Speak up for the unsung BBC Singers

There are 20 BBC Singers and they cost less than one Gary Lineker. Unlike Lineker, they have broken no rules, but the BBC want to close them down. They have worked in a cave in Maida Vale for a hundred years and it is quite possible that top BBC executives, much too busy to listen to the Corporation’s own cultural output, know almost nothing about the Singers. They probably do not know, for instance, that the BBC Singers have a nice line in singing the Match of the Day theme tune. The Singers are a prime example of the sort of thing which justifies the BBC’s unique privilege of raising money through the licence fee. They are central to Britain’s musical ecology and keep our great choral tradition alive by commissioning new work in a way no commercial organisation could manage. The Singers also maintain the highest levels of training. You have to be extremely skilled as sight-readers to cover the range of music the singers sing. In turn, this requirement sets the standards throughout the world of choirs. Nobody really knows why the BBC is so zealous to destroy this unique body of people. It has given no clear reasons. But it seems reasonable to guess that it wants to run down its own classical music culture. Once you’ve got rid of the Singers, you will want to disband the orchestras too, then the Proms and eventually Radio 3 itself, whose classical coherence is already under threat. Speak up for the unsung Singers.

It is often said, as in the case of Gary Lineker and the small boats, that the reductio ad Hitlerum is to be avoided. The latest example is Hugo Rifkind in Tuesday’s Times, calling Lineker’s words ‘crass, because Nazi comparisons always are’. The warning is wise, but are comparisons always crass? In trying to work out what Vladimir Putin is up to, for instance, the Hitler comparison is instructive – the propagation of bogus history to work up grievance; the belief that democracies are weak and can be fobbed off; the deployment of territorial claims and the build-up of military threat accompanied by the denial that force will be used; the use of petty nationalist proxies, false flags, bogus plebiscites; the making of agreements in order to break them when you are ready to do so; the policy of total lies.