Keir Starmer is worried that the Devil and his minions are taking over the souls of impressionable British boys and is on a mission to eradicate the evil before it can take root. His secret weapon is a Netflix documentary, sorry, cautionary tale that shows an angelic boy growing up in a fairly functional two-parent home but is lured into an online world of toxic masculinity and ends up a murderer. There have been parliamentary discussions, the usual media frenzy, a roundtable hastily convened and now a daring decision has been taken to screen the drama in every school in the kingdom, followed no doubt by many earnest discussions in classrooms and homes. Operation Stop-the-boys becoming-knife-wielding-fiends has been launched! Ninja swords will be banned by summer too. The nation’s girls will finally be safe. So who needs a national inquiry into the decades-long (and ongoing) child grooming/rape scandal? Not Labour!
That's twice now he's referred to Adolescence as a "documentary". He corrects himself but in a quieter tone, as if suggesting a possible alternative reading, nuance or footnote, rather than correcting a mistake.
Adolescence is not a documentary. It wasn't even a docu-drama,… https://t.co/B64DPAcJ4n
— simon evans (@TheSimonEvans) April 1, 2025
The Justice Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, is congratulating herself on averting a judicial disaster that was to set to strike the nation on April 1 2025. It was a heroic effort,a skin by the teeth, eleventh hour save. The Sentencing Council’s guidance (for judges) on pre-sentencing reports for ethnic, sexual and religious minority groups was set to effect two-tier justice based on group identities on Tuesday and despite public disquiet and representations from the government, the Council had stood firm and refused to withdraw the guidance. The government threatened legislation to override the guidance and the Council finally blinked at the very last hour and suspended its guidance. Madam Justice now promises to introduce legislation to stop the guidance from ever coming into effect. Have a think about this. A Labour government established this legal quango in April 2010 to try to ensure consistency in sentencing. Sir Keir, at the time Director of Public Prosecutions, was one of its founding members. Exactly 15 years later, a Labour government headed by the same man, Sir Starmer, has to battle this Council and scramble to devise laws to keep it in check.
Finally, an amusing incident that came to my attention via the gender critical naughty corner at Mumsnet will amuse regular readers. It is not in the mainstream media, not so curiously. Kings College London (KCL) is as captured by social justice as all of western academia and last year, tried to queer its engineering course. Nothing unusual in that. Engineering students were set a task to design something for LGBTQ students – the Engineering Design Empowerment Module project, assigned on 16 October 2024, required students to create a product for LGBTQ+ people, focused on providing education or safe spaces. A bit of a head scratcher that, but I am sure there must be some mechanical device that would have eased the unending suffering of the poor dears. Except that the students- a large cohort of whom are fee-paying international students with erm, deeply held religious views- revolted against the task.
The project has resulted in divided opinions amongst the more vocal engineering students. Many voiced dissatisfaction with the module and department, and one student complained about their peers’ reaction towards the LGBTQ+ focus of the module. Most complaints questioned the project’s relevance to engineering.
A student petition, signed by 74 students, was followed by a complaint form. The initial petition claimed the project made some students feel “uncomfortable” due to religious and cultural differences. One student wrote: “It is against my Islamic religious beliefs.” “I feel uncomfortable as I don’t want to choose between succeeding in my academic career and following my religion,” another added.
Additionally, the complaint form received overtly homophobic responses, like “no gay only male and female”.
If they had been ordinary white British students, there would have been serious repercussions and the students would have been collectively tarred and feathered for their bigotry. Not this lot. It seems that some students even got their embassies involved “over academic and safety concerns regarding their involvement with the project”. KCL buckled under the pressure and the project was withdrawn, sorry broadened to take into account these concerns. Imagine a Saudi student returning home to face the severe political and human rights ramifications for completing his uni assignment. You can’t? I cannot either but KCL could envisage all the pounds floating away and the hypocrisy of the social justice revolutionaries is laid bare. The LGBTQ+ activists were left fuming.
