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The other night I watched Michael Mcintyre’s Comedy Roadshow on BBC iPlayer. You can watch it here.
I was enjoying the programme until right at the end (scroll to 41:50) when the comedian Kevin Bridges, who was making a joke about God coming to earth, lumped George Bush and Robert Mugabe together as the worst examples of humanity – the people who would run away from God.
I did a double take. Was he seriously comparing George Bush to Mugabe in terms of evil? Where these seriously the two worst people that came to mind? Evidently, they were.
Bush may have passed the Patriot act destroying civil liberties, he may have gone to war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and he may have run up huge deficits through spending, but Mugabe he ain’t. Mugabe is a genuinely evil tyrant who has run his entire country into the ground for racist reasons, and who now rules as an unelected despot crushing any democratic opposition. The two men aren’t even worthy of comparison.
Ultimately, this worrying window into the left’s bizarre world view is given a prime showing via our state broadcaster, as if there is something funny about George Bush and Robert Mugabe being likened to one another. Somehow, I think a joke comparing Barack Obama to Joseph Stalin wouldn’t have made the cut.
What’s worse still is that the public is forced to pay for such views to be broadcast via a poll tax, or ‘TV license’ as it is commonly called. The BBC is meant to be politically neutral, but instead the public is paying for democratically elected right-wingers to be compared to murdering despots. If the BBC wants to broadcast such views it should do so in a marketplace where people are free to opt out of paying for the BBC’s services.
Examples like this reinforce the case for the license fee to be abolished and for the BBC to be privatised. It cannot expect to take our money and then use it to propagate a slanted worldview. The BBC must adapt and compete in an open media market: It cannot go on being the loudest voice of authority in the broadcast media simply thanks to its government-enforced monopoly.
