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 Laurie Penny lectures. Good oh!

So on Monday the Independent decided to run a piece entitled "How should we talk to men about sexism?". A fascinating question, to be sure. The piece was a dialogue between Laurie Penny and Martin Robbins (both call themselves feminists) trying to answer the above question. There are some inadvertent points of interest in the article.

Firstly the cringeworthyness of some male feminists. Mr Robbins kicks off with:

"It’s tough being a male feminist, albeit far less tough than being a female one"

Note that Robbins seems to have learned (or been 'trained') to put in the disclaimer saying "albeit far less tough than being a female one " (so please don't be nasty to me, nice feminists). Possibly he feels he must make mention of his privilege as a male every other sentence? You tell me. 

When Robbins says 

"Where are the spaces where men can stand up and say – actually, this is fucked up? I wish feminism was seen as a discipline in which we discussed men’s issues as much as women’s"

Ally Fogg (who's been there) replies:

"I have to say there's a rather depressing answer to this question guys, which is that anyone who attempts to do so is likely to bring down the furious wrath of the feminist movement upon his or her head. Attempt to do it in a feminist space and the best you can hope for is that you'll get a chorus of mockery.."

Secondly behold the heartwarming intellectual humility on display:

"Feminists often repeat the mantra that [the 'patriarchy' affects men] without properly devoting time to explaining why"


Feminists don't need to argue that the patriarchy affects men, they merely need to explain why. Apparently the debate is all done and dusted. Another snippet:


"Martin: You almost need a sort of training arena where you can say stupid things to feminists and not get shot down in public. When I was struggling to understand patriarchy, I found feminist blogs unhelpful. I was asking questions I now realise were a bit stupid, but out of naivety rather than anything else.

Laurie: I’ve thought about this a lot and unfortunately, I do think female feminists are going to have to be a bit more forgiving and generous in our corrections from time to time..."

Ignore the nauseating brown-nosing from Robbins, just try to imagine Penny graciously being 'forgiving in her corrections'. Bit of a Mistress/slave dynamic in play there. 

This attitude didn't emerge from a vacuum, it's the way many feminists have learnt to behave towards I think it says everything you need to know about feminist's attitude towards men who try to join their ranks.

Sith entity affecting england football performance

Scientists have discovered the source of dark-side sombreness responsible for England’s poor football performances. Readings have indicated extremely high levels of Sith activity precisely located around England’s commentary team in Kiev.

“We’re not naming any names” said Professor Dinkworm of the Institute of Studies, “but there’s one individual who we suspect of radiating negative energy on an epic scale. It’s clearly taken it’s toll on the players”

Scientists believe that this entity calls itself Darth Lawro, and has been clouding the entire teams  thoughts with horrors from the Dark Side.

“This creature must have a colossal midichlorian count,” said Dinkworm, “he’s able to literally depress not just the team, but an entire nation through a trick of the force, using the medium of television”

Viewers phoned in with higher than usual numbers of complaints of headaches, caused by repetition of mantras such as “No shape, no cohesion, no ambition, no hope”.

Readings spiked around the time the commentator concerned said “if his brains were petrol he’d never get out of the garage”

Prof Dinkworm, and his team believe that the waves of dark-side gloom instil the certainty of inevitable defeat that psychically transmits to the players and all England supporters worldwide. “It’s a major discovery”, he said, “If we can overthrow Darth Lawro, we estimate that England will win the next 5 world cups in a row from sheer relief”

“Assuming we keep sacking the manager, of course”

Ray Bradbury's message

I am finally getting the time to look through the links I bookmarked after the death of Ray Bradbury, and have skimmed through what several people have said about him. Now on another day, I will no doubt have a different interpretation of what he said to us. But today, if I had to fix on a single message in a bottle that he was hoping would reach us, it would be this.

There was always this passion in the things he said, even in the interviews I saw him do he always seemed to be slightly manic and in love with life - like a friend of mine I talked to yesterday. I think he was urgently telling us to be in love with life too, to put everything into life like a love affair, to savour every bit of it. And the reason it is so urgent is that if you are not nurturing your life, if you are sitting there feeling bored, you are letting things slowly fester. You need to keep your joy alive, find new avenues for it, or you are in danger of losing (or at least temporarily mislaying) it.

This is why writing is often better than reading - you are forcing yourself to find something to talk about, and find the words for it, and then think again for better words for the same thing - if the first words you thought of were stilted. It struck me once - on a routine bus journey early one morning - that all the thoughts I had were unformed and lost forever the moment I had thought them. At least if I wrote everything down - what a pile of redundant verbiage that would make - but at least I would be articulating those thoughts. And in the act of writing something down you see your ideas far more vividly, warts and all, and start to refine them.

