We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
|
Maybe I imagined it.
I thought I saw the first few seconds of a scary video, either put out by the Home Office “Prevent” scheme or by some NGO with a similar remit. The video featured a teenage actor – white and male, obviously – portraying a boy lamenting that he had got a criminal record after impulsively posting hate speech online. I remembered the title as being something like “It just takes a few seconds to get a criminal record” or “It only takes a few words to get a criminal record”. From what little I saw of it, the video seemed more sinister than 99% of the hate speech it aimed to combat – because it was not put out by some Twitter-addled rando with thirteen followers but by His Majesty’s government, or an organisation closely associated with the same.
Ya know how it is. I just saw a second or two and thought, “I might blog about that”, but I was too busy to note it down. And now it’s disappeared. I put a query into CoPilot, which might have been unwise, and got this:
🔗 Official Home Office Video Link
🎥 “It Just Takes a Few Words to Get a Criminal Record” — UK Government (Prevent)
YouTube (Official UK Government Channel): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8hE1G9FqJw (youtube.com in Bing)
This is the authentic version of the video you’re looking for. It’s produced as part of the UK Government’s counter extremism and online safety messaging aimed at young people.
📌 What this video covers
• Warns young people that posting extremist or hateful content online can lead to:
o Arrest
o Prosecution
o A criminal record
• Uses a serious, cautionary tone
• Shows teen actors in realistic online scenarios
• Designed to discourage impulsive posting of harmful content
The link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8hE1G9FqJw says “This video isn’t available anymore”
That “anymore” suggests it did once exist, but I am beginning to wonder if I did not hallucinate the whole thing and spur the A.I. to join in my hallucination by means of my prompts.
Assuming I did not imagine it, can I get this video back from the void? I’ve tried the Wayback Machine without success.
UPDATE: That was quick. My thanks to commenter nbc who said, “This one?”
Yes. This one.
https://xcancel.com/Steve_Laws_/status/2029317472059359438
It took me about a second of scrolling down from that post to find views expressed by Steve Laws that I strongly disagreed with. For instance, he mocks Laurence Fox for saying, in the context of the child-killer Ian Huntley being attacked and killed by another prisoner, that even the most depraved criminals should be protected from vigilante justice in prison. Steve Laws appears to be an actual far-right person. They do exist. But as I have said before, “if there is a truth respectable people shy away from mentioning, do not be surprised when the despicable people who will say it aloud are listened to.”
The video appears to have been put out by the police rather than the Home Office, and shows a boy – not “a boy” in the sense of “a young man”; a child of about thirteen – tearfully saying “I just got all my devices taken away by the police. My mum couldn’t believe it. I might get a criminal record and not be able to go to college. I only shared a link. I just thought it was funny. But it was terrorist content, and that is not a game, it’s real life.”
That is a deeply sinister message for the police to be putting out, particularly in that it is aimed at children.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Ted Schuerzinger has provided a direct link to the video: https://www.instagram.com/terrorismpolice/reel/DVd1g1bkg7I/. It came from an Instagram account called “terrorismpolice”. The final frame shows a police logo and the words:
COUNTER TERRORISM POLICING
A.C.T.|ACTION COUNTERS TERRORISM
WHAT YOU SHARE LEAVES A TRACE
CLICK TO FIND OUT MORE
and the caption to the Instagram video says,
Has your child spotted our latest campaign on their feed? 👀
We’ve launched a digital campaign aimed at teenage boys to highlight the real-world consequences of sharing harmful extremist content online.
The content is being promoted on platforms young people already use, to reach them where they are.
Our message is simple: sharing extremist material can lead to serious legal and life-changing consequences.
It’s not just a laugh. What you share leaves a trace.
Learn more about the campaign and the message behind it via the link in our story.
Two questions occur to me:
1) Why was the video removed from YouTube? Hostile comments?
2) Is the video an accurate portrayal of the likely “real-world consequences of sharing harmful extremist content online” when the sharer is a child and the content is something the child shares because they think it is funny? If it is not an accurate portrayal, then the police officers or police employees who made the video are deliberately frightening children with misinformation regarding the law. People have had the police turn up at their doors to issue a “friendly warning” for less. If, however, it is an accurate portrayal of the real world – that is, if children really are being given criminal records for sharing (not creating, sharing) comic memes of whose extremist origin they were unaware, then we are further along than even I thought.
