How Serious is the BBC About Wanting to Represent Britain’s Working Class?
My Spectator column this week is about the BBC’s much written about initiative to ensure 25% of its employees are from “lower socio-economic groups” by 2027 so it “reflects the extraordinary diversity of the lives, backgrounds and experiences of the whole U.K. public”. Needless to say, I’m unconvinced that yet another ‘diversity target’ will do anything to reduce the progressive, metropolitan bias of the BBC.
The problem lies in the way the BBC has defined ‘working-class’.
To qualify for special treatment, applicants will be asked what the occupation was of the main parental earner in their household when they were 14. But what if they had no occupation? I know plenty of posh deadbeats who don’t work because they don’t need to. Would they be classed as ‘unemployed’ by the BBC box-tickers? And what about recent arrivals in the U.K. who have had to take menial jobs to make ends meet? My cleaner in the 1990s had been a professor of geology in the Soviet Union before its collapse.
No, if the BBC’s aim is to diversify the political attitudes and cultural taste of its staff, it should go the whole hog and stipulate that only white British working-class applicants – defined by a combination of household income when they were growing up and their parents’ education – are capable of meeting this target. They are the truly under-represented group among the BBC’s staff, as they are in all the professions, not least because they’re less likely to go to university than almost any other demographic. According to a report by the House of Commons Education Committee last year, the proportion of white British pupils eligible for free school meals participating in higher education by the age of 19 in 2018-19 was 16%, the lowest of any ethnic group apart from travellers of Irish heritage and Gypsy/Roma.
One reason that white British working-class people will continue to be under-represented at the Beeb in spite of the new quota is because the Corporation announced last year it wasn’t satisfied with just 15% of its workforce being from BAME backgrounds and wants to increase that to 20%. And many of the applicants who tick the BAME box will also tick the ‘working-class’ box, given that non-white people from low income families are more likely to go to university than whites. According to the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, 59% of black African pupils eligible for free school meals progressed to higher education in 2018-19, 58.6% of Bangladeshis, 57.2% of Indians, 47.1% of Pakistanis and 31.8% of black Caribbean pupils. So much for ‘white privilege’.
And that 16% figure for poor white British pupils conceals an even starker figure – just 12.7% of boys in this group progress to higher education, compared with 19.4% of girls. That’s the truly disadvantaged group in modern Britain: white working-class males. It is their taste that is completely neglected by the BBC, with the exception of Match of the Day. But even for those brief moments of pleasure on Saturday and Sunday night, they have to put up with the BBC commentators extravagantly praising the Premier League footballers taking the knee before the game. The implication is that people like them are racist troglodytes badly in need of cultural re-education.
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: Andrew Tettenborn has made a similar argument about this new BBC hiring quota in the Critic.
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My prediction is that a lot of Tarquins are going to say “bus driver” because it’s the only way they’ll tick a quota box and avoid having their application shredded.
See also Colonial students claiming to be 1/64th Elizabeth Warren.
I used to have some regard for bus drivers until one of them spawned Sajid Jabbit.
Not to mention Sadiq Khan, it seems.
BBC representing the working class? Don’t make me laugh – the BBC despises the British people and in particular the little oiks who have to get their hands dirty for a living.
It is institutionally oikophobic, like the Labour party and Grauniad.
But it loves the working class as little by as it has a brown face.
Jeepers! The damned predictive texting on this website – it alters whatever I put after I press print.
How does one edit on this website? Someone must know.
It’s getting truly ridiculous at the BBC now. On a radio commentary for the Champions League this week, you had a female commentator and a female ‘expert summariser’. Not a man in sight commentating on male sport. Last time I watched athletics on the BBC, the presenting team were all women (4 to zero) and three of them were black. More sexism against men. The BBC website is trying its hardest to eliminate easy access to any male football coverage outside the EPL, whilst constantly putting women’s football top of the website. If they were doing things honestly, they would have a dedicated page for women’s football and a dedicated link on the BBC sport home page. But no, they have to sponge off male sport and then try and eradicate the entirety of the male football pyramid at the same time. There is not a chance that this behaviour is anything but calculating and deliberate. I do not have any obligation to watch women’s football, the only obligation I have is to provide no impediment to anyone who does want to watch it. The BBC seems to think that everyone has to have women’s football stuffed down their throats.… Read more »
Fundamentally, I agree with you… women commentating on football is like men commentating on childbirth.
