Someone said this the other day

To quote something someone said the other day (to be precise, it was yesterday and the someone was Craig - and he didn’t exactly say it; he blogged it.) 

Did Mishal Husain lie during her Jacob Rees-Mogg interview? 

Well, did she lie? Craig concluded that technically, she didn’t. Perhaps it was just semantics - the issue being whether or not quoting someone is effectively endorsing it. Even Fran Unsworth seems to be worrying about this. She certainly looks worried in that picture.

The Times (£) has related the incident, which was of great interest to bloggers about the BBC’s bias, in particular, the headline: Brexit: Jacob Rees-Mogg attacks BBC ‘lefty obsession’ with AfD tweet and: “I think this is typical of the BBC’s obsession, dare I say it, the Today programme’s obsession, about this.”

Anyway, the subject was sort of intriguing, so I listened again on the BBC’s revamped listen-again facility, which Siobhan from W1A has (probably) titled “BBC Sounds”. 

(It’s just iPlayer, revamped so that one can no longer link to the direct spot, (at least I don’t know how - you used to be able to use:  #playt=?h?m?s ) and you can no longer see the Today Programme’s running order, or read the list of contributors.) In other words ‘listen again’ has effectively been downgraded, made user-unfriendly; if you want to know any of these facts now you have to do it manually so to speak.

So the question is, does retweeting or quoting from what ‘someone told me the other day’ constitute an endorsement of that viewpoint, or indicate one’s approval of the sentiment expressed therein?

The AfD leader asks "Is it any wonder the British see bad faith behind every manoeuvre from Brussels?" https://t.co/hc7wtyLkiA

— Jacob Rees-Mogg (@Jacob_Rees_Mogg) March 31, 2019

We’re talking James Naughtie and the interview with Justin Webb on the Today Programme 22/03/19, in which the original comparison between Jacob Rees Mogg and France's National Front / Germany’s AfD first raised its controversial head. 

Also present with Justin, for your information, was Kathleen Burk, Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at University College London and the topic was the state of British Politics at the time of Brexit.

During that brief conversation, there were no less than three examples of Jim using the ‘some say’ strategy. 

I’ll list them since you’re so riveted.

1.)
…………. “I have never seen the sustained level of contempt for the leaders of both parties.. somebody said to me the other day, ’you would have to go back to the 19th century to find the time whiny had a piece minister and a leader of the opposition simultaneously at such a level of incompetence' That’s what they believe and I think in the long term that the two parties are both in a position from which they can’t recover……..…”

2.)
“………….Now I’m not saying that the Conservative party’s going to split overnight and disappear, ‘course it’s not; the same is true of Labour. But I think there are things afoot that cannot be corrected. Somebody put it to me the other day: ‘Look! In any other European country the Conservative Party wouldn't exist in its current form. The ERG, Jacob Rees Mogg's group, in France would be in the National Front, because that's what they believe, and in Germany they would be in the AfD.’ It's only because of our system that the carapace of this party keeps them in. And I think on both sides of the aisle that can't last………….”

3.)
“………….I mean I just think that the leadership of both parties is at the moment so spectacularly weak. I mean a Labour person was saying to me the other night: ‘Can you imagine, in the face of what this government has been unable to do in a thousand days on Brexit, that Corbyn is, by any poll, 4,5, 6 percentage points behind’ It’s almost incredible!….”

Just to be clear (or not) in all the above cases it’s a bit confusing as to whether the sentences following (what I assume) to be these quotes are actually Jim’s own thoughts or part of the quote itself.

All these examples do look as if Jim was using them to elucidate or illuminate his own view, but he could try to claim, not very convincingly, I’d say, that they were ‘nuffing to do with me, guv’.

Anyway, now we’ve clarified that - and by the way, as Craig already told us, Jim had to sort of apologise for his problematic comparison.  

Important questions arise from the above affair.  Namely:

Number one: 

What is so terrible about associating oneself with an anti-immigration / anti-Islam party “whose leader in the German parliament's views include Germany being overrun by Arabs and Roma”?   

Mishal Husain’s reaction - she audibly recoils in horror at the very idea, which is inappropriate and hardly impartial. It’s undoubtedly un-PC in the current climate to opine negatively about Islamic immigration, but surely it is a matter of legitimate concern. The word “overrun”  in particular is clumsy and emotive - was that word chosen by Mishal to make the AfD sound worse than absolutely necessary? (to coin a phrase)

Number two: 

Jacob Rees Mogg’s reaction, i.e., “What Mr Naugtie said was an outrageous slur” might have been justified when the National Front in France was run by the old man Le Pen, but surely his daughter Marine’s present-day incarnation of the party has distanced itself from all that Nazi stuff. And, surely the AfD is a legitimate party - nationalist, maybe, patriotic, certainly, but I genuinely don’t know whether they are truly anti-semitic, or if that is another example of people lazily equating “Islamophobia” with antisemitism. Is there a parallel with the Labour Party’s Jewish “fig leaves”?

If you watch the speech that J R-M Tweeted (Alice Weidel’s) it’s pretty impressive, and sympathetic to the UK. What’s not to like? I really do not know whether the AfD is antisemitic. It’s a difficult one, and hard to find substantive evidence either way. I understand someone was once expelled for something relevant, but other parties have similar problems. It seems to me that far too many people, including Jews, are adding two and two to make five.

In their most desperate hour of need, Jewish refugees were shamefully refused sanctuary by Britain. However, it doesn’t follow that the answer lies in indiscriminate and perpetual open borders. There is little or no comparison between the situation then and now, and antisemitism and Islamophobia are entirely different. Conflating them is lazy and ignorant and it muddies the waters. Why, someone said that only the other day.