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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I note that her apology is in regards to her bone-headed comments regarding the Jewish community. However this is only one part of the letter that is both racist and offensive. Her ignorance of the Barbary Slave Trade and the appalling privations suffered by white Europeans held as slaves of the Ottoman Empire in the middle east are equally bad if not worse. This organised slave trade continued substantially after the Atlantic Slave Trade was ended, and conditions for its victims where equally unpleasant.
I also find it disappointing but not especially surprising that this is completely ignored by the entire MSM.
You forgot to mention the castrations, which is why you don’t see to many descendants of Africans held as slaves back then running around the middle east
Bigoted, hypocritical, pig-ignorant … and a Labour MP for 35 years. And there are plenty more just like her on the Labour benches.
Well done.
Absolutely needed to be said. Thirty five years an MP and still as thick as the day she was born. A loathsome woman who has never been anything but an utter disgrace to this country. Amongst a den of thieves, layabouts, incompetents and inadequates she reigns supreme.
Not quite never – she opposed the medical mandate!
This blundering buffon had to be gotten rid of one way or another before the next election. Starmer may be a beady eyed incompetent, but at least he realises you cannot win elections with blithering idiots like this in your party.
Racism, gender, vax status, climate etc etc. These are all ‘contentious’ issues fostered and fuelled by the powers that be. In this way, people waste their energies squabbling amongst themselves. The privileged get away without scrutiny, feathering their nests and tightening their control.
I take it that Traveller is a modern euphemism for Romany gypsies, who have distinct racial characteristics, rather than tinkers, commuters, sales reps and holiday makers.
I would also be interested to hear what special racial characteristics apply to the Irish (who included he late Phil Lynott), as opposed to any other Western European national.
Plenty of Romany died along side Jews in Hitler’s death camps and have suffered because of their race in Eastern Europe.
Parliament debated the WHO pandemic treaty last week which will open the door to full global dictatorship. DEFRA are making quiet Danish style plans to destroy the UK farming industry, our energy security is hanging by a mosquito’s ball bag and extraordinary numbers of people are dying with ’cause of death unknown’.
And what do we have in the MSM? A racist in a race baiting panto, a government bullying soap opera, claims that increasing trace gas plant food ruins baseball matches and an article musing on the type of technology potentially needed to shrink bingo wings.
Musk come on man, we need that spaceship.
She’s an idiot, has always been an idiot and always will be an idiot. However this is the Daily Sceptic associated with the Free Speech Union. I defend her right to say what she said. The world should be free to hear her words without censorship or misrepresentation so we can judge for ourselves just what we think. And in all honesty, I think context has been lost and she made a legitimate point. What she actually said is not how it is being reported. I may be right wing and I may hate identity politics, but even I can appreciate her point that being black is an ever present fact that can lead to more exposure to racism (from the few racists that are out there – my point not hers). If you are Jewish, it is much of the time, for most Jews, not evident to the racists who are potentially going to be hostile that you are Jewish. Of course that she is being hit by the kind of misrepresentation tactics she has so often deployed against others has a delicious irony. But that doesn’t change the fact I deplore it when she and her leftist ilk do it, so deplore others doing it now.
Do you really think that’s the point she’s making? It’s possible to read that into it, but not obvious, at least to me. I think you might be projecting your own logic onto what she wrote.
She seems to draw a distinction between “racism” and “prejudice” which I struggle to follow. Isn’t “racism” just “prejudice based on race”? Is she saying that the other groups are not separate “races”?
I don’t think anyone here thinks she should be censored or stopped from saying these things. Whether she should keep her job in the Labour Party is a matter for them – most likely a tricky decision for them.
I agree it’s true that discussing anything to do with Jews or Israel seems to be impossible to do calmly, but I don’t think her remarks are part of that general area of discussion, though of course she is entitled to her view that blacks are a “special case”.
Overall I think it’s great that the woke left seem inclined to eat each other from time to time, and this represents one of the few hopes I have that their ideas will in the eyes of the public at large be discredited.
I’m very literal. She doesn’t say Jews are merely subject to “red head“ prejudice. In fact everything she has said, sentence by sentence is factually correct. Granted you can easily believe her to be be implying the same point as she makes about redheads applies to the groups she identifies later in the paragraph, but that is an assumption on your part. I’m pretty sure everyone commenting on here will have argued a case the other way with exactly this reasoning I am giving, when that person is a part of their political tribe. Pretty sure Boris and Jeremy Clarkson provided quite a few pertinent examples in their writing and the subsequent furore when something “controversial” is said.
She talks about various “white” groups including Jews that “undoubtedly experience prejudice” which is “similar to racism”.
