Diversity: Such a Strength, the BBC Has To Enforce It

When I was a child, the BBC was unquestionably the home of quality television. Who can forget the magical 1984 Christmas treat, “The Box of Delights,” or the comedy genius of “Blackadder” and “Only Fools and Horses”? “Doctor Who” even had my father glued to the screen back in the 1980s.

Times change, however. Thanks to liberal progressivism, quality output at the BBC has been jettisoned in favour of ridiculously exaggerated ethnic quotas (non-whites already constitute 22% of screen roles, despite making up only 12% of the population); BBC ‘Diversity Tsars’ on £1,700 a day, offering up paradoxical aphorisms such as ‘White people are never judged on their race’; the dismissal of white men (no matter how well they perform); the continuous blackwashing of history; and the self-satisfied victimhood paraded by non-whites, forced to suffer the indignity of sharing the office with the few remaining white employees the Beeb has not yet managed to sack.

The pages of The Guardian may cheer the diversity push, but there are predictable consequences to such meddling. And although you’d be hard pushed to find anyone more liberal than my dad, even he had to admit that “Doctor Who” had lost its way. “It’s not as good as it used to be,” he remarked to me once, though he refrained from ascribing the demise to the plot playing second fiddle to the timelord’s sudden black, non-binary gayness.

Much like those strangers to Whitehall, the beach-bound civil service, and the genuflecting Old Bill who couldn’t find a jihadi sympathiser at a Jeremy Corbyn wreath-laying, working at the BBC has become less of a haven for media types and more of a graduate scheme for far-left political activism.

Many have long-since argued that the BBC is unfit for purpose, but this week’s diversity farrago takes the biscuit—an excellent précis of which was covered earlier in these pages. As reported by The Telegraph on Monday, BBC managers are now being instructed not to hire candidates who are ‘dismissive’ of diversity and inclusion. Instead, leaked recruitment guidelines demand applicants be asked to “explain what diversity and inclusion means to (them),” and (should they be offered a position) to expand on what opportunities they perceive to “celebrate or encourage diversity and inclusion in (their) role?”

No one could sincerely pass such a test—and, more to the point, no one should aim to either. If you’re a white male applicant genuinely in favour of ‘diversity’ at the BBC, surely you should not be showing up to the interview in the first place? If you’re a non-white pushing for ever more stringent diversity quotas, it’s hard to conclude that you’re not aiming to get where you don’t deserve to be on merit, or perhaps that you’re simply anti-white. Who in their right mind would be supportive of such motives?

As former BBC journalist Robin Aitken pointed out, “These guidelines illustrate just how embedded DEI [Diversity, Equality and Inclusion] ideology is in the BBC. The rules act as a mechanism to maintain groupthink and screen out anyone who is skeptical of this novel doctrine of diversity and inclusion.” However, Aitken’s subsequent observation is flat wrong: “The BBC is now hiring not on the basis of skill or merit, but instead on people’s political attitudes to diversity.” No! The BBC is not hiring on the basis of genuine political attitudes; it is hiring on the basis of feigned attitudes, and that’s the most egregious part.

As an aside, the BBC recruitment guidelines advised that applicants be given ten minutes to answer questions on diversity and inclusion. On a personal note, I have just endured the most in-depth interview of my professional life—a 25-minute grilling from three interlocutors, encompassing everything from my school days to my ‘vision’ for the future. At no point did any of the very senior figures enquire as to my attitude towards diversity; had they done so, they’d have got very short shrift indeed.

Force-feeding lies and demanding their regurgitation is a dangerous business, not without historical precedent. Sir Thomas Moore famously refused to recant his Catholicism and was burned alive for the privilege. Alas, we do not live in such heroic times, and although our equivalent auto-da-fé is merely to face the flames of cancel culture, few are prepared for that firewalk either.

It is clear that the BBC does not believe its own propaganda on diversity; why else would you need to enforce something so self-evidently true or popular? I can’t help making the comparisons with COVID here and the state mendacity that forced most of us to toe the line: vaccines so effective you lost your job if you refused them, and social distancing so necessary, those pushing it were disinclined to participate.

As a publicly funded broadcaster, the BBC has an express duty to be politically neutral (a laughable concept granted, when one considers their refusal to call Hamas ‘terrorists,’ or the bias of their Brexit coverage), but now it seems they aren’t even pretending. There is of course nothing wrong (beyond the obvious) with a channel that wishes to indulge in a strong left-wing political slant; GB News, after all, appears to manage this reasonably well from the other side; however, if this is the route the BBC ostensibly wishes to go down, then (like the competition), it must do so on its own dime.

What is not acceptable is the charade of neutrality—Auntie foisting her political motives upon new employees and demanding the taxpayer fund it on pain of imprisonment. Perhaps BBC Verify could be persuaded to look into the matter—just as soon as they’ve finished investigating their own grand inquisitor?

The BBC claims it “reflects and celebrates the diversity” of the audiences it serves; if that’s the case, then that audience is about as diverse as a Remain convention in Kensington & Chelsea. With half a million cancelled licences in the last year alone, it is clear that the BBC is in fact no longer meeting the demands of its audience and, if truth be told, has failed to do so for quite some time. It ought now to be scrapped, or at the very least to have its charter revoked and face the full force of the open market. If the public genuinely desires a small-screen version of The Guardian, let them pay for it honestly.

Frank Haviland is the author of Banalysis: The Lie Destroying the West, and writes a Substack here.

This piece first appeared in The European Conservative, and is reproduced by kind permission.

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