The BBC biased? Never!

For a good while now, there has been a debate in the UK about whether the BBC has a left-wing bias or not. Less of a debate, more a statement of fact followed by vehement denials. But still we have to roll out the arguments.

The BBC are supposed to be unstintingly impartial - that is their rasion d'etre. Yet on their news and cultural output they relentlessly either stifle, ridicule, or completely ignore anything other than a narrow 'progressive' viewpoint (of the Guardian/Independent newspapers) - which has very limited support in the country as a whole, but is given free (or license fee-funded) propaganda by the state broadcaster

The above view is an angry one - but it is supported by the facts. Every time I switch on radio 4, or watch a BBC news programme of any kind, the slant is obvious. There is no balance within the programmes themselves, as there should be, nor is there any hint of the news programmes being balanced by more libertarian programmes. If you think there is, please show me.

Last night, as an example, I switched on "Saturday review", on radio 4. This was hosted by the scrupulously impartial, on-the-fence Bidisha, whose previous quotes include:

“Any man who thinks it’s OK to live in a household where the woman does the overwhelming majority of all the housework, childcare and family admin is a woman-hater”,

and

 “I wouldn’t be above some impromptu castration”

Please note that my collection of notes below took no work whatsoever. I listened to the programme once only, scribbling a couple of notes as I went along probably missing much. 

• look at the chosen topics: Naomi Alderman's novel undermining Christianity, a left-wing protest album (at a time when the Democrats are in power in America). Bidisha talks of the TV drama showing an "Empire with victorian values, undergong forced changes and reversals of power"
• the guest Cahal Dallat states that the programme "has a good Tory in it, which I think is something worth watching" - this 'good Tory'  talks of a minimum wage  3 times the one "that socialists have brought in"*
• the idea of the "old world breaking up" is mentioned about 5 times in 5 minutes
• when talking about a sci-fi-based play by Aykbourn, Bidisha enthused "That android is everything a man should be"
• there were odd remarks about Jesus’ “socialist principles”
• Bidisha rather wanted the Ry Cooder album to be history-changing,
• one guest said it was “really good to see a grumpy lefty getting out there and doing protest music"

Those are just a few examples, but the general agreement was relentless. Where was the non-progressive viewpoint to balance all this? I'll answer that for you: nowhere, and it won't appear soon on the BBC.

Sometimes your Guardian reader will respond that these views are now standard UK opinion, whereas a cursory (or more in-depth) look at newspaper sales shows that exactly the opposite is the case. If you mention this, they will, without missing a beat, change tack, and claim that the alternative 'liberal' view (read "Marxist inspired Guardian view") should be given some air-time. Which is ok - but not ALL the air-time. But by now their attention will appear to have wandered.

They don't care what the rationale is, they just want the progressive viewpoint pushed by public funding whatever the reason given needs to be. It is therefore unbalanced political propaganda and no-one should pretend it is anything other than that.

* for a very eloquent man, Cahal Dallat overused the words "socialists" and "tory" a little - which may or may not reflect his framework thinking about the world

The Guardian on Shakespeare

I have a new post on GraunWatch.

A writer named Emer O'Toole has written a piece for the Guardian claiming that the plays of Shakespeare are little more than an tool of colonial/imperialist control over the world. As I tend to see Shakespeare's plays as having been very central to British culture for centuries, I take issue with her here.

As the owner of the blog says, this isn't necessarily the "Guardian line" on Shakespeare. But I believe this line of thinking is all too common, and needs to be subjected to strong critical analysis wherever possible. Too many people are getting away with some very woolly thinking.

The subject was also discussed on David Thompson's blog (in the comments section of this post). The point was made that education and thought in the UK is being influenced by a strong anti-patriotism - quite common, I think, in the pages of the Guardian and Independent, and in the output of the BBC.

Will Self attracting amusement again

A ludicrous piece of writing appeared in the Guardian very recently written by Mr Will Self. It is his commentary on the closure of the News of the World and one of such pretentiousness that I almost achieved Nirvana reading it. At least I was aware of being on quite a different level of consciousness after reading it, to the one I started off with before I was unsuspectingly drawn to this abomination.

