You would expect Ukip, with its concerns about immigration, to be a big supporter of established British traditions. But it is not.
Here is Nigel Farage quoted in the Independent today:
"I would like to see the BBC cut back to the bone to be purely a public service broadcaster with an international reach, and I would have thought you could do that with a licence fee that was about a third of what it currently is."And that, of course, would mean no Doctor Who, Strictly Come Dancing, and Top Gear.
To most of us the BBC is an important part of our shared national life, but to the kippers it is a seething nest of lefties who invite studio audiences who laugh at their views. (That the kippers are outraged at this is a neat illustration of Calder's Fourth Law of Politics.)
If the kippers are loyal to anything it is a Britain from an imagined past. I am older than Nigel Farage and I don't remember it. You get the feeling that, for Ukip's more senior members, about the time they found a cure for diphtheria.
So let me make this suggestion to patriots in Ukip and all parties, Don't dismantle the BBC: campaign for it to show test cricket again.
3 comments:
I was thinking that many Kippers would probably feel very much at home in the world of Lord Bonkers. They're the sort of party that would have a Well Behaved Orphans policy.
But they would not like the way the WBOs are raised on Mill and L.T. Hobhouse.
Jim Thompson, the author, kept a black book as a young man. He wrote down the name of everyone who slighted him. Everyone who pissed him off was entered in the black book.
And that is Ukip; people scribbling in a black book about invisible harm.
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