The BBC has for the past several decades displayed a marked tendency to lurch from one minor crisis to another. These episodes tend to follow a predictable pattern. Typically, a scandal of some kind unfolds. This quickly becomes an obsession among journalists (mostly those who work at the Beeb itself). Despite the fact that ordinary people don’t particularly care, the story then comes to dominate media attention for several days in a manner that is out of all proportion to its importance. Eventually, there is a resolution, and the fuss dies down. Then, a few weeks or months later, a fresh (non-)crisis emerges.
Some examples off the top of my head (doubtless utterly opaque to non-British readers) include: the time Angus Deayton, presenter of a panel show, was exposed as having taken cocaine and having sex with prostitutes; the time Russell Brand telephoned, and left lewd voicemail messages live on air for an actor who once appeared in Fawlty Towers; the time phone-in quizzes on BBC programmes were discovered to have occasionally been rigged; the time Emily Maitlis, presenter of a major current affairs show, said openly biased things about Dominic Cummings, architect of the Brexit campaign; the time Nick Griffin, leader of the quasi-fascist British National Party, appeared on the debate show Question Time; the time Radio One’s weekly chart show declined to play Ding Dong! The Witch is Dead in full when it was almost the best-selling single in the week that Margaret Thatcher died…. And so on and so forth. These are all almost the textbook definitions of the phrase ‘storm in a teacup’ in the grand scheme of things. But they become, briefly, national obsessions – primarily because BBC journalists tell us they are. Gary Lineker’s brush with cancel culture is just the latest example.
These scandals have the air of what Paul Piccone used to call ‘artificial negativity’. At face value, they might be said to be damaging to the BBC’s reputation. But what they really serve to do is distract us from thinking about the real scandal, which is how utterly hegemonic Left-liberal progressivism now is within our purportedly impartial national broadcaster. It is much safer for the BBC if we are talking about what Gary Lineker should or should not say than if we are talking about the BBC Charter’s commitment to “reflect a wide range of subject matter and perspectives across our output as a whole…so that no significant strand of thought is under-represented or omitted”. That’s because this requirement, when it comes to conservatism, is now more observed in the breach than the observance.
To take one example, at the weekend the BBC website published a story entitled ‘Italy leaves children of same-sex parents in limbo’. It appears to concern (it is actually quite difficult to figure this out from reading the article itself) a confrontation between the Mayor of Milan and the Italian Interior Ministry over the issue of legal recognition of parent status. The way the story is presented, the Mayor of Milan had a few years ago made the ‘progressive’ decision to allow same-sex couples to be registered as parents. But recently the ‘far-Right’ Government of Ms. Meloni, who “made anti-LGBT rhetoric a cornerstone of her electoral campaign”, forced this practice to stop. Now children of same-sex parents are in “legal limbo”, and face a “range of challenges” including being orphaned if the sole legally-recognised parent passes away.
The article makes no bones about who the goodies and baddies are. Reading it, one would have to conclude that there is simply one side that cares about children and kindness, and one side that comprises unrepentant Nazis who are quite happy to cast children upon the dustheap so long as it means that they can express their ‘hostility’ to LGBT rights. Of the 10 or so people who are quoted or interviewed, only one (Matteo Salvini, the Italian Infrastructure Minister) is sympathetic to the Government’s policy – and his views are represented only by excerpts from a tweet. The other participants, all of whom are against the Government, are quoted from at length about their anxiety and discouragement, and are given free rein to opine about the Italian Government’s obnoxious policies and views and their negative consequences.
It takes a considerable amount of digging into the text of the article itself to glean that there might actually be some nuance to what is going on in the story. First, just as an aside, we discover on close reading that actually it is not the case that Italy’s ‘Right-wing Government’ forced the Mayor of Milan to put children of LGBT couples into ‘legal limbo’ by stopping him registering same-sex couples as parents. Actually, the practice was stopped by the Supreme Court of Cassation (Italy’s highest court); the Italian Interior Ministry just notified the Mayor of Milan of the fact. Whatever one chooses to describe as ‘legal limbo’, it is indisputably true that ignoring decisions of the Supreme Court will probably have that consequence in spades.
But that is in a sense by-the-by. The real problem here is that there is evidently something more to the entire discussion than meets the eye. The issue that animates Meloni and Salvini, it emerges, is here not the abolition of gay families, but a desire to regulate surrogacy. Meloni’s main policy proposal in this area, the article reveals, is actually to make surrogacy a universal crime (i.e., one that would be punishable even outside of the territory of Italy). And Salvini’s main statement on the matter (revealed in a caption to an accompanying photograph) is that “Children are not bought, not rented, not chosen on the internet”. The concern, in other words, is one which people on the Left once would probably have shared: namely the commodification of every facet of human life, including even childbirth and babies themselves.
