BBC ‘DIVERSITY’ AGENDA IS ‘IDEOLOGICAL UNIFORMITY’: Charles Moore (£ Daily Telegraph 14/7), urging over-75s to revolt against being “mugged” by being forced to pay BBC licence fees, stated:
“An agenda of recruitment and programming has promoted ‘diversity’ – by which, I suspect, is meant ideological uniformity – as a higher value than truth or news, education and entertainment . That agenda is actively hostile to the attitudes of most of the elderly. Spending is being splurged on the indifferent young’.
Mr Moore also argued that the BBC had chosen – during a pandemic – to launch a cultural revolution against being white, being British, being male, and taking pride in our history and culture.
BBC “NO LONGER MEETS ITS REMIT”: Helen Dale (CapX 13/7), noting that a mannequin of Jimmy Savile with a sign reading “None of them stopped me, and your licence paid for it” had appeared on the plinth of Edward Colston statue in Bristol, claimed that the BBC was no longer fulfilling its mission to ‘inform, entertain and educate’. Ms Dale said that as a result, she was no longer paying her licence fee, and added that she had written about wars more amusing than BBC comedy. She declared:
“Every Sunday, I’m reminded the less BBC imbibed, the better. Instead of God and Gardening, soothing and useful by turns, we’re treated to endless three-minute, multi-guest ding-dongs directed to Twitter’s politics tragics and no-one else.”
Noting that the Corporation had stopped exempting most over-75s from paying their licence fees, she said it was likely when the first prosecution of a pensioner occurred, the BBC would blame “Tory funding cuts’, despite legislation allowing it to recoup losses elsewhere. Ms Dale said that most of the 140,000-a-year prosecutions for non-payment of the licence fee were of women who were already struggling financially and their fines of an average of £176 made things worse for them.
IS BBC ‘ULTRA WOKE?’: Craig Byers (Is the BBC Biased? 13/7), noting that the BBC had issued advice to its many thousands of employees that, to avoid causing offence to transgender employees, they should use ‘their pronouns’ to identify themselves in online correspondence, opined:
“This wasn’t something the BBC had to advise. It was their choice. And, thus, the BBC took sides again in a matter of public controversy at a highly sensitive time – and, worse, on the side of a highly vocal, hyper-aggressive, unreasonable, small minority of people who (very wrongly) think they’re on the side of the angels.
“There are some 400 transgender people at the BBC, some 2% of the total. That’s hugely above the UK average. As in so many other ways, on this, the BBC is demographically very different to the UK as a whole. By being massively over-representative in one respect the corporation becomes massively under-representative in other respects.”
Mr Byers concluded:
“But is any of that what’s going on as far as the BBC’s concerned, or are they just being knee-jerk, ultra-pro-‘woke’ over this? I actually suspect that the number of BBC people discomforted by having such hyper-‘progressive’ folly forced upon them will outnumber the 2% of BBC staff it’s aimed at – albeit probably not massively, given that the BBC is a very PC organisation and, thus, many of its staff will be cringingly willing to bend every part of their/its/hers/his anatomy to signal those largely vicarious virtues.”
BBC POST-BREXIT PESSIMISM ‘DISMANTLED’: BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg had come under strong attack from Brexiteers over her claims on the Today programme that post-Brexit, UK mobile phone owners could face a surge in prices when using their phones from EU countries (Daily Express 13/7). Alessandra Scotto Di Santolo said that Brexiteers on Twitter had lambasted her ‘doom-mongering assessment’, with Paul Staines, the owner of the Guido Fawkes website, stating that no UK network was planning to raise charges after Brexit. He had also claimed that increases would be ‘suicidal for market share’. Ms Di Santolo also noted that a listener to the programme had asked why Today presenters had not challenged ‘Remainer propaganda points’.