Civitas Blog

To illustrate just how detached from reality she considered Mr Anthony Browne to be, Ms Alibhai-Browne singled out for special treatment one very specific instance of what he claimed was pc-motivated suppression of true opinion. This example pertains to the BBC’s treatment of Sir Andrew Green and his independent think-tank, Migrationwatch, and of which he is Chairman, which are dedicated to exposing the hazards and dangers of current unprecedented high levels of net immigration into the UK.

Mr Browne’s claim about the BBC’s treatment of Migrationwatch was made to illustrate a more general thesis about the PC-motivated suppression of opinion which he stated as follows:

‘Political correctness has …. created a climate that has fuelled a vast growth in charities and pressure groups that support and promote the politically correct views on almost all issues…. [A] huge non-governmental sector has grown up, all pushing in the PC direction… [who] are given endless invaluable free publicity from the BBC and most newspapers as objective, independent groups…. In contrast, there are virtually no pressure groups that promote politically incorrect views, and most of these that do… are treated with suspicion by the media, especially the BBC.’ (36-7)

In the sentences that immediately follow, to illustrate his general thesis about PC having caused the suppression of countervailing opinion, Mr Browne cited as an example the way in which, so he claimed, the BBC has withheld adequate airtime from Migrationwatch. He writes:

‘[For] example, … Migrationwatch UK, founded by the former ambassador Sir Andrew Green, [is] a lone group campaigning for less immigration (a view supported by 80% of the public), against literally dozens of groups promoting mass immigration. In contrast to these other groups, Migrationwatch … is almost totally blackballed by the BBC, and to some extent by the broadsheet media.’ (37)

Back now to Ms Alibhai-Brown, whose mounting fury I can almost feel with such calumny being allowed to go unchallenged against her favourite Auntie, from whom she personally has received such generous bounty in the form of the munificently generous airtime it has accorded her in which to broadcast her own impeccably PC views on immigration.

In delivery of what she clearly considers a decisive refutation of Browne’s contentions about the BBC’s treatment of Migrationwatch, Ms Alibhai-Brown bids her readers: ‘Go and check the BBC website and count the times Green has appeared in the past year alone’.

When a journalist as willing as Ms Alibhai-Brown to make public her phantasies about book-bashing issues her readers an order, this one instantaneously complies.

I visited the BBC’s web-site, carried out her prescribed searches, and this is what I found.

On the BBC’s general web-site, there were, as of last Monday (9 January), as many as 413 separate entries called up by searching against Sir Andrew Green’s name. However, of these only one had anything remotely to do with him or his views about immigration. Sixteen entries appeared against ‘Migrationwatch’, but, again, no more than one was about its views on immigration.

More success in finding mention by the BBC of Sir Andrew Green’s views about immigration was had by conducting a similar search with the same pair of terms on its News website. Here, as of today, 34 search results appeared both for “Migrationwatch” and the same number and set of items for ‘Sir Andrew Green’. Of these 34 search results, 16 were for items that appeared within the last twelve months, the time-frame which Ms Alibhai-Brown stipulated. By contrast, 422 search results appeared when a search was conducted tapping in ‘Refugee Council’, the name of a group that campaigns on their behalf, and 348 search results appeared when a search was made against the name of another such body, ‘Refugee Action’.

Further informal enquiries revealed that Sir Andrew Green tends to appear 2-3 times a year on the Today programme. On the rest of BBC Radio 4 News and more generally on that radio station, Sir Andrew has, apparently, been granted fewer than fifteen minutes in the last four years. He does appear from time to time on BBC Radio Five Live, and last year appeared twice on BBC Radio 2’s Jeremy Vine show and twice on BBC 2’s Newsnight, as a guest, plus a couple of sound bites on that programme.

All this compares with the series of five 15 minute programmes that the BBC granted Ms Alibhai-Brown a year or so ago to propagate her own favourable views about asylum-seekers.

Bearing in mind Migrationwatch is the only national body currently dedicated to making a rational case against large-scale immigration, and that, as Anthony Browne has pointed out, its concerns are shared by the vast majority of the public, the relative coverage given by the BBC to it compared with that given to bodies and individuals of the opposite persuasion top it suggests that it is Ms Alibhai-Browne and her fellow PC advocates, and not, as she claims, Anthony Browne, who ‘freely fabricates, accuses, and insinuates’.

In the Independent's earlier editorial about Browne’s publication, ‘Gone mad? Hardly. It’s all about respect for others’, the newspaper dismissed Mr Browne’s as ‘reactionary bilge’. Ominously, the editorial added that such opposition as Browne’s to political correctness ‘is still very much part of a reactionary political agenda. Tellingly, the vast majority of the stories that appear “political correctness gone mad” involve dark-skinned ethnic minorities.’

Since the vulnerable groups whom the PC-brigade deems in need of protection are identified by their members not being white heterosexual males, who in the eyes of the brigade have been and remain their oppressor-group, it would hardly be surprising if the majority of stories about the wilder excesses of PC did not figure any but dark-skinned ethnic minorities, rather than whites, who collectively vastly outnumber whites.

However, the suggestion that opposition to continued large-scale immigration to Britain is racist in motivation is simply untrue, as is the suggestion that to be against PC in general -- beyond when confined to demanding respectful address and reference in speech and writing to all as well as similar equality before the law -- is to be reactionary as opposed to progressive.

In any case, this whole terminology itself is already tainted by political correctness. Are die-hard advocates of collective ownership of the means of production and centrally state-planned economy in preference to a market economy and limited government ‘progressive’ or ‘reactionary’?

In the many broadcasts I have been called on to make since the publication of Anthony Browne’s pamphlet to help explain and defend its temperately expressed and moderate views -- and for all of which that I have searched for to date I have found there to be ample hard evidence not all which was admittedly cited in the publication, I have often had to correct television and radio interviewers and producers who had been briefed to describe Civitas as a right-wing think-tank. Whoever originally chose this particular accolade by which to characterise Civitas was driven more by a desire to discredit the think-tank in the eyes of the general public than by any concern for truth. We can no more be correctly described as right-wing than can Tony Blair be correctly described as left-wing. To be right or left of centre is not necessarily thereby to be on the wing or tip of either political orientation.

Still, these mis-characterisations show, as much as does the crowding-out of un-PC views from the public forum, the power of language. They also show how much work still remains for those who share Mr Browne’s concerns about the dangers of PC as a mechanism for oppressive totalitarian thought-control in challenging its nostrums wherever they rear their ugly head.

This conveniently brings me back to my starting-point -- dear Ms Alibhai-Brown. Finally, at the end of the day, one has to ask oneself the following question about her animadversions towards the views of Anthony Browne, in true Ali G. mode : Is it ‘cos Browne's white, right, or just plain both?