Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

Vladimir Putin meets the Munchkins

Late on Friday my editor at the Observer called and asked me to dash off a few words on what was wrong with the Mail and some Conservative MPs demanding that the BBC ban ‘Ding, dong the witch is dead’, a Munchkin chorus, from The Wizard of Oz. I was stuck on a train to Glasgow, but how could I resist?

The partially successful attempt to stop the BBC playing a clip from a 1939 children’s film is one of the most surreal cases of censorship I have seen. Right wingers were not demanding that the BBC blacklist the song because it was pornographic or libellous. The lyrics the merry Munchkins chirruped were irrelevant to them. They were censoring because they disapproved of the motives of the people who had bought the song, not because of the content of the song itself. That the BBC went along for the most part with them showed how quickly its new director-general would fold under political pressure. That the Mail was prepared to demand a ban, showed that the right could be as politically correct as the left. I assumed that the Mail would never again be able to ask for freedom of speech on its own behalf, but I underestimated the thickness of its brass neck, and within days it was calling for the liberty to speak and write without a shadow of a blush on its face.

I duly filed a piece for the Observer saying that I and many other who opposed Mrs Thatcher felt uneasy about celebrating her death. Her supporters had a good case when they said that the protests were simultaneously childish and grotesque. But as soon as they censored, they lost the argument.

On cue, an email arrived from Russia Today, Putin’s English language propaganda station.

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