Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

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  • A moment of reckoning

    Jonathan Sacerdoti at the Spectator – The BBC can’t brush aside the Gaza documentary scandal:

    The BBC’s admission of serious editorial failures in its documentary Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone is not just a scandal – it is a moment of reckoning. This is, without doubt, one of the most humiliating debacles in the corporation’s modern history, and it vindicates those who have long highlighted the BBC’s institutional biases when reporting on Israel. The implications of this controversy go far beyond journalistic failure; they touch on issues of public trust, financial accountability, and even national security.

    At the heart of this disgrace is the BBC’s failure to conduct even the most basic due diligence. That the narrator of the film – a child carefully chosen to evoke maximum emotional impact – was the son of a Hamas government official is not a minor oversight; it is an egregious failure of editorial integrity. Worse still, the BBC was misled by the independent production company it had commissioned, yet it failed to uncover the deception before broadcast. Such negligence is unacceptable in any context, but in the case of a documentary about a warzone – where misinformation can shape public opinion, influence policy, and even incite violence – it is nothing short of reckless….

    The BBC’s approach to complaints about its Israel coverage has long been characterised by arrogance and stonewalling. Time and again, concerns have been raised about its failures – whether in language choices, selective omissions, or outright factual distortions – only for the corporation to dismiss them with condescension. It was only through sustained pressure from figures like David Collier and myself, along with other indefatigable campaigners for media accountability, that the BBC was forced to confront its own wrongdoing in this case. But let’s be clear: had the BBC not been caught, it would not have admitted these failures. The pattern is always the same – deny, obfuscate, and then, when the evidence is overwhelming, reluctantly concede the bare minimum necessary to contain the scandal….

    The damage to the BBC’s credibility is now undeniable. It is not just those who exposed this scandal who should be vindicated, but also those who dismissed, ignored, or even defended the documentary who must now face accountability. The signatories of that ill-judged letter calling for the film’s reinstatement should reflect on their actions and issue a public apology. What did they think they were defending? A programme that engaged in fakery, deception, and mistranslation? A film whose integrity collapsed under the weight of the facts?

    The BBC’s reputation is in tatters, and rightly so. If it wants to rebuild public trust, it must not only own up to its failures but demonstrate that it has the courage to change. The days of brushing aside complaints, gaslighting critics, and hiding behind bureaucratic processes must end. This scandal should mark the beginning of a long-overdue reckoning with the BBC’s chronic bias against Israel and its failure to meet the most basic standards of journalistic integrity. Enough is enough.

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  • Medics playing God

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    Medicine is at its most dangerous when medics play God. Development is not a switch to be turned on and off at will; it is a deeply interwoven physiological, psychological, & social process. Yet we are now engaged in indulging ourselves in a reckless experiment—pausing puberty as if it were an inconvenience rather than the stage of development that is essential for procreation. But development does not wait. Delaying puberty isolates young people from their peers, severing them from the shared struggles that shape adolescence.

    When adults sanction the delay of secondary sex characteristics, they risk undermining a young person’s capacity to cope. The implicit message is: You’re afraid you can’t handle puberty, we agree—you don’t have the resources to manage the identity confusion & uncertainty that accompany the transition from childhood to adulthood. By stopping puberty, medics offer the concrete medical solution these children yearn for—while simultaneously signalling that even adults lack confidence in their ability to find the internal resources to manage. We are also stopping a part of the developmental process that brought them into existence.

    This was Dominiqo’s original idea—puberty blockers as a ‘pause for thought’ for adolescents who weren’t ready for puberty. What he didn’t realize was that this approach endorsed an omnipotent belief: that individuals can control the anxiety that comes with developmental change. And that sort of manic psychological defence is difficult to resist—or relinquish.

    The GIDS study confirms this. It’s like standing outside a drug rehabilitation service and saying Today, we’re offering psychological support over here, or you can get opium over there. Faced with that choice, the kids didn’t pause puberty and then return to a natural developmental pathway. They continued down the medical route. 95% moved from the allure of puberty blockers to the allure of cross-sex hormones.

    And I agree with the article—the consequences won’t be evident in two years, when individuals may still be caught in the euphoria of having seemingly triumphed over their biological development. The real reckoning will come in twenty years, after prolonged use of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgical interventions. That’s when we’ll see the full impact of this live experiment.

    The greatest mental health scandal of our generation is about to be reopened. Instead of addressing psychological distress at its root, we are interfering with normal developmental processes. Having led the world in putting the lid back on Pandora’s box, we are about to open it again. A tragic display of hubris.

