Whose Britishness?
On education, drugs, immigration, environmental alarmism, transgender issues, foreign aid, personal rights, privacy, free speech and – most of all – British culture, the Conservative Party has been firmly unconservative.
John Whittingdale, Media Minister, gave a speech to the Royal Television Society's Cambridge Convention on Wednesday, on 15th September 2021. In it, he outlined what the government believes the film and television industry’s priorities should be. “First, we want to make sure that British-made content is, in fact, distinctively “British”. I’m not talking about waving union flags and a picture of the Queen in every scene. I’m talking about continuing to make the programmes that are ours, and only ours; that could only have been made in the United Kingdom.”
The speech met the mockery of leftists and leftists dominate the industry. One professor was left frightened by the minister’s mild proposal: “Real shivers down the spine moment reading this: ‘We will talk to Ofcom about how to make the obligation of Britishness work.’” Another opined: “Britain is a multi-cultural country, whether they like it or not.” The minister did not mention ethnicity or race in his speech. It is curious that the automatic reaction of the progressives to benign representations of national life left progressives somewhere between triumphant defiance and fearful paranoia.
Whittingdale admitted. “Britishness is, of course, a nebulous concept.” For the Conservative Party, yes, rather nebulous. The minister was shuffled out of his job the day after this speech.
I look forward to Ben Elton’s next BBC sitcom, a revived version of The Thin Blue Line. A thin-skinned mayor promoted above his level of competency spends time fretting over rude tweets while ignoring ethnic-minority youths being hacked to death with machetes in broad daylight on high streets. His chief sidekick is a hapless police chief who is more concerned about rainbow pride police cars and diversity than actual crimes. Hilarity ensues.
Except that is not what Whittingdale meant and not what the BBC would produce. Anyone with conservative values despairs of the Conservative Party ever providing any meaningful pushback against progressive advances. On education, drugs, immigration, environmental alarmism, transgender issues, foreign aid, personal rights, privacy, free speech and – most of all – British culture, the Conservative Party has been firmly unconservative. On every progressive-led change to modern society, in response to the present-year argument (“Opposed to X? Come on! It’s [insert present year here]. Get with the times!”) the Conservatives have announced “That is a conservative value” and accepted change with alacrity.
The Conservative government is too worried about being called rude names by the BBC and The Guardian to ever do anything conservative. The Conservative government approves of woke programming – it would just like to have more of it made in the UK rather than imported from the US. After all, “wokeness is a conservative value”.
