‘WOKE’ BBC ‘SHOULD BE DEFUNDED’, SAYS BURCHILL’: Julie Burchill (£ Telegraph 18/10) argued that as ‘a circuit-break to the gloom and doom ahead’, the government – in order to win back support – should embark on a ‘brisk defunding of the BBC’. She opined:
‘I’m sure that most of us could get behind putting a rocket under all those self-righteous metropolitans who work for it and treating them to a trick they’ll never forget. How odd to think that the BBC was once one of the main things that kept the nation’s morale up – during the Second World War, especially. I dread to think how they’d react these days; no doubt we’d be instructed not to mindlessly rally round the flag against Germany in a jingoistic way – especially considering the racism of Churchill, in contrast with Hitler’s vegetarianism.’
Ms Burchill added that when Charles Moore, former editor of the Daily Telegraph, had been mooted as a possible candidate to become chairman of the BBC, ‘you could smell the fear and the fury of the Woke across the capital’, and that they should not be kept on the run. She asserted:
‘They’ll never reform themselves and to believe they will would be as foolish as expecting the best from the EU, another corrupted monolith with which they have so much in common; the endless entitlement, the fake enlightenment, the ceaseless spending of other people’s money.’
Ms Burchill concluded:
‘And now more than ever, as our country stands on the brink of a social sundering far greater than anything we have experienced since the civil war – north against south, pro-lockdown against anti-lockdown, British country against British country in a crumbling union – we don’t need yet another state-sponsored snowflake telling us how racist we are. Step forward Countryfile presenter Ellie Harrison, who has announced that the countryside itself is racist: ‘In asking whether the countryside is racist, then yes it is; but asking if it’s more racist than anywhere else – maybe, maybe not.’ Institutions outlive their usefulness and at that point they change or they perish. ‘Nation shall speak peace to nation’ (the BBC motto) and ‘United in diversity’ (the EU motto) are amusingly interchangeable – and they are wearing thin, despite the oceans of money employed to paper over the cracks. We don’t know where we’ll be this time next year, so do put the boot in, Boris – give us some savage amusement till this nightmare before Christmas is over.’
BBC NEWSREADERS’PAID FAR TOO MUCH’: Sophie Barnes reported that Martin Bell, a former BBC foreign correspondent (£ Telegraph 18/10), had claimed that BBC newsreaders – earning up to £465,000 a year in the case of Huw Edwards, who presented the News at Ten on BBC1 – were paid far too much for ‘mostly reading words off an autocue’. She added that Mr Bell, who had left the BBC in 1995 to stand as an ‘anti-corruption’ MP, had said he had earned £60,000 and had never asked for a pay rise.