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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.
The way to win the point is to flatly refuse to have anything to do with these parasites. One of the benefits of self-publishing is that you can bypass the publishing world and its hangers-on, such as sensitivity readers. In a few weeks, my latest novel, Railroad, will go live. It is set during the American Civil War, and it isn’t very sensitive. Okay, I did tone the language down a bit, but there is still language that would make sensitivity readers break out in a fit of the vapours. Too bad. It’s a historical novel, not modern-day. It is set during a period rife with violent racism, so the language and behaviours reflect that.
I would never let a sensitivity reader anywhere near my work. Ever. If readers are triggered, then they are probably reading the wrong author.
– Longrider
“Aborting baby girls proves Britain’s multiculturalism experiment has failed”, writes ex-Guardian writer Suzanne Moore in the Telegraph:
“…there are those who so value sons over daughters that they pressurise the women in their communities to abort female foetuses. This grim practice is called sex-selective abortion, and while most might assume that it only happens in the likes of China and India, it is in fact taking place in Britain too, among both first and second-generation immigrants whose roots lie in the Indian subcontinent.
It is rarely spoken about, but has come to light of late after the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS), which provides abortions to more than 100,000 women across the UK annually, was criticised for suggesting that termination on the grounds of “foetal sex” was not illegal.
Official advice, however, begs to differ. “This Government’s position is unequivocal: sex-selective abortion is illegal in England and Wales and will not be tolerated,” the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) said this week. “Sex is not a lawful ground for termination of pregnancy, and it is a criminal offence for any practitioner to carry out an abortion for that reason alone.”
Later in the article she gives her own view:
I may believe in a woman’s right to choose but this is not about choice. This is about maintaining “traditions” which dictate that sons are prized breadwinners and girls are to be married off.
I do not see any good reason for the scare quotes Suzanne Moore put around the word “tradition”. A tradition of which Suzanne Moore disapproves is still a tradition. Nor do I see any good reason for her saying “this is not about choice”. It quite obviously is about choice. Unlike Ms Moore, I am closer to being “pro-life” than “pro-choice”. Here’s an old post of mine that talks about that. I do not agree with the view that the question is simply one of a woman’s right to choose what happens to her own body; there is another life involved. The exact weight to give the competing rights of the foetus depend on a lot of factors, primarily how developed – how far from being a clump of cells and how near to being unquestionably a baby – the foetus is, but also including other factors such as the risk to the mother and whether the foetus is developing normally. However if one grants that a woman’s right to choose abortion does override the foetus’s right to life in particular circumstances, then the nature of a right to do something is that the person with that right does not need the approval of others to do that thing.
Putting it another way, how can it be justified that a female foetus that is solemnly decreed not to have a right to life suddenly gains that right if the woman wants to abort because of sexist tradition? Does that still work if the foetus is male and the woman wants to abort it because she’s a radical feminist?
This cult of safety has risen inexorably alongside the bloated state, the proliferation of lanyards dangling from corporate necks like talismans or morality nooses, – I mean look at us here, at the Margaret Thatcher Centre all proudly wearing our own blue ropes – and the insidious creep of human resources culture. HR departments, those modern inquisitors, enforce “safe spaces” where dissent is heresy, and risk assessments stifle innovation and free speech goes to die. It’s a world where playgrounds are padded to absurdity, and employees are trained not in skills, but in avoiding offence. This isn’t safeguarding; it’s societal strangulation, a slow garrote on the British spirit.
– Gawain Towler
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 (£)
Consider almost any apparently current ‘common knowledge’ today – Net Zero, critical race theory, trans, ‘diversity is our strength’ – and you will find instead a minority concern elevated to ‘common knowledge’ with the dictatorial overlord shouting down those who dare speak against it. This is most acutely felt within academia and certain corporates, but all of us at some point will have self-censored for fear our opinions are not common knowledge when in fact they probably are. If as a society we can succeed in getting a proper handle on ‘common knowledge’ we will greatly improve our country and our sense of ease within it.
– Joanna Gray
Ronan McCrea starts his Telegraph article with a glimpse into the past.
Three and a half decades ago, Henri Leconte, then one of the world’s biggest tennis stars, swept up in the adulation of the crowd, mocked a gay-looking ball boy on the centre court of a Wimbledon warm-up tournament. Pointing at the boy, he swung his wrist limply, while laughing, and encouraging the crowd to join in the fun.
And everybody thought it was a hoot. Everybody except one.
The ballboy was me, aged 13, and I still vividly remember the horror and total isolation I felt at the time. The fact, however, that such a scene would be unimaginable today shows the extent to which society has changed its approach to gay people.
