Interesting development…
The linked interview with Tom Mills is here:
Nothing here any attentive viewer hasn’t already observed - but interesting to have an ‘inside’ confirmation…
(Note however she had to leave the BBC to speak the truth!)
The same presenter being lauded by Max
“if a lot of people believed in a flat Earth we’d need to address it more”.
David Jordan, the BBC’s director of editorial policy, speaking to a House of Lords committee.
Says it all, really. BBC version of impartiality = telling the truth doesn’t come into it.
Glad I can’t get it for either TV or any radio and don’t miss it one tiny bit to be honest. We used to trust the BBC to bring the truth to the people and seeing the BBC logo on programmes that popped up on french channels made me feel quite patriotic, not any longer from what I have been reading now.
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Yes - I’ve been through the same evolution while working internationally for many years.
In the early days it was always really nice if I could get the BBC World Service - radio and television. Moreover, when my work took me into hot-ish spots- Berlin just after the wall came down, Sarajevo just after the seige, Tirana when you still had to drive around shell holes to get out of the airport - I was proud to hear locals say the BBC had been the only broadcaster they would trust.
But then I observed first hand this trust gradually eroded. The first knock in the world’s confidence was the Iraq war - seen almost everywhere outside the UK and US as criminal - but the decline in confidence in the BBC gradually became more and more pronounced. It even extended post-brexit to many hotels etc around the world not even offering the BBC - when they all still seem to include rolling news alternatives like CNN, France24, Al Jazeera - and even RT.
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Great article by Kenan Malik on how false but widely held assumptions about political economy ‘in the heart of government, in broadcasting studios and on newspapers’ front pages’ distort public perceptions…
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Rather interesting, if a little sad, to read back over the postings in this thread over nearly 3 years.
I grew up with Aunty Beeb on a Grundig radio
What’s interesting when you look back is that the BBC always was conservative/establishment - upper middle class, public school staff and governance, etc…
I think what has happened to it, and our increasing frustration with it, is related to the collapse of the ‘public sphere’ (the relatively stable set of social relations that reproduced certain ‘rules of debate’, including things like respect for objectivity, shame if caught lying, or taking money from dirty industries, shared belief in human rights, etc.).
But this public sphere has fallen apart in the face of increasing political polarisation, and media disintegration into multiple channels, both broadcast and online. There is no longer a coherent mainstream culture around the status-quo to support the BBC’s ‘voice of the nation’ understanding of itself. For example, it was always London-centric, but this was less of a problem before Scotland started breaking away for real.
The classic example is climate/ecological breakdown - and the fact that the BBC for years presented it as if it was a topic for a public school debating society, thus suggesting to listeners/viewers that real scientific conclusions were no different from the deliberate lies of obscure idealogues bought and paid for by the fossil fuel multinationals.
Hmmm, I don’t listen to the BBC any more, but I used to. Here’s a few chronologically sequenced thoughts about the factors in its decline:
i) Murdoch - and subsequently other foreign residents’ ownership of domestic print media - even the US doesn’t allow that.
ii) Alistair Campbell realising that governments needed to think much harder about their media profile, whereas previously they thought themselves to be largely above that.
iii) Trump demonstrating that blatant lies publicly issued through social media could be an effective tool of government that side stepped tradiitional mainstream media’s professional checks and filtters . Whereas previously government lies had been discreet. and often tacitly accepted.
iv) Offering bland aspirational mission statement like deflectng journalists’ searchiing questions in the following manner(incidentally, what became of all those late C20th/early C21st mission statements?) .
We are aiming to champion working families by streamlining wasteful expenditure within the public sector services and are working day and night to achieve these objectives for the benefit of honest hard working families."
Lastly, I’d love to learn other SF posters’ factors in how we got where we are.
I agree with much of what has been said above but would add something. Is it possible, that the BBC rather than leading public opinion, has been reacting to it, caught a little on the back foot, and mirroring?
I feel the Murdoch press and social media has been much more active in pushing opinion. Ukip led the way to a new, not very nice, British identity. Brexit rode the wave that had prepared the way.
Just who, if it was indeed ‘orchestrated’ this current UK attitude, or whether giving everyman a voice has lead to a more revealing national character, remains a subject for debate.
Hopefully not torches and pitchforks 
Can we not reserve that for the present cabinet? 
Remember it’s an English problem, not a UK problem.
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Quite right! Not so united anymore.
Reshuffle happening now.
Let’s hope that the ERG will be shown the door.
I think we have to be very careful when thinking about British - or English - ‘national character’.
Here on SurviveFrance many views have been put forward about ‘the French’, which rarely apply to Bretons (they often reflect people’s observations of inconsiderate driving - but Bretons are by far the most polite and considerate drivers I’ve ever come across).
My own view is that the key to understanding the polarisation in UK politics (and many other countries, both now and on many past occasions) is the 2008 financial crash. Of course the roots go back to Thatcherism/Reaganomics and the escalation of social inequality and unbalancing of the economy they unleashed. But the 2008 crash was when it hit home that things weren’t getting better - and moreover weren’t going to get better - without fundamental change The Cameron government’s ‘austerity’ exacerbated all this in the UK.
Lots of people desperate for change drove both the Brexit and Corbyn phenomena - and the continuing movement of people to political extremes. I can’t emphasise enough how dangerous this is - it is precisely the scenario that many times in the past has led to fascism - but not because of any ‘national character’ that distinguished Germany, Italy, Spain, Austria, etc, from the UK, France, Belgium, Denmark, etc, in 1930s Europe, but because of contingent political and economic differences - crucially, in a polarised political context, the conservatives/establishment allowing their fear of the left to draw them into facilitating the extreme right.
The '45, the Highland Clearances, the Enclosure Acts, the Potato Famine, Dublin PO…
Or am I being too flip?
OTOH, it was also easier to emigrate than oppose and often the formerly oppressed became the colonial oppressor. Certainly, between the mid C18th and mid C19tth the Clearances and Enclosure Acts were important drivers of GB’s imperial colonial project.
Too long a timescale. Of course there have been polarising episodes before (especially, like those you list, relating to the imposition of capitalist social relations on other social formations or resistances) - but when we think about the current polaristion, expressed by brexit, the BBC’s difficulty negotiating a broken public sphere, potential splits in both main political parties, the erosion of consensus on democratic and human rights, etc - then we see the 2008 financial crash, and the failure to really recover from it, as key.
From 1945 to 1979 people felt generally that life in the UK was getting better (and indeed it was) - that their children would have better lives than they had. Through the 80s, 90s and early 00s, I think most people just about managed to keep feeling that despite the difficulties they were experiencing, progress would return. But in 2008 I think that changed - it was evidence that the whole current economic edifice was precarious - and the lack of any real progress in living standards - indeed, their continued decline for most people - has added to the sense that the status quo just isn’t working.
Of course. As you know, I am prone to sweeping generalisations!
But…. It is possible to generalise a wee bit when speaking of a populace in its entirety and majority
On a happier note, I hear ‘the French’ are quite pleased to be referred to as such, in general. Driving habits I can only comment on as a pedestrian but take your word
And I will add, the folks on the roads down south with 84 plates, are usually very considerate in slowing to pass my dogs and stopping at our many village crossings, or often elsewhere 
Folks with 
B plates are a generally quite another matter
