Tim Luckhurst
says that the BBC is exercising thought-control over the extent of legitimate
debate
Angus Roxburgh, Europe correspondent of the BBC, has
published a book called Preachers of Hate. It analyses the resurgence of
populist politics in Continental Europe through interviews with leaders and
supporters of parties including France’s National Front, Austria’s Freedom
party, Slovakia’s HDZS, the Danish People’s party ...and Silvio Berlusconi’s
Forza Italia.
Preachers of Hate deserves to
be read. Roxburgh is intelligent and informed. He believes he has identified a
new generation of proto-fascists, and that they are responsible for a ‘steady
erosion of the ideals of European society’. If such ideals exist, historians may
one day conclude that they were more grievously injured by communists like
Slobodan Milosevic than by assertive tribunes of the new Right. Great minds at
Harvard, Cambridge and Heidelberg may even assert that tolerance of dissent
suffered terribly under the sanctimonious political monoculture promoted by T.
Blair and his ilk.
But let us leave the ultimate evisceration of Third
Way claptrap to those who will enjoy the benefits of hindsight. My question
relates to the mindset that constricts Roxburgh’s musings and that of many of
his BBC colleagues. Britain’s state broadcaster is exercising thought-control
over the extent of legitimate debate. The BBC has contributed to a narrowing of
the once broad plain of tolerated opinion. It has forgotten that, in a confident
democracy, extremism in the defence of liberty should not be deemed a vice. Read
Roxburgh and the work of other BBC stars like Andrew Marr, Fergal Keane, Jeremy
Paxman and Gavin Esler. The allegation will not feel as contentious as it
reasonably should.
Precise understanding is required here. I admire
(and, in Esler’s case, actively like) these journalists. I accept that they
reached the broadly liberal conclusions articulated in books like Ruling
Britannia (Marr), The United States of Anger (Esler), Letter to Daniel (Keane)
and The Political Animal (Paxman) after properly mature contemplation of
opposing points of view. The problem is that the opinions which the BBC now
expresses via the work of its most authoritative commentators reject the
healthily disputatious discipline of seeking consensus via the juxtaposition of
thesis and antithesis. The corporation’s world view starts in the liberal centre
and condemns alternative perspectives as mad. The BBC has forgotten that liberal
consensus emerged from a conflicting blend of extremes which were mixed to
create balance. It treats the rigid new orthodoxy of the militant centre as an
absolute, not an average. More peculiarly, it characterises it as moderate and
fails to perceive that this, too, is a form of intolerant extremism, shorn of
ideology but not of menace.
This approach is additionally dangerous
while Britain is governed by New Labour militants. The notion that an acutely
intolerant version of liberalism is the end of history and that it has emerged
fully-formed as a God-given truth, not one perspective among many, risks
subverting the proper relationship between government and journalism. If the
state broadcaster is motivated by the same ideals as the state it ought to
scrutinise, alternative thinking is stigmatised and forced to the margins of the
national conversation. Angus Roxburgh is guilty of this prejudice. To even begin
to think about Signor Berlusconi or the late Pim Fortuyn as ‘preachers of hate’
and members of a family that includes such racists as Le Pen is not just wrong;
it is risible. What Roxburgh is really doing is reacting with
liberal-conditioned horror to the reality that there are more ideas in heaven
and earth than are dreamt of in his or his employer’s philosophy.
No
wonder. The BBC has a habit of suppressing controversy. In the early 1990s, when
its criminally undervalued Central European correspondent Misha Glenny filed a
series of incisive predictions of ethnic conflict in the Balkans, the corporate
instinct was to order him to calm down. Glenny was uniquely well informed and
subsequently proved horribly right. No matter. His views, to borrow from
Roxburgh, challenged the ‘European ideals’ of his masters. They might live on
the continent he described, but they were not about to admit that large parts of
it are backward and intolerant until forced to do so.
