Time we woke up to madness
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CREDIT to Bristol Council, which swiftly removed a statue of a Black Lives Matter protester that had been placed on the plinth where slave trader Edward Colston once stood. The council says it is up to the people of the city to decide what happens next, and they’re right. Having visited a brother who lived and worked in the city on many occasions, I can’t help but think Bristolians will not be that keen on supporting an organisation which wants to defund the police and abolish jails.
THE principle of free speech is under attack in a way we have never seen before.
A wave of wokeness threatens to swamp everyone from Harry Potter creator JK Rowling to Dad’s Army’s Corporal Jones, Basil Fawlty and Lord Baden Powell.
In this sinister “cancel culture”, livelihoods can be wrecked and reputations tarnished because people are deemed to have committed some form of “wrong think”.
Respected authors and professors are “de-platformed” by student unions because they have dared to express support for causes this narrow-minded group has decided are wrong.
Around 70 years ago, George Orwell wrote:
“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
Ironically, these words are on display in the biggest and boldest way imaginable as you enter the BBC’s New Broadcasting House headquarters in London.
While it might be what it says above the door, it is certainly not what is happening in reality.
Since Brexit the BBC have lost their way spectacularly, something that has been picked up by John Humphrys, inset, who worked for the Corporation for more than 50 years.
In his autobiography he says they “badly failed” to read the public mood “and simply could not grasp” why the nation voted to head for the exit door from the EU. He said of the morning after the historic decision: “Leave had won – and this was not what the BBC had expected. Nor what it wanted.”
How a news organisation with more than 5,000 staff all over the UK and an annual budget of more than £350million could have got Brexit so wrong is baffling, but their determination to tell us we were all knuckle-dragging oafs continued until Boris Johnson’s thumping election win in December.
Until then, the BBC had been firmly in the grip of fashionable pressure groups, always from the left. It is little coincidence this is the political home of most of its staff. From news to comedy, the picture is bleak. Ricky Gervais has said his show The Office, which won multiple Baftas and Golden Globes, would struggle to get on air today as “the BBC have got more and more careful... so would worry about some of the subjects and jokes” and it would fall foul of “outrage mobs”.
Along with others he has signed a letter criticising “cancel culture” and labelled this new ultra-sensitivity as “a weird sort of fascism”.
Brexit uncorked a vicious anger which meant anyone could be called a racist simply for having a different view. Our sense of tolerance was lost.
But that was politics. The fact this movement is now targeting comedies recorded more than half a century ago, and which reflect a different Britain, is no laughing matter.