At last, the BBC has caught up with me. Readers may remember that I have been keeping and watching my television, but refusing to pay my television licence, for as long as the BBC continues to employ Jonathan Ross. (I sent the sum to Help the Aged instead.) The anti-Ross campaign has had some effect and Ross’s contract will not be renewed, but he continues to collect his £6 million a year from the Corporation until July, so I won’t contribute until he is off the books. I have just received a Summons, which begins ‘Brenda Curry TV LICENSING of TV Licensing, PO Box 88, Darwen, BBS 1YX says that you committed the offences listed on the following pages’, and tells me to appear at Hastings Magistrates’ Court on 1 March. That is only if I plead guilty, however. If I plead not guilty, the process takes longer and no date is yet fixed. I plead not guilty, on the grounds that the BBC, by broadcasting Ross’s torment of Andrew Sachs and not sacking Ross, is in breach of its Charter. I also have to make a statement of my financial circumstances. I notice that this is something that star performers of the BBC do not have to do. As I write, the Corporation is finally publishing the overall amounts (£70 million a year for the top earners, £230 million for all those who appear on screen and radio), but still treats individual amounts with the secrecy of MI6.
If Harriet Harman’s Equality Bill becomes law, I wonder what the BBC will do. If enacted, the Bill will impose a legal duty on public bodies to ‘have regard to the desirability of reducing socio-economic inequalities’. The authors of the book The Spirit Level, which lies behind the thinking in the Bill, hold up Japan as a model country. There, they say, the richest 20 per cent are only three and half times richer than the poorest 20 per cent. Jonathan Ross, I calculate, earns over 300 times more than the poorest 20 per cent, and even Mark Thompson, the Director-General of the BBC, earns over 40 times more (not to mention roughly eight times more than Harriet Harman). So far, the arguments for this oppressive piece of legislation do not look strong. The Equality Trust, for instance, claims, with demented specificity, that halving income inequality would ‘increase the proportion of the population who feel they can trust others by 85 per cent’ and ‘halve obesity’. But when I think of those BBC incomes dropping by, say, 90 per cent from their present levels, I must admit to the strange surge in happiness which, says The Spirit Level, is the natural result of a more equal society.
Perhaps it is because of my own much more modest experience of being on the wrong side of the law, but I hero-worship Robert Fidler, the Surrey farmer who built his family a little castle behind hay bales and has now been ordered by a court to knock it down. The reporting of the case has made me notice the lack of something at which British newspapers used to excel. The Fidler saga is one well suited to the old district reporters of the national papers. Such people knew their areas intimately. They could give the full, rich, often comical backgrounds behind a good local story. Nowadays, the rise of the internet has led papers to save money by getting rid of their district people. Almost all the reporting of the Fidler case seems to be based on agency material, and lacks the texture which gives so much pleasure. We know less about our own country than we used to.
Under cross-examination by the FBI, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian accused of the Detroit underpants bombing, has started to denounce his mentor, Anwar al-Awlaki. Awlaki, who was born in the United States, is an al-Qa’eda imam and recruiter, currently on the run in Yemen. He is said to be directing terrorist operations in the Arabian peninsula. He argues on his website that Muslims who kill civilian non-Muslims should not be condemned. He also corresponded with Major Nidal Hassan, the army psychiatrist accused of murdering 13 men at Fort Hood, Texas, and wrote on his blog four days after the shooting ‘Nidal Hasan [sic] did the right thing’. There is an impressive list of mosques and Muslim institutes in Britain at which Awlaki has been (or has been billed as) a guest speaker: the Tawheed Mosque in Leyton, the Edinburgh Central Mosque, Al-Muntada al-Islami in Parson’s Green, and the East London Mosque (which was opened by the Prince of Wales, and of which Dr Mohammed Abdul Bari, the current secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain, is a trustee). At the London Muslim Centre, next door to the East London Mosque, Awlaki preached last year under the title of ‘The End of Time… A New Beginning!’, with a promotional flyer with a picture of a crumbling Statue of Liberty against a missile-streaked New York skyline. Cageprisoners, the organisation dedicated to publicising the plight of the inmates of Guantanamo Bay, invited Awlaki to deliver video messages to their annual dinners in 2008 and 2009. He was a ‘distinguished speaker’ at the annual conference of the Federation of Student Islamic Societies. He was promoted as a speaker in a series of Muslim Association of Britain events at the school of Oriental and African Studies, Imperial College, King’s College, London, and the LSE. He has been praised on the blog of Azad Ali, the then President of the Civil Service Islamic Society. Most of the organisations and individuals named above are usually described in the press as ‘moderate’ Muslims. In Qatar, there is now an Al Qaradawi Centre for Research in Moderate Thought. Yusuf Al Qaradawi, after whom it is named, is the main religious guru for the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas. He holds that suicide bombing is ‘a duty’, supports the killing of all Americans in Iraq and the whipping of homosexuals, and says that Hitler ‘managed to put them [the Jews] in their place’. Is there any other current major religious or political movement where moderation takes this form?
Sometimes, a perfectly reasonable word turns itself into a fashionable concept, and starts to grate. We have reached that point with the word ‘hub’. Everything — a city, a café, a church, a school, a website — feels the need to claim that it is a hub or, even better, a ‘community hub’. One begins to long for those few places or bodies in this country which are still completely unhubby. I am thinking of Boston in Lincolnshire or Ely or St David’s, or the English Speaking Union, or the Royal and Ancient Order of Buffaloes, or the University of Wales, Lampeter, or Lydd Airport, or the Angus Steak House chain (‘an institution that you can depend on’). Away with all this hubbub.
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