The Concord Of This Discord

These days I do try to make myself resist commenting on the various MSM comment sites. However, this morning, I could not resist this BBC Have You say: ‘How can broadcasters better reflect ethnic diversity?’

My comment:

People are individuals, not representatives of any 'group': racial, religious, sexual or whatever. Therefore they should be employed by anyone - including the BBC and the rest of the media - solely on their individual merits and on no other criteria, especially some artificial and arbitrary quota that 'represents' or 'balances' some perceived inequality.

It is time that the people who make these decisions realised that acts of 'positive discrimination' perpetuate divisions not cure them.

There I ran up against the BBC’s word limit, a device that often adds to the frustration of indulging in these various MSM ‘comment’ items.

Of course, this notion of treating people as members of a group who – it is presumed - all share common traits, aspirations, world view and so forth is a product of the Left, a sub-Marxist view of competing groups forcing the course of history through their interactions.

When the ‘working class’ a rather nebulous concept at the best of times, refused to follow their part in the script, the Left looked around for other ‘victim’ groups it could champion (scroll down to see the extract from BRITAIN SINCE 1945 by Kenneth O Morgan.)

This has led to the current proliferation of various groupings, some overlapping (Asian and a woman, Homosexual black, and any other variation you could come up with) and often contradictory. The Left constantly claims to be for these groups and, especially, against stereotyping of them, but the very existence of these groups (which you are put in whether you want to be or not – another example of the insidious underhand coerciveness of the Left) forces stereotypical behaviours, attitudes and outlooks upon those within them. Rather than being, or becoming, individuals, people are seen as and made to adhere to what is expected of, and from, that grouping.

Those that escape these groups, for example the so-called Black & Asian middle-class, do this by stepping outside the serotype of the group and becoming individuals in their own right. The other method of escape is – ironically - to work in the public service industries, and areas like the entertainment industry that perpetuate these groups through reinforcing the images of the stereotypes of that particular grouping.

Both these escape routes are akin to the ‘working class’ kids who used grammar schools to escape being stereotyped as working class and became individuals and therefore ‘middle-class traitors’ in the eyes of the class warriors. Many of whom became themselves a form of ‘professional working class’ champions and spokespeople who had used that very same escape from the working class through the Grammar schools that the ‘traitors’ had used. This is a major part of why those very same ‘professional working class’ class-warriors were so keen to see the destruction of the Grammar Schools, because of this very escape from the working class that they themselves had benefited from.

The whole – what we might as well call – ‘diversity agenda’ actually makes things worse, not better, by creating often artificial differences between various people and exacerbating, exaggerating and perpetuating them in ways the very opposite of what the ‘diversity agenda’ is purported to do. Rather than bringing ‘peoples together’ it creates division, anxiety, resentment, anger, bitterness, jealousy and so on, all around hazily-perceived and artificial ‘differences’.

Although, I do say that this is a Left-wing notion, it has been a central part of the post-war consensus that dominated – and still does partly dominate - political discourse in this country. Even Thatcherism, which demonstrated that Left-wing economic ideas could not work, tended to leave social policy alone, which allowed these ideas to become deeply entrenched, especially as opposition to the ‘Nasty Party’ seemed to carry with it a certain cache in ‘progressive’ circles.

However, it does seem that the Tory party under Cameron, and to a lesser extent Clegg’s Lib Dems, are becoming aware of just how badly the Left-based post-war consensus on social policy has so badly damaged this country and are making slow hesitant steps towards seeing if they can rectify some of it. The Labour party though faces an even greater loss of identity, and therefore purpose if it ever realises that its social policies are as deeply flawed and unworkable as its economic notions. Even now it has trouble creating a coherent identity, if it loses this the last of its philosophical underpinnings then it surely must cease to exist as a leftwing (however vaguely) party. Not that I – for one – would shed any tears over that… not any more.