No, It's Vital That They Have Access To Enjoyable Books

The number of children’s books featuring Black main characters fell by almost 8% last year, according to research into diversity in UK publishing.

...not books chosen by committee because they tick a particular box! 

Just 47 – or 2.1% – of the 2,189 books published for under-10s in 2025 featured a Black main character, a 7.8% fall from the previous year, according to Inclusive Books for Children (Ed: another fakecharity). Black children make up about 8.5% of that age bracket in England and Wales.

So what? It's utterly ridiculous to reduce reading for pleasure to a numbers game. Great characters are great characters, and can be enjoyed by anyone. 

Representation of south Asian main characters fell by 14.3 percentage points to 1.4%, despite children of south Asian heritage making up about 12.4% of the population of under-10s. Just three books featured main characters of Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) heritage, down 50% from the previous year. This represented 0.1% of surveyed books, compared with the group’s 2.2% share of the population.

The author Serena Patel said: “At an age when children are figuring out the world around them and where they fit in, it’s vital they have access to funny, inspiring, adventurous books that reflect both the lives they live and the ones they don’t. We must do better.”

You should have stopped that sentence after 'books', what you added after has no bearing on it. 

The survey also highlighted what it described as a lack of “incidental representation”: stories in which a main character’s identity does not explicitly drive the plot of the story.

Make up your minds! 

Dr Stella Louis, an early years consultant, trainer and author, pointed to this “continued reliance” on books where identity itself was the story. “Why can’t a child simply be south Asian, disabled, neurodivergent or bilingual and also be the hero of an ordinary story about friendship, adventure, loss or joy?” she said.

Apparently it;s both bad to have characters who are refugees and also  good to have them, at the same time, which just goes to show how impossible it is to please these people. So why does anyone ever try? 

“As an  Arab author, it is painful to see the number of children’s fiction books representing our region decline from six to only three in 2025,” said Nadine Kaadan. She said the fact that all three books published were focused on refugee experiences risked reinforcing a “single story” about the region, defining it through “war and displacement rather than our rich cultures and heritage”.

What heritage would you like to see, your heritage of antisemitism and slavery and misogyny? 

And if you're an author, isn't the answer in your own hands?  

Jake Hope, a children’s book consultant, said: “When children’s enjoyment of reading is at a significant low, it’s more important than ever that the stories children encounter reflect their lives, identities, experiences and emotions.

Why? Isn;t part of thr pleasure of reading based in learning about other lands or world, and other culture? It alway was for me. 

“These figures need to be more than mere statistics and a call to action for continued change and improvements.”

And as this is 'The Guardian' it wouldn't be complete without the obligatory 'Ooops':

This article was amended on 5 October 2026. In an earlier version Serena Patel was misidentified as Sheena Patel. This has been corrected, and an image of Sheena Patel removed. The first name of Jake Hope was also corrected.

Why does anyone believe anything they print? 

The moral imperative, social safety and certainty

Nick Dixon, the online pundit, has written:

The Screwtape Letters is one of C.S. Lewis’s most enduring and prophetic works. Adopting the voice of the demon Screwtape, Lewis predicts everything from virtue signalling, to porn addiction.

He also shows us the folly of political utopianism, and, as is typical of Lewis’s oeuvre, exposes how the modern world has dispensed with truth and reason in favour of fashionable ideas and materialism.

At the personal level, we are implicitly warned (by taking the opposite view to the evil Screwtape) of how an obsessive focus on the future causes anxiety, and how the pleasures, though divine in origin, can be corrupted and perverted.

Lewis also makes it clear that our thirst for novelty and concerns about social status are further avenues for evil to exploit.

Charles Baudelaire, the French poet, first wrote a version of this thought in his 1864 prose poem "Le Joueur Généreux" ("The Generous Gambler"), writing: "La plus belle des ruses du Diable est de vous persuader qu'il n'existe pas!".

The stance itself has existed since time immemorial. Every possessed person in the public eye is well aware of it ... Madonna, Swift, Diddy, Amanda Bynes, let alone, going back, Anton LaVey, Albert Pyke ... the possessed have not the slightest problem with the concept ... it's just the Eloi, the normies of the society, deliberately miseducated, who continue the "eyes wide shut", standing in that river in Egypt.

