Month: August 2023

Generally speaking, the BBC deserves every plaudit for keeping a vigilant eye on any possible affront to diversity.

As a life-long champion of letting it all hang out, I applaud the corporation for its comprehensive diversity training programme. All staffers must attend and thus learn to be on the lookout for “170 different forms of unconscious bias”.

I wish I could attend that course because I can’t count so many on my own. I happen to know that one form of unconscious bias identified for BBC employees is based on their colleagues’ hobbies.

Not being privy to the specifics, I can only make a general admission that I too display a bias, both conscious and unconscious, against certain hobbies, such as putting live kittens into the microwave. However, if I were able to attend that course, I’m sure I’d be cured of my propensity to discriminate.

One way or another, when it comes to diversity, no amount of vigilance is excessive. For any lapse can have catastrophic consequences, scarring affected individuals for life.  

That’s why the Corporation deserves a light rap on the knuckles for the diversity survey recently circulated to its staff. It was a multiple-choice questionnaire, yet some of the important choices were left out.

Specifically, the question “What is your sexual orientation?” featured some omissions that many BBC staffers may find inexplicable, if not deliberately offensive. The answer options included only “bi/bisexual”, “lesbian/gay woman”, “gay man”, “other sexual orientation” and “prefer not to say”.

The questionnaire drew thunderous criticism for its wilful omissions, and quite right too. Only three of the 101 known sexes… sorry, I mean genders, were listed. The remaining 98 were unceremoniously lumped together under the rubric ‘other’, which reduced those valid options to a marginal status.

What about BBC employees who are proud of being, say, endosex, cisgender or demi-flux? They are fully justified in feeling slighted at best, mortally offended at worst. And you know what happens to cisgender people who feel slighted or, God forbid, offended?

Well, neither do I. But it’s a safe bet they may go to pieces, thereby jeopardising the quality of the BBC’s output, of which all Britons are rightly proud. And don’t get me started on the hurt feelings of fa’afafine and bissu Beebers. They’d be within their rights to demand that the Board answer the question bursting out of their wounded hearts: “And what am I, chopped liver?”

I think the BBC should either not list any options, instead just offering an empty space to be filled by the recipients, or, better, list all 101 of them. That would make the document bulkier, but at least the danger of offending a member of a respected minority would be averted.

Let’s remind ourselves, and keep reminding, that the whole purpose of diversity training is to avoid even the slightest possibility of causing offence. My proposal would serve this purpose, whereas the BBC questionnaire, while definitely making a step in the right direction, falls just short of the destination.

That’s why so many people subjected our national institution to just criticism. I’m sure the critics singled out such neglected but valid options as FTM, hijra, kathoey…

Wait a minute, Penelope has just looked over my shoulder and told me to read the papers more diligently. Turns out I’ve got it woefully wrong (“yet again”, as she put it). The BBC indeed came under fire for omitting a certain option, but it was none of those I’ve mentioned.

The option left out was “heterosexual”, aka “straight”. Apparently, some BBC staffers still identify themselves in that quaint, anachronistic and decidedly uncool fashion. And they are the ones who have complained.

I for one don’t see what their problem is. The questionnaire did include the “other sexual orientation” rubric, didn’t it? All they had to do was scribble “straight” in and go back to sweeping the floor, or whatever such sticks-in-the-mud do at the BBC.

How long before straight people start lying about their ‘orientation’ to have any chance of getting a job at the BBC? This is a multiple-choice question, and the answer options are “soon”, “in the immediate future” and “faster than you can say Jack Robinson”.

These words, I would have thought, were as likely to cross my lips as “Perhaps Hitler was on to something”. Yet here I am, defending the Corporation against slander.

Don’t get me wrong: the BBC violates its Charter not just every day but in practically every programme, including Match of the Day. That document commits Beeb to impartiality, which it delivers only when talking about two woke causes at the same time.

Most of its employees vote for the leftmost parties, and those few who don’t are typically technical personnel: cameramen, grips, technicians and so on. On-camera Beepers are consistently, impeccably and – which is worse – openly left-wing in everything they say, or rather preach.

Hence I am generally sympathetic to the idea of defunding the BBC by scrapping its annual licence fee. Definitely, let’s do it – but not for the wrong reasons.

These thoughts have been inspired by the mighty storm breaking out in the teacup of a single word. The offensive word was uttered by Sally Nugent, BBC Breakfast hostess.

The word was ‘infamous’, which Miss Nugent used in what many irate individuals and organisations saw as an offensive context. This is what she actually said: “Eighty years after 19 Lancaster bombers took part in the infamous Dambusters Raid, tonight a special anniversary flypast will take place over Lincolnshire.”