But…
If you let them define the terms of the debate, you immediately cede the ground to them.
It’s not sexist, it’s self-destructive.
It’s not demeaning, it’s absurd.
It’s not wrong, it’s total nonsense.
If you’re paying the TV licence, you’re part of the problem.
Also you can’t say batsman now, it has to be batter.
Batperson?
How about the batty?
It is a way to give shedloads of money to the classes believe vex by the BBC, i.e. women, blacks, non-whites, trans-whatevers, Labour/LibDem/SNP/Green party activists, relatives and friends of senior BBC staff. No experience or talent is required. Just turn up and follow the narrative, smile and look jolly.
Well, that one gave me a laugh.
Quotas are merely a sign they’re covering up their nepotistic hiring practises…
The problem isn’t who’s on the screen, it’s that they’ve been picked because they’ll spout unrepresentative crap.
I agree. it’s the spouting of “crap” by people chosen for the sake of appearances that’s the problem.
The first woman hired to speak on men’s cricket in Australia was an actress who happened to love cricket. It was an embarrassment. But today there are female commentators on men’s cricket who are first-rate analysts of the game.
And at least one of the females who comment on men’s Aussie Rules football is a fine player herself, who makes very perceptive tactical observations (believe it or not – Aussie Rules does have tactics).
Ah lol. The BBC is a political campaigning organisation pretending to be a broadcaster in order to give them revenue and access. I doubt they give two hoots about representing the working class, but even if they do and end up employing a few more, who really cares? Because what they will not do is ensure they employ people with a diverse range of political views nor will they give any space to any views that conflict with their narrative. I don’t think there is any hope for the BBC – the only option now is to privatise it and disconnect it from the state. If you want an example of how they think, these are the words of Michael Wendling, BBC journalist, writing about what I had complained was biased coverage of an early anti-lockdown protest: “We have no obligation to give a platform to erroneous ideas. We don’t, to take an extreme example, broadcast the manifestos of mass murderers alongside police statements so that people can “make up their own minds”. I’m not saying the people there were violent. Some of them were (as the story reflected) were drawn by legitimate concerns. But the speakers (Mr Icke and… Read more »
Because what they will not do is ensure they employ people with a diverse range of political views nor will they give any space to any views that conflict with their narrative.
Ah – my pet beef. Diversity is considered “progressive” and desirable as long as it’s confined to employing people who look different or have different-sounding names, while holding and expressing precisely the same set of approved views.
Would it be too much to ask that we try a system of, oh I know this will sound silly but, ….just employing the best candidate for the job..?
Oh god wouldn’t that be great. It’ll never catch on because that involves things that can’t be measured in a spreadsheet – intuition for one thing.
That’s heresy!
Oh my god.
Sorry Neil, that is a very outdated idea that actually went out of the window a long time ago.
At work when a job came up and we gossiped about potential candidates we would joke that the ideal candidate would be a female, with a disability of some sort, also possibly a lesbian, who might also belong to some obscure religion, thereby ticking all the boxes. 9 times out of 10 we usually weren’t far wrong.
Whether they were the best candidate for the attributes of the job was a totally different issue of whether they were the best candidate.
In the current cultural milieu, it’s tempting to tell upper-middle class Toby to stay in his lane, but I’ll resist. He (and Tettenborn) make some good points about trying to manage by numbers. The fundamental question is: who gives a shit? The BBC is beyond being a lost cause and it is representative of a far larger problem that fixing the BBC will simply not address. And there’s another much bigger problem too. Working class people might have at one time been ‘salt of the earth’ – the down-at-heel autodidact craftsmen that grew up in the 1950s with manners, propriety and pride, and whose offspring were the first generation to go to university. It’s the environment I grew up in and I was one of those ‘first to go to university’. I did my bookwork and fucked off out of there, like many around me. By the end of the century, once social mobility had done its thing, much of what remained of the white working class was thick, ugly, tribal barbarians with a welfare addiction and a total lack of moral fabric. If you want to see what I mean, watch the first few series of Shameless. I literally… Read more »
I think we mean the working classes that actually work, not chavkind.
Do they still exist in any meaningful sense? We have hardly any industry to speak of – today vast majority of the actually working working class is basically window cleaners, postmen, van drivers, hairdressers, call-centre workers and vanishingly few tradesmen.
