Thought for the day

Let me begin with a brief precis, by no means intended as an apologia. My father died suddenly in 1982 and although I remember little about him, I can recall a few memories. Sundays are mostly a forgotten boredom but I can picture him in his armchair watching Brian Walden on the television. As it happens, I can also bring to mind the hot tears of frustration when I overheard him discussing the forthcoming Labour Party conference at Blackpool’s Winter Gardens. Sensing an opportunity for cakes and balloons, I began petitioning him to take me along, uncomprehending his subsequent gentle refusal and explanation. I was six years old when Labour first let me down. There were to be no cakes and no celebrations, not then as a little boy and not now either, now we are told the socialist tradition has been consigned to the last century, and is apparently never to come again.

He died in April outside the social security office he was due to sign on at, having been made redundant at the age of 62. In the years that followed I saw my mother struggle to keep us afloat, navigating the notoriously fickle seasonal employment market of a faded coastal town in the 1980s. One of her many jobs was as a cleaner at the Pleasure Beach and she recalls the time she was barked at for not clearing tables fast enough. Occupied with the task of attempting to prise loose a soiled nappy fermenting behind a hot radiator, where it had been stuffed by a considerate patron, she was humilated further for a job that offered just £1.42 an hour. When he demised suddenly and uselessly on the floor of his boardroom in 2004, Geoffrey Thompson, who had inherited the resort in 1976, was worth an esitmated £25m.

In 1987 my mother remarried and we moved to Thorne, a forlorn mining village near Doncaster. This once proud little town had been licked to a splinter by economic fate and the closure of the colliery that provided the majority of employment. Today the bright lights of Doncaster offer a career in any number of call centres and if that doesn’t appeal there’s always God to keep the local children well behaved.

I now want to write about the BBC and it is because of this that I offer the above in the interests of full disclosure. Lately the BBC has found itself the unwelcome subject of a succession of negative headlines. Never guilty of missing an opportunity to stick the boot in further, the usual outriders from the right-wing media have dusted off the same old accusations of an inherent left-wing bias. And yet I can’t square that particular circle which asks us to believe the BBC is little more than an extension of the Socialist Workers Party. I am left-wing and I am working-class. I do not own my own home and, earning slightly over £13000 a year cannot afford to buy much more than a flat in a converted former council house in one of Sheffield’s poorest areas. Alack, even that option is barred at present, as the Department of Work & Pensions do not currently offer permament contracts to new employees; as it currently stands, I could find myself turfed out of work by next January at the latest, should my contract not be renewed. If the BBC is left-wing I can’t say I’ve noticed lately.

A cursory and by no means extensive glance at a random day’s viewing explodes this myth so often peddled by the right-wing. Every morning Breakfast – one presumes it is no longer called Breakfast News so as not to incur prosecution under the Trade Descriptions Act – regularly distils us the latest from the City courtesy of Declan Curry, the only presenter from that programme to cross the picket line during the 2005 strike. The same channel then helpfully explains how we can make a killing at a property auction – Homes Under the Hammer – shovels more misery on those of us who cannot afford a home at even the low end of the housing market – To Buy Or Not To Buy – and advises how to pawn Granny’s Wedgwood collection for a quick buck – Cash in the Attic. Elsewhere in the schedules The Apprentice and Dragon’s Den sell the message that happiness lies at the conclusion of the next killer deal and there’s even a version for kids where the winners get a limousine ride while the losers take the bus home.

Is this really the output of a conduit for liberal propaganda? Who are these people trying to kid? Imagine, if you would, regular dispatches from the frontline of the anti-globalisation movement during the risible and ridiculously named Breakfast, or a radio phone-in programme by a left-wing equivalent to Jon Gaunt – although perhaps without the violent prediliction that led him to abuse a critical listener as a “moron” and threaten to “come around… with a baseball bat” – or the equally shrill and visceral Stephen Nolan. Countenance the possibility of John Pilger or Noam Chomsky or Tariq Ali being allowed a seat at the Question Time table. It would not happen. It does not happen.

The estimable Johann Hari nails it here:

This is stated so often that nobody stops to ask: is this true? Where’s the evidence? In fact, the BBC’s most famous and high-profile presenters today are figures of the right, and make increasingly little effort to hide it. Andrew Neil – union-buster, former Murdoch lackey and cheerleader for Thatcher at her most foaming – presents all the BBC’s live Westminster coverage, with six programmes. On ‘This Week’, he jeers at anybody who expresses left-liberal ideas as unwordly imbeciles, and is immediately reinforced by another Thatcherite, Michael Portillo. Only the poorly-prepared Diane Abbot is there to pout alternatives.

I must consider my blood pressure but from memory I can recall one particular incident in which Radio Five’s hateful Peter Allen – a man who regarded chinless Otis Ferry’s incursion into the House of Commons as little more than the harmless jeu d’esprit of a pithy rascal – responding to critical emails accusing the channel of affording Gordon Brown too much coverage with the bizarre response “imagine how sick we’d all be if John McDonnell was Prime Minister?” Although this presumably did not go unchallenged somewhere, I cannot recall any left-winger being allowed recourse on air.

On a December morning in 2005 the BBC descended on Sheffield’s leafy Ecclesall Road, an extensive avenue connecting some of the most sought-after areas in England’s fourth city, to broadcast what was little more than a puff-piece derived entirely from a report by Barclays Bank. Whilst one half of Sheffield can still expect to die some eight years earlier than their affluent neighbours from the other side of the city, they can at least take comfort from the fact that they share the same geography with some of the most relatively wealthiest outside London. What goes without mention should only do so if it doesn’t warrant it, yet this rather stark statistic was not deemed relevent to the report, which instead juxtaposed footage of the city’s poorest areas with the words of an estate agent delivering a glowing encomium to the must-have postcodes. And that was it, the assumption of popular affluence encapsulated in one report.

From Radio 4’s Thought for the Day to BBC 1’s Songs of Praise; from Radio 2’s awful Jeremy Vine Show to BBCi’s Have Your Say (both of which invariably couch debate in terms designed to get right-wingers frothing about the liberal conspiracy reducing the country to its knees); from the genuflection before the Windsors to the courting of Alastair Campbell; from former Young Conservative Nick Robinson to Spectator Chief Executive Andrew Neil; from Dragon’s Den to the Apprentice; from Jeremy Clarkson (who last night spent an hour soiling the Arctic in a Toyota and concluded that the “inconvenient truth is [that the damage alleged to have been done by the car to the environment] doesn’t even appear to have scratched the surface”) to Jon Gaunt. Hardly Marxism is it?

And yet the myth goes on.

Originally published 27th July. Reposted after being deleted in error.