The Guest Editors on the Today programme have been the ‘usual suspects’, even the supposedly right-leaning’ ones carefully selected to be sure they present the correct meassage.
We’ve had the actor who was a socialist, anti-Tory and pro foreign aid spending, a cyclist who voted for Gordon Brown and gave us a broadcast on behalf of the Corbyn fellow, an immigrant wife of someone famous who preached immigration, a disabled person who filled Today with stories of disabled people and a black person who couldn’t get over slavery…..and tomorrow a ‘famously gay’ oil businessman….I imagine he will not surprise us with tales from the left bank.
Oh yes, not forgetting one of Osborne’s advisors, so putatively right-wing, Rohan Silva, who was invisibly low profile in the background all week as the Today programme’s business editor…did anyone notice?
Let’s take a look at the ‘right wing’ Silva…..
So first off he ticks the ‘ethnic’ box…his immigrant parents came to the UK from Sri Lanka.
And just how influential is he in government and what policies does he espouse?
Funnily enough, just why did the BBC choose him?, he’s big on progressive policies…on open data, aid spending and he’s big on visa’s for people with ‘exceptional talent’…so immigration likely to be a subject he talked about.
All things the BBC will look approvingly upon.
Oh but one other thing….to undermine the BBC’s and Labour’s narrative about the Tories and race [Possibly timely given the ‘outrage’ about Letwin’s comments]….
It is a curiosity of the present generation that despite the Coalition being derided as out of touch, or dominated by Old Etonians, the two advisers spoken of as being the most influential within No 10 have brown skin and didn’t grow up in London.
One is Ameet Gill, protégé of Niall Ferguson, who partly through the historian’s executive TV producer Melanie Fall — twin sister of Prime Ministerial aide Kate Fall — caught the eye of the Cameron coterie. The other is Rohan Silva.
For the past five or six years, if you asked late twentysomethings in the Westminster milieu which young adviser had the most impact on policy, the answer was often reliably “Silva”.
The Guest Editors were just the BBC on steroids giving us the usual left-wing fare with an excuse to be particularly partial as guest editors, choosing subjects that I suspect didn’t surprise anyone, least of all those in the BBC who chose this dull, tokenistic, backward looking, jaded bunch knowing full well that they would load the programme with ‘right-on’ left-wing kitsch.
Item on R4 “today” on my drive to work, guest editor had asked the team to look at the issue of “Is it ever right to make jokes at the expense of disabled people?”.
As I remembered my primary school days and being told “don`t mock the afflicted” I thought I had this issue pretty much covered so switched off.
I then mused on the Christian roots of the teaching I had received, and wondered why it was necessary for the BBC to investigate this issue after 50 years of Progress. I came to the conclusion that the secular value of “equality” demands that all are treated the same, therefore all are open to humour.
So perhaps the aggressive pursuit of “equality” was actually generating some of todays, modern, edgy humour like Ricky Gervaise and Frankie Boyle (both BBC stalwarts) both of whom gained notoriety for cruel jibes at disabled people.
I mused , yet again at the BBCs role in the coarsening of public conversation and wondered anew at their absurd hypocrisy and presumption to lecture us about rectifying it.
The BBC literally cannot entertain real contrary views any more. So the guest editors all have to fit a pattern. Metropolitan and liberal in politics and social matters. We all know this so forget about the BBC. It is on the way to oblivion.
It would be instructive for someone at the BBC for once be honest about the liberal bias and at least defend it.
To admit it would be to undermine their justification for the BBC. Not their real justification (making up jobs for themselves and somebody else paying the bill) but their pretend justification. The moment the Bolsheviks began a policy of honesty the USSR collapsed. The BBC is rotten to its core and any honesty on its part would kill it stone dead.
The BBC is a a cancer in our national life.