis. But not a single item about the massacres in Iran. This is biased and disproportionate beyond belief.
– Luke Johnson
Since Israel’s military response to the October 7th massacre by Hamas, news organisation of the world could not get reporters into Gaza. And yet, we have seen a constant stream of reportage and commentary.
But since the outbreak of mass civil resistance resistance to Iran’s repressive Islamic regime, we have seen an order of magnitude less in the media about the ongoing horrors there. News organisations have often stated this was due to their inability to get reporters into Iran. Strange that.
Truly… no Jews, no news.
‘The business of funding digging journalists is important to encourage’, Andrew Marr informed the Independent in 2008. ‘It cannot be replaced by bloggers who don’t have access to politicians, who don’t have easy access to official documents, who aren’t able to buttonhole people in power.’ At the Cheltenham Literary Festival two years later, he was dismissing these online upstarts as ‘socially inadequate, pimpled, single, slightly seedy, bald, cauliflower-nosed young men sitting in their mother’s basements and ranting. They are very angry people.’ And there’s more: ‘So-called citizen journalism is the spewings and rantings of very drunk people late at night.’
But the media world is changing. In the US, major networks are looking to online media for a lead as ratings for legacy media decline. CBS has enlisted Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief of CBS News, a few short years after she was bullied out of the New York Times before she slowly built up a multi-million dollar online empire with the Free Press.
Some BBC stalwarts have, like Marr, perhaps seen where things are heading, and jumped ship to be free to express their old ideas on new media. Emily Maitlis and John Sopel created the News Agents podcast for this purpose. Oxbridge-educated Maitlis now doubles down on the smug but deluded sense of class-based superiority that has become her stock-in-trade. Never has she seemed more out of place as when she deigned to take her podcast to Clacton on the eve of the General Election last year. Nigel Farage is now Clacton’s MP.
– Michael Collins with an absolutely stonking article on Spiked
Kudos to the Guardian for not soft-pedalling this:
Chomsky had deeper ties with Epstein than previously known, documents reveal
The philosopher and the sex trafficker were in contact long after Epstein was convicted of soliciting prostitution from a minor, documents reveal
The prominent linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky called it a “most valuable experience” to have maintained “regular contact” with Jeffrey Epstein, who by then had long been convicted of soliciting prostitution from a minor, according to emails released earlier in November by US lawmakers.
Such comments from Chomsky, or attributed to him, suggest his association with Epstein – who officials concluded killed himself in jail in 2019 while awaiting trial on federal sex-trafficking charges – went deeper than the occasional political and academic discussions the former had previously claimed to have with the latter.
Chomsky, 96, had also reportedly acknowledged receiving about $270,000 from an account linked to Epstein while sorting the disbursement of common funds relating to the first of his two marriages, though the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor has insisted not “one penny” came directly from the infamous financier.
That is not much of a defence. Money is fungible.
Later, the article quotes from a letter written by Chomsky praising Epstein:
“The impact of Jeffrey’s limitless curiosity, extensive knowledge, penetrating insights and thoughtful appraisals is only heightened by his easy informality, without a trace of pretentiousness. He quickly became a highly valued friend and regular source of intellectual exchange and stimulation.”
In fairness, all that stuff about penetrating insights and thoughtful appraisals was probably true. Epstein would not have been able to rise as high – or sink as low – as he did without being able to read people. Epstein’s forte was befriending famous people, introducing them to each other, being at the centre of the networks of the global elite. My guess is that of the pleasures this position brought him, the status ranked higher in his mind than the money or the sex.
Added 23rd November: I am going to take the liberty of promoting a slightly edited version of something I wrote in the comments in reply to this excellent comment by Fraser Orr to the main post.
Fraser Orr writes, “FWIW, I find it a bit disturbing that mere association with this loathsome man (Epstein that is) that somehow convicts the associate”. I quite agree. Apart from the importance of the presumption of innocence in all circumstances, i.e. criminal or near-criminal wrongdoing needs to be proved, it should be obvious that a big part of the appeal of the sexual services that Epstein was offering was exclusivity. It wouldn’t have worked if everyone was invited. But I don’t think there’s any suggestion that Chomsky was involved in the sex stuff at all. My guess is what Epstein got out of associating with Chomsky was the feeling that he was an intellectual too, and one of the things Chomsky got out of associating with Epstein was a frisson of transgressiveness. He was above such bourgeois conventions as refusing to talk to someone who had been convicted of soliciting prostitution from a minor. But it looks very much as if the other thing Noam Chomsky got from his association with Jeffrey Epstein was money. “Chomsky, 96, had also reportedly acknowledged receiving about $270,000 from an account linked to Epstein while sorting the disbursement of common funds relating to the first of his two marriages” This sounds evasive. What does the thing about “sorting the disbursement of common funds” even mean? It sounds like something to do with calculating how the money should be split between him and his first wife. I can see how working out how to divide joint earnings after a marriage ends might be complicated, but why did Noam Chomsky doing whatever he was doing regarding money from his first marriage require Jeffrey Epstein to send him more than quarter of a million dollars? For an intellectual to take money from a disreputable but very rich patron is not a crime, but all those who laud Chomsky as a fearless social justice advocate and opponent of abusive power might like to reconsider their tributes.