Dean Conway has written a supportive article for Central Bylines about the Green Party’s eye-catching new housing policy:
Green Party policy ‘Abolish Landlords’: solving the housing crisis
The Green Party’s ‘Abolish Landlords’ policy could end the housing crisis with a number of measures that will benefit tenants
“The Private Rental Sector has failed”, reads the Green Party’s statement to ‘Abolish Landlords’ motion, adopted as party policy at October’s Green Party Conference. Key elements of its plan to tackle the UK’s endemic housing crisis include:
Abolishing Right-to-Buy legislation and introducing Rent Controls.
Levying more taxes on landlords, including Land Value taxes and national insurance on rental income.
Ending Buy-to-Let mortgages.
Subsidising councils to buy back properties that have not been insulated to EPC rating C or have been vacant for more than six months.
Speaking to Alex Mace by email, Worcester City’s Green Party councillor and co-sponsor of the motion, he told me that ‘Abolish Landlords’ “takes actual concrete steps to solve the housing crisis that are largely how our original stock of council homes were built through the 50s, 60s and 70s”, including establishing “a state-owned housing manufacturer … to deliver housing at scale”. While the motion does not actually outlaw landlordism, it “seeks to make it significantly less attractive to be a private landlord”.
I’m getting a “defund the police” vibe. Tell the base that the slogan means exactly what it says, while telling the rubes that it doesn’t, with scope to row back on either position when convenient.
By the way, here is the Greens’ policy on migration, as stated on their website:
The Green Party in government will:
Implement a fair and humane system of managed immigration
Treat all migrants as if they are citizens
Give all residents the right to vote
Help families to be together
Dismantle the Home Office
Abolish the No Recourse to Public Funds condition
Abolish the ten year route to settlement
Stop the profiteering from application fees
Stop putting people in prison because of their immigration status
Accept our responsibility for the climate emergency and support the people forced to move
That policy would increase the need for rented housing rather a lot.
Taylor Lorenz is the one who doxxed Libs of TikTok, who came this close to lionising the murderer Luigi Mangione, and who for some reason habitually lies about her age, but she makes some excellent points in this article: “The world wants to ban children from social media, but there will be grave consequences for us all”.
Excerpt:
While social media bans may seem like a prudent measure to protect children, they are not only ineffective, they endanger both children and adults. There is little evidence that social media is driving any type of widespread mental health crisis in children. Studies have repeatedly shown the opposite. Removing anonymity from the web, which will inevitably happen when tech companies are required to identify and ban children, allows for easier government tracking and censorship of journalists, activists and whistleblowers, who rely on online anonymity.
And while some claim the laws would curb big tech’s power, only the largest tech companies have the resources to shoulder the extensive costs of age verification systems. Non-profit and indie platforms could be forced to close, consolidating big tech’s power further. Mass surveillance systems, once constructed, could also be easily leveraged by governments and bad actors.
If we want to fix the problems with social media, the place to start is through comprehensive data-privacy reform and consumer protections. Governments could also take action to break up big tech companies and prosecute them for anti-competitive behaviour. Lawmakers, who claim to care about children, could pass broader social and economic policies that we know would meaningfully improve children’s lives. Social media is a lifeline, especially for marginalised youth such as LGBTQ+ teens. Any policies that limit online access should centre on the most vulnerable children and adults.
To enact the social media bans being proposed around the world requires some system of age verification, which inherently means expanding surveillance technology. Because algorithmic systems cannot accurately estimate age, verifying a user’s age also requires collecting highly sensitive data or government documents to support the biometric data harvested. The laws being considered don’t all stipulate which system will be used, but there are significant privacy and safety concerns with all of them.
