The Whinge of Fate - Intolerance, Scaremongering, Me, the BBC and Publishing

Actually, I quite like appearing on the BBC’s ‘The Big Questions’. The production staff are efficient and friendly. The presenter, Nicky Campbell, researches his brief carefully, tries hard to be fair, and has a good sense of humour. The topics for discussion are usually interesting. And in my experience the audience at home is engaged. 

 

But yesterday’s programme brought me a series of really odd experiences. You can watch the whole thing here for the next few days :

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b055pqdn/the-big-questions-series-8-episode-9

 

It began with an argument about immigration in which Saira Grant, of the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, advanced the exploded claim that the current wave of mass immigration is normal, and a continuation of a long process. This is not the case, and can be shown not to be the case by simple research. Yet people still say it. It’s also hard to argue that we somehow  *need* huge numbers of migrants. There are, currently, 955,000 16-24 year-olds in this country not in education, employment or training (plus plenty more on debt-financed university courses of, er,  varying value) . If these people really cannot do the jobs now being done by migrants, or are not wanted by employers, why is that?

 

Might there be something wrong with our supposedly wondrous, ten-times-reformed school system? Or with the supposedly wonderful anything-goes family life we have adopted? Perish the thought. Only grouches, golden-age merchants,  misery-guts and inveterate pessimists think these are real problems. Everyone else knows that life here has never been so wonderful. (NB**$£$*! Sarcasm warning**&%£”$!)

Nor are we especially short of young people. If we stopped wholesale abortion on demand, we’d have an extra 180,000 live births a year. Migrants don’t, by and large, work for the NHS out of selfless virtue, but because they are paid to do so. Just like everyone else.

 

This stuff, happily, was counterbalanced by the responsible, fact-based and serious arguments of David Goodhart, a fully-paid-up member of the liberal elite who actually researched the issue for an excellent book ‘The British Dream: Successes and failures of Post-War Immigration’ .  Anyone who is remotely concerned about this subject should read it. As he showed in his contributions, he is also very well-informed about the crucial labour-market effects of this policy.

 

We then had an American History Professor from Manchester who said Mr Goodhart was wrong, and added ‘Every day I get hassled because I am an immigrant’.  I have written to her to ask what form this daily hassle takes.

 

After I managed to get a (much-interrupted) say, Ms Grant spoke of intolerance in ‘headlines in papers like yours’.

 

As I was actually in the midst of challenging her on this (about 9 minutes 40 seconds into the broadcast) she shifted her accusation from ‘intolerance’ to ‘scaremongering’. The speed of thought is an interesting thing, especially in TV studios, where it can slow down to nothing under pressure, but I can assure you that I had decided to protest against this remark before she had finished speaking. I’ll explain why this matters.

 

First, although I don’t write for that paper,  I’m more than happy to defend the Daily Mail’s coverage of mass immigration. One man’s ‘scaremongering’ is another man’s responsible reporting.  Mass immigration has revolutionised this country in the last 20 years and any newspaper which had ignored this truth or minimised it would have been deeply irresponsible. More to the point, it has never been properly debated or discussed before the electorate, and until recently has been largely ignored by major broadcasters.

 

I would say that the Mail on Sunday’s sister paper, the Daily Mail has in general been more correct about immigration into this country, sooner and more accurately, than any other daily paper, by miles.  It has done so despite being repeatedly smeared as ‘racist’ by its critics for simply stating the truth.

 

But those who think of this as ‘scaremongering’ will not be shifted from their view by me. The word ‘scaremongering’ contains so many presuppositions, shared by people such as Ms Grant and not shared by me, that it has no objective use here. They don’t like people drawing attention to the huge, unprecedented levels of immigration, presumably in case something is done to stop it.  I think it’s a necessary duty. These diverging opinions stem from different views of good, bad, right, wrong, patriotism, progress, benefit and harm.

 

But what of intolerance, the thing of which my newspaper was being publicly accused? Now , that is a different matter. Who doubts that there are intolerant people in this country? Some of them contribute here, much as I wish they wouldn’t .  We recently saw some football oafs in Paris shaming themselves in this way (and people wonder why I dislike this ugly, spiteful phoney game and its hangers-on).  In my travels round modern Britain, I have experienced intolerance of one migrant group by another.

 

But in what way has any headline in my newspaper fostered or encouraged intolerance?

 

The claim that drawing attention to migration of itself fosters intolerance may be made. Well, I don’t think this is true and know of no evidence to suggest that it is true. And until I am shown that it is true, by reputable research,  I will regard the suggestion as a crude attempt to justify censorship of the facts.

 

The next bizarre fallout from this programme was a tweet by the publisher and LBC presenter  Iain Dale, the man who recently said in public that he would have published my book ‘Short Breaks in Mordor’ (which my previous publisher had emphatically said they did not want to bring out, and which an agent whom I have successfully employed in the past brushed aside),  if only I had offered it to him.

 

I then *did* offer it to him, and he instantly retreated at high speed, blustering, saying that its existence as an e-book somehow made this impossible. I then sent him an outline for another book which I would like to write, about the Second World War, and he wrote back to me to say he wasn’t interested.  