The subtitle of the piece will give you a clue:

"We are in a strange interregnum of titillation between cultural hegemonies, before familiar hierarchies appear online"

Now I quote the late, great George Carlin here: "that is what is known as being STUNNINGLY, EMBARASSINGLY full of s**t". There's plenty of it, too :) Here is some more

"key to an understanding of how this interregnum is eating holes in the British social fabric"

Which led the way for my personal favourite from the 100s of bewildered comments. This from someone calling himself DannyKen:

"Blimey, Will. You don't so much mix your metaphors as put them in a blender"

I too commented on the images this put in my head. Someone is having a laugh here, surely?

"He's my boyfriend, I can hit him if I want to"

The quote in the title is from this story, in the Guardian of all places.

No one working for that newspaper is going to question where the attitudes of this girl come from (prevalent attitudes towards men, differences in perception of violence towards men and women), though many lines of print are written there on which attitudes towards women lead to violence.

I'd like to ask anyone reading this to think about why this was said - why the girl thought it was ok to say this. Here are some guesses:

a) the knowledge that she will probably escape a prison sentence (now where oh where did I read that someone wanted to empty women's prisons because they are too nasty? Do let me know)

b) common representations of men as more expendable in the media.How many times have we heard on the news that "women and children" were amongst those hurt" in some disaster, natural or otherwise. Hurting a man is represented as more or less ok, and frequently justified, if you watch BBC dramas.


The fact that we are (probably) hard-wired to have a little more sympathy for women and children doesn't mean we can pretend violence towards men is morally any different. Or we can, only if you are ready to disregard everything that is said about gender equality being for the greater good. You will also have to ignore anyone who claims that attitudes of 'men' towards 'women' are the cause of rape/violence. Some examples of this from our favourite rag:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/2011/mar/08/malaysia-international-womens-day
http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/2011/mar/23/church-action-against-sexual-violence
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/jul/02/gail-dines-pornography
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/nov/08/islam-channel-ofcom

I wonder at how easy it was for me to come up with those examples...

Yet if you say this to feminists, they look mystified. They simply cannot see how, if "attitudes towards women" cause violence, there can be any such phenomenon involving blatantly obvious attitudes towards men, and the fact that it is men who are sent off to die for their country, commit suicide more often than women, are treated unequally by the law etcetc.

It's slightly annoying :(

Chav-land

There are suggestions that the word 'chav' is an attack on the working class. I'm delighted to say that Polly Toynbee is one of those who have said this, and that once again I totally disagree with everything she said.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/may/31/chav-vile-word-fractured-britain

The simple fact is that being a "chav" is nothing to do with how much money you have, or were born into. It does, however, have everything to do with attitudes and behaviour that many working-class people would be ashamed of.

Perhaps this is where Toynbee loses the plot. What she calls "poisonous bile" could actually be described as social forces that help regulate behaviour. We condemn thuggish actions and threatening behaviour. We condemn the videos of kids showing off their knives on YouTube. It's part of what holds society together. Yet according to Polly Toynbee we can't say anything nasty about chavs because, she says, they are working class. 


Think about the logic of that for a second. We don't want to do down the working class, so we can't say anything nasty about a criminal if s(he) happens to be working class.

Toynbee has dragged the word 'class' into it for a reason - to obfuscate the argument and delude people into thinking we need to read Marx again to understand the issue. Shall we substitute the word "poor" for working-class? (it seems fair enough)  We are now saying: We don't want to do down the poor people for being poor, so we can't say anything nasty about a particular criminal if s(he) happens to be poor.

Happy with that? Because that is what I think she is saying.

The obvious problem is that some of us have started to use the term "chav" fairly derisively. Perhaps Toynbee doesn't like this aspect of things? It's perhaps an ugly part of the social forces I alluded to above, but I wonder whether she has ever said "men" in the same tone of voice we use to talk about chavs? Not even once or twice?

