Peter Whittle interviews Nigel Rees: Diversity Quotas & Woke Interference at the BBC

Charles Moore and Robin Aitken

Among the topics in this interesting and enjoyable 45-minute discussion are: 

Mrs [and Denis] Thatcher's attitudes towards the BBC, the BBC and Donald Trump, Lord Moore's difficult experiences guest-editing Today, the ''most biased'' BBC reporter Roger Harrabin, how Lord Moore hasn't been invited back on Question Time after embarrassing the BBC by pointing out to Fiona Bruce that he was the only one on the 6-person panel to have voted for Brexit, the BBC and Brexit, Tim Davie, the Bashir scandal, the feasibility or otherwise of BBC reform, the BBC's self-declared 'bravery', the BBC'S 'hesitancy' towards Islam and Islamism and their 'racist' reporting of the subject, the BBC's 'unilluminating and biased' attitude to BLM, religious illiteracy at the BBC, and what impact GB News might have on the BBC.

Is BBC bias getting worse?

Are we all OK with that?

We may not all be 100% comfortable with men talking about their husbands. “Speak for yourself!” do  I hear you say? Well, I am speaking for me. It’s not so much that I care one way or the other about same-sex marriage, it’s a language thing. I wouldn’t mind if they used an expression like ‘my spouse’ instead. 

The word ‘husband’ conjures up more than gender-neutral ‘partner in marriage’. For me, the word emotes masculinity in a nurturing, protective kind of way, and a bloke who mentions his ‘husband’ instantly clothes himself in a frilly pinny. Not that Dave Rubin appears at all emasculated in this video, despite referring to his husband.  (Has anyone ever heard Peter Whittle doing that?)

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I know I keep posting videos that include other people’s negative opinions of the BBC instead of expressing my own. The best excuse I can offer for that is that I can’t bear to watch the BBC at the moment. 

I lie. I do watch the Saturday night double-bill Scandi-Noir offering on BBC Four. Something to look forward to, (although I hated 'Twin', mainly because I found the tale deeply unconvincing and I didn’t warm to the actor.) 

State of Happiness is promising. Full of 60s nostalgia and the usual Scandi-Noir mixture of personal and political intrigue. Like Mad Men but with a parochial flavour and more—-Norweigan.

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One other topic I wanted to mention - not especially BBC-related - is addressed by my favourite TCW author, Margaret Ashworth. (As well as Karen Harradine, for obvious reasons)

I have a policy of never commenting on other blogs - it’s a kind of self-imposed tradition which I religiously uphold (despite having forgotten the original reason for inventing it) so mentioning this here is my other option. I read Margaret Ashworth’s post about the troupe of Bacup mummers known as ‘Nutters’ (origin of nickname being actual nuts and not a politically incorrect reference to insanity) who perform an annual ritual of parading… wait for it… ‘blacked-up’. Margaret explains,

“The Moorish pirates which originated from North Africa are said to have settled in Cornwall and they became employed in the local mines.” 

but at the time of writing, as far as I can see, neither she or anyone below the line has mentioned Cornwall’s (Padstow’s) controversial “Darkie Day”. In comparison to the smartly-dressed Bacup Nutters, Padstow’s Darkies look a bit of a shambles, and I only mention it because I find that it does have a BBC related aspect after all.  One which I found amusing, so there. 2006: “MP calls for Darkie Day to stop”!  It made me laugh anyway.  Diane Abbott, “Britain’s first black woman MP,” says it’s racist.

As a fan of upholding obscure traditions, I did wonder if Diane Abbott is OK with the nutters or if any sensitive actual  ‘nutters’ have called for the Bacup mummers to change their name to something less offensive and more gender-neutral such as ‘dancing parents with poor mental health’.

"The media has failed to ask the right questions"

This episode of the New Culture Forum is worth watching. You get a better view if you watch it on Y.T. rather on this site in its cramped form.

Deafening silence

You’ve probably seen this already, but the new episode of Peter Whittle’s “So What You’re Saying Is” series. features a young student named James Oliver who has co-founded a ‘free speech society’. Fancy that, a free speech society at a university!    

Hmm, maybe I’m behind the times, but like Peter Whittle, I used to think universities were “the very places that should be open to new thoughts and new ideas.”

Unequivocal freedom of speech is all well and good, but there is the thing about shouting ‘fire!’ in a crowded theatre. In other words, it’s fine to start from the principle that ‘anything goes’, but there is the question of incitement, which invites the obvious question…. can the audience always be relied on to engage its brain? To which the answer must be negative..