    Like the lobotomies of the 1950s, future generations will look back in disbelief, asking: What were they thinking? But it won’t be the researchers and their cheerleaders who are left to pick up the pieces of fractured families and individuals who have lost the developmental opportunities that come with the challenges of puberty. That burden will fall on the next generation of psychotherapists, psychiatrists, and psychologists.

    And before anyone starts searching for that mythical figure, the true trans child, let’s be clear: there is only one thing with less prognostic reliability than an adult mental health diagnosis—a mental health diagnosis in children. Psychiatry isn’t like medicine. There is no schizococcus—no biological test to confirm a condition. There are only clusters of symptoms and illness behaviour.

    After 46 years in psychiatry, I’ve seen every form of delusional thinking & manic denial employed by the profession. That’s why my first book was called Making Room for Madness in Mental Health. Rather than helping people understand & manage the difficulties that come with development, we promise to remove the pain associated with being human-playing god by denying the facts of life.

  • An unethical experiment on children

    This is a disgraceful decision.

    The NHS has announced plans to start offering puberty blockers as part of a £10.7 million clinical trial, prompting warnings of an “unethical experiment on children”.

    Puberty blockers were “indefinitely” banned across the UK last year for use in children identifying as transgender, due to fears they are unsafe and harm bone and brain development.

    Under the planned trial, run by a team at Kings’ College London, children seeking help from NHS gender services will be eligible for the drugs, if their parents and doctors agree it is suitable. The “Pathways” trial will closely monitor participants for two years, including with regular brain scans.

    Giving powerful drugs to confused children is no better simply because it's part of a trial. They're still getting the drugs – which we have very good reason to believe will ruin their lives. It's still child abuse.

    In her final report, Dr Hilary Cass recommended a new trial to look into puberty blockers. This NHS-commissioned study, due to last until 2031, was confirmed by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR), on a contract worth £10,694,902. The trial is yet to pass ethical approval, although the NHS expects it to begin this year.

    Cass welcomed the new trial, saying it “aims to fill some of the gaps in our knowledge about the outcomes of different interventions and address some of the uncertainty about the impacts and efficacy of puberty-suppressing hormones”.

    That's a shame. I assumed she'd put that in originally as a kind of sop to the inevitable push-back she knew she'd get from trans activists – so perhaps now she feels she has no choice but to back it.

    However, several doctors and campaign groups have raised concerns about the ethics of the trial, arguing that existing evidence proves puberty blockers are harmful, and damage brain and bone development as well as long-term fertility and sexual function.

    One psychiatrist warned the trial risks “repeating the same ethical failures” of the now-closed Tavistock and Portman NHS gender identity development service (Gids), which was accused of rushing hundreds of children on to puberty blockers from 2011 onwards.

    Dr David Bell, a psychiatrist who was a whistleblower at the Tavistock trust, said he found it “extraordinary” that the NHS-supported trial was going ahead, adding that “again an experiment is being carried out on children”.

    “If we accept that puberty blockers were an experiment that failed many many children, how can we justify conducting a trial when we know that a significant number of children will be harmed?”, he asked.

    There's no answer to that. We can't.

    “There are a number of reasons why it is unethical. Once children are started on puberty blockers it’s extremely hard for them to come off them. By starting puberty blockers children are in effect being put on a medical pathway to gender transition which will include, for many, progression to surgery. “The prescribing of puberty blockers introduces physical harms to a physically healthy child. There is significant evidence that puberty blockers seriously impact on bone density.”

    Helen Joyce, the director of advocacy at charity Sex Matters, said: “We have good reason already to think these drugs are harmful, and that the benefits are limited or non-existent.

    “It’s as if the NHS was planning a trial of lobotomies long after concerns first started to be raised — in fact, even worse because the test subjects are children. It seems that £10 million of public money is going to be spent on this unethical experiment.”…

    Thousands of children and young teenagers were put on puberty-blocking drugs — known as gonadotropin-releasing hormone analogues — by the NHS Tavistock gender clinic (Gids) from 2011 onwards, in what is increasingly seen as a medical scandal. Some doctors are concerned that this new NHS trial, however well-intentioned, risks repeating some of those same mistakes.

    In particular, campaigners fear that the trial’s two-year follow-up period is insufficient to tell us about the long-term outcomes of putting children on a medical pathway.