Philosophers are there to invent clever alternative notions, once people are duped into thinking there can be no personification of evil, that it's only human nature, that no one created humans that way at the dawn of time, that it all happened as a big bang or through evolution from the amoeba.

One pesky concept is the moral imperative. We see it in the society we once had (the majority being too young to have experienced it) ... it was going to work each day, newspaper in hand, having had a safe, folic acid and bovaer free brek, with cuppa ... modestly dressed, chatting to the usuals with no fear of being stabbed, raped or both, ordure and rubbish everywhere on the streets, pitholes.

It was civilised and based on a code of precepts none dare mention the source of ... because then you'd be a far right fascist or Jesus freak.  To becsure, it was also Plato, Aristotle and those lads, John Stuart Mill (yes, a philosopher), David Hume et al.

You can see that society in the remaining architecture, the art, in the natural civility in our dealings, instead of the obline potty mouthed abuse of the net today.  It was in gentlemen's agreements ... your word is your bond.

It (largely) worked, always remembering that there were major enemies who had snuck in through portals, from Them behind the pollies, to the Chinese, to middle-east fanaticism, to the sub-continent, to darkest Africa and the Caribbean, to Net Zero and Agenda 30 etc.  The banksters.  Blair, Obama.  Some say Donny, the Vatican ... no end to the accused foes.

You can't revese societal decline ... there's the duping of the people, the enemies causing that and playing the people.

In lucid moments, think back to what the hegemony actually was in the west at the point of its greatest security, domestically, its philosophical underpinnings.  But the bstds behind, in the shadows, still got in and started pointless wars ... slaughtered millions.  WMD, MAD.

No powerful theocrat, no Paisley, no C19th bible thumper is going to be able to reverse this steep decline now ... against the juggernaut ... and yet I see thousands of ordinary folk, mainly American, on X, calling out to soc-medders ... and yet sidetracked by denominational cults, you can tell them by their rainbows.

The change starts within ourselves. Politically, yesterday I was debating with a friend, past fellow blogger, on holding the nose and voting with the controlled opposition ... just to get rid of Labour, as if the other Uniparty branches would be any better once in power.

Descending into their clever political game ... that's going to lead us out to some sort of political nobility? Hardly ... it just changes the rosettes ... red to blue, light blue, green, yellow.

Civil war?  Who leads it?

Oh, just adding this from our DAD at Unherdables today:

UK. 20-year-old British free speech advocate and Restore Britain party operative Montgomery Toms was attacked by an angry mob during one of his public debates in Brighton, England, United Kingdom, on Saturday, 10 October.

He uploaded multiple videos of the incident to his X feed. The footage shows him being swarmed by a mob of mostly young men who tore down his tent.

https://www.hungarianconservative.com/articles/current/montgomery-toms-free-speech-attacked-brighton/

Do we stand firm on our principles these days ... or do we fall for this "strategic" ... that is, morally bankrupt voting, that clever foolushness which Them wish us to eternally remain within?

Local Councils Should Refer To The Police...

...not be expected to investigate themselves.

A paedophile nursery worker was cleared by an investigation overseen by a local authority three years before he was arrested.

In February, Vincent Chan was jailed after pleading guilty to 56 offences, including assault by penetration on three-year-old girls in his care at a Bright Horizons nursery on Finchley Road in north-west London. After his conviction, prosecutors described him as a “prolific sexual predator”.

But as a man, and one with an ethnic identity, he was a valuable hire for the nursery, no doubt

The Guardian can now reveal that Chan was the subject of an earlier safeguarding investigation, carried out by Bright Horizons, with the oversight of Camden council. It followed what were described as “significant concerns” raised with the nursery in 2021 about Chan’s conduct and behaviour by the parent of a young girl, including concerns about what her daughter was saying to her about Chan.

Bright Horizons referred the matter to Camden council, which advised the nursery to investigate. Chan was put on duties that involved no contact with children while the investigation by Bright Horizons took place. After it was completed, Chan was cleared to return to his role caring for young children in the nursery.

And must have thought he could get away with it - because he could, as the nursery and council were allowed to mark their own homework, in effect.

