Straight White Male and other languages

Talking of Michael “In Israel they murder each other a great deal” White, indeed, the BBC is losing its stalwarts; they’re dropping like flies. 

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“How fluent are you in Straight White Male?” Jeffrey Boakye asks his guest Iesha Small as he stands in for Michael Rosen on Radio 4’s Word of Mouth.

What is this funky new language? I bet it’s something to do with white privilege! Ah! It’s a new name for cultivated eloquence. If I remember, one would aspire to it in the olden days if one wanted to get on in life, or get on the radio. But not any more.  Now, if S.W.M. is, like, your first language - it’s, like, a positive drawback. Mr Boakye is a teacher. His subject is English. He should know.

Everything on the BBC - from the radio to the TV and the web-sphere - is devoted to black people explaining what’s wrong with white people; this must be  ‘good’ racism.

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This morning at 19 minutes past seven  Mishal  Husain spoke to a mother about an incident.

 “….the male turned out to be a 12-year-old with a toy gun.” said Miss, in her ‘sugary’ voice before introducing the boy’s mother who described the incident. "Armed police!" "Toy gun!" "Jogging bottoms!" “Was it cos I is black?”  emoted the boy’s mother, the BBC and Miss Husain. Yes indeed. Everything is because that.

Why on earth was a 12-year-old playing with a toy gun? Surely, at that age he should have had a real gun.

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Later, Kemi Badenoch MP Treasury & Equalities Minister, (black,) was subjected to The Sanctimonious Schoolmarm treatment. 

“Are you satisfied with a 12-year-old being treated in this way?” asked Miss Husain, menacingly. 

“Do you feel for the mother who felt that the officers would kill her if we’d moved when they arrived at the house?” she probed?

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• Why aren’t there enough people of colour in football management? 
• Why did the (black) (ex)security guard mistake the (black) editor of Vogue magazine for a delivery driver? 
• Why must everything on every single programme on every single one of the BBC’s multiple platforms be race-related? (Black-race related I mean. Not just any old race.)  
• When will it be safe to come out again? 

"BBC seems swept up in an emotional tide"

Do you remember 'Michael White of The Guardian'?

He used to be that paper's BBC-friendly political editor, and in the first decade of the present century, in blogs hereabouts at least, he was regarded as the absolute epitome of the snooty, 'wine-drinking', (possibly muesli-munching), left-liberal, Labour-Party-friendly, pro-BBC hack - the ying to Polly Toynbee's identical yang, so to speak. 

Anyhow, the great man's thankfully still in action (albeit on Twitter) and this very morning he sent out the following exasperated-sounding tweet: 

Lots of anti-racist talk on BBC Radio 4's Today (again) today, much of it muddled, conventional thinking (again). It’s an important issue, but BBC seems swept up in an emotional tide. I switched to R3 where there are no complaints (yet) that music is too dominated by dead white Germans.

Now, if BBC Radio 4 has lost 'Michael White of The Guardian' of all people - one of their friendliest friends, often a presenter on their programmes - then I sense huge trouble ahead for the BBC.

The BBC Radio 4 audience includes a good number of 'Michael White of The Guardian'-type people. 

As regular readers will know, that station's increasingly dour, narrow, woke focus has certainly put me off in recent years, but for it to make 'Michael White of The Guardian' despair of it is truly one hell of an achievement!

How sweet!

You'll like this. Not a lot. (As Anna Soubry - remember her? - used to say). 

Here's blog favourite John Simpson sharing a moment with Sir Michael White, ex-political editor of the Guardian - and, in days gone by, on blogs like this, the absolute epitome of the BBC/Guardian left-liberal axis:

John Simpson: Downing Street is putting out the word that it is boycotting Radio 4's Today because of its, and the BBC’s, ‘bias’ against Boris Johnson & the Conservatives during the campaign.
Sir Michael White: Interesting, isn’t it, John, that the Global Britain crew have spent a decade or more trashing the BBC, Britain’s only truly global media brand - widely respected except by Team Brexit & Trump who also hates public service media.
John Simpson: I certainly think any govt should appreciate the immense value to Britain of having a voice which is listened to & appreciated right across the world.

#FriendsReunited.

Michael White on BBC bias

Michael White, former political editor and associate editor of The Guardian, makes a point this afternoon about BBC bias:

I think he's spot on about that.

Why bother

I’m getting fed up. I can’t be bothered to write about many things that have been in the news recently, such as the ‘fake sheikh’ type sting, crafted by Al Jazeera to look like an Israeli government plot to sabotage UK parliament .

Even the Guardian’s Michael White, famous for  announcing: “In Israel they murder each other a great deal” Tweeted that it looked to him like a cheap entrapment job, (With a Twitter timeline like that how does he find time to do anything else?) which, amusingly, led to a few fanatical Israel bashers accusing him of being a Zionist.

I can’t even bring myself to mention the decision of a German court that  “Torching a synagogue is not antisemitic”  and I don’t know how (or if) the BBC reported that, but they did mention the Amber Rudd hate incident. Andrew Neill savaged the poor Oxford professor (of physics) who dreamt up that ludicrous allegation. 

I know everyone loves Andrew Neill, but in this case the victim seemed too much of a soft target, like a rabbit in the headlights really, who, for all I know did this out of a misguided desire to stand up for the underdog. If you see what I mean.

I won’t even bother to mention “On Your Farm”, aired early on Sunday morning when we were all half asleep. It brought us a Halal farmer, whose religious beliefs were alluded as a kind of ‘given’. You know, PBUH and midday prayers were woven into the conversation as though they were common parlance. The normalisation of Islam by stealth.

I can’t be arsed to mention Radio 4 this morning, which had more than the absolutely necessary quota of Islam-related content and a good dose of overt Trump-bashing. (I wonder if the level of BBC Trump-bashing will continue after the inauguration?)

I won’t even try to tackle Yolande Knell’s reporting about the Paris summit, but I did wonder if Yolande Knell knows anything at all about history pre 1967? I mean who does she think Israel stole captured the West Bank from? And how did she think they came by it?  

One thing I will just mention is the Holocaust remembrance edition of the Antiques Roadshow. Of course it was nice that the BBC chose to feature this on a long-running programme such as this, and I thought Fiona Bruce was rather good, her ‘say-it / act-it-out’ style was suitably reined in for once. 

However, I will remind you that the BBC has always been fond of recounting tales of the suffering of Jews, as long as it’s purely holocaust-related. One of the artefacts in this episode was a pair of striped trousers. The actual ones. Cynicism aside, it was a very moving film.

One particular artefact struck a chord. In fact it was Fiona’s favourite. It was a board game, a kind of cross between Snakes and Ladders and Monopoly, where the object was, through lucky throws of the dice, to round up the most Jews and cart them off to the police station. The cone-shaped pieces were painted with ugly faces to represent Jews. Fiona Bruce was shocked that this popular game was designed to inculcate Jew-hatred into German children. 

I wonder what Fiona Bruce’s reaction would be if she knew about the Jew-hatred that is being inculcated into Palestinian children as we speak. Through UNRWA, funded by foreign aid. The similarities are undeniable. I’m shocked, aren’t you?

So I won’t mention any of that. Instead, for sentimental reasons, I’ll tell you about quotes and recitations that my father often came out with, (when he was alive) the general theme being absurdity. 

One that tickled him came from an old ‘music-hall’ routine by Wilkie Bard:  “I want you to notice my leggings”. 

Mad. I think he adapted some of the words.

Another favourite was from Samuel Beckett: 

My father’s simplified version just went:

“Why did you engender me?”   “I didn’t know it’d be you”

I do like a bit of the absurd, as you’ll guess.