Friday 27th February 2026: Pakistan declares state of ‘open war’ after bombing major Afghan cities
Saturday 28th February 2026: US and Israel launch attack on Iran, as Trump says ‘major combat operations’ under way
Lot of it about these days. I was going to make a rather tasteless metaphor about it being like the Gorton and Denton by-election, with the Greens winning and Reform coming second, displacing the established parties. But of course the surprise war – to all but the very old – was Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Given Iran’s participation in proxy wars in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen, and its hostile actions against Israel, Saudi Arabia, and probably other countries that I’ve forgotten (even leaving out Western ones), I’m surprised this didn’t happen earlier. As for Pakistan and their former protégés the Taliban, he who sups with the devil should have a long spoon.
Update: Israel says that Ayatollah Khamenei has been found dead in the rubble of his compound. For the sake of the Iranian people, so many of whom have been murdered by Khamenei’s regime in the recent protests, I hope that this is true. In contrast, Zack Polanski of the Green Party says “This is an illegal, unprovoked and brutal attack that shows once again that the USA and Israel are rogue states.” Illegal, Zack? If the leadership of the Islamic Republic of Iran wanted the protection of international law, they should have renounced and made recompense for taking diplomats hostage. In the absence of that renunciation the international community should have put them down like rabid dogs forty-seven years ago.
“How to detoxify the immigration debate” is the title of an LSE (London School of Economics) blog post by Hana Kapetanovic.
The debate is being dominated by the loudest voices with the most strongly held views; the voices of the majority aren’t being heard. It would sound very different if they were. In British Future’s segmentation of public attitudes to immigration, the biggest group by far is the “Balancer Middle”, with around half (49 per cent) of the public falling into this group. This group is not fundamentally opposed to immigration, but wants it to be “controlled and fair”.
and
As much as public perceptions are shaped by the media, political and information landscape, we mustn’t forget that public perceptions in turn shape media and political debates. The media publishes articles they think people will read. Politicians move to where they think the votes are, and yet are still faced with low trust. We need to break this democratic doom loop.
Breaking the democratic doom loop and detoxifying the debate sounds nice, but her proposal to do this is to take a group of a few dozen voters – a group that is a representative sample of the electorate but is self-selected in that the group is made up of the sort of people who want to participate and have time to do it – show them lots of briefings by government approved experts, have them converse for a few days guided by a government facilitator, and declare that whatever curated consensus the group comes to after this exercise has greater democratic validity than either the discourse of MPs who have actually been elected or the myriad private debates of the un-detoxified mass of the electorate.
This process is called a “Citizens’ Assembly” or a “Citizens’ Jury”. If all these grand titles boil down to is a bigger than average focus group, fine. Endearingly worthy, in fact. But the minute this “Citizens’ Assembly” starts to displace the powers of the old sort of assembly voted in by all the citizens, or the “Citizens’ Jury” starts to think that it can make decisions that affect other people’s lives as if it were a jury jury, then…
No.
This tweet (https://x.com/nicolelampert/status/2026017118341263795) from Nicole Lampert shows a 45 second video of Jeremy Corbyn, former Leader of the Opposition and twice the Labour Party’s candidate to be Prime Minister. In it, he says,
‘[I got a message] from the director of Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza. And he said there had been a delivery of boxes to the hospital by the IDF. A large number of boxes, 60 or 70 boxes. And after the IDF had gone off, they opened the boxes. And each one contained the skull of a Palestinian who had been killed. And there were also delivered [sic] of bodies of dead women in Pala- in Gaza – that had been opened and some of the organs removed. I mean, it’s hard to describe this. That is what is happening to the people of Palestine.’
As Alex Hearn said said in the comments, “He won’t believe British intelligence about a Russian chemical attack in Salisbury but he’ll believe a fantasy from Hamas run Gaza.”
There is a slightly longer version of the same video from CAMERA UK here: https://x.com/CAMERAorgUK/status/2026229835803107332. This starts a few seconds earlier than Nicole Lampert’s video and includes Mr Corbyn saying that he got the message from the director of Al Shifa Hospital on Thursday or Friday morning.