Yes. If I were not hearing about this incident from the person with most cause to remember to the day when it happened, I would have thought it took place in the 1960s or 70s, not 1990.
But the dramatic shift in society’s approach to homosexuality mustn’t be taken for granted. Indeed, I fear it could all too easily return: it takes a striking degree of complacency to think that after centuries and centuries of repression, a few decades of tolerance could mark an irrevocable change.
Ironically, the unprecedented freedom that we’ve won in the past few decades is now under threat from within our own ranks – not least the approach of gay rights groups like Stonewall.
I’m among many gay people who believe that hanging on to what we have would be a good long-term result.
Mr McCrea then describes the almost Stakhanovite pressure on companies and their employees to do ever more to prove their “allyship”:
Getting a good score on the [Workplace Equality] index requires a dizzying range of active steps from verifying that suppliers are “committed to LGBT inclusion” and community engagement work. In the US, the main gay rights group, the Human Rights Campaign, went even further, recommending a kind of gay tithe (as or they put “cash or in-kind donation to at least one LGBTQ+ specific organisation”) along with a “standard of demonstrating at least five efforts of public commitment to the LGBTQ+ community”.
I suspect any private sense of “commitment to the LGBTQ+ community” that the managers and employees of these companies might once have had was neutralised by the third public demonstration of commitment and sent well into reverse by the fifth.
He continues,
This approach not only risks alienating people who are happy to live and let live but don’t like being subjected to propaganda at work. It also undermines the key argument that helped gay rights to advance in recent decades, namely that accepting gay people required simply that approach: live and let live.
He is right. Though I agree with what he has said so far, I doubt that Mr McCrea would agree with what I am about to say: as a libertarian, I believe on principle that there should not be any anti-discrimination laws whatsoever. I think gay people would be more accepted, not less, if coercion was removed from the equation entirely – and even if they weren’t, I would still advocate for it on the grounds of the fundamental right to free association. However, back in the real world, at least the laws against discrimination in employment and so on do not reach that deeply into people’s personal lives. They are nearly always passed after the bulk of the public have already been won over by moral argument. Their main effect is to make people somewhat grumpier and more cynical about doing what they were going to do anyway. A terrible wrong turning was made when gay activists, having got about as far as was logically possible in terms of forbidding workplace discrimination, started trying to compel speech, as in the cases of Lee v Ashers Baking Company Ltd and others in the UK and Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission in the US.
Note that in the British case at least, the plaintiff was not shocked to discover that the bakers would not bake a cake with his required slogan on it. Gareth Lee deliberately sought out bakers who would object. He wanted to set the legal precedent that they could be compelled to promote a message antithetical to their beliefs. If the decision had gone the other way, I have sometimes wondered what Mr Lee’s position would have been regarding slogans offensive to his deepest beliefs.
Although both the Ashers and the Masterpiece cases were eventually decided in favour of the right of the defendants to free speech (which includes the right not to be forced to speak), the years-long attempts to force people to write words which they thought were morally wrong made a mockery of “live and let live”. Legal cases such as these, and the increasingly onerous demands for displays of support for the LGBTQ+ cause made upon every workplace and institution, have made many people feel – as did the Stakhanovite workers – that every act of compliance merely lays them open to new demands. That breeds enmity, not solidarity. Stop demanding that people feel certain emotions. Let us get back to the humbler, more achievable principle of “live and let live”.
“Police in free speech row after telling cancer patient to apologise for social media post”, the Telegraph reports.
Police have become embroiled in a free speech row after officers told a cancer patient to apologise for a social media post.
Deborah Anderson, an American citizen living in Slough, was confronted by an officer from Thames Valley Police after someone complained about an offensive Facebook post.
The police did not divulge which post had been the subject of the complaint.
The mother of two, who is undergoing chemotherapy treatment for cancer, was told that if she did not apologise for the comments she could be interviewed at the police station.
Ms Anderson, a vocal supporter of Donald Trump and a member of the Free Speech Union (FSU), refused and said the officer’s time would be better spent investigating serious crimes such as burglary.
Thames Valley Police later dropped the case after the FSU instructed lawyers.
However, the incident has reignited the debate over how far the police should intervene in social media spats.
The issue came into focus earlier this month when Graham Linehan, the Irish comedy writer, was arrested by five armed officers at Heathrow Airport over comments he had posted on X about a transgender activist.
Sir Mark Rowley, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, has since said the police were in an impossible position when it came to such matters and called on the Government to provide greater clarity within legislation.
[…]
Ms Anderson was visited at home by a single officer in June and informed that Thames Valley Police had received a complaint about her.
In a video shared by the FSU, the officer said: “Something we believe you have written on Facebook has upset someone.”
