This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column And I have been met with unending scornful denial. This vital truth, that the most important cultural and media organisation in Britain, which shapes the views of millions on every subject, is tilted against the conservative cause in every field of human endeavour, has been for years the most obvious fact in the country – but also the one most utterly denied. Well, now we have double-proof that the BBC is biased and knows it is. And also of how that bias has helped to shape British politics. First, from the Director-General himself, Mark Thompson, above, we have the admission that, when he joined the Corporation 30 years ago, there was a ‘massive bias to the Left’. I love that ‘was’, as if all those Eighties Leftists have stopped being what they were, and stopped hiring people like themselves. Also there’s the absurd claim that the Corporation now has ‘an honourable tradition’ of journalists of the Right working for it. Really? Perhaps they are strong among the makers of children’s programmes in Gaelic. The BBC remains reliably pro-EU, pro-PC, anti-Israel, in favour of the sexual revolution, soft on drugs, fanatical about man-made climate change. It has partly cured itself of its crude anti-Americanism, and Mr Thompson’s confession is plainly a sign of a wider recognition that things have not been right, in both senses of the word. Two of its own prominent journalists, Jonathan Charles (on the EU) and Roger Harrabin (on global warming), last week broadcast extraordinary programmes on Radio 4. In one, Mr Charles actually said of the launch of the euro in 1999: ‘Even now I can remember the great air of excitement. It did seem like the start of a new era ... for a few brief days I suppose I and everyone else suspended their scepticism and all got caught up in that euphoria.’ I suppose he did. And Mr Harrabin mused, faintly hilariously: ‘I’ve never considered myself a climate-change sceptic.’ No, nor has anyone else. But he conceded: ‘I’ve always had questions that weren’t fully settled, particularly about our ability to model future climate given our poor knowledge of some elements of the current climate system.’ But now we have the latest evidence, from Mr Thompson’s briefing notes, that the BBC has for a long time been co-operating closely with David Cameron, who disembowelled the Tory Party to make it acceptable to the BBC’s militant cultural revolutionaries. I first pointed this out long before the Election, when the BBC refused to disclose details of a meeting Mr Thompson had then with Mr Cameron. Around the same time, BBC coverage of the Tories switched from an unending stream of high-pressure slime to cautious approval, gradually warming into endorsement. The key to this is which of the two was and is the senior partner at these meetings. You will get a better picture of modern Britain if you grasp that it is the BBC which, as the medieval Church once did, gives or withholds its blessing to the leaders it approves of. Lean to the Left, or face frozen disapproval, consistently unfair coverage, misrepresentation and actual exclusion from the national debate. This is a real, dangerous scandal threatening our future. Yet it merits less space in the media than a fuss about cricket. Maybe Mr Brown is weird. But isn’t Mr Blair just as peculiar? Just, for a start, look at the way he sat during the alleged ‘interview’ with Andrew Marr last week,right. ‘Audience’ would be a more accurate term. I have noticed he often does this, legs wide apart, with his tie draped over his, er, trousers. Strange, or what? Then there’s the passage in which he claims to have had a premonition that he would become leader of the Labour Party. ‘Premonition’? Ha ha. I long for the day when someone explains just how this no-account barrister rose to high office. (Here I repeat my appeal for anyone who was ever represented by him in court to get in touch.) How did he become MP for a safe northern Labour seat, and then leader of a major political party? All the books so far written fail to explain this miraculous series of events. Maybe it really was the finger of destiny, as Mr Blair seems to imagine. Carole Caplin might know. Or maybe (my preferred explanation) it was really a good old Labour Party machine fix, which began with a search for someone malleable who was the absolute opposite of Michael Foot (no walking stick, no donkey jacket, no ideas, no books, no thick glasses, looks good on TV) and ended with an unhinged war on Iraq. Note, as Mr Blair admits, that being Prime Minister was the first and only job in government he ever had. There’s a fascinating story to be told one day of how this grave national mistake came to be made, but this isn’t it. Meanwhile, these memoirs – written in a consistently jokey style – are much more like those of an actor than those of any politician I’ve ever come across. He looks back on the great stage of history, across which he was ushered, inwardly baffled, by skilled directors and producers, much as some old ham might look back on his days in Hollywood. Iraq... do we really want to do it again? And still I meet people who claim that the Iraq War was in some way a success. As the USA formally ends its combat role, the country is lawless, riven by sectarian hate. Despite its supposed ‘democracy’, its politicians cannot form a government. Iran, supposedly our enemy, dominates Iraqi politics. Christians have fled persecution in their tens of thousands. Many Iraqis live abroad, too scared to return home for one good reason or another. Women, far from being ‘liberated’, are now forced to wear black shrouds. There is terror in the streets. Power and water have never been properly restored. The men America paid to fight for it are now deserting back to the insurgency. The pro-British middle class, destroyed by sanctions, has never recovered. And a new war is in the making over Kurdish control of the northern oilfields. And then there are the dead and maimed. Until those responsible in high places have admitted this was a dreadful error, we face the risk that they may try again, perhaps in Iran. They must be made to apologise before any such stupidity takes place. ********************************************* The official persecution of Blackpool teacher David Roy, driven from his job for standing up to revolting indiscipline in his classroom, is yet more evidence that the State and the law in this country