"A quiet argument for staying in the EU"

Nick Cohen, who has taken recently to crticising the BBC for not being anti-Brexit enough, has found a new BBC programme to admire:

Nick Cohen: As well as being a superb documentary, the BBC’s secret history of the war in Northern Ireland is a quiet argument for staying in the EU. If you don’t understand why some of us old farts are furious about Brexit, it explains why.

I bet it does!

Scoop!

Meanwhile over at the Observer, Carole Cadwalladr is continuing her dogged (some say obsessive) pursuit of Arron Banks and Leave.EU. 

As ever, she's receiving a lot of fervent support and plenty of derisive flak on Twitter.

This week she's got some emails showing that Mr Banks and Andy Wigmore of Leave.EU wanted to behave like investigative journalists and dig up lots of dirt on certain people - in this case their journalistic  opponents - and, worse, they actually intended to use it (if they actually found any) to discredit them. And one of their targets was a (then) high-profile BBC editor. 

"How low can you go?", she asks.

To summarise the main part of her story today, here's one of her tweets about it: 

As John Sweeney of BBC Newsnight prepared a report on Arron Banks mystery £££ & how he funded Brexit, the leaders of the LeaveEU campaign agreed to hire a private investigator to dig up ‘personal stuff’ about Ian Katz, the programme’s editor.

Shocking! Arron and Andy were even thinking of digging into Ian Katz's personal life and finances.

(Private citizens obviously shouldn't do that kind of thing. Such things should be left to proper people, like BBC reporters and Observer journalists).

Ironically, she's absolutely fuming this morning at the BBC for not going big with her 'scoops' every week, and her supporters and hopping mad at the Beeb too, piling accusations and demands on the corporation. She's accusing them of letting 'the bullies' win:

No news organisation in Britain followed up our reports from last weekend. The BBC stands silent. The bullies are winning.

Her Observer colleague Nick Cohen, an ally, must have spotted the irony in her attacking the BBC too, tweeting a 'covering' point:

Critics of the BBC, who I admit have a point, should note that however cravenly Marr, the Today programme and Panorama have behaved, at least Newsnight is a home for decent journalism.

In fairness to the BBC, some of them probably think that there's something in Carole's investigations; others probably think there's very little in it. If so, which is right? On the strength of this week's 'scoop', and despite a lot of sound and fury about it, I'd say the latter.

Radical bid

Everyone's a critic....

Is it Maoist to complain about BBC bias?

Back in April, I looked into a tweet by Tim Montgomerie that asked "Are all presenters of Radio 4's Week in Westminster Remainers?" and found that, though they weren't all Remainers, Tim did have a point about the balance of Remainers and Leavers. 

Out of the 26 episodes between the EU referendum and then only 2 episodes had been fronted by an open Leave supporter (Peter Oborne) while 14 episodes had been fronted by open Remain supporters. 

Tim has returned to the fray today with another such tweet: 

Well, the regular presenters when I last looked in April were: Steve Richards, George Parker (FT), Tom Newton Dunn (Sun), Helen Lewis (New Statesman), Peter Oborne (Daily Mail), Anushka Asthana (Guardian), Isabel Hardman (Spectator) and Jim Waterson (Buzzfeed). Since then there's also been Anne McElvoy (Economist), Paul Waugh (HuffPost) and Sam Coates (Times). 

Tim remains wrong about "not one of them" backing Brexit, given that Peter Oborne is still a regular presenter, but the overall balance - especially with the likes of Steve Richards, Tom Newton Dunn, Helen Lewis and Anne McElvoy being on - remains very heavily pro-Remain and he still has a point....though making it is, apparently, "Maoist":

Tim Montgomerie: Nine (I think) regular presenters of BBC Radio 4’s #WeekinWestminster. Not one of them back Brexit. At least five are Remainers.
Nick Cohen: Tory Maoism (cont).
Tim Montgomerie: Poor Nick. Can’t tell the difference between a Brexiteer wanting balance on a publicly funding broadcaster and a communist tyrant of an undemocratic superstate who killed millions.

I've never thought of myself as a Maoist before just for complaining about BBC bias. That said, I'm off out in a few minutes (despite the wintry showers) to advance courageously under the guidance of the red flag of Mao Zedong thought, and do a bit of shopping.

(P.S. If any of the 70% of 16-24 year olds who Survation found had never heard of Mao are passing by, please write to your present or former schools and complain!). 

“Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself; but talent instantly recognizes genius.”

