Fighting the BBC is the last battle of Brexit
‘How did we all get it so wrong?” a mournful Andrew Marr asked Huw Edwards on the morning of Friday 13th. Hang on a minute, who did Marr mean by “we”?
The BBC certainly had a thousand ostrich eggs splattered on its face. Others were not so ready to believe that a hung parliament and a Prime Minister Corbyn (*furiously waves garlic and crucifix*) were a serious possibility. Last Thursday morning, I’d guessed a Tory majority of 42. Some gut instinct was telling me Boris could get a landslide, but hourly talking up of Labour’s prospects by the BBC and Sky News chipped away at my confidence.
No wonder, when the historic exit poll was released at 10pm, that many of us practically exploded with relief. The BBC had us scared, and quite unnecessarily. Worse than that, at a crucial crossroads in Britain’s history, our national broadcaster revealed that it barely knew the nation at all. I’ve always defended the BBC, and admired much of its output, but for the past five
Thousands of Labour voters switched to Boris – Question Time couldn’t find one
weeks it was not making forecasts, it was making wishcasts.
The BBC Charter has a requirement of impartiality. But, when you come down to it, it’s not really a question of the corporation being biased in favour of Labour. This general election was the final battle in the bloody, long, drawn-out Brexit War and the BBC has effectively been Remainer High Command since June 2016 when the British people shocked the establishment by voting to reject the EU. So ingrained is what the veteran presenter John Humphrys calls the BBC’S “institutional liberal bias” that no one thought to question the wisdom of using a publicly funded broadcaster to bombard 17.4million Leave voters with anti-brexit propaganda. Europe editor Katya Adler was forever telling us what the EU wanted. How about what British people want? Globalist BBC types would probably call that “populist nationalism”, darlings. Humphrys says that BBC bosses were “devastated” by the victory of the Leave campaign. He likened their expressions to a football fan whose team just missed a penalty. “I’m not sure the BBC as a whole ever quite had a real grasp of what was going on in Europe, or of what people in this country thought about it.”
The BBC prides itself on diversity but it is embarrassingly bad at representing the views of millions of normal people. Sure, it loves a regional accent, but any working-class presenter must be fully signed up to the woke values and metropolitan outlook of their liberal superiors.
Imagine the dismay and astonishment viewers felt when they watched BBC One’s Question Time last Friday, following Boris’s magnificent victory, only to find the usual panel of doomsters. “Does anybody here want to defend Boris Johnson?” asked Fiona Bruce. A lonely hand went up. “I didn’t vote for him but…”
For crying out loud! Hundreds of thousands of Labour voters had just switched the allegiance of generations for Boris and Question Time couldn’t even find one person to admit they’d voted for him? Why not take Question Time to Workington or Wrexham where people were bubbling over with excitement at this redrawing of the political map? “Why should I pay a tax for this biased rubbish?” fumed one Tory viewer, speaking for the frustrated millions.
Like the Labour Party, the BBC has displayed remarkable contempt for the normal person and is now running out of time to save itself. That brand of po-faced, liberal sanctimoniousness is finished. A friend from South Wales, who voted Tory, jokes about being patronised by people who wouldn’t know a working-class person if they bopped them on the nose. “They say I live in a pocket of social deprivation,” she laughs. “So bloody what? We know how to enjoy our lives. F--- ’em!”
Unlike Emily Thornberry and her snotty ilk, working-class people tend to love their country. They don’t regard the Union flag as akin to a swastika. Asked by a reporter why she wouldn’t vote for Corbyn, one Geordie lady replied, “He disrespects the Queen.” Broadcasting House may be chock-full of republicans, but normal people have huge respect for Her Majesty and they love Princess Diana’s boys and their beautiful little kids.
Normal people like the military, with each region having a proud attachment to a regiment in which normal people’s sons and daughters serve. (The mastermind of this huge demographic shift, Dominic Cummings, had a paternal grandfather who served in the Durham Light Infantry.)
Normal people don’t believe that they live in a hateful, racist society, as they are informed they do on a daily basis by privately educated BBC presenters and Corbynistas. According to the new, 2019 Eurobarometer on discrimination, when people were asked “How comfortable would you feel if your child fell in love with a black person?”, the UK emerged as one of the most tolerant countries in the world.
But we knew that, didn’t we? Not Andrew Marr’s “we”. I mean, the normal “we”. The Normals who live outside the metropolitan bubble and who haven’t succumbed to the deadly virtue-signalling virus that destroys that part of the brain where common sense and humour reside.
Normal people might not be racist, but they’re concerned about immigration, which has happened far too fast and put huge pressure on their public services, whatever the BBC news might say. It’s also depressed wages in their communities – ask their builder nephew! – and they’re counting on Boris to sort it out. Points-based system and better border control? Bring it on! Lest we forget that it is the Conservatives that just got the first gay Muslim into Parliament. Meanwhile, the Labour Party, which thinks it can lecture us all, still hasn’t had a female leader.
Normal people aren’t the downtrodden victims of the Marxist imagination. They have aspirations for their families, every bit as much as shadow ministers living in three-million-quid Georgian houses in Islington.
They watch Kirsty and Phil and they plan to knock through and create a kitchen-diner on the back of the house. They use Ofsted ratings to help them find the best school for their kids. (Corbyn said he’d abolish Ofsted.) The Normals’ grandparents put their savings towards a small flat in Moraira, on the Med, last year so that’s summer holidays for the whole extended family sorted. They love Ryanair because it gets them there cheaply and those who say you have to buy trees to offset your flight, well, sorry, but posh people take three holidays abroad a year.
I don’t know about you, but my heart rose when I saw that bunch of new Conservative MPS leaving their normal homes in the North on Monday and heading to Westminster, their normal views and normal values packed tight in their pull-along cases.
A star-struck Dehenna Davison, the first Tory to represent Bishop Auckland, marvelled at “all the famous faces”. Another bashful chap confessed it was “like starting big school”. Here they came, to set a rotten Parliament back on a decent course, these harbingers of hope, the smiley emissaries of the Normal.
As for the BBC, yesterday they were still wheeling out dismal, defeated MPS and banging on about the impossibility of Boris getting a trade deal with the EU by December 2020.
Oh, do shut up. We’ve had enough of your wretched Remainer gloom. I feel prouder and more optimistic than I have in years. Have the grace to admit you lost the Brexit War, as most Labour voters in the country already have, and move on. If the BBC can’t capture the public mood then the public will rightly ask, why on earth are we paying for the BBC?
“How did we all get it so wrong?” asked a mournful Andrew Marr on the morning of a stunning election victory. Put it another way, thank goodness the normal people got it so spectacularly right.