Here’s the thing, as the saying goes. All these fashionable speakers, writers and bloggers who are up in arms about politically incorrect or otherwise outspoken people like Peter Hitchens, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Germaine Greer, Julie Bindel etc., getting themselves rudely de-platformed by people and places that should be open to new ideas (e.g. the mainstream media and various (nearly all) universities) are a bit on the quiet side when a certain recipient of a ‘free speech award’ happens to be the artist formerly known as Stephen Yaxley-Lennon.  

(I haven’t forgotten the one exception - his speech at the Oxford Union. At the time the content was restricted for legal reasons - but outside the circle of the ‘already converted’ the occasion went virtually unreported)

Ezra Levant has covered this one. So have various semi-obscure sites like ‘Ruptly’.

 The full YT video is flawed by the buffering, noise interference and weird jumps and missing bits.  This is the best one I can find.

One site I used to follow a lot, The New English Review, has done some interesting digging around the reporting / non-reporting issue.

And for your entertainment, here’s Owen Jones - whom I fear has gone completely bananas.

The UK media proper isn’t interested. I have no idea if the free speech advocates we know and love - the most prominent ones - will acknowledge, celebrate or ignore it. Think of it as a form of ‘snog, marry avoid’.

BBC. Maintain, reform, abolish?

(As David Vance might have said:) "Thoughts?"

Brexit bias? BBC faces a difficult balancing act in polarised nation

This article by Roy Greenslade in the Guardian caught my eye.
If you really want to immerse yourself in a parallel, Brexit-dystopia-style world, read the comments. You don’t have to be semi-literate to join in the discussion, but it helps. (As the saying goes.)

You might need the Antidote below

Enjoy

Douglas Murray has been doing the rounds -  publicising his book The Madness of Crowds - Race, Gender and Identity. 

Of all the book-publicity material I’ve seen, (with Candace Owens, Julia Hartley-Brewer , etc etc,) this conversation with Peter Whittle in the “So What you’re Saying Is…” series, (New Culture Forum) allows the subject free rein to express and develop his ideas.

 Of the Roger Scruton fiasco: 

“…….a public square so stupid and deracinated that people who are actually thoughtful and have thought about things can be ‘disappeared’ at the whim of the ignoramus.”

As one commenter says, we get to hear Douglas Murray without too much input from the host. 

I’m not too sure about the dirty-protest themed backdrop, (I might discuss backgrounds at a later date) but it’s good.

This Brexit themed video (H/T M.B.) is fun, probably more so for the 52% than the 48%…

Radio 4’s Start the Week this morning alluded to the BBC in a discussion about confirmation bias, echo chambers and ‘non-diversity of thinking. 

From within my own bubble, I’m beginning to suspect that the BBC’s popularity is in a downward spiral.

BBC Groupthink on Immigration?

There's an interesting article in Standpoint by Peter Whittle of the New Culture Forum which you might care to read:

The BBC’s Groupthink on Immigration Stinks

Here's a taster:

In its coverage of the economic arguments for and against immigration, the BBC has devoted far more time to the pro-immigration argument, while at the same time ignoring many of the social costs. In the 16 years under study, [Ed] West found only a "tiny handful" of TV, radio and online reports in which the anti-immigration voices had not been outnumbered.

"Is it possible," asks West, "for a news organisation that is dedicated to celebrating ‘diversity' in British society to deal impartially with the question of immigration?" The short answer to that, as supplied by this report, is obviously not. So much of the bias in BBC immigration reporting has been a matter of bias by omission, but West has included examples of a quite brazen lack of balance.  So when BBC Online covered a 2007 report into new immigration figures, the Conservative MP Damian Green and Andrew Green, founder of MigrationWatch UK, were "balanced" by four supporters of mass migration. When the 2011 census showed a truly historic demographic transformation — that white British people in London were now, for the first time in its history, in a minority — Newsnight presented the change as of little consequence, and the ensuing discussion was again essentially three against one.    

Sometimes, the analysis offered by the BBC's correspondents is nothing short of propaganda. Either that, or they are living in an alternate universe, or perhaps in denial. Earlier this year, the Today programme considered "white flight" from London, a term that presenter James Naughtie called "loaded". Having spoken to white Britons who had left the East End in recent years, the home affairs correspondent Mark Easton informed us that it was all about property prices, that it was essentially a story of whites benefiting from increased prosperity. "It's a story of aspiration," he concluded, "it's a story of success." No mention, of course, that it might be due to an alienation brought on by a sense that their neighbourhoods were taking on an increasingly unfamiliar air, or that schools and hospitals were overcrowded. Not that there has been any white flight so far as the BBC's soap EastEnders is concerned; as West points out, "The show is stuck in a 1980s demographic time warp: a realistic East London soap opera would have to show a white family moving out every year, to be replaced by Bangladeshis or Somalis, and much of the programme would need to be subtitled."