Sure you can interpret it that way, but I think the far more important point is, sheesh, that the culture war leads to thin skinned offence taking IS the problem. No let me rephrase that, because isn’t the point here, if we are being honest, that people are feigning taking offence just to inauthentically use it as a political weapon? I mean, honest question, are you honestly offended by what she said, or do you see it more as an opportunity to make counter comments? I’m not criticising you here on a personal level, because I know I can certainly enjoy some comment jousting and anyway we are on the same side. But isn’t that honestly more the point?
I am not at all “offended” by what she said. Perhaps I would be if I were Jewish or whatever. Let her speak – never interrupt a fool!
I think her arguments are weak. She cherry picks instances of racism taken to extremes to which only blacks have been subjected and uses them to conclude that other groups she refers to do not suffer racism, only something similar.
This we can certainly both agree on!
It was the left that weaponised the concept of “offence”. I’m more than happy to turn it back on the left, at any time of the day or night.
I don’t accept that there is a race called “Jews”: Simon Schama and Jeff Goldblum clearly don’t belong to the same ethnic group.
I thought there were clear differences in bits of their DNA but of course there has been a lot of mixing.
That’s because of the level of inbreeding – they have a number of very common genetic disorders as a result (in much the same way as islam).
Excellent comment tof.
The backlash against her letter has been extraordinary. I don’t like her, and she is not an asset to the Labour party, but it seems all nuance is lost when it comes to discussion about race.
I can sort of see what she is driving at, while at no time defending anti-Semitism. Unless they open their mouths and speak, I would be unable to pick out an Irish person or a ‘traveller’ or Roma in a crowd, whereas a black person is more obvious. (One of my children is ginger so I tend to warm to this group…)
She has got many facts wrong, as the article points out, and she was unwise to poke this particular ants nest, but the rush to condemn her articulating an unfashionable view shows that society at large is as cowardly and prone to herd-mentality as ever.
In a crowd, the Roma is the one saying “Beeg Ishooo”
I don’t see why it’s extraordinary. She’s trying to pull rank in the “victims of racism” stakes, and any victim group that she says she or her people outrank are probably going to feel pretty pissed off by that. I’m not offended personally, just think she is talking rubbish. Different races and nationalities have been victimised in different ways since time immemorial – arguably some races have suffered more than others overall, but that’s not really what she’s arguing.
The difficulties surrounding any discussion regarding Jewish people, Israel, anti-Semitism etc are IMO a different matter. I agree that it seems impossible for anyone to discuss it rationally without it descending into name-calling, but I don’t think that’s really the issue here (though obviously the usual suspects have been wheeled out to use the “anti-semitic” card which I am not sure applies in this case). A big part of the problem isn’t history, it’s where we are today and the relative levels of success enjoyed by different groups and the countries they populate.
I think it’s your latter point that has struck me the most: the way the critics of DA have leapt onto the antisemitism bandwagon, no doubt owing to her association with the Corbyn Labour party.
I don’t detect anything particularly anti Semitic in what she said, but that hasn’t stopped all the offence-takers hitting the nuclear button thereby shutting down discussion.
She’s still a pain in the neck.
I agree that belittling the suffering from racism of Jews isn’t anti-semitic, just daft/inaccurate. I might be offended by it, were I Jewish, but that’s not the same as anti-Semitism. The professional victim brigade have a bit of a problem in this area though; hopefully it will be their undoing.
It’s a case of over-compensation. See l we are not bigots and don’t just censor people on the Right, we are ‘fair’ and believe in ‘equality’.
Its just Panto complete with comical, grotesque dame.
The moment I open my mouth, people realize that I’m a foreigner. The more educated ones recognize my German accents, others tend to think that I must be Polish. I’ve been asked Are you Polish? with this characteristic, latent aggression in the voice of the speaker for more times than I can remember and contempt for foreigners, especially foreigners believed to be Polish, is by no means uncommon in England.
Isn’t Diane Wrong shoes suppose to be an Oxford grad?
The fact that she chose to air her ignorant and extremely distasteful views in a national newspaper shows these are her true beliefs. The guff about it being an early draft is laughable. Thankfully we still have a semblance of free speech and the Observer published her letter, showing her up for what she really is, a hypocritical race baiting bigot. She is not fit to be an MP.
Diane Abbott – “I misspoke.” Whoops caught lying.
“It was an early draft.” Whoops, I dropped a right firkin clanger but I didn’t mean it. Honest.
Diane Abbott – never been known to leave home without the race card in her handbag.
She has been know to leave home with two left shoes.
Oh yes. Brilliant.
She needs to stay, purely for the comedy value.
Lammy can fill that slot quite well.