The real Sherlock Holmes

Another lost Sherlock Holmes story has been re-discovered (by a certain Nick Cohen) and published in The Spectator. 

The tale is entitled Sherlock Holmes and the Mystery of the Murdered Script, and in just a few brilliant pages it tells the story of a troubled BBC Director General who pays a desperate visit to Baker Street and leaves the great sleuth appalled and the good Dr Watson in an understandable rage. 

The mystery at first seems to be one of the toughest that Holmes has ever faced and concerns The Six Thatchers, broadcast on BBC One on New Year's Day. 

The mystery, simply put, is this: What was it that the BBC broadcast and why did they broadcast it? 

Holmes's brilliant mind, however, cleaves through the fog and finds the truth with ease - a truth that I, your humble servant, will not spoil by copying and pasting it onto this blog. (It sends the BBC's DG away with a haunted face - as well it might).

Instead I shall merely whet your appetite for mystery by copying and pasting the following extract, as Tony Hall begins his horrifying tale of what befell BBC One viewers on New Year's Day:

‘It begins with Professor Moriarty taking over every computer and TV screen.’

‘Why would he do that?’

‘No one knows’

‘Will it be explained later?’

‘No one knows. Anyway, a boy burns to death in a car.’

‘Is this child’s unfortunate demise at the heart of your case?’

‘Not really. It’s covered in 90 seconds.’

‘As I understand it, Mr Hall, you assigned 90 minutes to your entertainment. How did your scriptwriters fill the remaining 88 minutes and 30 seconds?’

Our visitor turned pale. He clearly did not wish to speak, but with the effort of a condemned man climbing the steps he stammered, ‘By making you lovable.’

‘Lovable?’

‘Yes to show you are game for a laff.’

‘And how do these repellent qualities manifest themselves?’

‘You lunge for a plate of biscuits and shout, “Are those ginger nuts? I love ginger nuts”.’

‘Surely this must make me seem remarkably stupid?’

‘Everyone must in BBC drama today. Easily bored 13-year olds are our target audience.  Even after the watershed. Especially after the watershed.’

Can you solve the Mystery of the Murdered Script before clicking on the link to the Spectator and reading on? What evil purpose compelled the BBC to commit such a deed of infamy against the great sleuth, his faithful companion, his wife, their creator, and the viewing Great British public?

Nicholas Witchell on the Queen's corgis

I agree with Nick

Nick Sutton, editor of The World at One and The World This Weekend, tweets; Nick Cohen of the Observer and Spectator replies:

Presumably the BBC is happy now @suttonnick

— Nick Cohen (@NickCohen4) April 17, 2016

The right to rant

Nick Cohen penned an article just t’other day, entitled: Nobody will ever forgive the right if they destroy the BBC.

Cohen wasn’t writing primarily about bias. He was arguing on behalf of the BBC and telling us that it is a National Treasure and ‘ya won’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone’, but he did include the passage below.

 “And, yes, thank you for raising it, I know, there is BBC bias. I accept that Radio 4 will give us left- and extreme left-wing comedians but never their right- or far-right equivalents. You do not have to tell me either that you can find individual broadcasters who are bent. I have as much contempt for them as anyone else. But the point surely is that the BBC has standards that they are failing to meet.”

A crude summary: “ The audience is intelligent enough to recognise (and if necessary tolerate) a bit of bias, because the BBC has its heart in the right place, and its minor flaws can easily be fixed. “

Well, now there’s another article by Nick.  This time he’s addressing the principle of journalistic integrity, impartiality and ranting. He uses the topical example of Andrew Neil’s ‘courageous’ rant, which many people thought of as a long-awaited breath of fresh air. (I must admit I thought it was a long awaited statement of the bleeding obvious). 

Cohen’s article argues that it’s inappropriate for respected journalists to exploit their  privileged position by spouting their personal political opinions, particularly when they’re delivered in full frontal, close-up, talking-head-to-camera packages.

I wonder if there’s anything slightly contradictory in these two pieces, but perhaps that’s a bit nit-picking - Nick-pitting - of me.

The below the line comments are, again, gratifying. (This is happening to me quite a lot recently. Someone says something I don’t like, and then masses of the general public dive in and save me the trouble of clarifying my objections in my own head. Yippee.)

I must point out a couple of things from the comments before I end.

Firstly, several complained that he chose to use Jon Snow as another (equivalent) example of dubious inappropriate ranting. Many below the line commenters pointed out that there is no comparison whatsoever between Andrew Neil’s and Jon Snow’s un-journalistic rants.

