3 days ago
BBC's Thought for the Day shouldn't sell wokery
Radio Four's Today programme is the BBC's current affairs flagship, a three-hour set that seeks to establish the political agenda with interviews and discussions. Thought for the Day, broadcast at around 7.45 each morning, is supposed to offer some reflective relief from the normal cut and thrust.
The slot, which began life in 1939 under the title Lift Up Your Hearts, was once almost exclusively Christian in its output but is now often occupied by representatives of other faiths. The BBC says it offers 'reflections from a faith perspective on issues and people in the news'.
Clearly, it will be the opinion of the contributor but it must still conform to the non-partisan requirements of a public service broadcaster funded by licence-fee payers who don't have the luxury of getting their two minutes and 45 seconds on the air.
Wednesday's Thought for the Day was given by a hitherto little-known refugee charity founder called Krish Kandiah. He proceeded to deliver a sustained attack on the Conservative front-bencher Robert Jenrick over a newspaper article about illegal immigration.
He said the shadow justice secretary had fuelled 'fear of the stranger' by saying he did not want his children 'to share a neighbourhood with men from backward countries who broke into Britain illegally'. Mr Kandiah commented: 'The technical name for this is xenophobia.'
Since the Government has asked a panel to produce a new definition of Islamophobia we can now see how it could be used by some to shut down legitimate points of view expressed in a newspaper. These segments on Today are scripted and screened in advance so how did this get through? It has subsequently been edited; but since no one who read it requested any changes we must infer they thought it contained nothing untoward.
There is a set of assumptions that underpins far too much of the BBC's news output, ranging from welfare and the NHS to climate change and immigration. An in-built bias against anything that challenges lazy Left-of-centre nostrums suffocates broader debate on issues that matter to the great majority of listeners. The Thought for the Day fiasco is on a par with the failure to pull the live anti-Israeli ranting of rap group Bob Vylan during Glastonbury. Will the BBC ever learn, or is it simply incapable of doing so?