Ms Anderson then asked: “You’re here because someone got upset? Is it against the law? Am I being arrested?”
The officer confirmed that she was not being arrested and explained: “My plan was that if it was you who wrote the comment, you could just make an apology to the person.”
Ms Anderson replied: “I am not apologising to anybody, I can tell you that.”
The officer told her: “The alternative would be that I would have to call you in for interview.”
Ms Anderson then asked the officer: “Are there no houses that have been burgled recently, no rapes, no murders? … Then why aren’t you out there investigating those?”
Lord Young of Acton, general secretary of the FSU, said: “Watching this video, it’s as if the police have become schoolteachers, intervening in petty squabbles. Since when has it been their job to ask people to apologise?
“Except instead of threatening you with detention if you don’t, they’re threatening you with arrest. It’s both comical and deeply sinister – carry on 1984.
A spokesman for Thames Valley Police said: “In June, we received a report from a person who felt threatened by comments directed at them online.
“Following engagement with both parties, no arrests were made and no further action was taken.”
If Plod the Prefect comes round to “engage” with you, do what Ms Anderson did and stand your ground. The chances are good that they will back off. Even if they don’t, you will have kept your self-respect.* This is the alternative.
*Another way to preserve your self-respect in these times is not to join the police. No officer should have to endure this type of deliberately humiliating hazing ritual.
Let me say this upfront: I was not Charlie Kirk’s biggest fan, nor was I a bitter detractor. I saw him in cynical terms and still do, as an ally of convenience on some issues, an opponent on others. As I am very much in favour of free speech, I am perfectly happy to see his image raised as a political icon, a literal free speech martyr.
Being a family man with much to live for, I venture with confidence Charlie Kirk would have rather not been assassinated. But nevertheless having been murdered by some trans-fixated politically motivated lunatic, Kirk is perhaps looking down from the heaven he believed in feeling vindicated, pleased that at least his death mightily serves a cause he strongly believed in.
I do find it interesting to see this AI generated meme appearing, showing political activist Charlie Kirk and Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska…
Both were murdered whilst on video. Iryna Zarutska was stabbed by a racially motivated serial-offender a couple weeks before Charlie Kirk was assassinated. Kirk spoke out about her murder, horrified by the vile senseless crime captured in slow motion for all to see. And of course he cared, Iryna was murdered by a US national in the United States of America.
But Kirk was not keen on supporting Ukraine against mass-murderous Russia, which was what had driven Iryna to become a refugee in the USA. Had she died in Ukraine in a Russian missile strike on an apartment block, her passing would not warrant a mention, just another nameless victim of the Russian imperialism Kirk would rather not see a single US cent spent opposing.
Charlie Kirk was deeply religious, claiming this was his strongest motivation, which was probably true. He was also a nationalist, and in that particular Gott mit uns strain of American Christianity, maybe Charlie Kirk did not see the tension between his indifference to the victims of the war in Ukraine and his Christianity, possibly seeing the narrow interests of the USA and God as being one and the same. But perhaps my own aggressively secular sensibilities are showing.
So, I am happy to see him exploited as a free speech martyr, even though I did not particularly like the man, and I am confident Charlie Kirk would have been perfectly ok with that too.
It has been interesting to see the predictably alarmed reactions to the huge march in London organised by Tommy Robinson et al.
One remark I heard on a video was “The most alarming aspect of the event was just how normal the vast majority of the marchers were… the sort of people you’d meet in a country pub, or at a half-time queue for the loo or a concert.”
At first, my reaction to hearing that was “surely the normality of the crowd should have made the march less alarming”… but then I realised the marchers not being stereotypical bovver boys makes plausibly labelling the demonstration as “far-right” vastly harder.
Yes, I can see how that might alarm some people as the magic words racist, fascist, and far-right lose their power from years of overuse and the fact there were reggae bands and alarmingly black faces in the crowd.
The Urban Dictionary defines a “wedgie” as
…the condition when someones underwear gets stuck up their ass naturally, or by someone pulling it up there. Wedgies are done usually to nerds who wear tighty whities. However it can be done to people who wear boxers to, and of all ages. Wedgies are done as an act of dominance, to torture somone, for sibling rivalry, or just friends messing around.
I hereby add to this definition. A “wedgie” also means an artistic performance that is woke and edgy done as an act of dominance over the audience, which is presumed to consist of white, straight, cisgender, bourgeois, uptight people – tighty-whities, one might call them – who will be shocked but who will not dare to object. The opening ceremony of the 2024 Paris Olympics, which took place a year ago today, was a wedgie.
