In the Kingdom of the Blind, is there a one-eyed man?
BBC (British Blindness Condition) is a unique sensory disease in that, although its attack on the nervous system is blindingly obvious, the vast majority of the United Kingdom population neither know nor accept that they have it – or that, importantly, it is now in its tertiary stage….and thus almost insoluble, or even partly reversible. Very few politicians of whom I know (or have met) accept it in any real sense, for were they to do so, it would mean admitting what everyone who recognises BBC* knows perfectly well: it is their job to fix it, and they clearly do not have to remotest iota of a notion how they might even begin to do that. Thus their ‘solution’ is to witter on about innuendo, exaggeration, hysteria, and how Britain is just the same as it ever was. When you can’t deter something, better to deny it: Chamberlain managed it for five years with Hitler, as did Laval and Daladier. It’s much less painful than dealing with it. For a while.
*I should say at this point that, while the other BBC (the British Broadcasting Corporation, or Beeb) stands implicated in several features of BBC, it is more a sufferer from BBC than BBC itself. Thus you will see and hear the Beeb twisting, ignoring, recalibrating and generally obfuscating facts, but is far from being the only medium with a desire to stifle Free Speech. Some parts of the Beeb want more political Accountability and Transparency, but when they try to get it, everything from extinction to imprisonment is threatened. On the other hand, Broadcasting House also exaggerates the need for Citizen safety (toeing the Government line) but fails to spot when that safety is genuinely threatened by insane ideas about what form austerity should take, whether it be safe to put money into banks, or how many global terror threats there are.
Unconscious sufferers from BBC can be grouped together as a majority social group who have had the following things removed from their lives without either anaesthetic or notice: Free speech, Accountability in public and professional life, Citizen Safety, Civics teaching, Transparency of policy, Equality before the Law, and Democracy.
Once a culture has reached that stage, fact can never be objectively separated from fiction again: civilisation will cease to exist, and in the UK there will very probably be several concurrent symptoms that we have achieved such a fate. They may or may not include game shows about live death on TV and shopkeepers demanding you buy something at gunpoint. But we can be reasonably safe in assuming that any one or more of Jeremy Hunt, Ed Balls, Lord Ashcroft, Harriet Harman, Boris Johnson, Simon Cowell or Grant Shapps will have become Prime Minister.
The United States reached decivilisation when Ronald Reagan was elected for a second term. Russia did so when Vladimir Putin and Dimitry Medvedev began playing tennis with the Presidency and Prime Ministership. Australia had a jolly good crack at the target by electing Tony Abbott as PM last week. All of them were, however, trailing in the funereal (not so say surreal) State of Zimbabwe under the beneficent rule of Robert Mugabe.
Being British myself, I’m trying very hard to retain an open mind about which Stage of the Cross we’ve reached. It’s become increasingly hard to do this after four decades in which the prime (as in uppermost) emotion in my psyche about Blighty has been one of the non-availability of any sane political choice. This is a long-winded way of describing one long word in summation, viz: disenfranchisement. And for those reading this piece during a brief respite from addiction to The Grocer, no – it doesn’t mean being kicked out by KFC as a retailer. It currently means being asked to make a choice between an Old Etonian coke-snorting tosspot, a former eurocrat with a serious narcolepsy problem, and a Focus Groupie who says nothing original and seems incapable of putting his gumshield in the right way up.
But the true test of whether one lives in a decivilised country is to look at a cross-section of the news each day – across the spectrum of blindingly obvious proprietorial bias – and see if the features can be easily applied.
Today, for example, TV art-to-pets icon Rolf Harris has been in Court to face nine charges of indecent assault, and four more of creating indecent images of children. Whatever one thinks about the use of celebs as weapons of mass distraction when it comes to the mainstream of paedophilia, does anyone expect Mr Harris to get equality before the Law?
After the Kenyan mall attack of yesterday, the Prime Minister David Cameron has called an emergency session of the Cobra Committee on anti-terrorist action. Hands up all those who really think Cameron’s approach to the Islamic problem involves any kind of transparency of policy?
The BBC reports that two in five ‘hate crime’ victims in Wales know their abuser. Do we even in our wildest dreams imagine that Hate Crime has anything significant to do with citizen safety?
Lord Mandelson writes approvingly in the columns of the Financial Times today that Ed Miliband has “aligned his approach with popular opinions”, but critically that the Labour leader fails to grasp – get this – “It is content the voters want, not volume”. Do we see any sign here that even the ‘quality’ press grasps the need to teach our young about the need for higher Civics standards in public life?
The Parliamentary Bills progress site reports that the Local Government Accountability Bill is designed ‘to make provision about the accounts of local and certain other public authorities and the auditing of those accounts; to make provision about the appointment, functions and regulation of local auditors; to make provision about data matching; to make provision about examinations by the Comptroller and Auditor-General relating to English local and other public authorities; to make provision about the publication of information by smaller authorities; to make provision for directions to comply with codes of practice on local authority publicity; to make provision about council tax referendums’. Does anyone born before April 1st 2003 believe this will solve anything substantive about the almost total lack of accountability in public and professional life? Wouldn’t just one simple ban on all television advertising for liability suits do 1000% more to restore trust in our commitment to decency?
Last Friday, Bank of England head Mark Carney was questioned by the House of Commons Treasury Committee about the recent decisions emanating from the BoE’s Monetary Policy Committee. The event was covered by the BBC’s Democracy Live Channel. Do I see even three hands going up in the audience in support of this as an example of democracy in action? Has anyone at the BoE told the British people the truth over the last five years?
You see, all I did was take those seven deadly aspects of cultural destruction and apply them to seven ‘news’ stories in the media today. And the examples (chosen at random) show obvious signs of all seven dimensions being present. I could do the same tomorrow with seven more issues or stories, and guarantee to produce the same result.
The conclusion one is forced to reach is that, in the United Kingdom of riven Northern Island, bolshie Scotland, truculent Wales and apathetic England, the British Blindness Condition is rampant.
Which opthalmic genius with political ambition will rid us of this tragic disease? I find it difficult to see any possibilities on the horizon: perhaps this means that I too am suffering from BBC. Or terminal boredom.
