BLM Dance - A Racist Speaks

ITV talent show Britain’s Got Talent recently featured a dance number from a troupe called Diversity. It narrated the murder of George Floyd last May. In the week and a half since broadcast, Ofcom have received more than 15,500 complaints. But on what grounds? It has been claimed that reference to the Black Lives Matter movement is somehow “political”. That might be difficult to justify an investigation.

The complaints have been accompanied by the usual mischaracterisation of BLM, with disgruntled viewers calling it “paramilitary” and “Marxist”, among other usually abusive terms. The abuse extended to BGT judge Ashley Banjo, who took part in the routine and later revealed that he had been the subject of threats and racist abuse.

So one might have thought that those commenting on the affair in the supposedly upmarket press would exercise caution, try to be a calming influence. But that thought would have been seriously misplaced in the case of tedious bigot Rod Liddle, who has been given a platform by the Murdoch Sunday Times to pontificate on BGT, and indeed BLM.

Liddle, who was once entrusted with editing the Radio 4 Today programme - which brought us Andrew “transcription error” Gilligan and lost the BBC one of its best Directors General of recent times - has decided that the Corporation is a closet BLM backer. Oh, and the England football manager is, too. Not that he can prove that. Because he is lying.

“Diversity’s performance occasioned the second-largest postbag of complaints to Ofcom in a decade: more than 10,000 viewers wrote in. And t gives you a clue about something that has been shrouded these past few months - the level of popular support for BLM [false equivalence there]. Our institutions, desperate to acquire right-on credentials [false assumption], may [small word doing some seriously heavy lifting] support the movement”.

Really? Do go on. “So, too, the BBC and the England manager Gareth Southgate [may, and also may not]. But I always suspected that the public did not buy into it for one minute, finding it corrosive and divisive and maniacal [no citation]”. Then comes another whopper. “There are no opinion polls available. I asked one company why this was the case, and the reply was ‘Because we were worried we wouldn’t like the results’ [no citation]”.

Liddle is lying: Sunder Katwala has put together a thread (see HERE) which opens with this correction to the Sunday Times column: “There are several polls on this, from YouGov, Opinium, Number Cruncher Politics, Focaldata, ComResSavanta”. Support for BLM has been strong among ethnic minority Britons, and has not been insignificant among whites.

Yet Liddle keeps on claiming that They Daren’t Do Polling On BLM. So perhaps he can explain why, as Katwala points out, “How did the Sunday Times, 26th July 2020, report on polling on Black Lives Matter if there has been no polling on Black Lives Matter, according to the Sunday Times today?!”. How indeed. What an embarrassment Rod Liddle is.

And what an embarrassment the Murdoch press is, in giving him a platform. Not that this is just another excuse to be racist, you understand. Well, maybe slightly racist.

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