    Dr Louise Irvine, a GP and co-chairwoman of the clinical advisory network on sex and gender said: “A two-year follow-up will tell us nothing at all about risks or benefits of puberty blockers. I am shocked they are putting children through the known risks of puberty blockers for no gain in knowledge and I consider it totally unethical.”

    "The trial is yet to pass ethical approval". We shall see.

  • Battery ferry

    Ca. 1910. "Sunset from the Battery — New York, N.Y."

    image from www.shorpy.com
    [Photo: Shorpy/Detroit Publishing Company]

  • Prisoners and martyrs the “most dear” to Palestinians

    What the Palestinians really want. From MEMRI TV:

    Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas confirmed in a February 20, 2025, speech at the Fatah Revolutionary Council that the Palestinian Authority would continue its payments to Palestinians who committed terrorist attacks against Israelis, also known as "pay-to-slay." He reiterated that if Palestinians had only a single penny left, it would go to the prisoners and the families of the "martyrs." Abbas stated that the prisoners and martyrs are the "most dear" to Palestinians, and he would not allow payments to them to be reduced.

    It is worth noting that in the version of this speech aired on Palestinian TV and posted on Abbas's Facebook page, any reference to the continued payments to prisoners and “martyr” families was redacted.

  • Idiot media figures

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    As you cannot know what the truth is behind the production but want it restored online for public consumption anyway – I want to clarify what seems to be your publicly stated position:

    You believe it does not matter:
    If it is Hamas propaganda
    If the BBC did give money to Hamas
    If it was scripted
    If it is mistranslated
    If scenes were staged
    If Hamas family members were involved
    If the actors support the murder of Jews
    If the actors celebrated Oct 7
    If scenes etc are stitched together
    If a proscribed group had editorial input/p>

    You still want it shown as a factual account to the British public./p>

    Your position isn't just ethically unsupportable and deeply unprofessional – it also supports breaking UK law to work with and pay radical Islamic terrorists./p>

    And if this gives any indication into the quality and professionalism of your own work – none of you should ever work in the industry again.

  • What the Palestinians want

    Stephen Daisley at the Spectator:

    The western liberal mind is a captive of the two-state solution ideology, a lethal idealism convinced that Palestinian statehood will bring peace even as every step towards it brings only more violence. At the United Nations and in the foreign ministries of Europe, each Palestinian rejection of an Israeli offer proves that more pressure must be brought to bear on Israel. To cite evidence of the failure and futility of this model is to commit the gravest heresy. The two-state solution isn’t diplomacy, it’s religion.

    A revelation from former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert ought to turn even the most devout believer at least agnostic. It was 2008 when Olmert tried to get Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas to accept a state, but like Yasser Arafat before him Abbas walked away. The broad outline of the deal was known but we have had to rely on a hasty sketch Abbas scribbled on a napkin for the contours of the Palestinian state he rejected. Now Olmert has revealed the map he presented 17 years ago, and it depicts a territorial settlement strikingly favourable to the Palestinians.

    Olmert offered Abbas a Palestinian state on 95.1 per cent of the West Bank, 100 per of Gaza (which Israel had relinquished three years earlier), and 4.9 per cent of sovereign Israel. Jerusalem would be divided and the eastern sections handed to Palestine for its capital city. Israel would give up sovereignty over the Old City and the Temple Mount – the holiest site in Judaism – to an Arab-majority international committee. Olmert would demolish 78 settlements, expel 88,000 thousand Jews to make way for Palestinians, and build a road or tunnel connecting the two Palestinian territories on either side of Israel. In return, Israel would get to retain 4.9 per cent of Judea and Samaria in the form of settlement blocs Ma’ale Adumim, Gush Etzion and Ariel, and 45 smaller communities.

    Olmert is a hate figure on the Israeli right, in part for his willingness to compromise so much in pursuit of peace and in part for his apostasy as a former right-winger who shifted to the centre. But it is not only right-wingers who would object to his 2008 offer. It is difficult to imagine even a left-leaning government making such an offer today. The concessions are simply too many and too extensive and, besides, Israeli attitudes have been hardened by years of Palestinian rejectionism and terror. The Olmert map was the best offer the Palestinians ever received. They will never see another one like it.