She was referring to Operation Chastise, a 1943 attack on German dams with so-called ‘bouncing bombs’. The attack breached two dams and destroyed two hydroelectric power stations, causing widespread flooding in the Ruhr valley. Some 1,600 civilians died, along with 53 RAF flyers.

Because of the large civilian losses, the raid isn’t without its critics. But the canonical consensus in Britain is that it was heroic, self-sacrificial and strategically justified. Hence calling it ‘infamous’ is like calling Nelson a libertine pirate or Wellington a Francophobe bandit.

Predictably, all hell broke loose, with the Defund the BBC Campaign leading the way. The BBC hastily issued an apology, saying it had been just a slip of the tongue, but Campaign director Rebecca Ryan would have none of it:

“If this awful error, which tarnished the memory of a heroic military operation that helped boost British morale during World War 2, was ‘a stumble’ it should have been immediately corrected on air.”

She concluded by succinctly stating the mission of her organisation: “The broadcaster must be cut loose and made to stand on its own feet financially.”

I second the sentiment, but not for this reason. In fact, I’d like to defend both the BBC and, chivalrously, Miss Nugent against this attack. However, if you feel my defence will be tantamount to damning with faint praise, who am I to argue?

I strongly suspect that all Miss Nugent knows about Operation Chastise comes from the 1955 film The Dam Busters, if that. I looked into her educational credentials and found no compelling reason to believe she is especially erudite.

Miss Nugent graduated from University of Huddersfield. Several websites claim she did so in 1971, which, considering that was the year she was born, strikes me as unlikely. Dismissing the possibility that this venerable institution issues degrees to neonates, one has to assume it’s a typo, and her real graduation year was 1991.

If that’s the case, then Huddersfield wasn’t a university at the time. It was still a polytechnic, only upgrading its status in 1992, following the Higher Education Act.

That was an exercise in egalitarian legerdemain, enabling the downtrodden to claim they have gone to university instead of a lowly polytechnic. Thus, if Britain had 22 universities in 1960, today she has 160 – supposedly. In reality, we still have 22, or even fewer, since upgrading the status of polytechnics has produced a growing inflation in the value of a university degree.

Why do I go into this in such detail? Because I believe the BBC’s apology that Miss Nugent made a slip of the tongue. She meant to say ‘famous’, which inadvertently came out as ‘infamous’.

It’s not only possible but likely that an alumna of Huddersfield ‘University’ may genuinely not know the difference between ‘famous’ and ‘infamous’. She may well think that ‘infamous’ is the more refined way of saying the same thing.

This is widespread: I’ve heard many people say ‘simplistic’ when they mean ‘simple’ or ‘risqué’ when they mean ‘risky’. This is what linguists call ‘genteelism’, a verbal attempt to sound more educated (or, in Britain, higher class) than one is.

This is a predictable outcome of egalitarian education: people feel entitled to the higher status they have done little to attain. Treating a university degree as a licence to kill the real meaning of words, they believe, along with Humpty Dumpty, that words mean what they want them to mean.

Thus they say ‘peruse’ instead of ‘scan’, ‘masterful’ instead of ‘masterly’, ‘disinterested’ instead of ‘uninterested’, ‘electrocuted’ instead of ‘got a shock’, ‘momentarily’ instead of ‘shortly’, ‘enormity’ instead of ‘immensity’, ‘refute’ instead of ‘deny’ – and these, along with many others, are the solecisms one hears regularly from all and sundry, including TV journalists.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not trying to be snobbish here, rating people’s education on the basis of their CVs. In fact, I’ve seen total ignoramuses boasting Oxbridge degrees and highly educated people who have gone to lowly universities or none at all.

In fact, I believe that, when all is said and done, there is no education other than self-education. Someone who has spent a lifetime perusing (rather than scanning) by the yard books written by great stylists will know the difference between ‘famous’ and ‘infamous’.

Yet simple observation suggests that most people tend to devote their valuable time to pursuits promising a more immediate payoff. Thus English is being mangled so widely and consistently that one begins to suspect lifelong self-education isn’t in the forefront of most people’s minds.

In fact, many people hardly ever increase their erudition beyond the level they attained at school or university. That being the case, the better schools and universities they attend, the less likely they will be to say ‘infamous’ when they mean ‘famous’.

Miss Nugent’s excuse may or may not be truthful. Yet I for one find it perfectly plausible.

As to defunding the BBC, by all means let’s. But for all the right reasons.

Many commentators are asking this question, and not out of idle curiosity.

Some are convinced that from the start the Russians saw the conquest of Ukraine as the first stage of their invasion of Poland, and only the courage of the Ukrainian army has made them suspend their plan.

But suspend doesn’t mean abandon. There are signs, and their number is growing, that Putin is about to launch a false-flag operation against that Nato member. The false flag will show the colours of either Belarus or the Wagner Group, with the Kremlin claiming innocence.

