Rod Liddle. National treasure.
"There was a kind of peak BBC Radio 4 moment last week when the network put on a play called Bess Loves Porgy. As you might have guessed, this was a rewrite of Porgy and Bess, the twist being that Porgy was a black, disabled grime rap artist in south London. I hope it went down well with the millions of black, disabled grime rap artists in south London who are listeners to Radio 4.
The network was, in the same week, continuing its serialisation of Georges – ‘Testament’s bold new adaptation of Alexander Dumas’ tale of racial intolerance’. They are absolutely obsessed with racism at R4, in a kind of mentally unhinged manner.
I thought about these two plays while the ludicrous Garygate saga was playing out in the national media – and it made me tetchy and irritable. You see, Gary Lineker is not the point. Georges is the point – and all the other right-on tendentious woke guff this station rams down the throats of its patient listeners. World at One and PM and Today are also the point in the way in which they have covered the government’s plans to stop those boats crossing the Channel.
Scarcely a moment goes by without a reporter emoting about the plight of some Afghan or Albanian refugee queuing up at Calais for his dinghy, or some jackass from an NGO lacerating the government for its ‘cruelty’, or a similar view from someone from the UN or EU. This is another area where Lineker was wrong when he said, in an odiously self-regarding manner, that he would continue to ‘speak up for those poor souls who don’t have a voice’.
Don’t have a voice! They are the only voices we hear. The people who don’t have a voice are the residents of Dover, where an Afghan teenager was recently arrested on suspicion of raping a girl, or indeed the silent majority of the country who want properly regulated immigration, not the free-for-all demanded by the NGOs.
My point is a simple one. What Lineker says about anything does not matter a monkey’s. It is the rest of the output that’s the problem. It’s the stuff we see or hear on air every night of the week. A week or so back, I watched a report on the BBC’s regional news programme Look North about a peaceful protest in Carlisle by residents worried about an influx of refugees into their city. The march was opposed by the usual middle-class ‘anti-hate’ brigade whose views were almost all we heard in one of the most egregiously biased news reports I have ever seen. The people responsible for that kind of yellow journalism are the ones who should be taken off air, not a sports presenter who has swallowed the whole rot and parrots it out for public approval.
It is hard not to feel a little sorry for the BBC director-general, Tim Davie, who I think does recognise a certain bias within his corporation’s output and has been quietly making an effort to do something about it. He miscalculated over Lineker, as I suspected he would.
The clever thing to have done would have been to have issued a statement distancing the corporation from Lineker’s asinine comments but supporting his right, as a freelance, to say what the hell he likes. And then, because he persists in embarrassing the BBC and is not remotely worth his salary, sacking him when his contract comes up for renewal, stating that the intention is to ‘take the programme in a different direction’. They did that with poor Sue Barker – why not Gary? He is a capable presenter, sure, but not much more than that.
The problem Davie had is that almost the entirety of the BBC staff entirely agree with the jug-eared crisp-seller – that’s the point, again, Tim – and it was pretty obvious that nobody would be prepared to step into Lineker’s shoes to present Match of the Day. And so the awful man was made a martyr and – because, like Emily Maitlis, he believes his Twitter feed – thinks the entire British public is behind him. It most definitely is not. Although a majority – me included – probably believe he should not have his freedom of speech compromised.
How to deal with big names on huge freelance salaries who keep saying stuff? Let them. It makes no odds in the end. The BBC in particular has long had problems trying to constrain its supposedly valuable big stars and the simple answer to the problem is that it should cease from doing so forthwith. When a furore occurs, all the corporation would have to do is to issue a short statement to the effect that this was a case of an individual speaking and does not reflect the views of the BBC as a whole (even if it patently does).
Given that Davie is now to re-examine the strictures over who can say what and when, may I propose a radical solution? Never mind adjudicating between the freelancers and the staffers – allow all who work for the corporation the freedom to say whatever they want, whenever they want. Let’s hear exactly what they have to say. Open the views of the individuals who work for that rather bloated old behemoth to the general public.
The old mantra, much beloved by the former director-general Tony Hall, that when individuals enter Broadcasting House they should ‘hang their political opinions up on a coat hanger’ was always either naive or disingenuous, one or the other. We are all the sum of our opinions and beliefs and we can no more jettison them than we can rid ourselves of our own DNA.
Yes, journalists may try to be even–handed, but the bias is always there – in the story selection, in the choice of interviewees, in the tone of voice. So henceforth, let’s be open about that – then we will have an honest view of what, in general, the BBC stands for politically."
www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-shouldnt-bbc-staff-express-opinions/
