Rod Liddle on the BBC (The Spectator)

Yesterday I noted that "Those outside the bubble are ceaselessly lectured, indeed have no other language of norms and morality." At that time I hadn't read the piece below.

Must be the zeitgeist.

Rod Liddle

Rod Liddle (The Spectator) writes:

"It is hard to keep up, isn’t it? The British Register of Victimhood lengthens almost daily, in defiance of science, common sense and reality. I think that the only way to avoid giving offence is for the BBC to lecture us on a daily basis about how we must see the world, according to its own implacable and berserk liberal agenda. Maybe a 15-minute slot after the early evening news, where Kirsty Wark or Huw Edwards could simply spell out to us where we’re going wrong and what we should do about it. That would be a genuine public service, no?

The corporation recently made a video aimed at GCSE students about multiculturalism — and it was, as you can imagine, a carefully balanced piece of work, giving equal weight to both sides of the story. ‘Multiculturalism is a powerful tool for survival and possibly the only way to survive, so let’s embrace it,’ the children were informed. Elsewhere a smug little Geordie narrator (the dialect of choice these days) said that Great Britain had ‘always’ been a nation of immigrants, there was no such thing as British people, and yet you could always hear malevolent idiots ‘banging on’ about the need to control immigration.

No mention was made of the overwhelming opposition to uncontrolled immigration, nor the weight of numbers that have arrived here recently, nor the relationship with crime figures. Still less the views of the majority of the population that immigration has actually not been a good thing, overall, for the country. In other words, they wish it hadn’t happened.

The film was eventually pulled by the BBC because, as viewers on YouTube pointed out, it was vacuous, tendentious, biased tripe. This must have come as a shock to the producers of the film, who will surely have believed that they were simply promulgating the usual BBC line on immigration — and that this isn’t remotely a case of bias but simply decency and civility, and that those who disagree are uneducated untermenschen who need to be taught a lesson or two, preferably by some Geordie halfwit so that it sounds authentic and not too metrocentric.

The problem is that this is indeed precisely the BBC’s view, without caveat: it is the mindset which informs every single report the BBC has ever done on the subject of immigration, be it on the news programmes or the dramas or even the bloody Food Programme. And as I say, they do not think that it is bias at all. It is simply right, and there’s an end to it. And if they pull this video, I assume they’ll be pulling Newsnight, The News at Ten, Today, World at One and every local news programme across the country."

The pervasiveness of bubble-think - and not just on immigration.