But do remember Bradbury's law, which I will state as - always be reaching for the sun in some way. It's close to my old school motto, actually, and something I've seldom even attempted to live up to.

Ray Bradbury

I think I was 11 years old when some clever soul sent two books wrapped up as Christmas presents through the post. I can't remember who it was who sent these two books, and I had to wait, as usual, until the evening of December 24th - when my family conducted its annual festive ceremony - before I could see what they were

They were a red book and a yellow book of the same size. The stories of Ray Bradbury volumes 1 and 2. My mother was far from impressed with this present - shaking her head portentously, thinking I'd be frightened by the stories. The present-giver had known better.

Seeing one of my more precocious friends reading things like 1984 had instilled in me the desire to read, and to hopefully somehow become 'cleverer' by doing so. But what was I to read? If I were to write a page of advice to my 12 year old self it would certainly contain, in bold letters, the message "read what you enjoy reading, and don't worry too much about the rest. Give it a chance, but if it consistently fails to arouse your interest then leave it"

Reading through those volumes for the first time was one of the periods of inspiration in my life. As the above piece of advice will tell you, I don't think I always followed my nose faithfully enough - too many other things distracted me, and quite often after a period of being interested in a topic, I will get bored - and we're back to square one. But for a while that year I was enthralled.

And when you are that interested as a child, you learn things. You do so as naturally as going to sleep and waking. The next day you are in some sense a new person because your day is lit up with an important piece of understanding that was not there before, and all that you see and hear are linked to this new important fact, so you will remember it for good. It is incorporated into your life.

What I learned I cannot tell you, really. Except that when you read a good writer you get a strong dose of  their personality. And what a personality his was. The preface to those stories was his passionate defence of his creative side. School friends jeered at his stories and comics, till he realised that those were not his friends, but his enemies.

This was eerily close to my own experience - the boys at school laughing at my imaginative life. I was something of a coward, and desperately wanted to fit in. I never could, of course - children are an intolerant bunch. I didn't have his moral courage, but then I never forgot his message in those pages either. The message, and the mesmerising stories stayed with me all my life. I still go back to them from time to time. There really was no other choice over how to live one's life. I clearly can not have the same personality as Bradbury. No one is the same as any other person exactly. But those books helped me find some of mine.

There's not much I can do about it now he is gone. He would want me to turn it to something positive. So I will make his death a spur to remember that lesson every day. I heard the lesson early, I'm still processing it.

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.

The dishonesty of the left on racism

So I understand that in the BBC's ongoing fight against racism, they interviewed a lady (alas I don't have her name) on the radio, who gave a few opinions on the subject. Sadly, it seems that she rolled out the argument - completely discredited in my view - that 'racism' only exists within a particular power dynamic or relation. The idea is that black people cannot be guilty of racism by definition, because they have less power in UK society.

There are so many problems with this argument. Ask a white man being beaten up by several black men - if he thinks he has much greater 'power'. How exactly is this power defined? And where does this idea leave the problem of racism between racial minorities? Does that not count as racism any more? Isn't one rule for white, another for blacks racist in itself?

But today I want to focus on the basic hypocrisy behind all this. Anti-racism was once a noble sentiment. I was under the impression – I think we all were – that racism used to mean something like the following:

“a wrong done to (or a dislike taken towards) someone, on the basis of their ‘race’ or skin colour”

It meant this for a long time, and the fight against this sort of racism had much moral sway. But at some stage a deeply dubious subclause was added (by some) so the new definition became:

“a wrong done to (or a dislike taken towards) someone, on the basis of their ‘race’ or skin colour, but only if they are on the wrong end of a power relation”

Never mind that this ‘power relation’ was undefined and undefinable, everyone knew what the point of it was – to provide a specious rationale for saying that black people could not be called ‘racist’ under any circumstances. Now the only racists were white people. Put this way, it becomes clear where the actual discrimination by race lies. Some want a political stick to beat white people with.

The (creaky) reasoning behind it could be – for all I know - that  white people have “too much” or disproportionate power in the United Kingdom, so that any means are justifiable to try and reduce that power.

But if the meaning of the term “racism” is being casually altered to put one set of people in power and kick another out, then anti-racists are not acting from principles of equality and justice, and merely playing politics, as dishonestly as any politician ever did.