Not only was Andrew Neil on the ‘right’ side (and Jon Snow on the ‘wrong’) ....

“Oh dear! You attempt to follow your own lead by the 'impartial' equation of Neil with Snow. Not acceptable. Neil knew evil when he saw it and left us in no doubt where he stood, as every good journalist should. Snow is a newsreader and his anti Israel pro Palestine bias is so obvious my parrot can recite it.
There is simply no comparison. Your attempt to draw one is not convincing.”

....but some said Snow is supposed to be a news anchor, whereas Neil is a political commentator. Some pointed out that Neil confined his criticism to ISIS rather than Islamic extremism, therefore his speech wasn’t courageous at all, and someone else said:

  “Incidentally Neil is wrong in supposing that Paris will necessarily continue to be a bright shining light.Demographics win”

Even though the outlook is bleak, at least the tenor of the below-the-line response to this piece was heartening. Positively cheered me up for a few seconds.

Jeremy Corbyn's "well-known objections to violence in any forms"

Following on from Sue's post, there's another article by Nick Cohen in this week's Spectator that's well worth reading: Jeremy Corbyn isn't anti-war. He's just anti-West, 

Nick Cohen argues a point that will be familiar to at least some of us: namely that Stop the War Coalition types (like Mr Corbyn) aren't really anti-war. They're merely anti-this war (whichever war that may be) - if 'this war' involves 'the West' attacking 'the anti-West'. 

Why? Because such people believe that 'the West' (the US, UK, Israel, etc) is the cause of the world's evils and they take sides against it. 

Their heartfelt condemnation of violence, therefore, only flows one way - against the West. Towards the enemies of the West, in contrast, their condemnation verges on the non-existent, however shocking the violence. 

The same goes for showing 'understanding', though the directions are reversed here: Dialogue with Hamas? Yes. Opposition to boycotts of Israel? Far from it. 

Or as Nick Cohen puts it:

Whatever its protestations, Corbyn’s far left is not anti-war. Pacifism may not be a moral position in all circumstances but, in my view at least, it remains an honourable belief, rooted in Christian teaching. Corbyn does not share it. He does not oppose violence wherever it comes from, as the BBC’s political editor claimed this week. When anti-western regimes and movements go to war, his language turns slippery. Corbyn never quite has the guts to support the violence of others, but he excuses it like a gangster’s lawyer trying to get a crime boss off on a technicality.

The mention of the BBC's political editor there refers to an article at the BBC News website by Laura Kuenssberg in which she writes of Mr Corbyn's "well-known objections to violence in any forms".

Nick Cohen stands up for the BBC

Nick Cohen has written a passionate defence of the BBC in today's Observer. 

I will attempt to summarise it as fully and fairly as I can:

The BBC is in trouble. 

Though it's one of the most trusted institutions in Britain, the BBC is becoming politically isolated. 

The Tories are after it. UKIP are after it. The SNP are after it. The Corbynistas are after it. They all want to see the BBC beaten into submission. 

Why? Because these are troubled times, and troubled times give rise to ideological movements that cannot bear to have their “solutions” questioned or “facts” challenged. 

Each possesses its own version of the Marxist theory of false consciousness. The people would see that they and they alone represented the light and the truth and the way, if only the media did not brainwash them to vote against their true interests. 

The Right's arguments against, say, the BBC's coverage of the EU don't hold up. The evidence is flimsy. The BBC's coverage will be far for impartial that anything that will appear in the newspapers.  

The BBC has earned the people's trust by providing serious, accurate news for generations, which almost everyone in Britain turns to when there is a major story. The BBC should start standing up for itself, and people should start standing up for the BBC. 

Plus genuine conservatives will be appalled by the effects of the Tories' intended slashing of the BBC. They wouldn't want to lose Radio 4 or Radio 3 or to see the BBC's foreign coverage curtailed. 

If arguments were settled democratically the BBC would win. Most people know that a diminished BBC, like a diminished NHS, would diminish us all.

Now, I really do enjoy reading Nick Cohen when he's writing passionately about something I agree with him over. It's on those occasions where Nick proves himself to be one of the wisest and most independent-minded commentators in the country. When he's passionate about something I don't agree with him about though, well, frankly-speaking, he brings nothing but discredit on himself.

It usually works like that, even with media types I don't like, such as Yasmin Alibhai Brown. She's obviously a rude, nasty, bigoted ignoramus, except on those very rare occasions when she says something I agree with her about (like the wrongness of the full Muslim veil), at which point she reveals herself as unexpectedly shrewd and insightful. (And the same goes for young Owen and Polly).

