Letters to the Editor | 6 May 2006

Prepare for coalition

From William MacDougall

Sir: I hope Fraser Nelson is mistaken in his talk of a ‘Lib Dem Test’ for Tory policies (‘Cameron’s secret plan’, 29 April). Of course the party should not be frightened of coalition; after all, it has been in coalition for much of its history (with Irish parties, or Liberal and Labour splinter groups). But the way to prepare is to have stronger, not weaker, policies. If we are already voting to ban parental interviews, where would we compromise on education — on banning the remaining grammar schools? No, to prepare for coalition with the Lib Dems (or Labour) we should have more extreme policies, e.g., a grammar school in every town, so that we can compromise on a grammar school in every second town.

William MacDougall
London N6

PC Beeb

From Colin Broughton

Sir: Rod Liddle is right in suggesting that the fiction of the BBC’s impartiality should be addressed by more openness (‘BBC staff’s views should be open’, 29 April). The bias of the BBC is far from ‘gentle’. On the contrary, its all-pervasive political correctness reaches from news reports and current affairs programmes into every nook and cranny of its output, including the plotlines and characters to be found in the soaps. This amounts to a blatant manipulation of truth, in which reality is presented in a warm glow of leftist wishful thinking.

However, Rod Liddle doesn’t go far enough. Rather than simply letting individuals in the BBC express their real opinions, which — given the natural leftism of the humanities and sociology graduates who go into the media and, in particular, the BBC — is not going to much widen the ideological spectrum, why not get rid of the organisation altogether? There might have been an argument for what is effectively a state-run broadcasting system once, but in an era of many TV and radio channels it is as anachronistic as any other state-owned industry post-Thatcher.