In case you are wondering, no, I do not believe the director of Al Shifa Hospital (who appears to be Dr Mohammed Abu Salmiya, although I would like Mr Corbyn to specify who gave him this message) for a moment. Not just because he is the head of an organisation controlled by Hamas, although that would be enough in itself to make me disbelieve him, but because this claim is identical in form to a centuries long stream of anti-Jewish blood libels about Jews murdering Christians or Muslims to harvest their bodies. The old version, exemplified by Little St Hugh of Lincoln had the Jews killing Christians as human sacrifices, usually with the additional detail that the Jews baked the victims’ bodies into their matzos, the unleavened bread served at Passover. This religious version of the blood libel is almost dead in Europe but still commonplace among Palestinians, including academics like Dr Samar Maqusi, formerly of University College London. The slightly updated version drops the matzos and has organ-harvesting as the motive instead. This one is very common among Palestinians and increasingly common among Westerners – witness the Right Honourable Jeremy Corbyn MP speaking in February 2026.
Why does Corbyn think the IDF would bring these boxes of skulls and dismembered corpses to Al Shifa hospital? [Update: OK, someone in the comments to the CAMERA post says the ceasefire agreement required the IDF return unidentified human remains to Gaza. But in that case the director of Al-Shifa hospital would know perfectly well what was going on, and it does not explain why there were claimed to be boxes of skulls in particular, nor why a medical doctor would specifically claim that women’s internal organs had been removed.]
Did Corbyn think to ask the director of Al-Shifa Hospital what he did with them? If the IDF ever deliver any boxes of skulls and corpses with missing organs to me, I’ll be sure and contact all the world’s most eminent forensic pathologists so they can carry out post mortems and give the evidence to the world.
Another update: This was no “misspeaking”. Jeremy Corbyn has publicly made the same allegation in more detail within the last few days. In the comments to the CAMERA post, someone called SHO_MY links to a video posted at 3:03pm on 23 Feb 2026 (https://x.com/EL4JC/status/2025949713292296383) from a pro-Corbyn account called #EL4C @EL4JC:
In the video Corbyn is addressing a public meeting. In his speech he says,
‘I’m going to read something to you. If you’ve already heard it, please be patient. If you haven’t, please be prepared to be shocked. I got a statement this morning from my good friend Doctor Mustafa Barghouti who’s an independent member of the Palestine National Initiative, a member of the Palestine National Assembly, and he’s forwarded me a statement by the director of Al-Shifa Medical Complex, Gaza, and I’m going to read it to you. “The director of Al-Shifa Medical Complex stated that approximately 10,000 individuals remain missing underneath the rubble across the Gaza Strip. Of these, around 5,000 persons are unaccounted for and their fate remains unknown. He further reported that 66 boxes were received yesterday from the occupying authorities – that’s the IDF – containing only the skulls of deceased victims. In addition, the bodies of women were handed over with no information provided regarding the location or circumstances of their abduction. According to the director, some of the returned bodies showed signs of severe mutilation including severed hands, while others had their abdomens surgically opened and subsequently restitched. Thus these findings raise great, raise grave concerns. He warned of credible indications of organ theft from the bodies of martyrs in the Gaza Strip, describing these acts as serious violations of international humanitarian law and human dignity.” And that I just received this morning. Just think about that statement. And I’ve no reason to disbelieve anything Mustafa Barghouti says, or the director of Al Shifa Medical Complex.’
I do.
And I ask again, what has the director of Al-Shifa Medical Complex done with these bodies that he says show credible indications of organ theft? What action has he taken to get what he believes to be evidence of a horrible crime out to the world so that impartial outside observers can assess it? What is he doing to get these “credible indications” of organ theft either proved or disproved?
Beatrice Adler-Bolton
@realLandsEnd
Sanism names a deep, pervasive belief that ppl who appear out of control, incoherent, or in psychiatric crisis are not trustworthy, less human & fundamentally disruptive to social life. It’s a hierarchy of credibility and belonging, where visible distress = danger/contamination
1:59 AM · Feb 23, 2026
https://x.com/realLandsEnd/status/2025752283435196882
This tweet by Beatrice Alder-Bolton, co-author of Health Communism: A Surplus Manifesto, has been garnering interest, as it was intended to do. As the title says, while I never doubt the humanity of people who appear “out of control, incoherent, or in psychiatric crisis”, I do think that while they remain in this state in public places they are disruptive to social life. I also think that while in this state they are untrustworthy.
