Imagine it's 1930s Germany. An authoritarian Govt is elected by just a third of the electorate. They use grotesque & dangerous rhetoric to scapegoat vulnerable minorities. A brave TV presenter speaks up. The Govt & press demonise him & the cowardly state broadcaster silences him.
The @BBC in 2020, & again in 2021, confirmed the personal @Twitter accounts of freelancers (eg Lineker, Packham, & Andrew Neil) are "unrelated to" the BBC, & "the BBC is not responsible for its content".
Davie's new (October 2020) social media guidelines stated @BBC staff should, on their own personal social media accounts, 'avoid expressing personal views on current issues of political controversy', which as a right-winger he described using the pejorative 'virtue signalling'.
However, the response to a complaint about Chris Packham, which came in September 2021 - almost a year after Tim Davie had set out his new social media guidelines for '@BBC staff' in October 2020 - stated Chris's "personal social media account has no connection to the @BBC." 🤔
I've written before about the uncanny parallels between the rise of the Boris Johnson regime & the rise of the Nazi regime, both ushered in by a third of the electorate.
Imho, if anything, Gary Lineker was too restrained in his tweet about Govt rhetoric.
When Adolf Hitler took power in 1933, the Nazis controlled less than 3% of Germany’s newspapers.
In contemporary Britain, the overwhelming majority of national newspapers exist to neutralize any threat from the Left to corporate interests, which includes defending a failed Govt.
In early 1933, the Nazi regime deployed radio, press, & newsreels to stoke fears of a pending “Communist uprising” - a sort of ideological “invasion” from within - then channeled popular anxieties into political measures that eradicated civil liberties.
Anyone who supports free speech - & everyone should support it - should be apoplectic.
If ALL @BBC presenters are to be BANNED from saying ANYTHING political - and almost everything IS political on @Twitter - then almost every presenter will be silenced.
The highly selective outrage from the @BBC, from the "pro-free speech" @Conservatives, & from their "pro-free speech" billionaire-owned right-wing press & media, reveals them as the pathetic, intolerant, anti-free-speech hypocrites they really are.
The @BBC will not broadcast an episode of David Attenborough’s flagship new series on British wildlife #WildIsles because of fears its themes of the destruction of nature would risk a backlash from Tory politicians & the billionaire-owned press.
This is symptomatic of something terrible happening to Britain - a rapid slide away from a relatively open, unified, welcoming, forward-looking mature democracy, toward an insular, unwelcoming, backward-looking, polarised, infantilising authoritarian oligarchy.
The decision has angered the programme-makers & some insiders at the @BBC, who fear the corporation has bowed to pressure from lobbying groups with “dinosaurian ways”.
The latest row focuses on #WildIsles, narrated by David Attenborough, which is likely to be extremely popular.
That time Rishi Sunak distanced himself from Suella Braverman’s inflammatory claim the UK was facing an “invasion”, after far-right terrorist Andrew Leak firebombed an immigration processing centre & Robert Jenrick warned Ministers to choose their words more carefully.
Braverman said: “the British people deserve to know which party is serious about stopping the INVASION on our southern coast”. Shortly after, Sunak claimed the UK would always be a “compassionate, welcoming country”, & No. 10 emphasised her words had not been cleared with No. 10.
Lord Dubs, who came to the UK as a child refugee in 1939, said about Braverman’s comments “It [language] is very important because it influences public opinion. It influences the way people see refugees. It shows hostility to people who are fleeing for safety.”
But curiously not by Jacob Rees-Mogg accusing Tory Jews of being "illuminati", nor by Boris Johnson's book saying 'Jews control media', nor by Bridgen comparing vaccines to the actual #Holocaust, nor by his wife's use of the antisemitic conspiracy theory of 'Cultural Marxism'.