The same strategy was given a trial run in 2014, when the occupation of the Crimea and other parts of the Ukraine was supposedly carried out by the ‘little green men’, who had nothing to do with the Kremlin. That stratagem could have duped only those wishing to be duped, such as Nato governments scared witless of any direct confrontation with Putin.

Shortly after the Wagner Group staged its mutiny in June, at least 4,000 of its militants were transferred to Belarus, setting up camp near Mogilev. Apparently they are armed only with infantry weapons, having left their armour and artillery behind. Yet even infantry weapons could be sufficient to stage a deadly provocation.

The SS troops in Polish uniforms that on 31 August, 1939, attacked the Gleiwitz radio station didn’t have tanks and cannon either, which didn’t prevent them from providing a pretext for the Nazi invasion of Poland the next day.

One would think that the Belarussian dictator, Putin’s stooge Lukashenko, would feel uneasy about the presence on his territory of thousands of armed bandits who recently almost succeeded in taking Moscow. He has to realise that taking Minsk would be an easier proposition, but Lukashenko doesn’t have a choice in this matter.

According to him, the Wagnerians are chomping at the bit and looking westwards. This is how he describes the situation: “I said, ‘Why do you want to go west?’ So they say, ‘We control what happens: let’s go on an excursion to Warsaw and Rzeszow.”

The former is of course the Polish capital, whereas the latter is a key military hub through which supplies are flowing into the Ukraine. Rather than being a sightseeing trip, that ‘excursion’ would constitute an invasion of Poland.

At the same time the Russians deployed tactical nuclear missiles in Belarus. This violates every known non-proliferation treaty, but Putin assured the world that Russia remained in control of those weapons.

However, Lukashenko then spoke out of turn, claiming the decision of when to go nuclear, and against whom, was his to make. It isn’t. But should the Russians support Wagner with a tactical nuclear strike, they could cite that pronouncement as proof of their innocence. It’s all that ghastly Lukashenko’s fault.

If Nato decided to retaliate, it would have an excuse to accept Putin’s lies and strike at Belarus instead. Russia would then see it her moral duty to come to the aid of her loyal ally, screaming all over the world about Nato’s dastardly aggression.

Americans are trying to preempt that ploy by telling Putin they can see right through it. Asked about the presence of Wagner mercenaries on the Polish border and whether she sees it as a real threat to Nato, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the US Ambassador to the UN, said: “We certainly worry that this group… is a threat to all of us.”

She then added that “any attack by the Wagner Group will be seen as an attack by the Russian government.”

These are fighting words, but so far they have been uttered only by a relatively minor official of one Nato member. Though we don’t know what sort of messages are being sent through unofficial channels, so far we haven’t heard a statement to that effect from Nato at large, all for one and one for all.

However, the messages sent by deeds rather than words are unequivocal: the West is willing to do all it can, and possibly even more, to avoid a military conflict with Russia come what may. Drip-feeding just enough aid for the Ukraine to fight but not enough for her to win is about as far as Nato seems willing to go.

Now, I have always assumed that Article 5 of the Nato Charter says it all loud and clear: an attack on one member is an attack on them all. I – and I am sure some of you – saw that as a sort of tripwire arrangement. One shot fired at any Nato member pushes the button for cruise missiles flying in the opposite direction.

Then a friend of mine, who is more meticulous in such matters, suggested I read the actual text of the Article rather than relying on generally accepted inference. And what do you know: no tripwire is anywhere in evidence.

Not to bore you with its turgid prose, I’ll put the full text in the post-scriptum. But the upshot is that the use of armed force is only one option, and each member will decide whether to exercise it either individually or in concert with other members. What they unequivocally undertake to do is to report the situation to the UN Security Council, of which Russia is one of the five permanent members with veto power.

In other words, Article 5 doesn’t warn any potential aggressor that any ‘excursion’ on his part will bring about an instant violent response. In fact, one struggles to see how the existence of that provision changes the current situation, one involving the Ukraine.

Nato has always had the option to interfere militarily, but has chosen not to do so because it has no appetite, nor any obligation, to fight Russia. Fine. But the way I read it, Article 5 neither obliges Nato to stop Russian aggression by force nor boosts its appetite for such a confrontation.

Hence Putin, unable to make much headway against the Ukraine, may feel he has little to fear if he decided to test Nato’s resolve by an ‘excursion’ into Poland, false flag or otherwise. The situation is fraught with lethal danger, and the West’s vacillation makes it more so.

P.S. The full text of Article 5, as promised. See what you make of it: “The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognised by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.