instinctively side with the wrong people. The lies of troublemaking children were readily believed. Only Mr Roy’s determination led to his vindication. Many others, sensing the mood, have surrendered to chaos, and who can blame them? But reports blaming this change on Labour policies are misleading. Successive Tory governments have left most state education in the hands of the Left. And they continue to do so. 29 August 2010 12:11 AM This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column The real mystery about the death of Dr David Kelly is this: What and who drove him to kill himself? These important questions are being buried by what I think is silly speculation. Who on earth would have wanted to murder him, and why on earth would they have wanted to do so? If he did, he would never have been able to look himself in the face again. Such things can – and do – drive people to go to lonely places, hack repeatedly at their wrists with knives, and cram down fistfuls of pills. The Blair apparatus was furious with Dr Kelly for telling the truth about its concerted campaign to defraud the British people into sup porting a wrong and stupid war. It was backed at the time by the Tory Opposition, which was typically useless over Iraq as it has been over everything else. And please note, the Tory Party has never retracted or apologised for its support for the war. So it is just as interested in forgetting the shameful abuse of power that was at the heart of it, and which Dr Kelly exposed. Also, remember that the ludicrous Hutton Report exonerated the Government and somehow blamed the BBC. Like all angry governments caught in the act of deceit, Mr Blair’s machine wanted recantations and grovelling – not least to scare any other civil servants involved into utter silence. Abusers of power come to hate the truth. This is an account that still hasn’t been settled. By all means, have an inquest – it can do no harm. But don’t forget what this is really about – the abuse of power and the gravest foreign policy mistake since Suez, still not admitted by those who made it. Whatever happened to William Hague? I don’t at all regret defending him – as I did, sometimes alone – in his time as leader of the Tory Party. Our sheep-like media ganged up on him in a way that still makes me rather ill to recall. He was, as everyone now admits, a far better leader than he was given credit for, undermined and ultimately destroyed by the same creepy forces that eventually put the liberal David Cameron in charge. I always assumed that the first baseball cap incident was just a mistake. But the recent picture of him, clad in his IQ-reducer and shades, makes me wonder. Has he, like so many Tory politicians and journalists of the Nineties, decided to make his peace with the Blairite settlement, to accept the cultural revolution and the EU takeover and the rest? Opposition to Mr Cameron’s Blairism ought to be coming from somewhere by now. But I don’t think it will be coming from under Mr Hague’s horrible headgear. All the logic of our education system leads to one conclusion: to bring back fairness and rigour, restore the grammar schools so stupidly destroyed by Anthony Crosland and Margaret Thatcher. But because all major parties are implicated in the crime of wrecking them, none has the courage or the decency to admit that this was a mistake. This failure also leads to the appalling policies of the supposed intellectual David Willetts, who wants to force universities to reject qualified applicants in favour of unqualified ones, in the sacred cause of equality. Actually, I suppose you’d have to be an intellectual to be unable to see just how stupid this is. The one-time conservative Michael Gove on Friday openly joined in this campaign for equality – that is, for state schools to put Marxoid social engineering first and education second. When, exactly, did the Tory Party formally dedicate itself to a policy of egalitarianism, the absolute hard core of socialist and communist thinking (though all socialist societies are fiercely unequal in practice), and the thing which conservatives are supposed to be against? This week’s Order of Gullible Stupidity goes to Professor Colin Blakemore, for his drivelling remarks about heroin abusers. Among other PC twaddle, he said: ‘The crux of this problem, I’m afraid, is the persistent view that drug addiction is somehow the fault of the addict.’ Well, of course it is. The ‘addict’ has freely decided to poke into his body an illegal substance that is well known to be highly damaging to health and morals. Why do people think that a scientific qualification makes a person immune from fashionable propaganda? The oppo site seems to be the case. The average squirrel could see that if you treat criminals of any kind with sympathy and kindness, you’ll get more criminals. And the possession and use of heroin is, rightly, a crime – as the families of those who follow this path of cruel self-indulgence well know. The trapped miners in Chile are to be given ‘antidepressants’, propelled down the narrow tube that connects them with the outside world. How horrible. If these men are downhearted, it’s because they are trapped in a small, smelly cave half-a-mile below ground, with little to do and no hope of escape for months. They would be better off doing as they have been – singing to keep up their spirits. The last thing they need is to start taking drugs – especially ones increasingly associated with suicide and violence, whose operation on the brain is a mystery and whose supposed cheering effects are no better than those of placebos. The lazy acceptance that real misery can be cured by a capsule, and contentment is available in a blister-pack, is a curse of the modern world. It’s all very well making the ‘British’ passport harder to forge. But – apart from the fact that it’s not British at all but an EU passport – the real problem is that such documents are so easy to obtain. Recently, on my way back from an Eastern European destination outside the EU, I sat next to a man who spoke almost no English and had to use sign language to explain to me that he wanted me to get up so he could go to the lavatory. When the stewardess came round offering British landing cards, I expected him to ask for one. But he smilingly produced a brand new British passport. No wonder the country is now the most crowded in Europe. NB: The Cameron Government has no plans to do anything at all about this.
