The BBC's outright hypocrisy over racism

When Danny Baker Tweeted a picture of a chimp dressed up like an aristocrat in reaction to the royal baby coverage, he was quite rightly criticised.

He later apologised and claimed that he was trying to lampoon inherited privilege, and hadn't even considered the racial connotations, but by then it was too late for him, he'd already been sacked by the BBC.

Having listened to Danny Baker's shows many times in the past I've never heard him say anything remotely racist (it's mainly irreverent nonsense) and given his long broadcasting history of never saying anything even remotely racist or bigoted, my opinion is that his apology should be taken in good faith.

The problem of course is that the BBC's decision to sack Baker betrays barefaced hypocrisy.

You only have to look back to Alan Sugar's brazenly racist Tweet about the Senegal football team last year to find a completely different approach from the BBC. Sugar was completely unapologetic about his racist Tweet, and the BBC somehow decided not to sack the star of their hit show The Apprentice.

Either the BBC's attitude to racism has developed extremely quickly from allowing unapologetic racists to get away with it last year, to sacking people for racist-looking Tweets now, or there's something else at play.

Maybe the BBC considers social media racism to be perfectly fine when it's aimed downwards, at nations like Senegal, and at African beach vendors, but when it's aimed at the royals, even inadvertently, it's an instant sacking offence.

This kind of Nazi-style racism is considered
fine and dandy by the BBC.

Then to exacerbate the hypocrisy on the very evening that Danny Baker was sacked they invited Nigel Farage onto their flagship Question Time show for a record 33rd time. 

Despite Farage's long history of making racist comments about Romanians, using Nazi style propaganda to attack refugees, aligning with outright fascists in the European Parliament, whipping up anti-Muslim sentiments, and wilfully spreading the extreme-right white supremacist "great replacement" conspiracy theory, he's always welcome in BBC studios.

And then there was the time that they invited the extreme-right hate preacher Tommy Robinson (real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon) onto Newsnight for a softball interview on the very day one of his acolytes was jailed for a murderous terrorist rampage in Finsbury Park.

And then there was the time that the BBC invited leader of the Generation Identity hate group onto Newsnight on the very day one of their followers had carried out the mass killings in Christchurch, New Zealand.

And then on the day after Danny Baker's sacking, the BBC invited the right-wing polemicist Ben Shapiro onto their Daily Politics show, despite his history of anti-Muslim hatemongering, his racist comments about Arabs, his constant spreading of far-right conspiracy nonsense like Obama birtherism and the Nazi-derived cultural Marxism conspiracy theory, and the fact he inspired the extreme-right terrorist who carried out the Quebec City Mosque shooting (who obsessively viewed Shapiro's Twitter output).

 

If Danny Baker's Tweet was so offensive he had to
be barred from the BBC, why isn't this?

The BBC's warped explanation for platforming Shapiro was to boast about how many Facebook and Twitter followers he has, as if his popularity is somehow a shield against his repulsive political views, and his dangerous extreme-right conspiracy-mongering.

Of course the BBC's 'he's got loads of supporters' argument could have been used in favour of inviting Hitler onto the BBC in 1939, or the murderous Chilean dictator Pinochet in the 1980s, or Osama Bin Laden in the 2000s.

This facile 'he's popular so we have to give him a platform' argument also creates the impression that if Danny Baker had had a few hundred thousand more followers on social media, perhaps he wouldn't just have not been sacked, but he would have actually been invited onto flagship BBC politics shows to talk about his distasteful Tweet!

It seems that if you're an out-and-our racist or an extreme-right polemicist with a long history of spreading racist ideas and far-right conspiracies, the BBC are clamouring to invite you on their shows to help you to widen your profile, and if you're a star of one of their hit shows and you aim your despicable social media racism downwards and then outright refuse to apologise for it, that's perfectly fine too.

But woe betide you if the royal family are the subject of your ridiculously ill-considered Tweet.

I'm not trying to argue that Danny Baker is blameless, or that he didn't deserve criticism for what he Tweeted.