There is a proper debate that needs to be had about this. Do we want it to be the case that a market for foetuses – for human life – should emerge? For what it is worth, I am fully in support of gay people marrying and adopting children subject to the same safeguarding expectation in place for heterosexual people. And I have no problem with the donation of eggs or sperm. But I do recognise that there is force to the argument that we should tread carefully about the marketisation of pregnancy and child birth – and I look back with a certain fondness on the era when the Left actually had proper critiques of that kind of thing.
More importantly, I recognise that this issue is something about which reasonable people can surely disagree. Whatever I (or, more pertinently, any given BBC journalist) might personally make of Georgia Meloni, she is not a fringe politician or crank. She is the Prime Minister of one of the most important and populous countries in Europe and obviously represents a large constituency within it. Her views matter and should be given due weight and properly represented and discussed – particularly when they are of wider international relevance, which the debate over surrogacy surely is.
Providing this proper representation and discussion should be the role of the BBC. If there is any argument for the existence of a national broadcaster that we are forced by the criminal law to pay for, it is that it should have a unifying function. It should provide a space within which genuine disagreements can be hashed out and, hopefully, a modus vivendi between opposing sides reached. It should in other words allow both sides in an argument to hear one another out so that, even if they do not reach agreement, they at least come to recognise that everyone holds their views for good reasons and not because they are simply stupid or malevolent. This, indeed, is a vitally important constitutional function when performed correctly. But when it comes to issues like Georgia Meloni’s policies on same-sex parenthood, the BBC signally fails to fulfil that purpose. To the average BBC journalist, ensuring that “no significant strand of thought is under-represented or omitted” simply isn’t on the agenda in debates like these. It’s considered more important to signal loyalty to one significant strand of thought alone: the consensus among what Matt Goodwin calls the ‘new elite’. This article on Meloni is merely one small example of that mindset.
What Gary Lineker should or should not be allowed to say matters not one iota when set against the real scandal: that our national broadcaster could not care less about fairly representing both sides to contentious debates, or about fulfilling its proper constitutional role as a neutral forum for the exchange of views. But the Beeb is just much more confident with Lineker-gate style crises than it is with inquiry into the mores of its journalists in general – and such crises come along with just enough regularity to keep us distracted from the deeper problem. This form of ‘artificial negativity’ probably isn’t deliberate – one can’t credit the institution with that level of competence, for one thing. But it is highly effective all the same.
Dr. David McGrogan is Associate Professor of Law at Northumbria Law School. This article first appeared on his Substack page. Subscribe here.
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“other reliable sources such as the Guardian newspaper and the BBC”
At this point I stopped reading. You are ‘avin’ a laugh!
I hoped it was written with “tongue firmly in cheek.”
It was sarcasm old chap.
In the picture, at the top of the article, they are.
It would appear there has been very little thinking applied at all. They thought of a number they would like to increase tax revenue by, and then chose targets braindead Socialists love to target, with absolutely no thought or care for the consequences.
At best.
Or else a deliberate attempt to destroy some important reservoirs of Englishness.
Precisely.
She is undoubtedly nowhere near as smart as she thinks she is.
And the rolls Royce minds in the treasury have revealed themselves to be no better.
It has been recognised for years that the treasury’s economic models are hopelessly unfit for purpose.
What a shambles.
I hear that those that did work alongside her in the complaints department labelled her ‘fucking useless’ – which does seem to have been quite accurate. Already the Mail says that odds on her being sacked in the New Year are shortening rapidly. It might take until we are officially in recession – the fastest ever caused by a Labour government – and the Two Tier Never Here Kier passes through the country to notice.
The “thinking” seems to me more oriented towards destroying our country while temporarily keeping onside people on benefits, the “green” lobby, the woketards and public sector workers – their main constituencies.
There is no doubt in my mind that Kneel’s government are under orders to destroy this country. I do not accept that there is enough intelligence in the Cabinet to pull off what is clearly a well thought through campaign of fiscal destruction so clearly this is a team planted by the Davos Deviants.
As the Blackbelt Barrister pointed out on YouTube yesterday Rachel Thieves claims to be able to account for every penny spent by this government but to date she has failed to elucidate on the contents of the mythical twenty two billion black hole, or is it holes, one or two, I’m losing count?
A succession of tax raising measures which will actually cost the country billions suggests not just abacus-style planning but actually well thought through and costed impoverishment measures. Everything this government lays its hands on has negative consequences. To suggest this is not by design is pushing the definition of gullibility beyond extremes.
I tend to agree – I am sure what they are doing is not driven by any genuine desire to improve the economy.
https://youtu.be/gBXzRTDiQ2M?si=DWJ6Du_zrNakuTe9
blackbeltbarrister
BlackbeltBarrister is getting angrier and more outspoken all the time. He used to play his cards fairly close to his chest but the events of the last few years have clearly pushed him over the edge. Good to have people like him on our side.
Someone like him is in an awkward position that he has a good job earning good money but he is going to be clobbered by these changes.
