This week has seen the right-leaning part of the political and media establishment go through the looking glass in no style at all as they have constructed a straw man out of nothing more than the BBC working within restrictions imposed on live music performances by the Coronavirus pandemic, and looking to keep performers safe, and then knocked it down in a hail of righteousness and flat-out lies.
Andrea Jenkyns (the one on the right)
Perhaps the most egregious lie of all is the pretence that the BBC is engaging in an act of censorship, merely because the scaled-down Last Night of the Proms will feature both Rule, Britannia! and Land of Hope and Glory, but neither piece will be sung (Elgar’s first Pomp and Circumstance March, to which the words Land of Hope and Glory were later added, began life as a purely instrumental work). So, big deal.
What a happy chappie
Well, it was a big deal to not-really-racist-honestly minor thesp Laurence Fox, who urged his fans to download a version of the Elgar with Vera Lynn singing the words. This has topped the download charts, to the delight of ignorant opportunist Tory MP Andrea Jenkyns who trilled “
Land of Hope and Glory reaches number 1. A Knighthood for [Laurence Fox]! The king of anti establishment and anti-wokeness. Bravo!”
Yes, a knighthood is so anti-establishment, isn’t it? This did not impress @paulonbooks who responded “
And just behind Tucker Carlson in the Gobshite Of The Day Stakes is Andrea Jenkyns with this drivel. Reminder: we pay MPs £81,932 per year”.
Sean O’Connor was also less than totally enamoured of the situation: “
what bothers me far more about Mr Fox, with his privileged - yes privileged - position and ‘media visibility’, is his dreadful take on [Black Lives Matter], his spiteful ‘anti-wokeness’ and what appear to me to be some really awful views and opinions”. Also, others encourage him.
Justin Webb (no relation) put it succinctly. “
What I object most to is this mechanism [Fox leveraging his fan base for clicks and donations] being facilitated by someone like [Jeremy Vine on Channel 5] who absolutely should know better. Fox has the right to an opinion, but not to airtime or national exposure. Broadcasters shouldn't be leveraging his dog whistle racism for clicks”. Also, the clinging to so-called “
tradition” is misplaced.
As one Tweeter put it, “
Reminder that not only has the BBC dropped Land of Hope & Glory from Last Night before & no one wet their pants, but the Conservative Party dropped it from their conference that year as well”. That
was in 2001, after the 9/11 attacks.
And as for the incessant “
woke” whinge of right-wing mouth artists (as well as Piers Morgan), perhaps we should consider the definition given by Oxford Dictionaries: “
alert to injustice in society, especially racism”. Perhaps Ms Jenkyns, whose salary and expenses are paid by We The People, could explain why it is suddenly A Very Good Thing to be opposed to those alert to injustice in society, and especially racism.
Laurence Fox is free to be as anti-anti-racist as he chooses. That is not what we should be seeing from those paid from the public purse.
Hello Andrea Jenkyns.
Jenkyns has previously whined "Last year, I got a threatening and sexually explicit email calling for my female genitals to be cut with barbed wire and to die in a pool of my own excrement. All this for my stance on Brexit. The sad thing is, we deal with it on a daily basis so we’re probably not shocked anymore and just accept it. And what kind of society is that? ... I hope others realise that abuse and violence, in any form, are unacceptable in politics on all sides."
ReplyDeleteHowever, in February 2020, Jenkyns defended her decision to provide a character reference for the court case of a Conservative Party activist who made violent threats to Labour MP Yvette Cooper and was subsequently jailed for nine weeks. The statement described the activist as a "decent and honest person whose heart is in the right place".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ia6g9cOg1jQ
ReplyDelete"Andrea Jenkyns who trilled “Land of Hope and Glory reaches number 1. A Knighthood for [Laurence Fox]! The king of anti establishment and anti-wokeness. Bravo!”
ReplyDeletePersonally watching Stop the Pigeon as a small child-person in the 70s inoculated me against state honours. There was something very unseemly about the way Muttley would do anything for a medal.
The very idea that a Knighthood can be awarded for the service of 'Being a Dick on social media' is kind of bewildering.
But we do live in a country that decided Jimmy Savile, Mussolini and Robert Mugabwe were worthy of such honours, so yeah...
@ jez box .... the lozzafox remix (with added privilege)
ReplyDeleteYou just know that in former times, the likes of Jenkyns, Fox, Farage, et al, would have been up in arms about the ending of other such bedrocks of England's 'heritage' as prison hulks, transportation, the stocks/ pillory, public hanging, the 'cat' and the treadmill for prisoners, child labour, the press-gang, rotten boroughs, the slave trade. The list of horrors we have managed thankfully though sometimes tardily, to shake off is endless, but is just an excuse for the gammonarati to bewail the loss of proud British traditions.
ReplyDeleteApparently, the version of the song being downloaded is from the 1994 album, 'Vera Lynn Remembers: The Songs that won World War 2'. Surely they should all be Russian songs.
ReplyDelete