A competent tradesman (electrician / builder / plumber, etc) can earn a lot more than many supposed “white collar” jobs – basically because they provide a service which people actually need whereas a fair number of white-collar jobs fit right into the bullshit jobs category.
You’re not wrong at all… and this further muddies the water and makes management by spreadsheet even more impossible (yes, I know…)
Does a guy who makes £100K a year with his hands and a bag of spanners count as working class?
In my book, yes. They still have working class attitudes. I guess that would change across generations, but where I live is middle class in terms of income but I would say more working class culturally.
And that’s where the conversation becomes interesting, because I consider myself working class, even though I have a white collar job, a healthy salary and a detached house. I seriously lack middle-class attitudes though… I tried to wear them as a skin suit for 20 years or so, but in the end I gave it up as a bad job… it was like trying to wear someone else’s shoes.
I concluded you can become the economic middle-class, but not the social, cultural or political middle class unless you’re born into it or are some kind of sociopath.
As far as I am concerned, working class people are those who do useful things, and the middle class are those people who tell the working class people how they should be doing useful things. The working class people nod, then ignore them and get on with the job. Then the middle class talk loudly and take most of the credit.
This is why the BBC will never employ working class people – because the working class people are too busy doing useful things.
I agree. I guess your kids may become middle class, though that really depends on what school they go to, where you live and how you behave, who you marry, who you mix with.
The workers you’re describing mostly work in isolation from each other and have relatively little bargaining power. It doesn’t make them worthless.
The ones I know are not “thick, ugly, tribal barbarians with a welfare addiction and a total lack of moral fabric”. Nothing like it. They are pleasant, responsible and interesting human beings, who are often desperate to keep their jobs.
I have on the other hand seen plenty of people in posh jobs who appear to have a remarkable absence of moral fabric, together with an addiction to sneering at people who are less well-off.
Judging by much of what was on before I stopped watching, that had already happened.
It’s a fair point… couldn’t confirm though… I haven’t watched any telly for years now. I think I last had a TV licence in about 2007, and that was only because the bird I was seeing wouldn’t so much as step into a house without a tellybox.
Insightful, and so very true.
GB News have found this site
https://twitter.com/i/status/1511895388185571328
April 1st was 7 days ago, a bit late aren’t we?
Richard Sharp (BBC chairman)
https://en.wikipedia.og/wiki/Richard_Sharp_(BBC_chairman)
Do the maths
Also attended Davos 2020.
The BBC Is Not At All Serious About Wanting To Represent Britain’s Working Class.
There, fixed it.
“The BBC Is Not At All Serious About”… anything, except government propaganda.
I’ll tell you how you might define “working class”: the same you way define “white working class”, but without reference to colour.
There is white trash, and coloured trash.
There are white working class people, and coloured ones- both most with a job, some without.
There are white upper middle class professional ‘progressives’, and coloured ones.
There are white upper middle class professional ‘conservatives/with working class values’, and coloured ones.
The real problem is intolerance of each other, who is on the up and down numerically and influence-wise.
Other popular ‘primary identies’ like homosexuality or religion also overlap with each of them, which complicates things and increases intolerance even further.
Surely you mean trash of colour!
In 1984 I returned to BBC Scotland after covering the Tory conference in Brighton. The IRA had come close to assassinating Margaret Thatcher with a bomb and the country was in shock. Apart, that is, from some of my BBC colleagues. “Pity they missed the bitch,” one confided to me. For three decades I was that rare breed – a Conservative at the BBC. In my time working on programmes such as Today and Breakfast News I couldn’t have formed a cricket team from Tory sympathisers. As one producer put it, you feel almost part of an ethnic minority. We all know the cliched critique of the BBC: a nest of Lefties promoting a progressive agenda and political correctness. Depressingly, that cliche is uncomfortably close to the truth: the BBC is biased, and it is a bias that seriously distorts public debate. In the past 30 years, ‘Auntie’ has transformed from the staid upholder of the status quo to a champion of progressive causes. In the process, the ideal at the heart of the corporation – that it should be fair-minded and non-partisan – has all but disappeared. Our scripts were as opinionated as any commentary in The Guardian. I… Read more »
It took me a long time to realise that the biggest (and most heinous) single con the BBC ever pulled in the 20th century was to persuade the working classes to hate Thatcher, in spite of her being the only PM we’ve ever had who genuinely understood their aspirations and gave them real opportunities to improve their circumstances.