The revelation that Camden council and Bright Horizons were aware of concerns about Chan three years before his arrest, and that there had been an investigation into his behaviour, will raise questions about whether there were earlier opportunities to stop him.

Local authorities have the ultimate responsibility for managing allegations raised that relate to adults who work with children. LADOs can recommend that a matter be referred to the police if they believe it meets a criminal threshold. It is understood that the Metropolitan police did not receive a referral in 2021 regarding Chan, and were only notified of the concerns subsequently.

All allegations that suggest criminal behaviour should result in automatic referral to the people who we pay to uphold the law, and not the people we pay to empty the bins and fix the potholes. 

This goes back a long time before folic and bovaer

There’s much about on folic just now … word is getting out …

… plus IYE has the bovaer story (Arla) over at Unherdables … but if we think for one moment that that’s all it is … sorry but that’s looking increasingly naive:

Once more and more people start waking up, then the more the owners of the clowns in parliament will feel the pressure to go to their next stage. Same goes with invaders and us uprising or Eloi-ing or sleepwalking to oblivion. To my mind, the solution must be lateral, not the way they’re designing it to turn out. Our framing, not theirs.

Folic acid and bovaer free recipes ... part two ... Flour-less Rich Fruit Cake

Thanks IYE:

1 cup dried apricots roughly chopped
1/2 cup medjoul dates roughly chopped
1/2 cup dried figs roughly chopped
1/2 cup dried cranberries (optional)
1/2 cup currants
1/2 cup raisins
1/2 cup stoned 🤪 prunes roughly chopped

1 large orange – zest and juice
3 tablespoons coconut oil
3 large eggs, beaten
2 heaped teaspoons mixed spice
1/2 teaspoon of ground ginger
1/2 cup of chopped pecans or walnuts (optional)
2 cups ground almonds
Pinch of salt

A generous 1/4 cup brandy 😇

20 cm loose bottom tin lined with greaseproof paper, baking parchment or whatever it is called in your neck of the woods
Oven temp 150 C or gas equivalent?
Cooking time 1 hour 15 – 1 hour 25 mins.

Method

Day before you want to bake put all the dried fruit in large bowl together with zest and juice of the orange and the brandy. Stir well, make a wish, cover with a plate or cling film and leave overnight. (No nibbling now!)

Day after, gently melt the coconut oil – don’t over heat. In another large bowl mix ground almonds, salt, spices, beaten eggs and the melted coconut oil. Mix well. Add the dried fruit and any remaining liquid ( won’t be much!) and mix thoroughly. Add the chopped nuts if using at this stage too.

Empty into prepped tin and bake. Check after 1 hr 15 – stick a skewer in the middle – should be cleanish and the cake firm.

When done leave it in the tin to cool completely then wrap in grease proof paper and then in tin foil. Keeps well for a couple of weeks.

It makes quite a dense cake. Delish served with a chunk of farmhouse cheddar and a glass of port.
Note there’s no sugar in it – sweetness comes from all the dried fruit.

Hope that all makes sense – have written it in my bestest writing. 😉

……

(JH: Pic BBC Good Food guide)

Folic acid and bovaer free recipes ... part one ... mincemeat

Ta, Andy, also Toodles and IYE

 

Andy

Mum used to make her own mincemeat. I e got her old 1930s recipe book. I’ll have a gander and put it up.

…..

Here we go, late night and just got back from the pub. Apologies for misspellings etc.

2lb cooking apples, 1lb raisins stoned (#metoo), 1lb sultanas, 3/4lb mixed peel, 1lb suet, 1lb caster sugar, grated rind of 2 lemons, juice of 3 lemons, 1 nutmeg grated, 3/4 lb raspberry jam (optional)

Put all fruit, peel and suet through a mincing machine or chop together as finely as possible. Texture will be slightly different, matter of taste. Stir in sugar, grated lemon rind and the juice, the nutmeg and jam if used. Sprinkle in a few whole currents, and, if possible a little brandy or whisky. Mix thoroughly. Put into pots and cover closely. These quantities make about 8lb of mincemeat. Smaller amounts mean reducing ingredients proportionally.

Mmm, I might give this a try. Good luck finding SFA free suet. If you do let me know please.

IYE

Thanks Andy, have noted and passed it on. No such thing as suet over here though 😕 Shall have to research what the alternatives are. Watch this space….

