The straw that broke….

After 55 years of knowing the world in part through the BBC, I can no longer listen. I am grieving.

I grew up listening to the radio. TV was restricted in my house (only BBC, only Black & White, only with permission).

Radio was freely available.

Radio was my first cultural community. I’d listen to BBC Radio 4 (speech, news, comedy, documentary) and to BBC Radio 3 (music, almost exclusively Classical, though with occasional splashes of Jazz). I travelled into strange worlds. Doors opened. Connections formed between one thing and another. It was, in large part, how I came to know of the world - or a world at least.

It was also a refuge. I didn’t have the happiest childhood. It was not the worst by a long way, but it was complicated. My parents made the best home they could, damaged as they both were by their own fractured and dysfunctional families. Trying to give me - and my brother and sister - opportunities they never had, they sent us to the boarding school where my father taught and my mother once had been a nurse.

It was not a good experience for me. Each evening I would see my father get into his car and drive home to a house that, for over two-thirds of each year, I was exiled from. I remained behind at school, a ‘christian’ boy’s school where, for years I was extensively bullied, and where I never felt I belonged.

Radio - specifically music-radio - was my hiding-place. There, I imagined myself into worlds where I belonged.

I especially loved listening to concerts from far-off places - some even on the other side of the Iron Curtain! I imagined myself in those Soviet-architecture concert halls, listening with others to the universal language of being human. Occasionally there would be a wholeday of live concerts, each from a different place: Turku, Prague, Inverness, Madrid, Athens, Moscow….. I would listen, rapt, and feel intimately connected to individuals in distant audiences, hearing the music at exactly the same time as me, isolated, confused and often close to despair .

It was magical and made me feel something close to hope.

Radio - specifically the BBC - gave me reasons to live at times.

So it has remained in the decades since.

There have been tensions in my relationship with the BBC. I can be as resistant to changes as anyone else. I get grumpy and then, after a while, realise that some changes are actually improvements, and those that aren’t are not the end of the world.

There have been significant challenges.

Increasingly the BBC has repositioned itself from being an independent broadcaster into being a state broadcaster. Ostensibly ‘arm’s-length’ from government, that’s a convenient fiction. Appointments to its board are political and the board makes political appointments to senior management. As the British Conservatives have embraced far-right extremism, and British Labour have embraced conservatism, so the tone, editorial perspective, and programming of the BBC has drifted rightwards.

The BBC’s unconditional hostility to Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn was unforgivable. They parroted the slurs and trivia of the far right press, and invented some slurs of their own. I remember standing in Heathrow airport waiting for a plane (back when I travelled a lot), watching a BBC interview with Corbyn. The interviewer questioned him for ten minutes about whether he would, or would not, kneel if he met the Queen. Corbyn was his customary polite and thoughtful self. The interviewer was like a recent media studies graduate hoping to get noticed.

Corbyn was an articulate and honest democratic socialist. He was treated as if he were a dangerous extremist. Decades before the BBC would have treated his politics as mainstream and the dribbling extremism of Johnson and Truss as dangerous lunacy.

Equally, for a decade, the BBC gave continual platform to Farage - thus legitimisng the push towards Brexit. They gave him endless appearances on Question Time, while entirely ignoring the emergent voice of Green politics (despite the fact that they, unlike Farage, actually had elected representatives in national and local government). It is not an exaggeration to say the the BBC manufactured the atmosphere which led to Brexit - bringing to fruition the dreams of Putin, Steve Bannon, the American oligarchy, and assorted international fascists.

Like many people, I came to distrust BBC News’ claim of impartiality. But this did not fracture my fundamental connection with the corporation. I just stopped listening to the news.

Over the last few years it has also been increasingly apparent across the ‘current affairs’ output of the corporation, that there is no longer any fundamental questioning of the orthodoxy of extremist capitalism/neo-liberalism/monetarism/rich-get-richer voodoo economics. The lack of critical enquiry on the part of ‘journalists’, asks us to accept unquestioningly Thatcher’s dictum that ‘There is no alternative’.

The BBC as a vehicle of enquiry and critique has been replaced by a cheerleader for state ideology.

Then came the genocide in Gaza. There’s neither space nor need here to delve into the disgusting, craven way BBC news has reported on the atrocities unfolding in Palestine. What they do/do not report, the language they use, the prioritising of the life and humanity of Israelis rather than Palestinians, the way presenters defend some perspectives and attack others - these and so many other journalistic and editorial failings disgrace the BBC. That their most decisive action of late has been to sack a football commentator who spoke against genocide speaks volumes.

Then came the final straw. As the phrase ‘the straw that broke the camel’s back’ reminds us, it’s the smallest of things that make a situation, finally, untenable.

I often spend Sunday mornings at my desk, doing administrative-type things. I have Radio 3 playing (as I do many mornings). I like not deciding what to listen to. I like to be surprised. More than anything I like the sense that I’m connecting to something that’s unfolding live. So I listen to the radio rather than choosing an album.

The presenter last Sunday, between pieces, told us how ‘all us presenters’ were swapping WhatsApp messages during the Eurovision Song Contest the night before. That’s normal, right? ‘Normal’ people have no problem with Eurovision. “Normal’ people are not concerned that a country that is systematically starving and slaughtering civilians is being treated as an equal member of ‘our community of nations’. ‘Normal’ people don’t think about genocide, not when there’s a bit of fun to be had.

Right?

This is the club the BBC invites us to be part of.

Of course there are millions of British people appalled by what is unfolding in Gaza, and sickened to the core by the fascists in the Israeli government and army. But they are not ’normal’ according to the BBC. We do not quite ‘belong’.

The BBC claims it is impartial. Impartiality does not mean manufacturing a consensus the government wants to impose.

The BBC is doing the same with Gaza as it did with Farage and Brexit, with neo-liberal economics, and with so much else - it is actively constructing a consensus around an extremist perspective.

It is normalising extremism.

It is betraying all codes of decency and respect, choosing to align with the powerful against the majority. It is serving its masters. It is providing distraction and manufacturing consensus.

After 55 years, I can no longer be part of that ideological manipulation.

You may think stopping listening to a radio station is trivial, but to me it’s not. It’s a loss of something that has been integral to my sense of who I am and how I know the world.

It’s gone.

I have stopped listening to BBC Radio and accessing the BBC News website. It won’t bother the BBC (they are doomed anyway - capitalism first makes ’socially beneficial’ organisations unviable, then privatises them - that’s the playbook. The BBC is well along the journey towards disappearing). But it bothers me.

I have started to look for alternatives. This morning I streamed a classical station from Switzerland. As I write this I am listening to a strange, elusive and mysterious contemporary opera streaming live from Hamburg. I have no idea what’s going on, nor what opera it is.

This morning, between music the announcements were in German, French, Italian and Romansch. Tonight they are in German.

It’s like I’m a child again, listening into strange worlds that I’m not a part of, imagining beyond what I know.