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Rod Liddle, The BBC tiptoes on eggshells over race and crushes the truth, 26 May 2013.
This is an open letter to a man called James. This particular James is white, middle-aged and public-school and Oxbridge-educated, and he’s running the important bits of the BBC. All the top people at the BBC are called James and are white and public-school and Oxbridge-educated, except for the director-general, who is white and public-school and Oxbridge-educated and called Tony. The rest — director of news, director of strategy, editor of the Ten O’Clock News, editor of the Today programme, senior foreign correspondent — are largely called James, white, middle-aged, public school.
That’s the BBC: no blacks, no dogs, no Irish. No women, either, or very few, nor indeed anyone called “Keith”. If you’re a woman at the BBC and you want to get on, I suggest you put on some trousers, flatten your breasts a bit and call yourself James. You could pencil in a moustache, although none of the other Jameses has one.
Anyway, it is perhaps because they are called James and white and middle class that they seem so terrified of telling the news as it is. If there were a few more people called Tariq or Keith or Harbinder running things, then there might be a little less tiptoeing on eggshells, less of this absolute terror of giving offence to the people the Jameses definitely are not.
Take Nick Robinson, for example, who has just been forced into a bizarre apology for saying that the suspected Woolwich killers were “of Muslim appearance”. He was quoting the police, so he had nothing to apologise for. It is an odd phrase, though; the attackers were dressed in Stone Island-type clobber, for a start, which you don’t often see down the mosque. A simple and honest description would have been “two large, black men”, but don’t hold your breath for something like that. Because the BBC, the James Gang, goes into paroxysms on stories like this — which is perhaps why, in the wake of Woolwich, they started going overboard fretting about the English Defence League singing songs in a pub — they’re far more comfortable reporting that sort of thing. Not the murder, but a few white hoolies singing Rule, Britannia! and shouting at the police.
And then remember the various gangs of men convicted of vile sexual assaults and the rape of underage girls in Oxford and Rochdale? The BBC described them as “of Asian origin”. What — blokes from Bhutan and North Korea and Hong Kong? Really? As it happens they weren’t even of Asian origin, entirely; some were from northeast Africa. They were all, indisputably, Muslim. Their warped view of their religion was central to the offences and thus to the story. The BBC didn’t dare to label them so unequivocally.
There have been riots this week in Sweden. The BBC’s report — just like The Guardian’s — suggested that these unpleasant disturbances had been occasioned by economic inequality. “Stockholm riots throw spotlight on Swedish inequality,” ran the headline on the BBC online.
You had to read between the lines to find out what was actually happening. Then you discovered, partly through those phrases buried away in the text — “community leaders” and “local mosques”, for example — that almost all the people doing the rioting were, to adapt Robinson’s phrase, people of non-Swedish origin. These were — are — race riots.
It was not ordinary Swedes rising up against the oppressive Swedish state; it was immigrants. Come on, James — why not tell us the truth?
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