Also food processors back in the day were our mums and grandmums – thinking of mincing machine – no doubt a modern food processor carefully controlled would do the job.  Goes away with dreams of a mincemeat plait and custard….😋

Btw have got a flour free fruit cake recipe if anyone is interested.

(JH: Yes please, kindly.)

Okay, suet substitutes. Have conferred. The resident Domestic Goddess recommends either butter or coconut oil. Butter has been used for over a decade in our Christmas puds.😲 Make sure the butter is cold first then grate it. Same with coconut oil but trickier to handle. For savoury uses use lard.

Toods summarised

Andy! Yum! I really love minced meat. Ashamedly I must confess I usually buy it. The brand was pretty good. My mother used to make it. I have no idea where her recipe is so I am anxious to try your ‘mum’s’! Thrilled to have it. It makes so much I might put it in jars as gifts for friends too!

‘1lb raisins stoned (#metoo)’  🥴

Photo credit: https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/22621/old-time-mincemeat-pie/

Late note from Isilme

IYE – have you tried asking the butcher for some suet. Originally that’s where you’d get it from.

I’m loving all these recipes. Trouble is, my Beloved is drooling over them and now it looks like I’ll have to try them out. Only to keep him happy, of course. I hate to say it, but I already have all those ingredients in my larder. It seems I have no excuse.

I’m making some bread and butter pudding for tonight’s dessert. I found some hot cross buns in the freezer and felt it was about time they got eaten!

They’re mini ones, so I’ll simply cut them in half and butter each piece, then lay them in a dish and scatter a bit of mixed dried fruit over them, plus a tablespoon of demerara sugar.

Then beat together an egg and half a pint (300ml) milk and pour over the top.

Quite often I do two eggs and a pint of milk because beloved likes the eggy bit.

You leave it for half an hour to all soak in, sprinkle the top with another tablespoon of demerara sugar and then cook it for 1 hour at Gas 4 / 350F / 180C / 160 fan oven.

Yummy!

……

(JH: This is the issue though, Isilme … milk, butter (bovaer poison), bread flour (folic acid). We need independent sources of milk and flour. This is what we’re banging on about.)

Isilme adds:

"Today, not long after reading your blog about the folic acid stuff, I received an email from this online company with the title "Check out our range of unfortified flour" and it explained in the email that none of their organic flour had folic acid in it (white bread flour, plain flour, self raising etc). How did they know I wanted 'non folic acid' stuff? I could have just bought the wholemeal flour because that's what I wanted, nothing to do with folic acid. How do they know I glanced to the side of the page to see the ingredients? Very weird!"

Because You Can't Appease Zealots

And you shouldn't even try:

Her walk was poised, her outfit – crop top, tailored trousers, high heels – so on point that when Josie Knowles strutted down a London Fashion Week catwalk last month she could have passed for a model. That is, had it not been for the sign the Peta protester held saying “H&M: Wool is Bloody Cruel.” Still, as one social media commentator put it when praising her strut: “you cant tell me Peta didn’t know what they were doing when they hired this diva”.

Well, if you want to infiltrate a place, it helps to look like you fit in... 

For the record, Knowles’s clothes were all vegan and secondhand; the trousers were Spacegirlz, a now defunct early 2000s label; her high-heeled boots were from the Peta prop cupboard.

Wonder why it's defunct?  

One of the reasons Knowles’s catwalk moment engaged so many was because it felt unlikely that someone clearly steeped in fashion’s visual codes would also be prepared to protest against the industry so fiercely.

Knowles has never worked in fashion. She studied philosophy at university, went vegan after falling into an internet rabbit hole, appalled by what she saw about the treatment of animals. She interned at Peta for six months before she was hired there.

She came a little late to the party, but of course, activists never say 'Jon done!' and retire, do they? 

Since 2023, activists have rushed the catwalks of top fashion shows including Burberry, Gucci, Hermès, Victoria Beckham and Fendi. Many of them have been young men and women who could pass for models themselves. Peta activists often blend in so well that before some recent catwalk ambushes, they have mingled with show-goers and even sat front row before leaping to action.

But Peta still protested because the organization is shifting emphasis. It’s now calling for the eradication of nearly all animal-derived fabrics including, perhaps most divisively, wool.out the dedication of the fannatic.