The tendency to
force ideas into a narrow channel is not new but it has got worse. Colleagues
who worked with me at the BBC during Margaret Thatcher’s premiership remember
the seething resentment we all felt at the government’s decision to ban us from
broadcasting the voices of Sinn Fein leaders like Gerry Adams. We loathed what
he said, but thought it crucial that viewers and listeners should be able to
hear him and reach their own conclusions. These days the corporation goes into
paroxysms of self-doubt as to whether it should grant air time to those who
argue for British withdrawal from the European Union, supporters of selective
education, and critics of Islam.
The former Prussian State Library in
Communist East Berlin contained something known to locals as ‘the poison room’.
It stored books the state did not want its subjects to read. It was, as a
result, an entire department — not the single chamber the name suggests. The BBC
is contributing to the creation of a similar phenomenon, a prison of the mind
from which its own staff are denied permission to wander. Enjoy Marr, Keane,
etc. as much as you like. They are all obviously talented and wholly entitled to
their opinions. The tragedy is that equally talented journalists who hold views
that tend to the left or right extreme of the civilised spectrum are now
characterised by the BBC as mad, bad and dangerous to know.
Would the
BBC tolerate the publication by one of its correspondents of a book arguing that
Britain should abandon the EU and join the North American Free Trade
Association? Would it employ a correspondent who argues (as I and a substantial
minority of the Scottish population do) that the Scottish Parliament has proved
to be a disreputable institution and that devolution has created waste,
incompetence and bureaucracy in approximately equal measures? How might it react
to an education correspondent who published the suggestion that rigid academic
selection in state schools is considered socially just in many parts of modern
Europe? Would a Middle East correspondent who observed that politicised Islam
has proved intrinsically incapable of creating economically vibrant societies,
or of balancing the rights of the sexes, be permitted to prosper?
All of
these views are supported by credible evidence. They are not currently popular,
but it is a very long way from that to dismissing them as insane — or it ought
to be. Reading Angus Roxburgh and his many colleagues is illuminating, but not
for the best of reasons. It used to be the boorish, reactionary Right who argued
that democratic government should understand a little less and condemn a great
deal more. Now it has become the philosophy of the world’s most famous news
broadcaster.
The books published by BBC correspondents tell us more than
what the individual authors think. They tell us what the BBC hierarchy deems
acceptable. Instinctive critics, of which I am not one, have long perceived bias
in the sneering tone of individual interviewers. To that constituency the BBC
must be a left-wing conspiracy because it is state-financed. I disagree. The BBC
can be fair, inspiring and exceptional. It has often been all three, and most
usefully when the nation has been mired in dull consensus. Recently its
traditions have been overwhelmed by a rush to reduce the broad highway of
democratic debate to a narrow expressway constructed between high walls.
Another East German analogy is appropriate. The Communist authorities
renamed Carmen-Sylva-Strasse as Erich-Weinert-Strasse. Weinert was not much of a
poet, but he was a Communist and therefore, to the official mentality, right.
Reading the books published in recent years by BBC correspondents and
considering the agenda the corporation pursues in primetime news programmes
creates the feeling that truth, too, has been renamed. It is no longer a virtue
to be pursued but never fixed. It is liberal orthodoxy and it is absolute.
By forgetting that virtue does not always reside in the centre of any
given set of possibilities, the BBC promotes the near-equivalent of Orwellian
thought-crime. The bias is neither left- nor right-wing. It is a bias against
thinking. This is worse even than the demented fallacy that all opinions are
equally valid. The paradigm within which the corporation permits its
correspondents to opine is debilitatingly narrow. It does more than insult
Silvio Berlusconi and the Italians who elected him. It ignores the lesson that
new social consensus has routinely emerged from the absorption into the
mainstream of ideas once condemned as extreme. Without that alchemy neither the
Labour government of 1945 nor the Conservative one of 1979 could have existed,
never mind the French Revolution or universal suffrage. Small wonder that the
electorate is alienated from politics and political broadcasting alike. To the
BBC, much that challenges the present, temporary consensus is simply
unthinkable. Mr Blair must be ever so grateful.