I could argue with every sentence she spills forth. For example:

"Aspiration and social mobility are the useful mirage, laying blame squarely with individuals who should try harder to escape their families and friends, instead of seeking great fairness for all."

No. People should try harder to not stab other people, not give someone a kicking because they are bored. It's not hard, you don't need a rich Mummy and Daddy to make that decision.

There seems to be an assumption in there that if only governments eliminated inequalities tomorrow then all this crime would disappear overnight. It's an old, tired argument, and it's not going to happen any time soon, so we won't get to find out whether it's true or not. One of the problems with "social mobility" is not one Toynbee will be happy with - the fact is we only need so many Doctors, CEOs, and Lawyers. So I'm fascinated to know what sort of world she thinks we will live in when inequality is finally defeated. 

As usual with Marxists, they are not at all concerned with the details of a crime, and looking at what might actually have caused it. They start off with the explanation. They are sure it is right - though they don't have the evidence - and over and over again they deny the concept of responsibility for ones actions (apart from rich white men, who are held personally responsible for what other people do). It's the intoxicating, addictive quality that some people seem to find in Marxist ideas - suddenly they have the answer to everything! If only people would listen...

It reminds me of religious sects or cults where "missionaries" are trained in how to answer every question or rebuttal they might encounter. In fact, I think we'd be a lot safer and more rational if we lumped Guardian readers with the Moonies and Waco cult members and just got on with trying to understand difficult problems of the causes of crime without the hysterical know-alls in that paper.

Here endeth the lesson

A new Guardian hack for me to complain about

Simon Garfield


Here are some gems. Firstly from his (awful) piece on Sir Clive Sinclair:


"Sinclair, who is not an especially tall man, has always been a great one for the smallness of things."


"..colour games such as Jet Set Willy became the second major activity in teenage bedrooms"


Then he gives us a quoted snippet of the conversation - it doesn't seem to be going too well. In fact it appears Sir Clive wishes the meeting would come to a speedy conclusion. And I can't imagine why!


The lack of substance in the article would suggest that the encounter was indeed short :) Though that impression may be due to the general inadequacy of the work that went into the piece, I couldn't say.


Here's a quote from  his review of a book called "Listening to Britain", an account of some Government snooping on it's own people to get an idea of national morale.


"How genuine was the daily fear of invasion, how imaginative our fantasies, and how widespread our bigoted views of foreigners"


I don't know how well Garfield knows his history, about the camps specifically set up to torture and exterminate mind-boggling numbers of human beings, the nauseating experiments and brutality that we know went on in them. I wonder how imaginative our fantasies were, then, before we became the enlightened 21st century anti-patriots we are now.


Laudable though his distrust of spying governments is, Garfield wants - for his own reasons - to portray Britain's wartime spirit as "a rather tremulous and febrile blethering, more Dad's Army stumbling than unwavering Churchillian resolve". Now I rather like stories of Churchillian resolve, so I admit to being initially biased, but Garfield only sees proof of what he wants to see, and rather self-confidently - Guardian style.


He gives very few actual examples of xenophobia. I don't dispute them. Such attitudes were in abundance in advance of WW1 as well, and Niall Fergusson argues, I believe*, that the actual German threat (in terms of plans to invade) to Britain was negligible at that time. 


So similar attitudes were to be found in 1940 (but more threat of invasion). But I wonder what our journalist-hero expects to find, in a time of extreme fear and distrust. Imaginations run wild - and yet Garfield thinks one or two stories of fears of parachuting nuns are proof of our national xenophobia, at a time when whole populations were being wiped out; a few years after the Nanjing massacre**; not long after a long and bloody war with Germany, watching their military machine rise again...Surprisingly, some xenophobic comments emerged. To a certain type of journalist this is big news.


Such writers constantly harp on about British "xenophobia" - wherever they can find it - ignoring everything else. They love stories of arrogant British toffs, feckless decision makers, military operations that went wrong etcetc. In short, they are learning nothing, just linking everything they read to a story they have already outlined in their heads - a sure way to mental stagnation.  


* I'm getting facts from Wikipedia on this occasion :)


** I mention this to put stories of our own prejudice at the time into context