The BBC’s impartiality …

Until recently, the leader of the Muslim Council of Great Britain was Zara Mohammed. When she was replaced, she was interviewed for BBC News by Neha Gohil, and spoke about the Southport riots.

Given that she was not only Muslim herself but had had the job of representing her fellow Muslims, it was understandable that what worried her about the riots was not the murders that had provoked them but their effects on Muslims. She did acknowledge that “three children were killed in Southport” but her emphasis fell less on that than on “false rumours” and “online disinformation” about it. The “really terrifying ... kind of evil” was the riots themselves, “a tidal wave of Islamophobia”, “British Muslims under attack”, “Islamophobia [not] being taken seriously”, “such a normalisation of Islamophobic rhetoric”.

Now, someone else with such an office might have thought it as well to show a bit more concern (if only politic) for “the three children killed” and less single-minded a concern for those she represented. Given the barbarism of the murders and the silence of officialdom about the origin and immigration status of the murderer, she might even have found room for some sympathy with the rioters. And if she compared these riots with what she could hardly fail to know of the savagery of inter-communal riots on the Indian subcontinent, where most of the people she represented originate from, she might even have observed in these rioters something like restraint. But, let us grant that, nevertheless, it was understandable that she should concentrate, to the exclusion of anything else, on what she did concentrate on.

But, then, there is her interviewer, Neha Gohil, who wasn’t interviewing her on behalf of the Muslim Council of Great Britain, nor even on her own behalf as a private individual with a perfect right to her own prejudices and partialities. She was interviewing her on behalf of the BBC. The interview took place on and, I expect, can still be found on BBC News. And Ms Gohil herself understood that she was representing the BBC. She says of Ms Mohammed, “she told the BBC” and “she spoke to the BBC”, i.e. to herself as the BBC’s representative. And the BBC is an organisation paid for by and meant, in its own particular way, to speak to and, perhaps for, the British people as a whole. Its Charter probably has the word ‘impartiality’ in it somewhere.

But Ms Gohil interviewed Ms Mohammed as if she shared precisely Ms Mohammed’s view of things – the view, that is, of someone representing not the BBC and not the British people as a whole but that of the Muslim Council of Great Britain (and how far that represents British Muslims, I don’t know). It wouldn’t be stretching things at all to say that she didn’t so much interview Ms Mohammed as echo her. ‘Islamophobia’ was no more for her than Ms Mohammed a word of contested or doubtful meaning but as incontestably there as arachnophobia (or any brick): “rising Islamophobia”, “Islamophobia in the Conservative Party”, “the rise in Islamophobia”, “anti-Muslim hate”, “an Islamophobia event in Parliament”, “Islamophobic chants”; and she enlisted a phrase of Sadiq Khan’s — “the fire of anti-Muslim hatred” — to back up the view she and MsMohammed share: ; and, along with that, the “more than 100 politicians, writers and other prominent figures criticising Ms Mohammed's ‘mistreatment’ … on a BBC Woman’s Hour interview.” Ms Gohil, representing the BBC, found the BBC wanting in sympathy with Muslims and their religion.

This so-called interview and its publication as BBC News (as news!) would, at one time, have brought disgrace on both Ms Gohil and the BBC. But no longer. The Senior Executives who run the BBC share too much of Ms Gohil’s partialities for any disgrace to fall on her; and the Senior Executives who run the Government share too much of the same partialities for any disgrace to fall on any BBC Senior Executive. The disgrace, nowadays, is all the other way. It falls on those who fail to share their partialities. Which is what, if not disgraceful?