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." 🤔
The September 2021 response to a complaint about Chris Packham expressing personal opinions on his personal @Twitter account also stated "We believe that our audience is able to separate Chris's presenting work for us from the personal views he shares outside of @BBC programmes".
Tory donor & Sunak's old boss Richard Sharp was installed in February 2021 - 4 months after the new guidelines & 7 months before the Packham complaint. The ambiguous & inconsistently enforced guidelines reveal Govt interference in the @BBC & an attack on freelancers' free speech.
A Home Office immigration video is fronted by an ex-UKIP MEP. The Govt is silencing critics of its grotesque rhetoric. Even Priti Patel is concerned about the barbaric immigration Bill, which allows deportation of unaccompanied children.
We now have a far-right Govt.
The @Conservatives' political survival strategy could not be clearer: they have lost the trust of the overwhelming majority of the British people; Ministers are happy to lie; & their economic & social policies are an abject failure - all they have left is divisive culture wars.
The only people the Govt care about are themselves, their donors, the right-wing press & media which have propped them up for a decade, & the small minority of multimillionaires & right-wing voters who are fed a diet of polarising culture war & far-right scapegoating rhetoric.
The "star" of the Home Office's grotesque immigration propaganda video is failed UKIPper Steven Woolfe, who nearly succeeded Farage as UKIP leader, until he was in a punch up in Strasbourg with a fellow kipper. He's also featured in #TuftonStreet's abysmal 'New Culture Forum'. 😬
Woolfe's English father was mixed race, born to a British Jewish mother & a Black American father, who abandoned Woolfe as a small child.
His first role as an Employed Barrister was acting as General Counsel for a stockbroking firm Merchant Securities Limited.
Woolfe moved to the Union Bank of Switzerland, London office in the legal & compliance department, & then went onto work for several investment banks such as Credit Suisse, Barclays Capital and Standard Bank as well as Aviva.
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.”