It’s truly excellent that she has outed herself as the racist bigot that she clearly is, in a national newspaper, The Observer no less. You couldn’t make it up.
Haha.. you just have to laugh.. Diane Abbot of all people caught out by the racist card.
She obviously wasn’t aware of old Voltaire’s wise perception all those years ago.. “If you want to really know who rules over you, just look who you’re not allowed to criticise”. A quote now being denied by every fact checker on planet earth.. proving without doubt its authenticity.. haha
I’ve zero time for any politician of any political persuasion, they’ve proven themselves to be bought and paid for charlatans time and time again. However, I am surprised by Abbot, who being a loyal Corbyn supporter, surely must have know who brought him down with the same smears of anti-semitism.. and of course who they put in his place.. the self confessed, kneeling, zionist friend of Israel.. Career Starmer.. You couldn’t make it up.. could you????
The Apology of Death…
What is a ‘white-seeming’ person? How does one ‘seem’ to be white?
She is all the more stupid because that Whoopi creature in the US made the same observation about the Jews a few months back and ordure was heaped on her from a great height from all quarters.
‘And at the height of slavery,’
When was slavery at its height exactly? During Greek times, Roman times, Persian times? Or how about the island of Britain pre-Roman, during the Roman occupation and after colonisation by the Angles, Saxons and Jutes up to the Norman Conquest?
What about the slaving raids by the Irish on the West Coast of Britain and Viking raids?
What about English people transported to the colonies to serve their sentence as indentured slaves?
Until the early 19th century, all maritime powers around the Mediterranean operated fleets of galleys rowed by galley slaves manacled to their benches. Slavery was a fixture during antiquity and probably reached its height in the times of the Roman Empire. It still existed in England in the middle ages. The old testaments already contains laws regarding the treatment of slaves. And none of this was about black people from Africa.
The problem with identify politics is that it’s done by Amercians who know preciously little, if anything, about the world and its history outside of the USA and who couldn’t care less about it. They’re apparently thinking an attitude like “Yo, world, suck it up! You’re much below us, anway!” is sufficient with respect to that. Instead of discussing how many structurally oppressed people can dance on the head of a pin, ie, what is or isn’t proper racsim, a much better reaction would F***k off back to the motherland, ignorant dumbasses, and take the likes of Diane Abbot with you.
Indeed, and it’s telling that despite the article to which she is responding talking explicitly about Britain, she quotes examples from pre-Civil Rights USA, as if they applied equally here.
“Whatever the source of these ideas, though, they are clearly factually dubious and likely to exacerbate racial divisions rather than heal them.”
Not sure her aim is to heal racial divisions.
Those who earn a living from stoking racism and finding it wherever they look are not interested in healing divisions. There is no money in it.
Harmony doesn’t pay.
Indeed – no money, no votes and no power.
Still, at least she went against her party to oppose the medical mandate!
True. Labour were more covidian than the tories but there were some patchy rebellions towards the end
I repeat, my ancestor Sir Cloudesley Shovell played a part in the redemption of English slaves from Africa in 1675. And some English people in the 19th Century endured slave like conditions in England. Seriously, what do they teach in these schools?
What a glorious name!
I’m Jewish and I agree with Dianne Abbott’s original comments.
For a start, Judaism is a religion, a creed, not a race, so you can’t be racist towards or about Jews; what you can be is prejudiced, which is what she said. Although now lapsed, I’m from an orthodox family and as a kid you would have seen me walking to shul on Saturday mornings with the rest of the congregation looking distinctly Jewish! So how many times was I or anyone I knew subjected to so-called racism in working class Leeds. That’s right, none. Don’t remember any of it. I simply don’t believe British Jews walk in fear. I don’t think black people walk in fear any more either, but if we were to go back a decade or two this might have been true for black and asian members of the population. Certainly Pakistanis were the victims of appalling racism, literal racism, where I’m from as recently as the 90s.
Of course none of this is has got anything to do with any genuine regard or concern about the plight of the UKs minorities. It’s a divide and conquer tactic meant to fracture and weaken society and embed the idea that we are a nation of bigots who need top down control, censorship and surveillance. I wish Diane Abbott had said that instead of her nauseating apology.
Finally, and very controversially, Jews need to stop feeding into this nonsense and playing victim. It’s not a good look. I’m in Vietnam, a country that was bombed, burnt, poisoned, raped and otherwise razed to the ground just a few generations ago. You do NOT see Vietnamese playing victim. They rebuild, remember – yes, forgive, and move on. My erstwhile homies could learn a thing or two from them.
Good to hear from you CG. Great post.
Diane Abbott opens her mouth to change her feet. Hardly a shocking revelation to compare with the classic “Man bites dog”!