Beatrice Alder-Bolton would like us to believe that she trusts them. If she had said that she sympathised with people visibly in psychiatric crisis, I would have believed her. I also sympathise. If she had said that she tries to engage with such people in order to help them, I might have believed her. I have met a few kind souls who habitually respond in this way. I admire them (the kind souls) from a safe distance. But when Beatrice Alder-Bolton implies that she thinks the man having a psychiatric crisis in front of her on public transport is trustworthy, I do not believe her. Her body goes onto high alert just like anyone else’s. And speaking for myself, you bet I don’t trust the crazy guy. You bet I think he might be dangerous. And if he has just emptied his bowels or his bladder in the carriage I do indeed fear contamination.
But in order to be worthy of trust myself, I cannot simply dismiss Beatrice Alder-Bolton as a high-functioning mad left-winger of the sort that even other left-wingers are beginning to realise are poisonous to their cause (“I am begging leftists and liberals to not do this again. It is normal and smart to be nervous and on high alert when someone behaves in a profoundly anti-social way (peeing on the subway) and/or a threatening way (screaming on the subway). The more cities tolerate this, the fewer people ride public transport, the worse that transport gets, and eventually it gets to a breaking point and people wind up voting for right-wing politicians who come in and crack skulls and way over-police.” – Jill Filipovic), I have to acknowledge that when Alder-Bolton’s way of thinking is described as “left libertarian”, the “libertarian” part is perfectly real.
I wrote about the influence that the libertarian writings of Thomas Szasz had and continue to have on me in a post called “Ideology and Insanity on the New York Subway”. Just as certain chemicals are harmless in themselves but dangerous in combination with others, the way that Szasz’s* libertarian ideals combined with the dominant suicidally empathetic ideals of our time has produced results like the random murder of Iryna Zarutska by Decarlos Brown.
There are ways to respect the equal humanity of those who cannot function in society while, well, continuing to have a society. Private property is one, and if that is too much for modern sensibilities, the rediscovery of the right to exclude mad people from public property. To use Ms Alder-Bolton’s word, sanism. The rediscovery of proud, unapologetic sanism.
*You say it “sasses”. In Hungarian the digraph “sz” has the same function as the English letter “s” and the letter “s” on its own is pronounced the same way as the English digraph “sh”. Confusingly, Polish is the other way round.
“UK minimum wage is raising youth unemployment, Bank of England’s Mann says” – Reuters, Feb 15th 2026
Do you remember your first crappy job? Today’s young people would wish for half your luck, writes Gaby Hinsliff in the Guardian, Feb 20th 2026:
This week, unemployment rates for 18- to 24-year-olds hit a high not seen outside the pandemic since 2015. School leavers are now competing for work stacking shelves or pulling pints with overqualified new graduates who can’t find graduate jobs, at a time when pubs, shops and cafes don’t seem to be hiring. Even those employers strong enough to have survived lockdown routinely complain that it’s getting too expensive to hire staff – especially young ones.
The Centre for Policy Studies thinktank calculates that it will cost 26% more to hire an 18- to 20-year-old by this spring than it did in 2024. That reflects government decisions taken for perfectly good reasons, including hiking employers’ national insurance to fund the NHS, plus two chunky rises to the minimum wage for the under-20s (now £10 an hour) in line with manifesto promises to level it up with the higher adult rate (now £12.21) over the course of a parliament. No matter how noble the motive, once it costs the same to hire four teenage Starmers as it once did to hire five, there are likely to be consequences. Yet until this week, when an internal Labour argument about whether they could be inadvertently pricing young people out of work spilled on to newspaper front pages, political debate over why so many young people don’t have jobs has mostly involved blaming them for being anxious snowflakes. Injury, meet insult.
I am truly, non-sarcastically impressed that Ms Hinsliff and a few other left-wing commenters are now willing to admit that “there are likely to be consequences” to increasing the minimum wage. Hearing that word, “consequences”, enter left-wing discussions of workers’ pay is like a glimpse of a little mammalian form scurrying through the dust kicked up by a brontosaurus.
“Spanish is clearly now the world’s coolest language. So why do we push children to learn French?”, asks Gary Nunn in the Guardian.