I do find it delightfully reassuring that media types are always at their best when saying things I agree with them about. I wish they all did, for their sakes (and the country's sake)....

...which, of course, might very well be how Nick Cohen imagines that people like me really think, and that such thinking flows into my criticism of the BBC. 

In this Observer piece, however, he seems not to have considered that such thinking might also steer him in particular directions too, and flow into his own passionate defence of the BBC.

Isn't he just as guilty of failing to stand outside of a kind of Marxist 'false consciousness' here? 

After all, each and every one of the groups of people he cites as opponents of the BBC are the very people he doesn't agree with - the Tories, UKIP, Scot Nats and Corbynistas. 

The people he does agree with - the centre, the centre-left, the soft-left, pro-EU people, Scottish unionists - are far less anti-BBC. 

He doesn't seem to sense that there could be a reason for all that - that the BBC is biased in favour of the points of view he's in favour of and biased against the points of view he's opposed to....

....and that he believes the BBC to be impartial because it shares so many of his views (if not all of them).

In this light, it's not that the BBC is unbiased because it's getting complaints from both sides, but because the BBC is heavily biased towards a particular position somewhere between UKIP, right-wing Tories, the SNP and the Labour left.

Is he prepared to seriously re-examine his own "facts" about the BBC's impartiality. say over its EU coverage? There's plenty of evidence out them for him to look at, plus the admissions of serious figures that there has been a pro-EU bias at the BBC in the past. Has he seen it? Did he just choose to disbelieve it?

This 'false consciousness' thing works both ways. No one, not even Nick Cohen, should assume themselves to be immune from it. And neither should anyone at the BBC. 

I do, however, take his point about how conservative types might come to regret the loss of all the good stuff that the BBC does. The BBC does do a lot of very good things (and you really would have to be seriously hardcore in your hatred of the BBC to deny that). I myself, as a blogger about BBC bias, might not say that often enough. But...

...that does not mean the BBC should be heavily biased on so many very important issues (given the licence fee)...

...and it doesn't mean that anything Nick's 'Thatcherite ideologue' John Whittingdale is planning anything like the the wholesale massacre of quality programming at the BBC that Nick Cohen implies he's planning either...

Incidentally, the link that Nick Cohen uses to prove that the BBC is still highly trusted by the British public reveals that he's using the heavily-slated findings of the BBC Trust's own preferred, small-scale survey into the matter whose findings by-passed the large-scale public consulation originally commissioned by the Trust - the findings of which were, apparently, far less positive. 

"Flimsy" evidence, you might say.

Aren't we?

Nick Cohen (another of the BBC's supporters at the Guardian) isn't a fan of Jeremy Corbyn, or some of his supporters. 

His latest Observer piece worries about the closed minds and almost religious intolerance of the Corbyn camp, and compares such zealous camp followers to parts of the political Right:

If you find the religious comparison far-fetched, spend a week reading the Daily Mail or Telegraph, and notice how Corbyn’s equivalents on right [sic] also fence themselves off from contrary arguments. They don’t allow one good word about the EU, BBC or trade unions to disturb the certainties of true believers. Both sides behave as if they fear their ideologies are like badly woven rugs. Let one thread come loose, tolerate one moment of doubt, and their entire political personas will unravel. 

Well, I don't think that can be said of either me or Sue, can it? We are more than prepared to say a good word about the BBC, when they deserve it, aren't we (and blow the certainties of the true believers!)?

Word games

I agree with Nick. Very much so in fact.

Here are some extracts:

The BBC looks like it is buckling under political pressure, as it so often does. Instead of telling Cameron that his behaviour [on 'Today'] demeaned his office, the Today programme was referring to the ‘so-called Islamic State’ this morning. If this carries on, the BBC will soon be reporting on ‘the supposedly Democratic Republic of Congo’ and ‘the alleged Netherlands’. Sycophantic MPs, meanwhile, are using ‘Daesh’ in the Commons. No one, not Cameron, the SNP, Lucas, Johnson or Goldsmith admitted that they were asking the public to engage in fruitless lying. Not one could acknowledge that their word games made distinctions without differences. 