What I'm saying is that the BBC's hypocrisy is absolutely undeniable if they sack him over what he did despite his long broadcasting history on non-racism, and his apology, while they continue to wilfully platform unrepentant racists, and extreme-right polemicists like Alan Sugar, Nigel Farage, 'Tommy Robinson', Generation Identity, and Ben Shapiro.

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Alan Sugar knows nothing about the British rail system, and even less about communism

Labour are moving ahead in most of the polls and suddenly the political right are shrieking frightened and incoherent abuse all over the Internet again.

Alan Sugar's furious accusation that Jeremy Corbyn is a "communist idiot" because of Labour's policy of renationalising the UK rail network is a case in point.

The first thing to note is that a significant majority of British people actually want the railways renationalised.

If it's "communism" to want vital infrastructure and public services like the rail network to be run on a not-for-profit basis for the benefit of the British people and the British economy, then a clear majority of Brits are a bunch of communist idiots by Alan Sugar's warped definition.

That's the problem with furiously screeching "communism" at popular and sensible centre-left democratic socialist policies like public ownership of the railways. The more that venal right-wing propagandists like Alan Sugar do it, the more they actually make communism look like a good idea!

Then there's Sugar's absurd claim that private ownership of rail franchises has improved the railways, when in reality Britain has an increasingly expensive and overcrowded rail network, with very low levels of investment, and many services outside London still operating clapped out old trains that were built before privatisation in 1994!

And what's worse is that this expensive, over-crowded, under-invested farce of a system comes at the cost of far higher public subsidies than it used to cost to run the entirety of British Rail before privatisation!

The British pubic pay twice as much to support the railways today as we did when it was a not-for-profit public service, all just to allow the likes of Richard Branson to siphon £300 million out of the system in private profits.

It's quite incredible to try to credit the people guilty of ripping vast profits out of the system for any marginal improvements in the system, when any taxpayer-funded improvements over the last 25 years have happened despite the private profiteers, not because of them.

Then there's the problem that if Alan Sugar believes it's "communist" to have publicly owned railways, then Germany, France, Spain, the Netherlands, Sweden, Japan, Switzerland, Canada, Italy, Belgium, Singapore, Ireland, and even Northern Ireland must all be communist states!

Who knew that "communism" was actually so commonplace?

Then there's the fact that 74% of the UK rail network are actually operated by the state rail companies of other countries like the Netherlands, France, Germany, Singapore, Hong Kong, and China.

If supporting public ownership of the railways makes someone a "communist", then supporting the current UK franchising model (which allows foreign state-ownership but bars the UK from bidding to run its own railways) obviously makes the likes of Alan Sugar a supporter of foreign communism!

As a self-appointed cheerleader for the current rail franchising model Alan Sugar believes that UK should be the only state on earth that is barred from running UK rail services, while the state rail companies of ... errr ... "communist" countries like Germany, France, the Netherlands and Singapore should be allowed to run British rail franchises!

See what a pickle people get themselves into when they wantonly lob accusations of "communism" around without even bothering to acquaint themselves with the absolutely basic facts first?

Once we see the screeching abuse of people like Alan Sugar in the context of some actual facts about the UK rail system it's beyond obvious that he's got an incredible amount of brass neck to be calling anyone else an "idiot", and that he resorts to such venal abuse and hyperbolic accusations because he simply hasn't got the intellect or knowledge to contest the argument with stuff like facts and evidence.

But instead of getting upset at this kind of vitriolic abuse, the majority of us who want decent not-for-profit public services that are run for the benefit of the British people and the British economy should be delighted that the only arguments that supporters of the private profiteers can muster are vitriol, abuse, fact-aversion, hyperbole, and glaring logical incoherence.

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What was Alan Sugar ever doing in the Labour Party?

In case you missed it, the unelected Peer Alan Sugar has been having a massively undignified meltdown on Twitter that must surely be making people wonder how on earth such an angry, arrogant, bile-spewing anti-socialist ever ended up making his home in the Labour Party in the first place.

Sugar's meltdown began when he posted an absolutely vile photoshopped image of Jeremy Corbyn alongside Adolf Hitler. After a sustained barrage of criticism over this crude undignified smear-job he eventually deleted the tweet, but he didn't stop there. His next piece of anti-Labour propaganda was a widely ridiculed "poem" about how much he hates Jeremy Corbyn.