Wool. Which is obtained not through killing animals at all. Tough sell, you'd think, in these 'natural is better than artificial' days, but you'd reckon without the desire never to get a proper job nd to spend your life in student politics.

For a fashion world patting itself on the back for dropping fur, calls to ban wool have been met with “a breath of exasperation from some fashion insiders, and confusion from others” according to a Vogue Business piece which ran in response to the protests.

Many farmers, fashion brands and wool producers, meanwhile, maintain that they adhere to ethical standards. They flag social and environmental concerns inherent in abandoning wool production, and argue that – because sheep have been bred for generations to grow very thick fleeces – not shearing them would also be cruel.

Anyone else would see this as an insurmountable challenge, but no... 

Some have also accused Peta of pushing synthetic fibres just when the environmental nightmare of polyester use needs to be abated, though Peta say that’s a false dichotomy. The Peta activists I spoke to were advocates for vegan plant-based alternatives such as bamboo, cotton, hemp and tencel.

Gen Z activists will be a big part of this. Having grown up with unfettered access to information online, Byrne says they are “less surprised than other generations when they learn that wool and leather are a product of cruelty”.

Imagine admitting that they have all this access to information, and yet they are dumber and more driven by emotion than other generations? 

Adulteration and misrepresentation

Trying to escape folic acid (and bovaer) while still buying from UK supermarkets. An increasingly difficult task with so much subterfuge going on.

Starting here:

Morrisons sell one bread sourced from a private baker afa customers can know … Jason’s. Here it is:

Clearly labelled wholemeal all over the packet but it also mentions ciabatta … so I’m expecting wholemeal ciabatta:

Note Arla Foods there (bovaer peddlers). Also note the front label:

Read the fine print below. “Meets”? At this stage, I ask … do all UK food customers have to go through forensic investigation, just to ensure non-toxic nutrients, esp. when the firms show not the slightest interest in providing pure foods? Is it unreasonable to demand non subterfuge and non adulteration?

And demand it where? In the MSM? In parliament or congress? Hardly. Obviously only on socmed. What of all the other poor sods in society?

Clutching Vipers To Our Bosom

The latest case involves a 16-year-old from Nottingham, who is originally from Poland, and cannot be named due to his age. The Old Bailey heard last week that the police received a report on September 10 of a person who had provided an online link to a number of terrorist documents. In one of the documents he is said to have made clear how much he hated the British people, referred to his hatred of society and made reference to having joined a true crime community, known as a 'com network'.

Then why is he still here? Deport him!

In a second document, he said that he was 'unlike other mass murders who discriminate against race, skin, colour or gender identity'. 'Each and every one of you piece of s*** humans are disgusting to me,' he allegedly wrote. 'If it is not clear already I am doing this mainly due to suicidal ideation and misanthropy.'

’Suicidal ideation’ yet has failed to successfully kill himself, I note. A liar or just incompetent?

Julia Faure-Walker told a hearing that the prosecution alleges that misanthropy – the hatred of humankind – 'is the ideological cause for the terrorist acts'. It means that the CPS has been able to charge the teenager with preparation of terrorist acts, which carries a potential life sentence.

Great, so we spend more taxpayer money on prosecuting him and if successful keeping him in jail, when a taxi to Heathrow and a one way plane ticket would suffice. 

'If humanity is the reason I am not able to live how I want, I might as well make them hurt as much as I do.'

Not able to live ‘how he wants’? That sounds like a clue to his major malfunction to me! 

It is more than a year since Jonathan Hall KC, the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, recommended a new offence of preparing a mass killing without an ideology.

Just in time. How fortuitous. 

The October 7th, 2023 massacre in Israel

Two opposing views on the massacre ...

But Ben Swann in Florida says:

Each reader will have his/her own view on it, his/her own intel. My slant is that of a Restore oriented Brit and ✝️ian within these isles. I believe that the gangs in control of nations are the enemies of their peoples … I’ve blogged on that since 2006.

I believe that a state enabled pro-Hamas march in London on this specific day is an offence against God and nature, especially given the state sponsoring of the invasion here, e.g. at Gosport, where the state, under Mahmoud, turned on local people.