Cutting the links with reality

It was a difficult one for the BBC, but they got through it. The problem was this: how to do the story on the chaos at the migrant centre in the former Manston airport which might result in the Home Secretary’s resignation without acknowledging that the root of the issue was a huge increase in asylum seekers? They were avid for the story because they could smell Suella Braverman’s blood on the wind. But it is, I think, contrary to BBC producer guidelines to suggest that Britain may have a problem with illegal immigration. How, then, to stick it to Braverman without implying there’s loads of Albanians flooding the country?

They got round it by interviewing, repeatedly, a SJW hobgoblin from a migrant-enabling charity to insist that even though it looked as though there were lots of illegal migrants, actually there weren’t really. This clown turned up on virtually every BBC radio news programme and even made an appearance on Newsnight in an opening package which seemed to say that all illegal migrants are absolutely bloody lovely people who only want a better life for themselves. By which dodge the corporation was a) able to castigate Braverman and the government for letting too many migrants in, while b) suggesting that there are not too many migrants coming in and that they should all be allowed to enter anyway. Generally, the BBC is curious about immigration and asylum seekers only if there’s a chance to hammer the government for being nasty to them. Credit, mind, to the World At One which allowed Nigel Farage to advance the proposition that Manston should once again become an airport, specialising in one-way flights to Tirana.

Another lack of curiosity about what seemed to me an interesting news story came with the severing of two undersea internet cables within the space of a week, one from Shetland to the Faroe Islands, the other from Shetland to the Scottish mainland.