**** 

All the euphemisms politicians demand we must use to avoid calling Islamic State ‘Islamic State’ [ISIS, ISIL, Daesh] therefore call Islamic State ‘Islamic State’. How can they not, for that is its name? And it is no more up to outsiders to change a group’s name than it is up to you to change the names of your acquaintances. Assuming the politicians know what they are doing, they must believe that many voters will not know what ‘Isil’ and ‘Isis’ stand for, or only Arabic speakers will understand the meaning of ‘Daesh’. In other words, they are relying on ignorance and hoping to foster ignorance too. 

Why the lies? Why the resort to the magical belief that you can change the world by changing language? 

**** 

The propaganda motive is, as the SNP says, to reassure hundreds of millions of Muslims that they are in no way implicated in Islamic State’s crimes, a sentiment so obvious it should not even need to be stated. But it provides reassurance by inventing a fairy story, which damages both Western governments and moderate Muslims when its falsehoods are exposed. To say that Islamic State has nothing to do with Islam is like saying Stalin’s Soviet Union had nothing to do with socialism, or the Inquisition had nothing to do with Catholicism. Islamic State has nothing to do with most varieties of Islam, just as Stalinism had nothing to do with most varieties of socialism, but Islamic State has everything to do with Salafist Sunni Islam, which has spread its ultra-puritan, ultra-reactionary literalist interpretation of the myths of early Islam across the world.

Impartiality

Here's proper impartiality for you: two pieces from Standpoint magazine - one bashing the BBC, the other bashing people who bash the BBC:

Time For A Leaner BBC To Pay Its Way, by Stephen Glover

Predictable Pot-Shots At Auntie, by Nick Cohen

Here's a sample from each of them:

Stephen Glover

If the Tories can reasonably consider themselves hard done by during the election, UKIP is entitled to think it was taken to the cleaners by the Corporation. Despite Ofcom’s decree that it should be treated as a “major party” on the same basis as Conservatives, Labour and Lib Dems, it was regularly tacked on to the end of BBC political reports, and sometimes entirely ignored. In one television debate Nigel Farage was barracked by a BBC-selected audience that appeared predominantly anti-UKIP. When grilled by Newsnight’s Evan Davis Mr Farage was treated as though he was batty or an extremist or both, though when Mr Davis came to interview the SNP’s Nicola Sturgeon, he was full of smiles and reassurance. 

By way of further supporting evidence, let me point out that the editor of Newsnight, Ian Katz, is a former deputy editor of the Guardian, its political editor hails from the same newspaper, and its economics editor was previously an economist at the TUC. Ask yourself whether it is imaginable for the editor and political editor of the most important current affairs programme to have worked for the Daily Telegraph, or for its economics editor to have cut his teeth at the Institute of Economic Affairs. The answer is obviously “No” — as it is equally inconceivable that an ex-Tory cabinet minister would be appointed as the £300,000-a-year “director of strategy and digital”, as the former Labour cabinet minister James Purnell was in 2013. The same point can be made about the centre-Left participants who monopolise the Beeb’s satirical and culture shows. Sometimes it seems as though Tony Hall, director-general, as well as its head of news, James Harding, are ’avin’ a larf. 

I don’t doubt there are many fine journalists working for Auntie who strive to be neutral and objective, and often succeed in being so. But with a few exceptions they are what they are — metropolitan, conventional members of the slightly left-wing cultural elite, wary of Tories and their strange antediluvian beliefs. Appointing right-wing BBC chairmen or director-generals won’t affect the direction of travel, as Margaret Thatcher discovered in the 1980s. It is surely instructive that almost every BBC journalist to whom one talks is convinced that the organisation is even-handed.

Nick Cohen

You have to read the right-wing press to see how unrelenting the assault on the BBC is in England. You have to read Bella Caledonia or one of the other SNP blogs to see how Scottish nationalists ape English Tories. It’s not that the BBC deserves to escape scrutiny for its biases and faults, or for the many follies of its managers. Rather, you need to look at the cultish refusal to allow one good word to be said about the corporation, and at how this stifling uniformity reveals the emptiness of nationalist and Tory myths.

Conservative intellectuals are fond of Jonathan Haidt’s argument in The Righteous Mind that liberals do not understand tradition and therefore cannot tolerate conservatives. Haidt’s thesis is highly dubious — the American and European liberal-Left are suffused with traditions of their own. But when conservatives go on to say that the Right is more broadminded than the Left, they reduce Haidt to absurdity.