However the nature of his work as a barrister it isn’t transferable abroad and I don’t see how he could work remotely.
A sharp mind is valued in many places, but not in the current cabinet: they don’t even know what it means.
Clearly they (ALL politicians / ALL the MSM pressitues / and members of the unelected administrative [“Deep”] state) are hell bent on the destruction of western civilization. They are all guilty of treason (that unfortunately no longer carries the death penalty).
Starmer and his cohort despise the nation state. They will do anything to undermine it, including impoverishing citizens.
This is true, but the slo-mo destruction has been well underway, courtesy of the Uniparty,for some time now, and this is without even mentioning the human rights abuses ( and economic disaster ) of epic proportions that was the ‘Scamdemic’ years. Yes, just another man running the country and effing it up on a massive scale, complete with maximum shafting of the British public.
Still waiting on some sort of supporting evidence….Anytime this decade will do
;
Meanwhile, how is that ”Women are to blame for the destruction of the Western World” hypothesis coming along, misogynists?
”What Boris Johnson and the Tories did on mass immigration.
Never forget it. Total betrayal.”
https://x.com/GoodwinMJ/status/1870587276226650147
“slo-mo destruction has been well underway, courtesy of the Uniparty,for some time now”
Absolutely Mogs and it kicked off big time with the traitor’s traitor Bliar in 1997 and has continued unabated ever since. What many have not yet realised is that the catalyst was Brexit and Trump in 2016. The Davos Deviants realised the tide was turning away from them and decided that Agenda 21 would become a completed Agenda 2030 by erm… 2030. And so the real war was launched in 2020 starting with the Scamdemic and off they went.
And yes Johnson can rightly stand alongside Bliar as a traitor because he is and we can add Cameron, May, Fishy and the rest of the various supporting casts too numerous to mention.
Agreed. It has been done deliberately.
Never rule out Occam’s Razor and that the obvious answer is often the correct one. Our Student Union government are just complete morons.
We’ve all made cock-ups at work and thought ‘God, what have I done?’. Do you think Rachel from accounts has had similar thoughts since the doom loop budget? She looks a bit haunted to me lately so maybe what she lacks in understanding of the economy she makes up with self awareness. Nah, I don’t think so either.
I think her appearance at the CBI Conference and that they just sat there after her speech instead of jumping up and down and whooping for joy truly stunned this ignorant and stupid woman.
Presumably the “thinking” has been done by “her brilliant advisers at the Treasury.” Perhaps they are taking the opportunity to try their ideas on as a financial experiment.
She is trying to beat Ed in the Incompetence Competition.
Socialists are never happier then when they destroy their own country.
China will be happy.
‘Simplistic Thinking’?
Rubbish.
It’s an orchestrated campaign to empoverish, disempower and humiliate those the Labour Party hate.
They know what to do, how to do it and possess a massive majority for the next 5 years.
“More taxes to pay for increased spending leads to less tax revenue leads to greater budget shortfall leads to more taxes dampening the economy and thus falling tax revenue and so on till the country is bankrupt and has to go to the IMF for an emergency bailout loan.”
A loan from the IMF. I believe I have been making this point for many, many months although I have moved on somewhat. The collapse will be so great that it won’t be a bailout loan we’ll just be sold off lock, stock and barrel to the highest bidders.
We certainly won’t have the money, or the skills, to build our desperately needed reliable, power stations.
Will we even have anyone that knows what, in principle, needs to be done, like repeal the 2008 Climate Change Act and all its associated legislation?
You really don’t need to be a genius, or even an economist, to recognise that Rachel-from-Complaints budget was going to crash the economy and create Stagflation
Since it’s so blindingly obvious, I think it must have been done deliberately ….. Agenda 2030 and levelling down in action.
might I add that in terms of the Private school VAT tax, not only is it going to cost more as pointed out in the article, but also Parents who sent their child privately they still had to contribute through taxes the sums allocated to state education, for a place not taken, thus giving extra money to the education system for children in state schools. Now that tax will be utilised by the ex private school children, thus reducing the “spare pupil” money that was available.
However you look at the imposition of VAT on Private schools it was done out of Spite, and frankly nastiness. If it were to be equitable ALL Private educational activities would be now subject to VAT, including University, extra curricular lessons, swimming lessons, gym, tennis, music I could go on. The very fact that one section of education has been singled out demonstrates this is just a callous attack by a communist, unethical group of people.
I seem to recall hearing all those other educational activities you listed, will have vat applied as well?
It was also said, that the EU specifically doesn’t charge VAT on education, so 2TK is out of step here
Labour governments have always bankrupted Britain its in their nature they can’t help themselves like a child with turrets.
“Thick” might be a less complicated way of explaining her thinking.
Socialist thinking. If it’s a Socialist it thinks like a Socialist and the outcome is a foregone conclusion – economic collapse… see USSR.
Socialism is not thinking, it is doctrine and dogma.