His argument for pushing children to learn Spanish rather than French is something about Bad Bunny, whoever that is, singing at the Superbowl, whatever that is, plus a slightly less childish argument about how more people worldwide speak Spanish than French. So they do, but that does not rescue the entire article from having the air of being written by una rata en un saco. Mr Nunn may well get his wish that Spanish should dislodge French as the main language taught in British schools, but the triumph will be spoilt by whispers that there is increasingly little practical point in teaching any foreign language to children who already speak English, the language the whole world wants to learn. Mr Nunn says that his Spanish has allowed him to “remote-work my way across Latin America and learn to salsa with guapo men in nightclubs” which is nice for him, but the number of current pupils likely to dance in his footsteps is low.
Fate played a cruel trick on British teachers of modern languages. When I was a girl, they had just fought a successful campaign to dethrone Latin and Greek. In vain did the teachers of dead languages bleat about widening cultural perspectives and indefinable cognitive benefits. Teachers of French and German and Spanish talked better, stronger, more manly talk about how many tens of millions of living humans spoke their favoured languages; about exports and global relevance and earning potential. They quoted Willy Brandt, “You may buy from me in your own language, but sell to me in mine”, and they won.
But now the German for “job” is “der job” and the Spanish for “marketing” is “el marketing” and it turns out that Germans and Spaniards will not just buy in English but conduct their international business in it. And the teachers and enthusiasts for modern languages are reduced to fighting over which of them will grab the largest share of the shrinking number of English-speaking pupils willing to put the effort in to learn any of them, while dredging up from memory all that benthic detritus about “seeing the world in with different eyes” that they mocked so mercilessly when it came out of the mouths of the classicists half a century ago.
[Added later in response to comments: I do not mock it. To me, the ability to see the world with different eyes; to see how thought itself can be differently arranged, is a huge benefit. Just not the sort of benefit that gets you a better job, not if you are a native English speaker. As translation software improves, even the payoff from all those years of study of being able to find your way around a foreign city disappears. The emotional benefit of being able to make a friendly connection with people you meet abroad by speaking their language will never die, unless brain augmentation makes us into a new sort of human, but that is almost the only advantage left that a living language has over a dead one. In terms of widening your understanding of how varied human cultures can be, dead languages win.]
As I have been saying for more than a decade, my feelings about the triumph of English are not particularly triumphant. Not only do I mourn the beigificiation of the world, I fear that when we are down to just Mandarin, English and Spanish the state will find it even easier to control us than it does now. There have been many times in history when minority languages served as a literal speakeasy for minority opinions and where dead languages helped keep free thought alive.
“The auto industry’s gamble on electric cars has turned into a catastrophe”, reports the Telegraph.
The gamble on electric cars has turned into a catastrophe and it will be many years before the industry recovers.
With less than four years remaining until the original target date for banning the sale of all new petrol and diesel cars, the giants of the industry were meant to be riding a boom in sales of battery-powered vehicles by now.
Sleek new models would be rolling off the production lines, new battery plants would be creating hundreds of thousands of jobs, while the billions poured into investment would be the catalyst for reindustrialising both Europe and the United States.
“We’re going to need 70,000 skilled people just to make batteries across this country,” announced Boris Johnson, the former prime minister, back in 2021. He promised unlimited government support for British EV production.
Over in France, Emmanuel Macron, the French president, was pouring billions into making his country a force in battery and EV production.
So we are starting to see the results of all that investment, right? Sales are booming, profits are rising and new jobs are being created? Well, not exactly.
The article goes on to mention EV-related losses and potential losses incurred by Stellantis, General Motors, Ford, Porsche and even Tesla.
Antonio Filosa, the chief executive of Stellantis, conceded that the company had overestimated “the pace of the energy transition that distanced us from many car buyers’ real-world needs, means and desires”.
It is a painful admission but one that is at least honest. One point is surely clear. We are not hearing very much about how the transition to EVs would lead to an industrial renaissance any more.
There have been two major problems. First, EVs may only be a niche product.