04 September 2010 6:56 PM
It must be true. The BBC's own boss says it's biased
Dr Kelly would never have lied for Blair – is THAT the reason he killed himself?
27 August 2010 12:24 PM
Goodbye, 'Harry Rose'. And 'Tiberius Dole', 'Pulchritudinous', 'Daniel2' and the rest of them. And Good Riddance
Sunday, 5 September 2010
For about 20 years, I and a few others have been pointing out that the BBC is biased to the Left, morally, culturally and politically. I have made this case patiently, with evidence, not crudely.
Blair, a baffled old ham striking a very peculiar pose ...
What a very odd creature is Anthony Blair. I feel I can justly point this out because Mr Blair has devoted so very much of his gruesomely interesting book to making nasty comments about the weirdness of Gordon Brown.
There’s no sensible answer to that. The only person who wanted David Kelly to be dead that awful day was poor David Kelly himself, God rest his soul.
Something had been done or said to him that made his life unbearable. I have always thought that he was under irresistible pressure to lie in public to save the Government’s face. If he didn’t lie, then nasty things would have happened to him.
In IQ-reducer and shades, even Hague’s a liberal now
Tories who turned into class warriors
Using heroin is rightly a crime. Any addict’s family knows that, professor
****************************************
**************************************
I have read carefully the contribution by Mr ‘Rose’ posted overnight. I should note that Mr 'Gibson' another haunter of the 'Peter Hitchens Must Die' site, says there that I frequently say that I will take action for defamation and then do not fulfil my words. In this, he is as inaccurate and/or ill-informed as Mr Rose is in his attack upon me. I have made one such actual threat, many years ago, against a person who baselessly accused me of racial bigotry - and that person swiftly provided the retraction and apology I sought, on the advice of that person's own lawyers. This is because my case was, as it is in this instance, unanswerable and well-documented, with a multitude of witnesses. The person had told a falsehood against me, which would tend to damage my reputation in the eyes of right-thinking people.
Now, as to Mr Rose's 'argument', it mainly consists of matters about which he disagrees with me. He is entitled to do so. Many people do. In a free society, that is perfectly proper. His problem is the bubble of arrogance in which he dwells, in which he thinks that it is a wicked act to hold views different from his.
Hence his use of fake-Freudian terms such as 'Homophobia', 'Islamophobia' and 'Xenophobia', which are just name-calling dressed up in grandiose and pseudo-classical language. But they are far more serious than name-calling in one important way. Because once Mr Rose and his co-thinkers have classified a person as holding such views, that person is no longer accorded any genuine opportunity, by them, to make his arguments. Nor is he to be allowed tolerance, basic courtesy or anything remotely resembling a fair hearing. Nor is there any further need actually to examine these arguments with the tools of reason. Instead he is to be treated as personally sinful, and therefore disqualified from their world.
I deal with these questions, especially these supposed 'phobias' at length in my book 'The Cameron Delusion', should Mr 'Rose' or any of his friends ever be interested in finding out what I actually think, instead of making up my opinions for me.
In their view, the offender (in this case, me) is suffering, at best, from a pathology. At worst, he is automatically wicked because he holds views different from those which Mr Rose has lazily absorbed from the conventional wisdom of the age. This is what makes Mr Rose and his co-thinkers believe they are licensed to heap personal abuse on my head, to participate in gigglesome websites calling (oh so post-modernly and ironically) for my death - and to make up falsehoods about me.
These are the standard roots of totalitarianism, and their full effects can be seen in the summary trials of Citizen Foucqier-Tinville's French Committee of Public safety, of Andrei Vyshinksy's Moscow Trials under Stalin and the National Socialist Volksgericht presided over by Roland Freisler. All are remarkably similar. The defendant is only there to be condemned and abused. His guilt is assumed, his defence unheard, his personal failings (aristocrat, bourgeois, reactionary, counter-revolutionary, traitor to the Fuehrer, etc) the important thing. He is automatically bad because he is against the prevailing wisdom of the day. And of course at the end he really 'Must Die' in an unironic and far from post-modern way.
