Today, Kew Gardens:
The exhibition – Henry Moore: Monumental Nature – opened this month, through till January.
Mick Hartley
Politics and Culture
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It’s a tough life, being a North Korean TV drama producer. From the Daily NK:
North Korea’s state film authority has issued a sweeping directive ordering its television drama production unit to make shows more entertaining and modern while tightening ideological controls across every element of production, sending writers and directors into a state of acute anxiety.
A source in Pyongyang told Daily NK that a “No. 1 directive,” a term denoting a supreme leader-level order carrying the highest degree of political authority, was issued in early May to the television drama production studio of the State Film Bureau, which oversees all film and drama production in North Korea and is located in the Moranbong district of Pyongyang. The directive sets out an entirely new framework for drama creation. “Everyone is gripped by fear that they will be held responsible if this directive is not properly carried out,” the source said.
On May 5, a solemn all-hands meeting was held in the bureau’s main conference room, attended by directors, writers, and other key creative personnel. An official from the Propaganda and Agitation Department of the Korean Workers’ Party central committee, North Korea’s primary organ for managing ideology and culture, delivered the directive and framed drama production as “an invisible war defending against the ideological and cultural infiltration of imperialists.” All ongoing productions were ordered to be fully realigned with the new directive’s requirements.
The directive’s contents span every stage and element of drama-making. Writers and directors are instructed to abandon the formulaic, ideologically rigid storytelling structures that have long characterized North Korean television drama and instead produce work with popular appeal, dimensional characters, and engaging narratives that draw viewers to their screens voluntarily. Dramas should depict the realistic everyday lives of ordinary North Koreans and allow protagonists to express inner conflict in a natural way, rather than simply embodying revolutionary loyalty.
At the same time, the directive imposes strict new standards on language, requiring all dialogue to conform to refined Pyongyang standard speech and prohibiting South Korean expressions, foreign loanwords, and vulgar slang. Costumes, hairstyles, makeup, and all on-screen props and furnishings must reflect socialist values and avoid any appearance of decadence or extravagance, with production teams instructed to establish and promote a modern yet modest aesthetic standard.
Right. Ease off with the hard-line ideologically rigid stories – but they must of course be ideologically correct, and reflect socialist values. More like South Korean dramas, then – but of course nothing like South Korean dramas…
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Green Part candidate Saiqa Ali was elected in Lambeth, despite the fact (or perhaps because of the fact) that she’d posted numerous inflammatory antisemitic posts on social media.
From the Times:
Two primary schools are being forced to close to serve as polling stations for a local council by-election after a Green Party councillor elected this month chose not to take up her seat.
Saiqa Ali appeared on the ballot paper as a Green candidate in the May 7 election, despite being suspended from the party after a raft of controversial social media posts, which later resulted in her being arrested by the Met Police. Already on the ballot, she was elected in the Streatham St Leonard’s ward in Lambeth council, south London.
Due to her decision, two schools have been told they will be requisitioned to serve as polling stations in a forthcoming by-election on July 2, forcing them to close for the day. Parents are being forced to find alternate childcare arrangements.
A letter from the head teacher at Henry Cavendish, one of the primary schools, to parents read: “We want to be entirely transparent with you — we are not happy with this request.”
Both schools were shut on May 7 for the original elections.
Controversial posts? Blatantly antisemitic posts, to be quite clear.
A ridiculous woman, and a ridiculous party.
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She looks zombified – trotting out the required line while knowing that it’s complete nonsense.
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I’m off for a few days. Back Wednesday the 27th.
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After the Rob Burley expose of the BBC’s trans capture, here’s Jo Bartosch at Spiked:
Trans activism has poisoned everything from crime reporting to fictional drama at the BBC. Time and again, the BBC refers to bearded, violent sex offenders as though they were women, demanding audiences ignore not merely biology but also their own eyes. Last year, we learnt just how pervasive trans dogma was at the BBC. In November, a leaked memo from Michael Prescott, a former standards adviser to the BBC, revealed that a team of ‘specialist’ LGBT reporters had ensured gender-critical perspectives were kept off-air, resulting in a ‘constant drip feed of one-sided stories… celebrating the trans experience without adequate balance or objectivity’.
As a recent paper by Oxford academics Michael Biggs and Ace North demonstrated, BBC audiences have repeatedly been presented with a distorted picture of violence involving trans-identified people. The researchers found that ‘BBC News published more than four times as many articles on transgender victims as on perpetrators, contributing to perceptions of exceptional vulnerability’.
