Delingpole: BBC Leftist Indoctrination Classes for Lockdown Schoolchildren? Nyet!

MAIDSTONE - ENGLAND - DECEMBER 06: UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson speaking during the BBC
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James Delingpole

Schools may be closed thanks to Boris Johnson’s latest interminable lockdown – but at least no children are going to miss out on their usual leftist indoctrination. That’s because the good old BBC — ‘Auntie’, as it refers to itself, though no one else does any more — has stepped into the breach by providing ‘educational’ programming for all stuck-at-home kiddies.

According to the BBC’s website:

The BBC will show curriculum-based programmes on TV from Monday.
They will include three hours of primary school programming every weekday on CBBC, and at least two hours for secondary pupils on BBC Two.
During the first lockdown in the spring, lessons were available on iPlayer, red button and online, but not on regular TV channels.
The move comes amid concerns that low-income families may struggle to afford data packages for their children to take part in online learning.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson praised the BBC’s “fantastic” plans on Tuesday. BBC Director-General Tim Davie said “education is absolutely vital”.
He continued: “The BBC is here to play its part and I’m delighted that we have been able to bring this to audiences so swiftly.”

Personally, the BBC is just about the last place on earth I’d trust with my children’s education. Its wokeness is now so relentless and all-pervasive — from the eco-propaganda of David Attenborough’s nature documentaries to the leftist social messaging of its dramas to its impossibly biased news coverage — that the Beeb is simply tainted beyond redemption.

Others appear to agree with me:

They’re right. I loathe every inch of the BBC. There is literally no part of it that has escaped untainted.

We’re all excruciatingly aware of its news biases — anti-Israel, anti-Trump, anti-free-market, rabidly eco-fascist; we’ve most of us given up on horrors like Doctor Who, which used to be a hugely entertaining and scary children’s TV series, but is now like an extended lecture on the evils of racism, homophobia, transphobia, even alienphobia; we all know that BBC Comedy is the very definition of oxymoron because, as was confirmed recently, almost all the BBC’s comedy slots go to approved (but toe-curlingly unfunny) leftists like Nish Kumar.

But nowhere in the BBC is safe from the forces of woke, these days — not its classical music programming on BBC Radio 3 (now ruined by quotas of third rate composers chosen purely because they are women) to its niche quiz programmes, such as Only Connect, where a question on people who’ve managed the ‘England football team’ refers to the ‘Women’s England football team’ (ie the one no one watches or cares about), as if somehow the two things were interchangeable. This is the purest woke indoctrination. You dread to think what the BBC, given half the chance, will be teaching our children about climate change or transgenderism or Black Lives Matter…

Any halfway decent Conservative government should know all this. But instead, this conservative-in-name-only administration wants to persuade us of something we know not to be true: that the BBC is a trusted and well-loved institution.

Here, quoted in the BBC article, is the Culture Secretary (itself a title so redolent of communist governments it’s ridiculous that the Conservatives haven’t thought to change the name).

Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden said the BBC “has helped the nation through some of the toughest moments of the last century”.

“And for the next few weeks it will help our children learn whilst we stay home, protect the NHS and save lives,” he added. “This will be a lifeline to parents and I welcome the BBC playing its part.”

Dowden is playing a dirty game here. He is invoking the BBC’s past record in the toughest moments of the last century – the despatches and bulletins during the Second World War, or its coverage of Winston Churchill’s funeral or the sinking of the destroyer HMS Coventry in the Falklands war or the murder of Lord Mountbatten by the IRA – in order to fool us that this is all of a piece with the BBC’s function today as propagandist in chief for Bigger Government, Further Lockdowns and, ultimately, the Great Reset. It’s just not. Sure, even in Lord Reith’s day the BBC was probably a left-biased institution. But not nearly as shamelessly so as it is today.

The fact that a ‘Conservative’ government and the irredeemably woke BBC are now acting in lockstep should send shivers down the spine. It cements the BBC’s role as the state’s propagandist. It also makes it much harder for the Conservatives to reform the BBC in the future: Johnson is effectively sending a signal to the world that the BBC is so trusted and unimpeachable an institution he’s happy to outsource to it the education of the nation’s children. How is he ever going to row back from that?

Still, something good may yet come of it: parents may finally realise that the era when you could trust the state – or its repellant broadcasting arm the BBC – to teach worthwhile values to your children has long since ended. Maybe we’ll all have to learn to teach our children ourselves: at least then we’ll know they’ve had an education we can trust.

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