Tim Davie must consider his position
The BBC says it should never have broadcast the vile rants of Bob Vylan at Glastonbury and should have cut the live stream when he started chanting 'death to the IDF'. So how did it happen?
It has emerged that BBC director-general Tim Davie was himself at Glastonbury on Saturday afternoon and whilst ruling that the performance should not subsequently be available on demand, did not pull the livestream from iPlayer.
Where were the protocols to ensure anti-Semitic political propaganda was not sent out unexpurgated on the airwaves, courtesy of the long-suffering licence-fee payer? And if such rules existed why were they not enforced by Mr Davie?
The incident could not have come as a surprise. Glastonbury attracts all sorts of preening, self-absorbed nonentities who think they have a monopoly of moral and political rectitude. Surely someone at the BBC must have done their due diligence and suspected that an act like Bob Vylan, which revels in controversy, would land them in it.
They knew of the risk because an on-screen warning was issued about the 'very strong and discriminatory language'. At the very least, BBC executives should have insisted upon a delay allowing editors to switch coverage to another act in the event of a nauseating stunt of the sort we witnessed on Saturday.
The Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy told MPs she wanted to know why this act was broadcast live by the BBC and the feed was not cut. 'I want explanations,' she said. Now that we know that Mr Davie was intimately involved in this disastrous episode he must consider his own position.
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