A glance at the conservative press shows you that dissent not only on the BBC but also on the EU is simply not allowed to exist. Even civilised conservatives, who deplore the dumbing-down of British culture, can never discuss in public what would happen to that culture if their allies succeeded in abolishing Radios Three and Four. Scottish nationalists boast that theirs is a warm and cuddly “civic” nationalism, yet they demand the sacking of BBC journalists who fail to show proper deference to their leaders.

The easy explanation for the group-think is that many journalists act like prostitutes, whoring out their integrity to whoever pays them. It is certainly the case that you cannot defend the BBC in most right-wing newspapers without running into trouble.

The left, Israel and being Jewish

Nick Cohen has written a piece in the Spectator which I find odd. It concerns the Swedish foreign minister Margot Wallström, who has denounced the subjugation of women in Saudi Arabia, condemned the Saudi courts for the harsh punishment of blogger Raif Badawi, and, really, criticised a whole raft of medieval practices that Islamic countries are ideologically wedded to. What took her so long?

Sweden used to be the model of laid back liberalism. It was a country full of golden-haired goddesses who liked to live and let live in the most modern and free thinking fashion. Now, its tolerance and free-thinking has attracted a mass influx of radical Islamists and the country is famous because it has become the rape capital of the west.  Sweden has embraced pro-Palestinian advocacy of course.

She’s in trouble for speaking out. Nick Cohen is full of admiration for the plucky Swede.  

“It is a sign of how upside-down modern politics has become that one assumes that a politician who defends freedom of speech and women’s rights in the Arab world must be some kind of muscular liberal, or neocon, or perhaps a supporter of one of Scandinavia’s new populist right-wing parties whose commitment to human rights is merely a cover for anti-Muslim hatred. But Margot Wallström is that modern rarity: a left-wing politician who goes where her principles take her.”

This is all well and good. We admire her for suddenly seeing and articulating the obvious, and we’re full of contempt for those who refuse to see what’s in front of them. Like Nick Cohen, everyone should be horrified that “the Swedish establishment has gone wild.”

We are, we are. However, this next bit is extremely problematic. You’ll see why.

She is foreign minister in Sweden’s weak coalition of Social Democrats and Greens, and took office promising a feminist foreign policy. She recognised Palestine in October last year — and, no, the Arab League and Organisation of Islamic Co-operation and Gulf Co-operation Council did not condemn her ‘unacceptable interference in the internal affairs of Israel’. I confess that her gesture struck me as counterproductive at the time. But after Benjamin Netanyahu ruled out a Palestinian state as he used every dirty trick he could think of to secure his re-election, she can claim with justice that history has vindicated her.

I don’t expect every opponent of radical Islam to understand Israeli politics, and I don’t assume Nick Cohen has to be an admirer of Benjamin Netanyahu in order for his opinion on the Islamization of Sweden to count. But I do expect him to have a little more understanding of Netanyahu’s tactics and the desperate predicament his country faces than to declare that Wallström’s ill-advised, premature recognition of ‘Palestine’ has been vindicated by history.  

It’s almost as if Cohen has used her recognition of ‘Palestine’  to excuse her, or to give her more credibility - with the readership of his article, as well as with the Swedish government and the EU. 

I looked at the comments to find out if any of the responses picked up this point. One or two did.

This has a tenuous but valid relationship to the way the BBC presents the Israeli / Palestinian situation.  

That was a ‘leftist’ issue, and so is this.   H/T Harry’s Place  This piece in Tablet (the Jewish, not the Catholic) examines Ed Miliband and his position regarding Jewishness and his attitude to Israel. It opens:

“In a packed conference hall in Islington, north London, the disembodied voice of Omar Barghouti is calling in over Skype. The co-founder of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement exhorts the crowd to renew their efforts for the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC), which is holding the meeting. He derides and denigrates Israel, the apartheid state. And then, his rhetoric building up to a pitch, he delivers his killer line: “Balfour is dead, now let’s bury his damned colonial legacy.” A loud cheer echoes around the room.”

It’s a good read. Ed wants to be PM, so some of his ambivalence is understandable, given the state we’re in. (Largely Labour’s doing) There is one jarring note in this piece. It’s in this bit here:

“ Geoffrey Alderman points to three major factors that have driven British Jews to the right. First, the community has been upwardly mobile and become more and more established as an upper-middle-class group in British society, making it naturally more conservative. Secondly, philo-Semitic Tory leader Margaret Thatcher also came to power in the north London constituency of Finchley, appointing several Jews to her cabinet and ushering in an era of market-driven economics that has been kind to the Jewish community. Many Jews living in north London and voting in the upcoming election will be just as exercised by Labour’s planned “mansion tax” on expensive houses as they are about Israel.”

