The abuse allegations that I’ve written about recently have
taken an interesting little turn. The ex Tory politician who was named by a ‘victim’
as having been involved in the paedophile activities at a children’s home forty
years ago has protested his innocence. Meanwhile, the man who made the
allegation has gone public with an unreserved apology, saying that it had been
a case of mistaken identity. I’m sure I don’t need to elaborate on the
inferences that will be drawn on both sides of the fence. There are those who
want to believe that everything’s OK so they can go back to sleep, and there
are those who want to see demons lurking under every pebble on the beach.
I know nothing. It isn’t my place – or anyone else’s – to
adopt unsubstantiated presumptions in individual cases. What I can do is offer
a reasonable general suspicion on what might be described as a side issue.
At the moment, all the fire is being directed at the BBC. Poor
old Auntie Beeb is sitting helplessly in the water while every ship in the
vicinity is firing 6” shells into her. She’s being damaged on all decks and
taking water. There is talk of high level resignations, the sacking of an
investigative partner organisation, and the cessation of its much-respected,
37-year-year old flagship news programme.
I find this implausible. Relations between the BBC and the
corridors of political power have been strained ever since the David Kelly
affair, when the Corporation blew the whistle on Tony Blair’s lies to
Parliament over WMD. Blair got away with it; the Director General of the BBC lost his
job. And now the BBC is being isolated and made the prime target again. My
instinct is nagging at me, and telling me – in a general sense only, you
understand – that that there’s a bad smell in the air. It reeks of the
scapegoat mentality. It has me wondering whether this is all part of an attempt
by the Establishment power base to take even more control of the BBC than it
already has. The BBC is supposed to be impartial; it’s paid for primarily by
the people of Britain
through the licence fee.
As for the abuse allegations, there is obviously a muddy
pool here, and we won’t know what lies at the bottom of it until the mud
clears. That’s if it ever does, which I’m coming to think is increasingly
unlikely.
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