Sunday 1 January 2017

Op ed


White Van Man v Lady Nugee

I was just reading an interesting piece in The Spectator by Bryan Appleyard on how British snobbery is back with a vengeance, with parts of the losing side in the EU referendum showing either pity or disdain for parts of the winning side - the poor parts. 

"Suddenly it was OK to believe that there was something fundamentally wrong with people worse off than you," he writes.

The BBC doesn't seem to me to have been innocent of that either. 

From Emma Jane Kirky's manipulative Brexit Street series on PM (making some of its Leave-voting 'vox pops' sound like stupid, feckless racists - to the delight of pro-EU types on Twitter) to Matthew Price's startling "Not everyone's so articulate" report on yesterday's Today, both from the most deprived Leave-voting parts of two of the poorest places in England,...

...and...

...from Mark Easton and Ed Thomas's various reports featuring either swastika-festooned or shaven-headed men as representative Leave voters to last week's Holby City showing a white, working-class woman being stupid, cruel and racist towards a Polish immigrant (and duly getting her comeuppance)...

...it's been clear for some time that many people at the BBC have been just as full of pity and/or disdain for the poorer parts of the winning side in the EU referendum (a part that too many BBC programmes have taken as representing the whole of the winning side) as any of those well-heeled or relatively well-heeled referendum losers in Bryan Appleyard's piece. 

2 comments:

  1. I'm looking forward to the drama where a drunken unemployed Polish migrant harasses a hard working Asian Hindu shopkeeper, who fled here from Pakistan due to religious persecution. Somehow I don't think that day will ever come.

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  2. Haroon Moghul, Brian Klaas and Ngaire Woods, mentioned in the previous post, personify the extremely intolerant liberal/left bubble that the BBC inhabit. It’s basically their world - they don’t know anything else. To step outside of that would be much too challenging and difficult - so much easier to shore up their defences with invented stereotypes rather than really engage with the world outside. Heaven forbid that their self-appointed intellectual and moral superiority might prove to be merely a delusion.

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