 

He likes to jeer at me when I complain about my problems with broadcasting and publishing. Of course, I do complain about these things, because they are true and interesting. I do not think I am ‘whingeing’, because I have, happily, done quite well in my career. I have worked in my chosen trade for more than 40  years, consorted with the mighty, penetrated the White House and the Kremlin, travelled to nearly 60 countries and lived in Moscow and Washington.  I have been in grave physical danger and have survived. I have successfully published several substantial books. I have  made a number of TV and radio programmes (one of the latter, ‘The Special Relationship’ on Radio 4, gained me unexpected independent praise). I jointly presented, for several hugely enjoyable and exhilarating years, a successful live Talk Radio show on current affairs.  I have been named as Columnist of the Year, and shortlisted as Foreign Reporter of the Year.   I was awarded the  Orwell Prize for journalism.  I once narrowly escaped being hired by the BBC as John Simpson’s Number Two.

 

In the light of this, it strikes me as odd that I have certain difficulties, especially with publishing and broadcasting, because my opinions are not acceptable to the people who dominate and direct both these trades.

 

I think my case on the publishing industry has recently been made for me. Johann Hari and I are individuals of similar prominence. Both of us have published books on the drug legalisation controversy, as it happens through the same reputable London publisher, Bloomsbury. Bloomsbury does not permit badly-written or ill-researched books to go out under its imprint. Amusingly, both books express doubts about the physical nature of ‘addiction’.

 

Mine was barely reviewed at all, and two of those reviews were tirades of abuse. It was hard to find in the few bookshops that stocked it. An invitation for me to discuss the book at the Hay Festival, the Glastonbury of the book world, was first made, then abruptly withdrawn without explanation.

 

Mr Hari’s book has been sympathetically and often generously reviewed in papers and magazines that ignored or excoriated mine. It is prominently displayed in the windows and on the front tables of all the bookshops I have visited in recent weeks.

 

He has been invited to the Hay festival , and I have (amusingly) been invited to be his supporting act. If I had tried to set up a controlled experiment to prove my point, I could not have done much better.

 

As for broadcasting, I have explained (not that it does any good) that simply appearing on TV and radio are not the same as presenting programmes on them, and that the way in which I am treated is influenced by the BBC’s hostility to my opinions, itself wonderfully demonstrated by my treatment on ‘What the Papers Say’ and ‘Feedback’, treatment so bad that the BBC later worked quite hard to make it up to me.

 

I have decided not to make public issues out of the sudden unexplained last-minute veto on a plan for me to make a TV documentary about grammar schools, or on  one specific occasion in which I was vetoed from regular appearances on a particularly desirable radio programme, also without explanation and against the wishes of the programme’s actual editor.  The story of my attempt to become an occasional presenter of the Radio 4 programme ‘A Point of View’ after this slot was awarded to Will Self and the former editor of ‘Marxism Today’,  Martin Jacques,  and the tale of the hilarious upshot of my efforts, are best left for a long winter evening.

 

Some years ago, I wrote this (rather good) explanation of my difficulties for the ‘New Statesman’

 

http://www.newstatesman.com/2009/08/labour-party-bbc-conservative

 

Suffice it to say that one critic managed to claim that this too was ‘whingeing’ about not getting on the BBC.

 

But this brings us round again to Mr Iain Dale, who Tweeted sarcastically yesterday morning : Oh look! Peter Hitchens is on the BBC again, for the 2nd time in a fortnight. What a travesty it is that they never have him on!’

 

To which I replied by asking him when and where I had ever said that I am ‘never’ invited on the BBC (The distinguished journalist Mehdi Hasan similarly claimed I had complained of being ‘ignored’ by the BBC, which of course I haven’t done, because the BBC don’t ignore me).

 

To which this noted trader in words, publisher and national broadcaster, responded : ‘Oh dear Peter. You constantly complain that you don't get invited onto BBC shows. Don't try to split hairs. Won't wash.’

 

Splitting hairs? Accuracy and truth in attribution are splitting hairs? Hmph. It is possible, of course, to think this. But I am not sure people in Mr Dale’s position should take this view.  

 

Actually, I have in fact never said that the BBC ‘never ‘ have me on.  It would be a stupid thing to say. They started having me on back in the early 1990s.  In the years before the Iraq war dealt a grave blow to my broadcasting career,  I could have papered an entire wall with passes to various BBC buildings, mostly for midnight trysts with Radio 5 live rewarded by cheques for strange sums such £17-43 and £24-14. But the Iraq war confused things terribly. Moral and social conservatives were ‘bad’. Opponents of the Iraq war were ‘good'. I was both. It did not compute, invitations dried up all over the place.

 

Nor do I ‘constantly’ complain that I don’t get invited on to BBC shows.  I don’t do this because it would be silly to do so, given that I do get invited on to BBC shows, more frequently than most people, though not as often as I would like, seldom as a presenter (which a left-wing journalist of my standing would do far more often) , and *never* as a regular presenter.

 

Just thought I’d mention it.