The writer needs to bear in mind that though there may be some truth in the last sentence, without qualification it’s sailing dangerously close to the infamous Tim Willcox ‘mansion tax/wealthy Jews’ remark, which was taken to be an antisemitic slur. Whenever people refer disparagingly to ‘those wealthy Jews’, and I’m sure there are quite a few successful Jewish business persons, they should remember who’s  buying up half of london these days. If we’re talking about money, power, control, lobbying, and wealth beyond the wildest dreams of Mr and Mrs normal, the Arabs beat the Jews hands down.

Apart from that, there is one heroic Labour MP. Michael Dugher, MP for Barnsley East. (Speech at 'We believe in Israel" conference 2015.) Is he the UK’s Margot Wallström?

  

Nick Cohen on the BBC's crackdown on dissent

There's a very strong attack on the BBC from Nick Cohen on the Guardian website headlined The sinister treatment of dissent at the BBC (h/t Guest Who at Biased BBC):

Nobody from John Humphrys in the morning to Evan Davis at night dares mention a scandal at the BBC. It undermines their reporting of every abuse whistleblowers reveal. It reinforces the dirty common sense of British life that you must keep your head down if you want to keep your job.

The scandal is simply this: the BBC is forcing out or demoting the journalists who exposed Jimmy Savile as a voracious abuser of girls. As Meirion Jones put it to me: “There is a small group of powerful people at the BBC who think it would have been better if the truth about Savile had never come out. And they aim to punish the reporters who revealed it.”

Meirion Jones was an investigative producer for the BBC. He broke the Savile story, but the editor of 'Newsnight' banned his report. The BBC then attempted a cover-up. 

A week ago, Jones’s managers told him that a temporary assignment on Panorama was over. He should have been able to go back to his old job. But there was no old job to go back to. He had been fired.

His reporter on the Savile film, Liz MacKean, also spoke out, "so the BBC forced her out too":

“When the Savile scandal broke,” she told me, “the BBC tried to smear my reputation. They said they had banned the film because Meirion and I had produced shoddy journalism. I stayed to fight them, but I knew they would make me leave in the end. Managers would look through me as if I wasn’t there. I went because I knew I was never going to appear on screen again.”

The BBC refuses to call them “whistleblowers”. Its official review into the Savile scandal found that BBC management had acted in “good faith”. 

If you are tempted to agree, consider the sequel. Panorama responded magnificently to the news that the BBC had killed the Savile scoop. It broadcast a special documentary, which earned the highest audience in the programme’s history. Jones and MacKean described how their journalism had been suppressed, and Panorama went on to document Savile’s crimes. How open the BBC is, I thought. What other institution would subject itself to the same level of self-criticism?

What a fool I was. Since then, BBC managers have shifted Tom Giles, the editor of Panorama, out of news. Peter Horrocks, an executive who insisted throughout the scandal that the BBC must behave ethically, announced last September that he was resigning to “find new challenges”. Clive Edwards, who as commissioning editor for current affairs oversaw the Panorama documentary, was demoted. The television trade press reported recently that his future is “not yet clear” (which doesn’t sound as if he has much of a future at all).

Nick Cohen contrasts their treatment with "those who did nothing to advance the public interest": Adrian Van Klaveren, who "allowed Newsnight to falsely imply that Lord McAlpine was a child abuser", and has now been promoted to "head of strategic change";  Helen Boaden, then BBC head of news at the time of the "censorship", who now sits on the BBC’s executive board; Peter Rippon, the 'Newsnight editor' who blocked Jones and MacKean, who "now has a comfortable job managing the BBC’s archive."

A senior BBC press officer vowed to “drip poison about Meirion’s suspected role”. He was later promoted. Peter Rippon said that if Jones spoke freely: “I will throw shit at him”.

Nick Cohen concludes with a more general point and a call to arms:

The best aspect of modern culture is that it revolts against such hierarchical control. The computer revolution makes information sharing and cooperative ways of working easy to achieve. But hierarchies have men and women at their summits who will fight as ferociously as BBC executives to protect their position, and prevent democratic change.

The case of Jones and MacKean makes my point. I have reported on it in the Observer and Private Eye has covered it too. But the Tory press, which daily bashes the BBC, has avoided the story. You only have to look at the Telegraph to understand why it does not want to encourage insubordination. Its journalists must resign before they can protest against HSBC’s control of its news pages.