Drivers are worried about the range, it is far from clear they are better for the environment once the impact of all the raw materials in the manufacturing process is taken into account, the charging infrastructure is not in place and we don’t generate the electricity to power them all at a price cheap enough to make EVs cost-effective.
Next, where there is a market, the new breed of Chinese brands led by BYD is walking away with it.
But fear not, our forward-thinking and tech-savvy government is on the case. Er…
Even worse, under the direction of Ed Miliband, the fanatical Energy Secretary, Britain is pressing on blindly with the 2030 target for phasing out sales of new petrol cars even as the rest of the world recognises that it is complete madness.
In January, the government’s Gambling Commission introduced yet another set of restrictions on gambling advertisements to stop people being enticed into making wagers they cannot afford. In most cases, I’m all for people – and industries – taking responsibility for their own choices, including the choice to gamble. But given that the government’s view is that gambling promotions that are too tempting should be banned, maybe it should refer itself to its own commission. In fact, the pressure placed on auto makers to switch to electric by both this and previous governments went well beyond high-pressure advertising and into coercion.
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.
Nick Timothy writes in the Telegraph:
It was last summer when Aston Villa drew Maccabi Tel Aviv in the Europa League. Immediately, the local, “Gaza Independent” MP Ayoub Khan launched a campaign to cancel the match. His petition demanded the match be cancelled because Aston is, in his words, a “predominantly Muslim community”.
After police planning started for the match, due to be played on November 6, officers met Birmingham councillors and officials at the Safety Advisory Group meeting on October 7. Two local councillors present said the “community want it stopped”. They met behind closed doors, but the minutes now show the truth. Even in the “absence of intelligence” the “planning assumption” of the police was that no away fans would attend the match.
The chairman of the Safety Advisory Group contacted the police two days later asking for a “more clear rationale”. A position had been reached, but the police were asked retrospectively to drum up a justification. The chairman warned the police to make sure the decision did not look like “anti-Jewish sentiment”.
When the committee met again on October 16, the police magicked their “significant intelligence” about the supposed violence of the Maccabi fans.
The police thought they could get away with it. Instead, their case has utterly collapsed. The “intelligence”, which the Chief Constable said had “changed the assessment”, focused on disorder in Amsterdam in 2024. It said the Maccabi fans were “linked to the Israel Defence Force” and targeted Muslim areas, throwing people into the river. Their report claimed the Dutch police sent 5,000 officers to tackle the violence. But none of it was true.
The fabricated “intelligence” supposedly came from an unminuted meeting between West Midlands Police and Dutch commanders on 1 October. This meeting was held six days before the meeting when the police said there was an “absence of intelligence”.
Amsterdam’s mayor, local police chief, and chief public prosecutor have all contradicted the “intelligence” – even calling it “nonsensical”. The disorder in Amsterdam was in fact violence against the Maccabi fans, which was described as a “Jew hunt”. It was an Israeli who was pushed into the river. Only 1,200 officers were deployed.
And it gets worse. West Midlands Police received intelligence on September 5, before the Safety Advisory Group meetings, saying local Islamists planned to “arm themselves” and attack Maccabi fans. But this information was suppressed, seemingly because the police did not want to admit that the true source of the threat lay closer to home. Instead of confronting the mob, the police gave in and banned the Israelis.
In modern times, the British social contract was meant to be that we, the people, give up the right to use force to protect ourselves in exchange for the police protecting us. Cue Libertarian grumbling “I do not recall signing this contract”, but that is the Britain we used to live in. It wasn’t ideal but it wasn’t bad either. It was one of the better societies that have ever existed.
The social contract relied on the idea that the only people permitted to arm themselves were servants of the state such as police officers or soldiers. If the state got wind that members of any other group – a white nationalist militia for example – were preparing to arm themselves in order to attack their enemies, an armed response unit would be kicking down their doors faster than you can say “Terrorism Act 2000”.
Now that some sections of the police have acquiesced in other groups taking the right to arm themselves, and, worse yet, have covered up their shame by portraying the aggressors as victims and vice versa, what reason do we have to continue to grant them special status as the sole holders of the right and responsibility to bear arms? Without the majestic aura of the law around them, the police are just another gang. They are not even the dominant gang.
|
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.
|