“Any such armed attack and all measures taken as a result thereof shall immediately be reported to the Security Council. Such measures shall be terminated when the Security Council has taken the measures necessary to restore and maintain international peace and security.”

Considering that US productivity is growing at 10 times the rate of Britain’s, there is a lot we could learn from the Americans.

So we do – but only the wrong things. One such is the critical race theory, according to which our whole history has been about racism, slavery, colonialism and little else.

Now, if you’ll forgive a personal note, one of the things that struck me when I moved from the US to Britain 35 years ago was how little racial rancour was noticeable. Blacks and whites were colour-blind the way they seldom were even in New York, to say nothing of Texas, the two places I knew well.

That was to be expected, considering how different the histories of the two countries were in that respect. Yet our ‘educators’ refuse to recognise this.

British children as young as five are taught about police brutality in the US as if Britain were an American state. Teachers are instructed that: “Police brutality and incidents like the death of George Floyd might not seem age appropriate for primary school pupils, but children of all ages are likely to have heard about these issues in the news or discussed them at home.”

I’m not sure how many British families discuss the George Floyd case (which The Times describes as “murder”) with their little tots. I suspect the number is small, and the frequency of such discussions smaller still.

I doubt this subject figures prominently in American families either, not three years after the fact. However, even supposing that some parents do choose that topic at beddy-bye time in preference to, say, a bunny rabbit going hop-hop, at least it has some marginal relevance there.

Yet an average British child doesn’t hear many stories of murderous police brutality, has never heard of Minneapolis, and wouldn’t know George Floyd from Pink Floyd.

Nevertheless, teachers are supposed to indoctrinate British five-year-olds on strictly American material (which is mostly false even in that context, but that’s a separate subject).

The same document directs teachers to a US infographic showing that white five-year-olds are more “strongly biased in favour of whiteness” compared with their black and “Latinx” (Latino) classmates.

Latino classmates? What, like Puerto Rican or Mexican? In Britain? Whenever I see a bevy of schoolchildren in London, they are mostly white, with a smattering of blacks, Indians and Muslims. There is never a Mexican or Puerto Rican anywhere in sight, to parade his lack of bias in favour of his race.

Another guidance tells teachers how to tackle the issue of “white privilege”, especially when talking to council estate urchins who don’t feel particularly privileged.

Our educators are expected to state in no uncertain terms that the original sin of whiteness isn’t redeemed by belonging to any other “disadvantaged” group, such as women, homosexuals or the poor. That, children should know, “doesn’t erase their white identity”.

Children are also taught to spurn “white saviour narratives” focused on white abolitionists such as William Wilberforce. Presumably it was Martin Luther King who freed the slaves in England.

Quite apart from the subversive and unsound nature of the critical theory in general, equating the race situation in Britain and America is pernicious demagoguery at its most soaring. And it’s ignorant demagoguery to boot.

Slavery was practically nonexistent in metropolitan England, though it was important to the economies of her colonies, including the American ones. Even in Elizabethan times slavery was already seen as abhorrent – three centuries before the Emancipation Proclamation was issued.

A report of a case as far back as 1569 states that: “… it was resolved that England was too pure an air for a slave to breathe, and so everyone who breathes it becomes free. Everyone who comes to this island is entitled to the protection of English law, whatever oppression he may have suffered and whatever may be the colour of his skin.”

Though Britain officially banned the slave trade only in 1807, unofficially the Royal Navy had been harassing slave traffic for decades. And you know what? The ranks of those Elizabethan jurists and Georgian sailors showed no multi-culti diversity whatsoever. Fancy that.

Those ‘educators’ who corrupt children’s minds with the critical race theory indirectly prove all that by dragging in strictly American material. They wouldn’t have to do so if they could illustrate their hateful drivel with enough examples from British history.

Children, exposed to a deluge of American TV and Internet, are already confused anyway. When my friend scolded his son for something or other, the lad replied in his Essex accent: “Okay, don’t make a federal case out of it.” Another child, who refused to own up to some transgression, told his mother he’d like to “take the Fifth”.

That boy was 15, not five, and he still hadn’t been taught that the right to silence had been enshrined in the English Common Law for over a century before American colonists used it to formulate the Fifth Amendment to their Constitution.

That knowledge is clearly deemed superfluous. Children don’t have to know anything about their country other than its history of racism and colonialism. Such education ideally prepares them for a lifetime of deracinated ignorance, possibly laced with subversive activities.

Now it’s time for the Church of England to follow suit, if it hasn’t already. It could take its cue from the Haitian slaves who rose against the French in 1789-1793. Widespread violence against the French colonial administrators proceeded under the slogan “The whites killed Christ. Let’s kill all whites!”

That may be a little extreme for our Anglican schools. Perhaps “let’s condemn all whites” would be more moderate.