They Are Shaping What Your Children Think. They Are Funding Where The Men Come From. They Have Signed The Contracts Until 2039.
A producer of Pickle Storm, a CBBC comedy aimed at children aged seven, is on record saying it plainly. The charity that met with the production team described its purpose with equal clarity: to "tap into children's media and directly impact framing of migration in children's content." The producer confirmed the intervention had worked. "It really will inform our writing," they said. The show's second series was edited accordingly.
The charity is called Heard. It has received more than £4.5 million in grant funding since 2021. A second charity, Imix, has placed hundreds of sympathetic migration stories in national outlets including the BBC, the Mirror and the Guardian, and claims more than 11,000 bookings on programmes including Newsnight and Good Morning Britain. A third, Counterpoint Arts, received more than £400,000 from Arts Council England, a publicly funded quango, and oversees an initiative seed-funded by George Soros's Open Society Foundations whose stated aim is to use pop culture to "shift the way we talk, think and feel about migration." Comic Relief has funded both Counterpoint and Heard.
The BBC says it has full editorial control. The producer of Pickle Storm says the intervention really will inform the writing. One of those statements is more specific than the other. Now look at what is happening outside the television screen.
Britain sends £171 million a year to Afghanistan. The Taliban has banned women from working for NGOs, who previously made up forty percent of the aid delivery workforce. The government's own parliamentary documents acknowledge its ability to support people in Afghanistan is "limited" as a result. Its own aid watchdog found that 94% of NGOs fully or partially ceased operations after the ban. Britain sends the money anyway, to a regime that has banned girls from secondary education, stripped women from public life by decree, and announced the enforcement of stoning and flogging for women accused of adultery. The Treasury writes the cheque. The Foreign Secretary says it saves lives. Neither will explain how, given the delivery mechanism has been banned by the regime it is supposed to work around.
Afghanistan, Somalia, Sudan and Ethiopia are among the top five recipients of British bilateral aid. They are also among the leading countries of origin for Channel crossings. Britain sends money to the countries the men are leaving, then spends £4.27 billion of the same aid budget classifying the cost of housing them in UK hotels as overseas development spending. The taxpayer funds the sending and the receiving, and both are counted as aid.
Heard, Imix and Counterpoint are shaping what British children see on television. The Foreign Office is writing cheques to the governments the arrivals are fleeing. The Home Office has signed accommodation contracts running to 2039 for the hotels housing them when they get here. The government's own project delivery guidance ties equality, diversity and inclusion policy to the UN's 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. And the Technology Secretary has announced new powers to remove content about all of this during times of crisis, with the definition of crisis set by ministers.
A government trying to stop the boats does not sign hotel contracts until 2039. A state trying to manage public consent for permanent settlement funds charities to condition 7 year-olds before they are old enough to vote. A political class that intends to reverse this does not build, fund and protect the institutional machinery designed to make reversal unthinkable.
The Pickle Storm producer confirmed the intervention would inform the writing. So it has. So does everything else.
"George Soros's Open Society Foundations seeded Pop Change, an initiative whose stated aim is to use pop culture to 'shift the way we talk, think and feel about migration.'"