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| Literally a BBC regular |
“Ash on an old man's sleeve,
Is all the ash the burnt roses leave.
Dust in the air suspended
Marks the place where a story ended,
Dust inbreathed was a house -
The wall, the wainscot and the mouse.
The death of hope and despair,
This is the death of air.”
Is all the ash the burnt roses leave.
Dust in the air suspended
Marks the place where a story ended,
Dust inbreathed was a house -
The wall, the wainscot and the mouse.
The death of hope and despair,
This is the death of air.”
Rob Burley, the BBC's head of live political programmes, is known for his entirely reasonable-sounding catchphrase, "So, here's the thing, people you don't agree with will sometimes be on TV."
Ah but, Rob, surely sometimes people I don't agree with will be on TV to a degree that perhaps merits questioning?
Take (self-professed 'literally a communist') Ash Sarkar of the tiny extreme-left website Novara Media, who we here at ITBB keep joking about because of her fabulous regularity on the BBC.
Well, guess what? Yes, she's on The Andrew Marr Show again this weekend!
So - and once more to re-channel my inner Samira Ahmed - let's ask the question again: What on earth is the BBC doing normalising and making a star of Ash Sarkar, a far-left figure from an extreme, controversial website with a very small readership?
Now, I'm very pro-free speech and am far from unhappy to see Our Ash yet again on the BBC. I like watching her. But...
...Questions surely remain about why certain extremist people are plucked from semi-obscurity and 'platformed' while others from the supposed other end of the political spectrum (often far less extreme than Ash) aren't given licence-fee-funded licence to be an 'uncontroversial BBC regular'.
There are strong implications of soggy-left BBC double standards here, of course.
Let me be bold and hazard a guess as to why Ash is a BBC favourite: She's a young, good-looking female Corbynista who mostly manages to appear much more moderate when she's appearing on TV than she does when she's on social media. And she's non-hideously BAME ('black, Asian and minority ethnic'). Bingo for the BBC's tick boxes?
Now, I'm very pro-free speech and am far from unhappy to see Our Ash yet again on the BBC. I like watching her. But...
...Questions surely remain about why certain extremist people are plucked from semi-obscurity and 'platformed' while others from the supposed other end of the political spectrum (often far less extreme than Ash) aren't given licence-fee-funded licence to be an 'uncontroversial BBC regular'.
There are strong implications of soggy-left BBC double standards here, of course.
Let me be bold and hazard a guess as to why Ash is a BBC favourite: She's a young, good-looking female Corbynista who mostly manages to appear much more moderate when she's appearing on TV than she does when she's on social media. And she's non-hideously BAME ('black, Asian and minority ethnic'). Bingo for the BBC's tick boxes?