The power of hierarchies is hard to break. But if you want to fight fraud in the City or the rape of children, it has to be broken. A start can be made by insisting that everyone from John Humphrys in the morning to Evan Davis at night tells the truth about the purge of the BBC’s truth tellers.

Maybe the BBC could prove him wrong by allowing him to make a documentary for them investigating this story further, and then broadcasting it in, say, Radio 4's 'The Report' spot or in BBC One's 'Panorama' spot?

James Harding, Putin and Nick Cohen

Partly for the sake of provocation  - and I mostly mean for the sake of recording my own feelings of provocation on reading the piece - and, also, just because it's him, please take a read of Nick Cohen's denunciation of BBC Director of News James Harding at Standpoint and its less-obviously-left-wing follow-up at the Spectator. 

It poses some serious questions about Mr Harding's past record [the then-Times man's passing over the expenses scandal] and present BBC directorship, alleging cronyism - the kind of potentially devastating charges that the BBC boss ought to be compelled to answer - but there's so much in Nick's piece that strikes me as wildly off-key (a polite way of saying "wrong") that I'd be glad of a second opinion. I'm having trouble sorting out the insights from the blind spots. 

A (genuinely) Modest Proposal

Nick Cohen has, characteristically, written a thought-provoking piece for Standpoint entitled The Beeb Needs its Mavericks - provoked by the exit from an etiolated Newsnight to an invigorated Channel 4 News of Newsnight's economics editor Paul Mason (a "furrow-browed theorist from the Marxisant Left," in Nick's words.)

Nick Cohen regrets the departure of Paul Mason. 

He notes Paul's stated reason - that he wants the freedom to write books "without submitting them to the BBC's censors" - and sees this as Paul Mason being forced out by the BBC. 

Nick cites in Paul's favour the furrow-browed one's slating of the EU for its treatment of Southern Europe during the Euro Crisis, which he says "stood out precisely because he was left-wing and had no time for the EU platitudes too many from the BBC swallowed without complaint."

For Nick Cohen, this  supports the general point that "outsiders from the Right or the Left often make the most perceptive journalists".  

I have my doubts (to put it mildly) about Paul Mason's perceptiveness, but Nick's contention that the liberal, conformist attitude of the BBC stifles the best in journalism rings true. 

The BBC seeks to be seen as impartial. It has a pronounced liberal, conformist tendency of its own, however, which suffocates the spirit of mavericks - mavericks (from either side of the political spectrum) who might see things more clearly than the liberal mainstream BBC.

The BBC, Nick says, is over-cautious. But over-cautious for what reason?

Well, because of people like me and those who blog at Biased BBC, and at the Telegraph, Mail, Commentator and Spectator:

Before you get carried away with happy-clappy enthusiasm for the liberation new technology brings, consider that if everyone can be a journalist everyone can be a spy. The web is searchable and the BBC managers who worry about what their staff write when they're off duty are not quite the little Hitlers they seem. Tweets and Facebook posts are taken down and used in evidence by the corporation's enemies, and not just by the Telegraph but, potentially by everyone with a political or commercial interest. You can ban people from going against company policy online, as many organisations do. But what happens when someone else tweets their opinions or, soon, captures an off-the-cuff remark in a bar or at a party from a supposedly impartial journalist or judge on Google Glass and broadcasts it?  

Well, guilty as charged m'lud, but so long as the BBC cleaves to its charter and its charter-bound commitments to impartiality, as formalised by parliament, and so long as each and every one of us (who owns a TV) is legally bound to pay the licence fee then I'm not prepared to have partisan reporters spouting off at my expense whilst claiming to be impartial....

I'd much prefer those partisan voices to be open about their partiality and for the BBC to spread them out in an even-handed way. 

Give me a fair cross-section of partisan voices - including right-wing and left-wing mavericks - on a regular basis and I'd be very happy to pay the licence fee - and to stop blogging about BBC bias. 

And maybe that's the way the BBC should go: Let their own reporters honestly and openly report from their own standpoints, but ensure that that a full range of opinion is provided. 

The snag there, I think, is that the BBC at present is vastly over-staffed with people who inhabit that liberal, conformist standpoint. How could you re-balance a publicly-funded corporation like that? 

With great difficulty, obviously.

So why not set the BBC loose from its impartiality obligations and let it openly rejoice in being a sort of left-leaning Guardian-on-air but share the present licence fee fund with a second public service broadcaster with a right-leaning Telegraph-on-air tendency. 

That would be fair, wouldn't it?