Turning the spotlight on TV’s sinister new face

ANYONE who appears on British TV programmes is now being urged to complete an astonishing questionnaire about skin colour, sexual orientation and ‘gender’.

This is the work of something called the Diamond Creative Diversity Network, which declares: ‘Diamond represents a committed decision by leading UK broadcasters to make change. We cannot expect to change cultures, attitudes or ways of working overnight, but Diamond is the tool that will enable us to say with confidence, “Change gonna come.” ’ Well, I believe this survey is a ridiculous and rather nasty idea. If I go on TV or radio, I do not represent all pinko-grey-skinned heterosexual males in their mid-60s. Many such people disagree with me.

If I represent anyone, I speak for the people who agree with me, whatever age, sex, orientation or skin colour they have. Thursday night’s BBC Question Time, whose audience were all under 30, showed that quite a few people who are neither my age or my skin colour (I neither know nor care about their private lives) were willing to applaud things I said.

But I have little doubt that such surveys will be used to exclude people like me from broadcasting.

This won’t be because I am not diverse enough. It will be because the surveys have provided a cover story for having even fewer moral and social conservatives on the airwaves.

It was certainly one of the tools the Tory Party used in the Cameron years to get rid of anyone who showed any signs of being a conservative.

Back in the 1960s, Martin Luther King quite rightly said that we should be judged on the content of our characters, and on nothing else. In those days, it was Apartheid South Africa which was always listing people according to their exact skin colour, and it was blackmailers who wanted to probe people’s private sexual tastes.

How did we get to this point, where self-congratulating liberals compile these sinister statistics?