Frank Johnson on the BBC -- Could Be Describing the CBC

Here’s my plan for a BBC that you would allow your wives and servants to watch Feb. 7, 04, Frank Johnson

The issue, for those of us whose disposition is conservative, with either sized ‘c,’ is whether we would wish it otherwise. For us, the broad lib-left-wingery of BBC current affairs and drama adds savour to life. It is something by which we measure our Conservatism or conservatism. We positively enjoy pointing out the sublimely ignorant one-sidedness of the BBC’s employees and contributors about almost anything political, either when they talk of the present or of the past.

We listened rapt to a recent radio series about the 1945 Labour government, which was actually called, apparently without irony, something like The New Jerusalem. Hardly any room was given to the possibility that that government’s lumbering NHS, vast housing estates, nationalisations and taxation might have stored up trouble for decades to come. We did not hear, for example, that the Attlee government’s hospital building compared unfavourably with that before the war. Nor did the programme dwell on Aneurin Bevan’s forecast that, because of his health service and because people would be healthier in general under successive Labour governments, the cost of the NHS would fall. It was bliss for us. We contentedly mocked or fumed for days, until it was replaced by a discussion of the Spanish civil war by experts, none of whom mentioned any Republican wickedness — only Franco’s.