The BBC’s in-house magazine, Ariel, has published this hard-hitting critique by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, who accuses the Corporation of “a profoundly illiberal agenda” and argues that “BBC shock jock presenters and producers know their fortunes can only get better”. The article is unavailable online – except here on mwaw.net. It should be read together with John Kampfner’s critique and Johann Hari’s recent article in the Independent.
The article, as publised in Ariel, starts here:
The BBC that helped keep this immigrant in Britain has sold out to ‘right wing populism’ and allows extreme, angry voices too much airtime.
There have been two moments in my life in England as an immigrant when I have made serious plans to quit and move to Canada. The first was in 1975 when I had finished my M.Phil at Oxford. Relatives and friends who had moved to Canada from Uganda (where I came from in 1972, the year Asians were expelled) had settled better, were welcomed more warmly than we who had ended up here. Remember we were not refugees but ultra-loyal British subjects. Enoch Powell was the hero then and we had entered a bitter place.
In 1975, a Canadian friend I’d made in Oxford contacted his local MP and together they persuaded my ex-husband and myself to migrate. We didn’t. One reason was that I couldn’t part from the BBC and Call My Bluff and Just a Minute and the trademark sombre, planetary voices delivering the news that sounded truer than any other truth. (That was back then, when I was not a sceptical journalist).
The second time was in 1996 when I had a newspaper job lined up in Toronto and just as we made final moves, I got a column to write in the Independent, a dream I had had for years. Again, when assessing whether it was the right decision, the BBC floated right up, joining the top reasons why Britain still had a hold on my heart.
So I have stayed, unable to wean myself off the BBC, which played into my ears as a child in Africa, like perennial soothing sounds of an ocean washing in imagined worlds. My dad, a news junkie and anglophile, never went out in the evenings before listening to the World Service news. He missed birthdays, funeral prayers, weddings all for his BBC.
I picked up his passion. Even now, in order for the broadcasts to sound as authentic and dependable as they did in the 50s, 60s and 70s, I need crackles to disturb the reception. It gives the impression that the powerful are trying to stop us listening.
When Idi Amin came to power, I was at Makerere University, then one of the finest in the world. Radio Uganda was playing My Boy Lollipop all day long interspersed with ominous warnings from military men. The crackling, valiant BBC told us what we needed desperately to know, though I now realise it was never the whole truth. It passed over the fact that Idi Amin was supported by Britain, the US and Israel, chosen to be their placed man in the Cold War playing out in Africa. Still, that trust and devotion would not be shaken.
Defenders of the Blairite onslaught
Of course a love like that sometimes hurts and disappoints. For too many years I have moaned about the lack of black and Asian reporters, editors, managers, controllers, and brand names. That wilful neglect continues to wound. As one of the two political columnists of colour in the national press (Gary Younge being the other) I expect to be seen as equal to my white peers. I am not. My colour and now culture limits what the Beeb believes I can or should do. Ah well. At least I have what is patronisingly called ‘access’.
However, I always, always defended the corporation and licence fee because it projected universal, good, liberal values – decency, justice, fairness, democracy, civil rights, national confidence, a common humanity, freedom, civilised conduct and the belief, if not the practice, of equality.
Thatcherism arrived and with it an onslaught on these principles denounced as ‘leftie’ or ‘politically correct’. The decade of Blairism produced further pressures, this time by the new right disguised as the new left. More alarmingly, the big boys and some girls too who lead the BBC were now sympathetic to these New Labour state controllers. In the aftermath of the Gilligan affair, I was truly shocked by how many journalists and editors privately told me they agreed with the Blairite onslaught and that Dyke was out of order.
Gilligan was proven right but the centre of gravity at the BBC is now to the right of where it was under Dyke. As my colleague Johann Hari wrote recently in the Independent: ‘The BBC’s most famous and high profile presenters today are figures on the right and make increasingly little effort to hide it.’ They chase each other for copies of the Daily Mail; they ceaselessly rail against feminism, equality campaigns, state interventions to promote health and safety and of course immigration. All progressive action these days gets stamped with the words ‘politically correct’ and the consensus at the BBC is that PC is always mad, bad and highly dangerous.
And still they cry foul, the right wing tabloids and parliamentarians.
Enigma of ‘radical impartiality’
This new century brought the extraordinary force of people power to radio, the web and new technology. It is shaking up all media outlets. The BBC, already too open to right wing populism and charged up to fight political correctness, is set for a further lurch away from its old values. BBC ‘shock jock’ presenters and producers know their fortunes can only get better. Vocal people use phone in programmes and the web to incessantly complain they are not being heard.
The trick is now used by experts too. Andrew Green, the anti-immigration prophet of Migration Watch, is never off the BBC but claims he is not allowed to present his views. The perpetually angry are also more than likely to be anti-immigration, anti-Europe, anti-equalities provision, anti-Muslim, nationalistic, pro-punishment, fearful and bursting with self pity and self righteousness.
I was recently asked to chair an internal BBC debate – part of the Audio and Music Festival. The subject was the enigmatic term ‘radical impartiality’, a new brand, potentially a bold new direction for the massive ship that is the BBC. It was floated by Peter Horrocks, head of television news, a man who from his demeanour is powerful, intellectual and an impeccable trend spotter.
Simply put (and he describes it in more complex terms) Horrocks believes the BBC needs to bring in voices and campaigners hitherto kept out of the corporation’s respectable broadcasting studios. This means, he says, a move away from the ‘no-platform’ posturings of student politics. On this I agree with him. But when he argues the BNP or extremist Muslim campaigners can be allowed to make their case, with robust interviewers ensuring ‘balance’ my blood freezes. The BBC was never a coliseum, a bloody arena for a fight to the death. That is already what I feel it sees itself as. And it wants more extreme action.
For the first time ever, I resent paying the licence fee because the BBC is not fulfilling its public service role with the integrity it always had.
Broadcasts impact on lives, on perceptions, on the sense of security of vulnerable citizens. Take one example. Day after day, the BBC arranges for an anti-immigration and anti-asylum mood to grow, which it has done over three years. Named asylum seekers are not put up to make their cases – they are always numbers; no equivalence exists between pro and anti immigration views.
A profoundly illiberal agenda is presented by respected presenters. And people like me get more afraid of the future. Some years ago Norman Tebbit, on the Today programme, told me I could never be British. Maybe he was right and I should have emigrated when I could have, before I had to witness the fall from grace of my BBC.
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown is a columnist, author and broadcaster
