THE BBC’s ban on the singing of Rule, Britannia and Land of Hope and Glory at the Last Night of the Proms should be welcomed. Even better would be a ban on the National Anthem and any other celebration of Britishness. We should give our ‘liberal’ intellectual elite, at the BBC and elsewhere, full rein to display and promote its credentials. The people will decide whether or not they are prepared permanently to swallow this force-feeding of national self-loathing.
That black lives matter is self-evident. The fact that different races share an equal propensity for good and evil should also be. Yet it is ignored because it does not fit the desired narrative of white guilt. For every white sinner, though, there is a black sinner and for every white saint there is a black equivalent, acknowledged or not.
The black celebrity historian David Olusoga may disagree. His recent MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh Festival highlighted his feelings of having been ‘crushed, isolated’ and ‘disempowered’ by the ‘TV industry’.
Is he having a laff at the gullibility of the liberal elite that surrounds him? It is, after all, difficult these days to escape its self-flagellation with regard to selected sins of past generations. Olusoga states, however, that he has had to seek medical treatment for clinical depression, and I am inclined to take him at his word. Mental health is no laughing matter.
Seeing the world over-much through a singularly black perspective may not have helped. It paints a picture for him that is out of focus with a broader panorama of the past. He is, perhaps, as much at fault as those whose behaviour he says he found ‘most shocking’:
‘. . . white colleagues – good, decent, creative people – genuinely could not see the problem . . .’
Olusoga is not alone amongst black media commentators in distinguishing between people principally on racial grounds. Any suggestion that the character of black people and of white people is fundamentally the same is ignored. He strongly criticised the BBC for recently, if only temporarily, defending a reporter who used the N-word on air in a report about a racially aggravated attack.
This ‘genuinely damaged faith in the BBC among many black people’ and would not have happened if there were more senior black staff in newsrooms, he claimed.
The more derogatory deployment of the N-word by the ‘greatest Black Briton’, Mary Seacole, in her autobiography is something that Olusoga is less willing to bring to public attention. He appears happy to promote half the story when it comes to black history. Remarkably, many in the media are happy to go along with the distortion of the past. A few weeks ago, the Times newspaper asked me to prove that Seacole’s well-attested autobiography was not a fake. Not even Olusoga is going that far.
