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As the BBC plans to put up a statue of Orwell, why he would have loathed today’s ...
THE BBC has announced it is to put up a statue of George Orwell, a one-time employee, outside its palatial New Broadcasting House. That’s George Orwell, tireless fighter for truth and honesty in public life, lifelong enemy of the arrogance and intolerance of bureaucratic tyrannies.
Orwell, who devised the contemptuous terms ‘Newspeak’ (for the language of a totalitarian state) and ‘thoughtcrime’ (to describe what the elite decided was socially unacceptable thinking).
With those ideas he was identifying more than 67 years ago the suffocating, truth-denying ideology that we now call political correctness, which dictates what we can and cannot say on a whole range of subjects from race to sexuality.
And the BBC is to claim him as one of its own! It’s like Tower Hamlets council putting up a statue of Bernard Manning.
Now as far as I’m concerned, there should be statues of Orwell — author of the two greatest political novels of the 20th century, Animal Farm and 1984 — all over the country.
There should be a statue of him in Parliament Square, not far from the Churchill one perhaps, holding one of his hand-rolled cigarettes and gazing keenly across the Houses of Parliament as if scrutinising their inhabitants’ every nefarious move.
There should be a statue of him outside every university that dares to pontificate about ‘safe spaces’ for those easily offended and ‘no platforms’ for speakers deemed to be unacceptable.
And there should be a statue of him at the BBC’s shiny new HQ — ‘the iconic home of the BBC reinvented for the digital future’, as the organisation puts it in its excitable management-speak.
But he should be standing some way away from his old employer, perhaps glancing back at it sourly — because when he left the organisation in 1943 he was deeply fed up with its pompous control freakery.
He later described his time there as ‘two wasted years’, concluding that the place was ‘halfway between a girls’ school and a lunatic asylum’.
And he would have loathed what has become of the BBC, simultaneously enslaved by the dubious diktats of political correctness and slyly authoritarian in the way it purveys its views.
He would have attacked without mercy this multi-billion-pound behemoth, with its immense power and influence, relentless Left-liberal bias and sinister detector vans that will cruise our streets hunting for people using iPlayer.
For Auntie has morphed into Big Brother — the terrifying and all-powerful figure who controlled and spied on the populace — which Orwell brought to life so vividly in 1984.
And it’s timely to remember the horrifying Room 101 of that novel — a torture chamber in which people’s worst fears became reality — was based on a conference room at the Beeb, where he spent many a boring hour trying not to nod off with the sheer tedium of it all.
Orwell was just the kind of maverick, independent-minded rebel despised by today’s BBC, with its endless procedures for ‘compliance’, its brainless mantras such as ‘celebrate diversity’, and its dopey ‘LBGT inclusion strategies’.
The quote to be inscribed on the wall of the BBC beside Orwell’s statue comes from the preface to Animal Farm: ‘If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.’
BUT THAT book’s great preface also contains some other penetrating observations: ‘Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban…
‘At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is “not done” to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was “not done” to mention trousers in the presence of a lady.
‘Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing…’
Such damning sentiments could hardly better describe the BBC’s approach to mass immigration in the past 15 years.
Its outlook was broadly that anyone in public life who even raised the subject for debate, much less dared to say that it was damaging for Britain, was dismissed as racist.
To the metropolitan executive classes, those who feared for our social fabric and for the future of schools and hospitals were simply Little Englanders without the brains to appreciate the multifarious benefits of diversity.
The same could be said of the Beeb’s view of Eurosceptics, whom it seemed to dismiss as xenophobic idiots. Yet as the Brexit vote showed, anti-EU sentiment is shared by the majority of Britons.
The irony, of course, is that the powerful BBC, with its staggering annual TV licence revenue of £3.7 billion, is one of the worst offenders in the imposition of ‘groupthink’.
It is quicker than anyone to censor any opinions it deems unfashionable or beyond the pale.
There was a particularly gross example only recently, on BBC Radio 5. During the Up All Night show presented by the writer and publisher Dotun Adebayo, a caller referred to appalling revelations about Muslim Pakistani grooming gangs that have been operating in many English towns, preying on underage white girls. Adebayo promptly interrupted and began to talk over him.
Puzzled, the caller asked about the extensive sexual abuse of young girls. ‘Did that not happen?’ he persisted. The BBC presenter replied: ‘Actually, no, that’s not true, as you know’, and then cut him off completely.
There is nothing pleasantly comical about Auntie Beeb here. This is something much, much worse. There has been so much child abuse by paedophile gangs going on that there is an entire subgenre of harrowing books by the pitiful girls themselves, with titles such as Violated, Broken And Betrayed, and Girl For Sale.
Is Dotun Adebayo saying these accounts are false?
There are also dozens of Asian men behind bars for unspeakable crimes that have taken place over many years, from Rotherham to Oxford, and Newcastle to Bristol. Were they wrongly convicted?
Of course not. The problem is that even a mention of the abuse, and its specific ethnic component, sends the BBC into a blind panic.
It makes a mockery of their entire ideology — one is tempted to say ‘religion’ — of a happy-clappy, smiley-face, progressive multicultural Britain.
How Orwell would have eviscerated such dishonesty. How he’d have loathed the BBC’s jumpy censoriousness, defensive arrogance, smug metropolitan sneer.
This, after all, is the man who once referred to ‘the Bloomsbury highbrow, with his mechanical snigger’.
And how he would have detested, and fought against, his old employer’s almost Stalinist secretiveness.
This was exemplified in the BBC’s astonishing behaviour over the Balen Report of 2004 — an internal inquiry into whether the BBC’s Middle East coverage has an antiIsrael bias.
Under the Freedom of Information Act (which the BBC has used on others frequently), interested parties asked to see the results.
AT THAT point, the BBC spent hundreds of thousands of pounds of their licence payers’ money keeping the findings suppressed. Though we still don’t know what the inquiry found, it’s reasonable to suppose the BBC is a little antiIsrael — especially since a prominent BBC journalist once told me he didn’t believe Israel had a right to exist.
So when the Orwell statue goes up, let’s remember him as he really was: an old-school patriotic socialist of the finest and most decent sort.
A man who went to Eton and knew all about privilege, yet left it behind to discover for himself the abject, crushing, barefoot poverty of Thirties Britain in The Road To Wigan Pier.
A young idealist who went to fight with the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War and yet was so disillusioned with the savagery and lies of his chosen side that he could not help but portray them with stinging criticism in that unforgettable portrait of a brutal and tragic conflict, Homage To Catalonia.
He was a Left-wing Englishman who adored England, strong tea, warm ale (but not ‘continental lager’), pubs, the English countryside, the English people with ‘their mild knobby faces, their bad teeth and gentle manners’, as he unforgettably (but as ever, truthfully) described them.
And above all, he loved freedom, of thought and expression, of a kind that has not always been familiar to the ideologues at the BBC.
How well he would have understood the way our own glossy cultural and intellectual elite openly despises those same English people — especially if they had the temerity to ignore their diktats on the EU referendum!
With vigorous political incorrectness he referred to the well-heeled, self-adoring Hampstead celebrity socialists of his own day as ‘the pansy left’ — a phrase that would still be useful today, if it weren’t for the danger of being arrested for ‘hate speech’ of some sort.
How well he understood it all. So yes, let’s have statues of the great man in every town in England. But let’s not pretend he belongs to the BBC. He belongs to us.