Now jump back another three years. Four years and ten days ago, I was excited to post about a series of thirty-five tweets from a then-unknown podcaster called Darryl Cooper, a.k.a. “MartyrMade”. The title of my post was a phrase from one of the tweets that I thought then, and still think now, exactly captured the nature of the loss of trust in institutions that divides my political life into the time before and the time after it happened. Here is the post: “Many Trump supporters don’t know for certain whether ballots were faked in November 2020, but they know with apodictic certainty that the press, the FBI, and even the courts would lie to them if they were”.
So perfectly did that series of tweets resonate with the spirit of the moment that, unknown to me, at the very moment when I was writing my post about them, Samizdata Illuminatus was also posting about the same topic.
Time moves on. I have recently added the following note to my post from 2021:
Another edit, four years later (July 2025): After posting this in 2021, I enthusiastically clicked Darryl Cooper’s “Follow” button on Twitter. As the next four years went by, he passed from being someone I followed because I admired them to being someone I followed because I despised them. Cooper is not quite out of the closet as a fan of Hitler. Read “The Case against Darryl Cooper” by John William Sherrod.
I still think this series of 35 tweets that Cooper posted in 2021 went viral for good reason. As I have said before with regard to the far right, 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.
What has this got to do with a tedious LGBT-whatever parody of Da Vinci’s “The Last Supper”?
Because the thing that made it finally sink into my consciousness that Darryl Cooper is a Nazi fanboi was this now-deleted tweet from him about that opening ceremony:
No, it wasn’t, you weirdo.
I took the screenshot of the tweet from this post on Instapundit in which Ed Driscoll discusses the “woke Right”.
In case the picture succumbs to link-rot, in the essay to which I link above, John William Sherrod describes it thus:
In yet another post, he posted two pictures. On the right was the blasphemous “Last Supper” depiction from the opening ceremony of the 2024 Paris Olympics. On the left was a photo of Hitler and his entourage with the Eiffel Tower behind them after France fell to the Nazis. Along with those two photos, Cooper posted:
“This may be putting it too crudely for some, but the picture on the left was infinitely preferable in virtually every way than the one on the right.”
“Straight white author’s career finally takes off after he tells woke publishers he’s gender queer Nigerian”, reports the Daily Mail.
The artist formerly and now once again known as Aaron Barry is truly a bard for our times:
From 2023 to 2024, Barry had managed to fool 30 respected literary journals around the globe and got about 50 of his ‘nonsensical’ poems published.
He published dozens of pieces as Adele Nwankwo, a ‘gender-fluid member of the Nigerian diaspora,’ including one titled After Coming Out: A Wrestling Promo.’
‘The CisBoys thought they could gang up on me and put an end to my championship pursuit?’ the poem published in 2023 reads. ‘Hah! I’ve got Toni Morrison books that hit harder than those bozos.
‘Oh, and this would set the crowd ablaze, cause them to whisk in rattle homemade signs (“The Nigerian Nightmare,” “Nwankwo 11:16,” Step on My Balls, Kween Adele!)’
‘The first poem to ever get picked up was the “yah jah gah hah” one,’ Barry told The Free Press in an article published on Wednesday.
He was referring to one of Nwankwo’s poems that was published in the Tofu Ink Arts Press, which has a mission of ‘amplifying the voices of the under-represented.’
The poem kicks off with a Toni Morrison quote about ‘navigating a white male world’ and features lines such as ‘voodoo prak tik casta oyal drip drip.’
‘It was very obviously nonsense. Just fake bad Creole,’ Barry explained to the outlet as he chuckled, baffled that the poem was accepted to begin with.
Another one of Barry’s characters, b.h. fein, whose pronouns are ‘its/complicated,’ was actually nominated for a 2025 Best of the Net Award.
The intro of the award-worthy piece, titled Shakespeare’s C*msl*t, reads: ‘To ?️ or not to ?️ William Shakespeare’s ??? little c*msl*t ??? : that is the question.
A 2024 interview with b.h. fein appears in a magazine called “The Cry Lounge” here:
hi there, reader! i’m b. h. fein (they/them or it’s/complicated)~~! i write lots of stuff (mostly in lowercase), but my gluten-free bread and vegan butter is free verse poetry. i haven’t been sending my stuff out for too too long, but i feel like i recently cracked the code as to what i can offer the poetry world
They wasn’t wrong there.
-*-
I was going to add a “Related Post” link to my Samizdata post about Rahila Khan, whose short stories about the lives of Asian girls and women in a depressed English town were much admired in the literary world of the late 1980s until she turned out to be the Rev. Toby Forward, an Anglican vicar. Virago, the publisher, had all its unsold copies of Down the Road, Worlds Away pulped. The post I thought I remembered writing seems to have metaphorically shared their fate.
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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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