They were very successful. Even now, people who were kids – or, indeed, weren’t even born – when Thatcher was PM assign all sorts of evil to her that she didn’t do. They can never explain why, if everything her government did was so bad, little of it was reversed by the 13 years of the Blair-Brown terror.
How did that work for the miners? Just asking.
BBC dropped all pretence that they’re not ideologically driven during the Brexit referendum. I’ll never forget them openly attacking “grey haired white people” as they they were most likely to vote to leave the bloc.
Mandatory Vaccination for the EU Just Went Through Under the Radar
https://www.globalresearch.ca/mandatory-vaccination-eu-just-went-through-under-radar/5776115
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Pfft. I am white and was eligible for free school meals as a child. We had NO money, and were hungry for a few years.
I also have a double barrelled surname (divorce rather than inherited), can ride a horse, am public school educated (full scholarship) and would be considered posh by those who are not.
You can’t make assumptions based on a handful of bits of info about anyone.
At my workplace they regularly send us these stupid social mobility questionnaires to show how great they are (it is a who you know workplace). The free school dinner question always stumps me because my parents were always poor enough to qualify, but always proud enough not to use it.
All of this is utterly irrelevant because it never occurs to the BBC to hire staff on ability.
Collectivism is assumed by the BBC, the only debate, to them, is what kind of collectivism.
Black people make up about 3 to 4 per cent of the population; Asian about 7 per cent. For some reason the BBC want to increase the BAME portion of their workforce to 20 per cent.
Watching drama on the BBC, there is always a large proportion of black actors (even in period dramas). Asians seem less common. I suppose we can now expect to see an abundance of oiks portrayed in the aristocracy…
The National Lottery add real gets on my thruppenies, only thing missing from the wheel chair bound ethnic minority is a rainbow flag.
FFS.
I gave up on the BBC quite a few years ago so I don’t give a toss who they employ. Totally irrelevant to me.
Huxley, you deserve a big cuddly piggle.
😉
It’s curious how these comments have deferred from the topic, to Thatcher.
I reiterate to previous points that I have made; that the DS is controlled opposition. TY, and his cronies, are part of the Establishment.
Most of us can’t afford cleaners, rent properties abroad for our children, terrorise and slaughter foxes, nor count the head of OFCOM or the government, as part of our social networks.
“Toby, I remember the good work that you did for me when I was Mayor of London. I have a new, and more important job for you. Can you possibly devise a way for us to track and analyse the level of dissent against our current policies? You will be amply rewarded, possibly with a Knighthood, and your Free Speech Union is perfect cover for such an operation.”
Thanking you in advance,
Boris”
Yet another story about the BBC. I ask again, cancelling your TV licence, what exactly are you going to miss?
Dramas? Available online
News? Available online
Sports? Available online
Movies? Available online
Documentaries? Available online
I don’t miss anything and I’m happy that in my small way I’m not contributing to another woke, British-hating institution that consistently seeks to ram its ideology down the throats of its viewers and listeners. Defunding the BBC is real, I just wish more people that spent time moaning about them actually did something about it.
They now consider themselves champions of the Woke-ing Class!
The BBC is the supreme master of tokenism and virtue signalling. Only 25% from “lower income groups”? A statement which is proof positive that the BBC is a beacon of privilege which starts at usually at a private school, Oxford (no other university will do) and then a cosy ladder to climb to a six-figure salary within the Beeb. Being physically attractive is a must. In the real World, the population by income can be divided roughly 90% – 10%. Within the affluent, inflation-proof 10% you can sub-divide to the 1%, the Wealthy, and the 0.1% the Super Rich. If the Church of England is the Establishment at Prayer the the Beeb is the Establishment in Show Business.
Not serious.
Next question?
Flipin’ heck, I keep getting shocked with people’s ignorance!
Do you really believe the BBC is interested in anyone at all?
The BBC is a tool of the Tavistock Institute of London, the most diabolical mass brainwash think tank in the world working to establish a New World Order, a global dictatorship. The likes of George Wells, Aldous Huxley and Bertrand Russel collaborated with Tavistock; it were Tavistock agents like Theodor Adorno who engineered the entire 60s revolution, if it wasn’t for Tavistock, the Beatles would have been totally unknown. I suggest you reading Dr John Coleman’s “Tavistock Institute” book.
Knowledge is power, while ignorance is dangerous!!!