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Kill Whitey ‘joke’ puts BBC in the last chance saloon

IT’S been quite a week for the BBC, even by its own shambolic standards. Published accounts showed staff pay has soared to £1.5billion, with Radio 2’s Zoe Ball awarded a mystifying £990,000 hike to £1,364,999 – although Gary Lineker did take a cut, brave little soldier that he is, down £400,000 to a mere £1,350,000.

New director-general Tim Davie was quick to defend Ball as ‘a broadcaster at the top of her game’. Maybe she is (although the million or so listeners who have turned off since she took over from Chris Evans might not agree), but that still doesn’t explain why she needs to be paid ten times more than the Prime Minister.

Yet none of that was the worst thing to happen last week on the BBC – that honour goes to Frankie Boyle’s New World Order.

In case you haven’t had the pleasure, this is a satirical comedy show broadcast at 10pm on Thursday. It’s everything you would expect: unoriginal, tribal rants full of tasteless jokes aimed at the approved targets of the selfcongratulatory Left (eg ‘Boris Johnson caught Covid. He later said that contingency plans had been made for his death. That’s true. I bought fireworks.’).

THE only reason Boyle gets away with it is, I suspect, the fact that almost no one watches it. But all that changed when one guest – comic Sophie Duker – cracked a joke about killing white people.

During a discussion about race, Duker said: ‘When we say we want to kill whitey, we don’t really mean we want to kill whitey,’ before quipping, ‘we do’. Cue laughter from the other panellists, who were either too stupid – or too scared – to pull her up on it.

Those who subsequently did (the clip went viral) have, naturally, been dismissed as racist.

But the truth is, this is a watershed moment, not just for the BBC, which has defended Duker’s comments, but for us all.

It’s no coincidence that although Oxford-educated Duker is British, ‘whitey’ is an American term.

I first came across it by listening to the late Gil Scott-Heron, who wrote a song in 1970 called Whitey On The Moon. Scott-Heron was inspired by the Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver, who argued that the Moon landings were nothing more than a distraction from the crippling poverty among America’s black communities.

Scott-Heron speaks of struggling to meet his rent even though ‘Whitey’s on the moon’. It’s a powerful lament, a true work of art that urges the listener to see the world from a different point of view.

Duker’s rant did nothing of the sort. It took a serious subject and debased it for cheap laughs – a one-dimensional diatribe which can only serve to deepen division.

There is no question that, historically, people of colour have a lot to be angry about. But the way forward is not to pile injustice upon injustice. As Martin Luther King said, hate cannot drive out hate.

‘Kill whitey’ is so much more than a bad joke. It reveals how far the bitter culture wars that have infected America – and in particular Black Lives Matter, a sinister organisation hiding behind a noble sentiment – have infiltrated our own, far more tolerant society.

That the BBC should openly support such hateful dogma calls into question the very notion of what it means to be a public service broadcaster.

No wonder the pressure group Defund The BBC last week announced it had raised more than £60,000 from the public.

I love the BBC, and would be bereft without it. But with the arrival of Davie, not to mention the imminent appointment of a new chairman, the Corporation stands at a crossroads. Either honour its core values of quality and impartiality – and stop funding this kind of putrid nonsense – or relinquish its privileged taxpayer-funded status and take its chances in the real world.