The scale of the BBC’s failure is difficult to overstate. Make no mistake: thanks in part to the corporation’s capitulation to trans activism, and the relentless stream of affirming coverage it pumped into British homes, there will now be young adults living with lifelong medical problems. Teenagers who were encouraged to interpret ordinary adolescent distress as evidence they had been ‘born in the wrong body’. They were even signposted by the BBC to discredited organisations like Mermaids. BBC programmes, like the 2014 documentary I Am Leo, treated a girl’s belief she was a boy not as something to explore cautiously, but as an identity to celebrate and affirm….
Today, the BBC’s hard-earned reputation for journalistic integrity and impartiality has not merely been tarnished. It has been shredded, and used to mop up the drool of swivel-eyed gender zealots. The public may begin to trust the BBC again when accuracy and impartiality are restored in reporting on the clash between women’s rights and the demands of gender ideology.
That means sex-based language should be used routinely and without embarrassment. But it goes beyond the trans issue. Trust will return when the immigration status of rapists is reported plainly. When claims of ‘genocide’ are tested against reality. The BBC will deserve public trust again only when its journalists remember that their duty is not to flatter activists or protect fashionable orthodoxies, but to report reality plainly, fearlessly and without apology.
Their duty is to report the news, to inform, not to educate into the “correct” way of thinking as per the BBC’s “progressive” graduate intake – whether on trans, or on Israel.
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A depressing report in the Telegraph on the rise in antisemitism here:
My wife and I noticed in the first few months after Oct 7 how people we knew felt compelled to take a side, which usually meant talking about “genocide” or how much they hated Netanyahu or posting anti-Israel memes on their Instagram accounts.
In casual conversations we found friends and school-gate acquaintances had swallowed the “apartheid state” and “genocide” narrative because it was a self-edifying idea to get behind. The history was irrelevant. The truth was irrelevant. This can manifest in almost any form from the deadly serious to the absurd.
One Sunday afternoon in the summer of 2024, my wife, who is a photographer, was trying to book a taxi to the Bevis Marks Synagogue in the City of London, where she was due to be taking pictures at an event. Eight times, a different driver picked up the fare then mysteriously dropped the job once they realised what the destination was. In the end, I drove her to work because nobody else would….
My wife asks “What have we done to deserve this?” That could have been asked a thousand years ago, but it still hurts her and her community in 2026.
“We’ve all become constantly vigilant,” says Rabbi Mordechai Wollenberg, the leader of the Woodford Forest United Synagogue where both my daughters had their bat mitzvahs. “We park our cars away from the gates. We check the CCTV more often. We are looking over our shoulders all the time.
“Community leaders don’t want to make our communities anxious. We are not going to be cowed but we are on edge, with very good reason, and we’ve not seen anything like this for a very long time.”
Another thing my wife says is that she can’t see us living in London in 10 years’ time let alone 20, and she can see our children wanting – or needing – to live abroad. She has decided to train with the Community Security Trust, the charity that provides security and advice to Britain’s Jews. Jewish schools and synagogues are already fortresses, a daily burden and fear no other faith or group has to face.
“A sentiment I am hearing more and more is that there may not be a future for Jews in this country, and for someone who values their British identity it’s hard to get my head around,” says Wollenberg. “You can tell how bad it is when the police come to visit us and our members say, ‘I’m so glad to see you, we’re so scared to go out.’”
Candidates at both general and local elections line up to declare their antipathy towards Israel, courting the worst instincts of progressives and sections of Muslim communities who appear to have been inculcated with Jew-hate from an early age.
I have to explain this political earthquake to my daughters as best I can, but I’ve lost all sense of what British politics is for, who it serves and what will come of such a topsy-turvy set of priorities. For some candidates, anti-Semitism isn’t just part of their ideology, it is their north star.
The grim reality is that much of this is fueled by those sections of the Muslim community “who appear to have been inculcated with Jew-hate from an early age”. The tragedy is that this is now backed by large sections of the “progressive” left – and beyond. The oldest hatred was just waiting to be resurrected.
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A reminder of the importance of single-sex spaces.
In Lancashire, Matthew Gilkes, an IT teacher has been jailed for 16 years after being found guilty of a string of child sex abuse crimes including taking indecent photographs in the changing rooms at the leisure centre in Chorley.
In Southampton, Joshua Vallis has been found guilty of sexually assaulting a 13-year-old girl in the mixed-sex changing rooms at Romsey Rapids swimming pool. Police found thousands of indecent images of children on his computer. He was released on bail and will be sentenced at a later date.
These two men had accrued thousands of indecent images of children. The crimes they committed in swimming pool changing rooms were part of a prolific pattern of offending.
Every woman and child is at risk of sexual predators using mixed-sex changing rooms to commit crimes. What will it take for local authorities, leisure providers and the sports councils to take this seriously?
Mick Hartley 