    Arafat’s decision to spurn a state at Camp David in 2000 has come to be seen as a tragic error, followed as it was by a quarter-century of bloodshed in the Second Intifada and several more wars between Israel and Gaza. The same cannot be said for Abbas’s decision, for he had one thing Arafat did not: the lesson of Arafat’s failure. Abbas understood the wages of inflexibility, he knew the price of rejection and that the Palestinians would pay it in blood. In declining Olmert’s blueprint, he condemned his own people to decades of dispossession. He didn’t just deny them a state, he stole the Palestinians’ future. That is not a tragedy, it is treason….

    The 7 October massacre has brought down upon Palestinian heads a ferocious Israeli retaliation and reliably sympathetic western governments are under threat from right-wing populists who harbour more affinity for Israel. The transfer of Palestinians out of the land, once a fringe prescription promoted by the likes of Meir Kahane, is now advocated by the president of the United States. Israel has shifted rightwards and any appetite for the sort of territorial division proposed by Ehud Olmert is limited to a depleted and moribund left. If the Palestinians ever return to the negotiating table they will find themselves negotiating over much less than before.

    Mahmoud Abbas is another Palestinian leader who chose self-sabotage over self-determination and the Olmert map is a symbol of his inexcusable folly.

    It's long been clear that the Palestinians have never been interested in a two-state solution: what they really want is the destruction of Israel. They've been encouraged in this head-in-the-sand attitude to a great extent by the beneficence of UNRWA, which for 75 years or so has catered to their fantasy that they are and always will be refugees – until the time of Israel's inevitable disappearance – while pouring money into schools which teach them that their goal in life is to kill Jews. Also, the Arabs are never held to account for their violence against Israel. After each defeat they just start back again, building up for the next attack.

    Will it be different this time? The Israelis are certainly at the end of their patience, but it's not clear that the Palestinians themselves are any nearer to some kind of accommodation. The great tragedy is that the world at large seems more pro-Palestinian than ever – helped along by distorted reporting from the likes of the BBC. 

    It's also not helped by the framing of this by western media as solely a territorial political conflict, while determinedly ignoring the clear and dominant Islamic doctrines driving Iran and Hamas.

  • Executed for “anti-people” crimes

    More public executions in North Korea. From the Daily NK:

    North Korean authorities have carried out public executions of approximately ten officials involved in what the regime termed “mega crimes” in Jagang province’s Usi county.

    The executed officials included members of the county’s agricultural inspection organ and the chief of the local Ministry of Social Security branch. The executions took place on Jan. 31, following condemnation of the officials at the recent 30th enlarged meeting of the Secretariat of the Eighth Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea, where their actions were denounced as “anti-people” crimes….

    According to Daily NK’s source in Jagang province, the incident began last autumn when local officials, under pressure to fulfill the party’s mandate to “unconditionally ensure” military rice supplies, demanded that ordinary citizens make up the shortfall in quotas. When public compliance proved insufficient, the agricultural inspection organ formed teams to conduct door-to-door searches.

    “These home searches weren’t unprecedented, but this time they crossed a line,” the source explained. “The inspectors didn’t just seize grain – they took livestock and household appliances, devastating people’s livelihoods.” The severity of these actions prompted residents to draw stark historical comparisons, with some telling the inspectors that “not even Japanese police during the occupation would have done something like this” and that “times are even harder than during the colonial era.”

    The situation worsened when citizens attempted to report the misconduct to the county’s Ministry of Social Security branch. Rather than investigating the complaints, the branch office alerted the agricultural inspection organ about the reports. This collusion ultimately led to the public execution of the branch chief alongside the other officials.

    The source noted that such practices extend beyond Usi county: “This abnormal way of doing business is widespread throughout society. Yet as usual, the state addresses these issues by punishing specific individuals rather than addressing the root causes.”

    Public reaction to the executions has been mixed. Some people questioned the necessity of such severe punishment for what they viewed as routine practices, while others expressed sympathy for officials who “died a dog’s death trying to carry out the party’s orders.”

    “The authorities executed officials for their methods of fulfilling party policy to ‘unconditionally ensure’ military rice stores, calling it an ‘anti-people crime,'” the source said. “But whether this will end the practice of forcing the public to make up military rice shortfalls remains to be seen. The general hope is that the authorities will stop these executions and implement fundamental reforms instead.”

    In other words, the officials were carrying out routine party policy, but were over-zealous to the extent that local complaints could no longer be ignored. So, instead of changing the policies, they just execute the officials and carry on as before.

  • You cannot trust Putin

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  • It’s easy. Yes or no?

    Interviewing Stephen Feinberg, nominee for deputy defense secretary. At least one Democrat is prepared to challenge the Trump Ukraine lies.

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