Author: Rod Liddle
Publication: Spectator
Date: March 12, 2008
URL: http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-magazine/features/552791/the-bbc-white-season-only-shows-how-little-auntie-has-really-changed.thtml
Rod Liddle says these tokenistic programmes
demonstrate that the BBC's view of the vast majority of people in this country
remains appallingly patronising. The Corporation has not renounced its bad
old metropolitan ways at all
I hope you are enjoying 'White Season' on
the BBC - a brave and groundbreaking attempt by the corporation to devote
0.003 per cent of its airtime to issues which bother 92 per cent of its licence
payers. One of the senior commissioning monkeys at the BBC, Richard Klein,
admitted that white people - some of whom he has met - have been underserved
by the corporation, and especially 'working-class' white people. Mind you,
it is surely difficult to serve such a hidden and secretive tranche of the
population, especially when they live beneath stones and only venture out
to get drunk and shout 'darkie!' at passers-by. But at least the BBC has tried
to understand these awful people and shown them where they are going wrong.
One of the films during the White Season was
about a white (i.e. British) girl growing up in a part of the north of England
which is heavily populated by Muslim immigrants from the Indian subcontinent.
The BBC has not shirked from dealing with immigration issues before, of course.
There is a huge and very costly unit within the BBC which tells broadcasters
precisely how they should deal with tensions occasioned by ethnic minorities
moving into traditionally white areas. Broadcasters should at all times be
on the side of the immigrant communities, rather than the side of the racist
indigenous whites. Politicians who try to stick up for the whites should be
kicked from pillar to post and their arguments ridiculed. Forgive me if this
seems to be a simplification - but that is how it felt back in the days when
I worked for the BBC.
But maybe things have changed. These days,
the stuff that was considered beyond the pale and racist even three years
ago is now uttered, open-faced, by the boss of the Equality and Human Rights
Commission, and by inner-city Labour MPs. Multiculturalism has ceased to be
the unchallengeable paradigm; it is now dead in the water. Partly this is
down to the astonishing success of those very politicians who dared to stick
up for the working-class whites: the British National Party now holds ten
seats on Barking and Dagenham Council. The political class saw that there
was a quiet revolution in the air and swung 90 degrees to the right. These
days, Jack Straw can tell you he insists that women who arrive at his office
for surgery must remove their hijab because he doesn't like it very much.
Five years ago he'd have been deselected: now he's 'opening a very real and
valuable debate'. Five years ago even the BNP would not have been so crass.
Even a Monday Club politician would have thought twice before saying such
a thing.
And so we have BBC1's White Season, which
is hanging on the coat-tails of this dramatic paradigm shift. Or, at least,
is pretending to. That film about the white girl in northern England ended
with her converting to Islam, converting her mum to Islam, and both of them
waving goodbye to their abusive, white, Christian, family patriarch and living
happily ever after.
Well, as a sop to the trenchant views of the
displaced and neglected white working class, this seems to me to be a little
wide of the mark. It is hardly seeing the world from a white working-class
perspective, is it? It is instead seeing the world from the perspective of
the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) - which is not to say that it is wrong,
per se, merely that it would serve to annoy still further those white working-class
people who feel the BBC could not give a toss one way or another about their
grievances.
There was another film, too, about white working-class
people in Barking and how, basically, it's a generational thing - with the
young whites mixing happily with young people of every colour of the rainbow
and only the thick-as-mince, time-warped, older generation cleaving to either
racist or embittered points of view about immigration. Is that an accurate
reflection of how it is?
It seems to me that in both cases it is how
the BBC fervently wishes it to be; it is the point of view of the educated,
middle-class, metropolitan white liberal elite - the very people who, as it
happened, foisted the damaging and now rejected creed of multiculturalism
upon the rest of us. If the MCB had been handed the task of devising a series
of programmes to highlight the problems of the white working classes in Britain,
it would undoubtedly have shown a greater awareness and sensitivity than did
the BBC.
It is all there in the title of the series,
'White', as if once these programmes have been put to bed - with a suitably
uplifting message for the untermensch such as convert to Islam and make friends
with everybody - then the whole business can be dropped. They can return to
making programmes which have absolutely no relevance whatsoever to white working-class
people, with their horrible views and their perpetual smoking and drinking.
It is this, rather than any conscious political
bias, which bedevils the BBC. It is, to misquote the former director-general,
Greg Dyke, hideously middle-class. Hideously metropolitan. Hideously civilised
(which means, in terms the rest of us would understand, hideously liberal).
But much more than all of these, hideously arrogant.
When those programmes were commissioned and
the BBC executives sat around discussing the content, they undoubtedly caught
the whiff of the zeitgeist - that, come on chaps, we really ought to do something
about those dreadful people in the north who somehow feel estranged and alienated.
But they were singularly incapable of commissioning anything which said, actually,
they might have a legitimate grievance. That would have been a step too far.
Instead they commissioned a bunch of programmes
that said: white working-class people, we feel your pain, but unfortunately,
you're wrong. In other words, they demonstrated precisely the same mindset
which infects every single news bulletin, documentary and drama we have witnessed
for the last 20 years on the BBC. Can you imagine them commissioning a film
about a Muslim girl who converts to Christianity, converts her mum - and by
the denouement is proven right to have done so? It will never happen.
