Tony Hall and the curse of our present system

I've written in a previous post about Tony Hall's grilling in front of a Commons committee on the subject of the BBC DG's plan to boost black, Asian and ethnic minority representation in the Corporation's output.

It will be recalled that Philip Davies, the Tory MP for Shipley, berated Hall for the BBC's "racist approach" to diversity, saying that the white working class were being ignored. Davies is wrong because although this may be a bad thing, it's not a racist bad thing: even on his own case it is discrimination on the basis of class rather than race.

Interestingly though the admirably clear-thinking Daniel Hannan has written a wonderful blog in the Torygraph today discussing the meaning of diversity which makes Davies' point much more cogently and forcefully.

I have been saying for years that the BBC's most serious weakness when it comes to bias is that it tends to admit people from a narrow societal and educational base, that's to say metrocentric young university graduates with a humanities degree.

Why, I have written so often that the words are getting worn out, are we surprised that the BBC has, by its own admission, a liberal bias given the nature of the people who work for it?

Here is Hannan, in a different context admittedly, but the read-across is nearly complete:

"How has “diversity” come to mean only headcounts of women and ethnic minorities? When voters complain that the party leaders are similar, they don’t mean that they’re all white, or that they’re all male, or even that they’re all Oxford-educated. They mean that they seem cut off from the concerns of the country at large. Nigel Farage . . . has never tried to pass himself off as anything other than a public-school-educated broker. On duty, he wears pinstripes; off duty, tweed and cords. And you know what? It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter because it’s what Nigel is saying that attracts his voters, not where he went to school."

". . . "diversity” has taken on almost the precise opposite of its dictionary definition. [For its advocates it] doesn’t just mean having people with different skin-tones; it means having people with different skin-tones who think in similar ways. . . But being diverse is less important to the diversity-wallahs than holding approved ideas about promoting diversity. . . The last thing its exponents want is actual pluralism. They want more Muslims, but not Muslims who hold Islamic views about, say, the definition of marriage. They want more black people, but not black people who get ideas about prospering outside the EU. They want more women, but not more Margaret Thatchers. . . [True diversity would involve breaking] . . .the attitudinal monotony, what the French call the pensée unique, that is the curse of our present system."