That is certainly one way of putting it. Another is that, first, the Trump stuff is much less important than the BBC’s issues in other areas and that it seems modestly significant that Goodall devotes almost no space at all in his lengthy Substack piece to any of those issues. Secondly, at no point does Goodall bother considering whether some or any of the criticisms made by Prescott and Grossman have any validity at all.
That, however, seems a necessary starting point.
News judgement is often a nuanced and complex business. News “values”, on the other hand, should be comparatively straightforward. This is where it is entirely reasonable to convict the BBC’s coverage of the sex & gender wars. For here the corporation largely – though with notable exceptions, especially Hannah Barnes on Newsnight – picked a side and chose the one that required BBC journalists to sacrifice their judgement. Ideology trumped basic news values. They said it was dry when in fact it wasn’t obviously dry at all.
For once again, among the most important of those values is this eternal question: Is This True?
– Alex Massie
There is blood in the water and the sharks are circling. This story is going to run and run and run 😀
As for its content, Simpson’s post summed up the BBC on several levels. Firstly, that its most senior journalists are simply unable to see the world as ordinary people see it. Politically motivated attack? Mate, the BBC literally edited footage. This was no innocent error; as Janet Daley put it, this was “a professionally crafted editing job which has to have been designed to produce a calculated effect for a political purpose”. Your bleating is only making it worse.
Secondly, that the BBC considers a Left-of-centre worldview to be the definition of objectivity. The Guardian is its ideological ally because both assume they are the privileged holders of sanity, grown-up thinking and the truth, which must be defended against the fascist hordes. When the chips are down, the BBC won’t even bother to hide it.
Thirdly, that any criticism of the broadcaster represents a bad-faith attempt to destroy a great socialist project that aims to redistribute the news to each according to his needs. Here lies the kicker: in pushing such a conspiratorial Leftist worldview, the doughty journalists of the BBC have apparently dispensed with the need for evidence.
– Jake Wallis Simons (£)
The day before yesterday I wrote, “Remember the names of those public figures, especially journalists, who say that this was acceptable behaviour by the BBC because it was done to Trump. These people think lying is acceptable. Assume they are lying to you; assume they would lie about you.”
One example is Adam Boulton. He is the former political editor of Sky News, among many other prestigious roles, and currently presents on Times Radio. Regular readers may recall that in 2023 he told BBC Newsnight that GB News should be shut down in order to protect the UK’s “delicate and important broadcast ecology”. Boulton’s response to the crisis at the BBC was this tweet:
Adam Boulton
@adamboultonTABB
For the record No words were put into Trump’s mouth. The quotes were him saying what he said.
9:36 AM · Nov 9, 2025
(Hat tip to the science fiction author Neal Asher.)
People in the replies to Boulton’s tweet have a lot of fun snipping out parts of what he said in order to reverse its meaning. But it is not really that funny. Leading journalist Adam Boulton thinks deliberate, carefully engineered selective quotation is an acceptable journalistic practice. Leading journalist Adam Boulton thinks lying is acceptable. Assume Adam Boulton is lying to you; assume Adam Boulton would lie about you.
Another journalist whose own words demonstrate that he thinks it is fine to use selective quotation to lie to his readers is Mikey Smith, Deputy Political Editor of the Mirror. Back in the days when he was Michael Smith, Mikey worked for Sky News and the BBC. On November 9th, he tweeted this:
Mikey Smith
@mikeysmith
It’s not an assault on the BBC. It’s an assault on facts.
The edit was only remotely a problem if your position is that Trump played no part whatsoever in encouraging January 6th. Which he plainly and obviously did.
7:37 PM · Nov 9, 2025
Leading journalist Mikey Smith thinks deliberate, carefully engineered selective quotation is an acceptable journalistic practice. Leading journalist Mikey Smith thinks lying is acceptable. Assume Mikey Smith is lying to you; assume Mikey Smith would lie about you.
Still, perhaps I was a little harsh about journalists in general in my earlier post. Sure, there are plenty of outright liars in the media, and plenty of people who upvote their lies and beg to be lied to some more. But perhaps a larger group is made up of caring, intelligent people who you’d probably really like if you met socially, in the unlikely event that you were invited to one of their social gatherings.
People like Jane Martinson. She is a Guardian columnist, a professor of financial journalism at City St George’s and a member of the board of the Scott Trust, which owns the Guardian Media Group. On November 9th she wrote this piece for the Guardian: “The BBC is facing a coordinated, politically motivated attack. With these resignations, it has given in”
Now the resignations of both Davie and the CEO of BBC News, Deborah Turness, have shown that baying for blood gets results.
The biggest shock is that this saga began just a week ago with the leak of a 19-page “devastating memo” from Michael Prescott, a former political journalist who spent three years as an external adviser to the broadcaster, published in the Telegraph. The dossier alleges BBC Panorama doctored a speech by Trump, making him appear to support the January 6 rioters, that its Arabic coverage privileged pro-Hamas views, and that a group of LGBTQ employees had excessive influence on coverage of sex and gender.