The totalitarian mind is convinced that it and all its thoughts are good and right, and that its opponents are self-evidently wicked and wrong (and better locked up or even dead). Luckily for us, Mr 'Rose' and his friends do not currently have any power. But they are in a long tradition of intolerant idealists which has frequently held power and invariably abused it. If they even began to grasp the end of it they would, I think, be chastened. But they don't. In the immortal words of Don Maclean they are like the man who said 'I'd heard about people like me. But I'd never made the connection.’
So they are shocked (for instance) at the idea that the police might rough up someone caught in an act of destructive vandalism, which is entirely distinct from the Ian Tomlinson case, in which, as it happens, I think the police behaved appallingly - as could be deduced from my description of an encounter with the riot squad during the Gaza demonstrations, published on this site some time ago.
But they are not shocked at their own totalitarian views, which lead ineluctably to the abuse of psychiatry in the Serbsky Institute, or to the gates of the labour camp and the steps to the gallows or the guillotine (instruments they noisily abhor if used against actual criminals).
Next, he tries to justify his attempt to smear me by association with the BNP. Well, anyone can do this who wants to, and who has no concern for truth. The BNP, though I can't prove this, quite possibly do copy some of their 'policies' from conservative columnists. So, on occasion, do the 'mainstream' parties. I can't stop them. My policies are good and workable, and the result of much thought. They are also plainly popular among considerable numbers of people. Others, seeking popularity, might well feel tempted to copy them. So what? There's no Patent Office for policies. To cite these similarities doesn't in any way provide evidence that I support or sympathise with the BNP itself. On the same basis I expect I could claim (which I emphatically don't) that Mr Rose is a keen ally of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.
There are many things on which I would differ with the BNP, as it happens. I don't - for example - think the death penalty should be applied to anyone except exceptionally heinous murderers. Nor do I support the reintroduction of corporal punishment in the penal system, only in schools. The fact that Mr 'Rose' thinks that I do advocate these things, because his simplified world-view makes him think he doesn't need to read what I actually write, doesn't make it so.
If the BNP were merely a party which supported national independence, a stern criminal justice system, a rigorous education system and departure from the EU, then nobody would mind being associated with it.
But this isn't so. It is something else - something decisive and important - that makes the accusation of being a BNP 'recruiter' potentially defamatory. The BNP had for many years a specifically racialist constitution, until it was compelled by law to alter it. The BNP contains many people, some in high positions, who have associated with Holocaust-denial and other political activities which place them outside the pale of civilisation or truth.
And it is precisely these aspects of the BNP, the ones which make it reprehensible and uncivilised, which I have exposed and condemned repeatedly. I have told correspondents that I will cease to correspond with them unless they leave the BNP. I have urged people dozens of times not to vote for it. Therefore to say that my positions are similar to the BNP's is a calculated smear. And to say that I am a 'recruiting sergeant' for it is the exact opposite of the plain truth. That is to say, a wicked lie. Mr Rose should apologise, and withdraw. But he has neither the manners, the grace or the honesty to do so.
Mr Rose also accuses me of 'inciting' ['BNP-esque'] 'xenophobia'. Now, I don't usually resort to the dictionary to make a point, because it generally doesn't solve much. But in this case it rather does.
The Concise Oxford English Dictionary offers the following rather terse and unambiguous definition of the word 'Incite': "Encourage or stir up (violent or unlawful behaviour) - urge or persuade to act in a violent or unlawful way.”
That, then, is what Mr 'Rose' has accused me in a public forum of doing (don't worry, I have a copy saved). It's not a word that needs to be 'exaggerated'. It is very hard currency indeed, which is why it is in the titles of so many Acts of Parliament dealing with criminal offences. Can he prove that I have done so? Of course he cannot. He has made it up. He should withdraw, and say sorry. But he has neither the manners, the grace or the honesty to do so.
Then let's move on to 'Xenophobia': "Intense or irrational dislike or fear of people from other countries.”
Really, Mr 'Rose'? When have I (a person who spends much of his life *in*other countries meeting the people there, and has lived abroad by choice) expressed or advocated such a thing? What fear? What dislike? Mr Rose has made it up. He should withdraw, and say sorry. But he has neither the manners, the grace or the honesty to do so.
Yet nothing in his posting addresses any of these matters. Nor do his quotations justify such further false accusations as that I 'demonize' Islam. I haven't, don't and won't. I just prefer Christianity, as I have often said. I am baffled, and also intrigued by his remark that he doesn't ‘know which is worse, demonizing Islam or defending Christianity.’
He should apologise and withdraw. But he has neither the manners, the grace or the honesty to do so.
That is why he is no longer welcome here. He is not fit to be here. As to whether I shall take further action against him, I shall consider the position over the coming weeks.
Posts