Sugar's pathetic "poem" prompted John Prescott to retort with a satirical Tweet proposing a Sugar Tax of £10,000 every time Alan Sugar posts a stupid Tweet or says something ridiculous.

This is where Alan went into full-meltdown mode, posting a bizarre series of abusive tweets in reply to Prescott and numerous other people who criticised his behaviour.

Sugar's vile Twitter rampage included repeatedly using insults like "stupid idiot", "loser", "tosser", and "non-achiever", resorting to misogyny by telling a woman to get a face lift, bitterly attacking the Labour left, and sneering repetition of the grotesque right-wing fantasy of natural economic justice.

This extraordinary temper tantrum of abuse and right-wing vitriol raises the questions of what an angry right-winger like this was ever doing in the Labour Party in the first place, and how the New Labour mob ever considered elevating such a person into the unelected House of Lords.

Sugar's Twitter rant demonstrated that he has masses of contempt for those who want to make Britain a slightly fairer place so that more people have the chance to rise out of poverty to have successful and productive lives.

It's absolutely clear from the bile that he spat at anyone who dared criticise him that Sugar also has a very right-wing arrogance, believing that his wealth somehow makes him better than other people.

He's spectacularly short-tempered and abusive with people he considers to be below him because they're not as loaded as he is.

One person politely pointed out that instead of actually turning up to debate and vote in the House of Lords where the New Labour mob put him, Sugar has barely lifted a finger to influence the political system. His laziness is so extreme that he's only bothered to vote in a pathetic 1.4% of Lords votes since 2015.

Sugar's response to this was an incoherently furious anti-Corbyn rant, attacking "red lefties", declaring himself politically infallible ("all I say is correct"), and refusing to engage with the actual question of his lamentable House of Lords attendance at all.

The really sad thing is that Sugar rose up from working class roots himself to become rich and famous, but he's now intent on kicking the ladder down to impede the life chances of others from his kind of background.

Alan Sugar's Twitter rants don't just expose the fact that he's a bitter and angry person who resorts to abuse and insults when challenged by people he considers to be beneath him, he's also demonstrating the awful ladder-kicking attitude of so many (but obviously not all) in the baby-boomer generation.

There's nothing more repulsive than seeing people who made it good during the greatest period of social mobility the UK has ever seen deliberately turning against their own class and actually endorsing the Tory party and their policies of erecting huge social mobility barriers, slashing education funding, overseeing an explosion of precarious low-paid jobs and the longest sustained decline in the value of UK workers' wages since records began, slashing in-work benefits, and condemning hundreds of thousands of kids to lives growing up in dire poverty.

But that's exactly what Sugar did when he endorsed Theresa May at the 2017 General Election.

If someone is prepared to abandon the Labour Party and then explicitly endorse the most right-wing, social mobility wrecking, infrastructure under-funding, poverty increasing, hope destroying government in living memory, it's absolutely clear that they never really had any interest in the traditional values and objectives of the Labour Party at all.

If the Labour Party moved so far from their democratic socialist roots that they were attracting right-wing self-servers like Alan Sugar during the New Labour era, it's no wonder at all that they ended up driving away traditional Labour voters resulting in a 4.2 million collapse in the Labour vote between 1997 and the final New Labour flop in 2015 (13.5 million down to 9.3 million).

After Jeremy Corbyn steered Labour back towards the centre-left territory they traditionally occupied, and the likes of Alan Sugar returned to their natural Tory home, the Labour vote has bounced back up by 3.6 million to 12.9 million at the 2017 General Election (the biggest increase in the Labour vote since Clement Attlee's radical transformative government won the 1945 post-war election).

So Alan Sugar can sing from the Tory song-sheet and spew his arrogant Twitter abuse as much as he likes. Labour has gone back to representing the people rather than mega-rich donors, and there's nothing he can do about it except lob impotent insults at people he detests for the fact they won't bow and scrape before him just because he's loaded and an unelected Lord put there for life by a political party he now despises.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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