I admire in a technical sense the way that Professor Martinson uses the word “alleges”. The claims that the BBC’s Arabic coverage privileged pro-Hamas views and that a group of LGBTQ employees had excessive influence on coverage of sex and gender can be fairly called allegations. Even if one thinks these two allegations are probably true, as I do, whether the behaviour of groups of journalists over a period of years was fair or unfair is not a matter that can be assessed quickly at a distance. Two of the three items in Professor Hutchinson’s list of things that she says the dossier “alleges” truly are allegations, i.e. claims that remain to be proved. The first one is the cuckoo in the nest. Professor Martinson also categorises it as an “allegation” that Panorama misleadingly edited Trump’s speech. If she had wanted to, she could have verified the allegation as fact by watching a twenty-three second video. That particular clip was from news.com.au, but it is widely available. (I suppose we could enter a spiral of distrust and say that maybe that video was faked like the Panorama one, but that would involve admitting the Panorama one was faked, so this option is not available to Professor Martinson.)
Now, Prof. Martinson might complain that it is unfair to focus on that little evasion when later in the article she did go on to say,
None of this is to say that the BBC has not made mistakes. At the very least, the Panorama documentary appears to have included a bad and misleading edit of an hour-long Trump speech, which is unacceptable even if that speech was subsequently found to have encouraged insurrection.
But if she did so complain about relevant material being downplayed, I wouldn’t have to go to ChatGPT to find a smoothly written defence of the practice. Notice how even in the act of admitting that the Panorama edit was “bad and misleading”, she still puts in a little doubt that it actually happened. She writes, “the Panorama documentary appears to have included a bad and misleading edit“. “Appears to” – can we get BBC Verify onto that? It might be that Jane Hutchinson wrote “appears to” here and “alleges” earlier as part of a subtle attempt to cast doubt on politically inconvenient facts that she knew were true but would prefer her readers to doubt. However I think it more likely that it was a mere reflex; an involuntary flinching of the eyes and mind away from the thought that a situation could exist where Trump – Trump! – was the one being lied about and people like her were the liars, and, more embarrassing yet, that she and people like her might be the ones being lied to. And that this might have been going on for years, and she, a Professor of Financial Journalism, had not noticed.
Let us finish this discussion with a short prayer for Guardian journalists and those who love them:
“Protect me from knowing what I don’t need to know. Protect me from even knowing that there are things to know that I don’t know. Protect me from knowing that I decided not to know about the things that I decided not to know about. Amen.”
– Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless
“BBC director general Tim Davie and News CEO Deborah Turness resign over Trump documentary edit”, reports the BBC about itself:
BBC director general Tim Davie and CEO of News Deborah Turness resign over Trump documentary edit
It comes after the Telegraph published details of a leaked internal BBC memo suggesting Panorama edited two parts of Trump’s speech together so he appeared to explicitly encourage the Capitol Hill riots of January 2021
In a statement, Davie says “there have been some mistakes made and as director general I have to take ultimate responsibility”
I used the tag “Deleted by the Woke Media” because fifty-four minutes of Trump’s speech on January 6th 2021 were deleted by the Woke BBC, and the trailing ends of the tape spliced together to make it appear as if he had said an inflammatory sentence he never said.
Remember the names of those public figures, especially journalists, who say that this was acceptable behaviour by the BBC because it was done to Trump. These people think lying is acceptable. Assume they are lying to you; assume they would lie about you.
The Telegraph has a story – with accompanying videos – that ought to finish several careers at the BBC: “Exclusive: BBC ‘doctored’ Trump speech, internal report reveals”.
What Trump actually said:
“We’re gonna walk down, and I’ll be there with you, we’re gonna walk down, we’re gonna walk down any one you want but I think right here, we’re gonna walk down to the Capitol and we’re gonna cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them because you’ll never take back our country with weakness, you have to show strength and you have to be strong…I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”
And 54 minutes later:
“Most people would stand there at 9 o’clock in the evening and say I wanna thank you very much, and they go off to some other life but I said something’s wrong here, something’s really wrong, can’t have happened, and we fight. We fight like hell and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not gonna have a country any more.”
What the spliced-together BBC version made it look like Trump said:
“We’re gonna walk down, and I’ll be there with you, we’re gonna walk down, we’re gonna walk down any one you want but I think right here, we’re gonna walk down to the Capitol and we’re gonna cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them because you’ll never take back our country with weakness, you have to show strength and you have to be strong…I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”
And immediately afterwards:
“Most people would stand there at 9 o’clock in the evening and say I wanna thank you very much, and they go off to some other life but I said something’s wrong here, something’s really wrong, can’t have happened, and we fight. We fight like hell and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not gonna have a country any more.”
In case your screen is not showing all the lines through most of the second version, the falsely edited BBC version made it look like Trump said,
“We’re gonna walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be with you and we fight. We fight like hell and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not gonna have a country anymore.”
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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