NATION SHALL SPEAK ***** UNTO NATION by Donal Kennedy

The British Broadcasting Corporation has a worthy motto “NATION SHALL SPEAK PEACE UNTO NATION.”  Those who’ve enjoyed Evelyn Waugh’s novel “SCOOP” featuring the hapless war correspondent William Boot of  “THE DAILY BEAST” may echo the Editor who endorsed the press magnate’s certainties – “UP TO A POINT, LORD COPPER.” Or even, Lord Reith.

Deference and conformity are the hallmarks of the BBC. Poppies from wall to wall.Kow-towing to Royalty. Military tattoos from fore-arms to nether regions and from London’s Olympia to Edinburgh.Sir Terry Wogan confounding the knavish tricks of lesser breeds who don’t give all their votes to Britain’s Eurovision contestants.The long unchallenged abuse visited on children on BBC premises by Sir Jimmy Saville.

I see the Corporation has engaged Sir Bob Geldof to do a programme on the 1916 Rising and I could only comment with expletives.

But what really intrigues me is the decision to engage Michael Portillo.  Portillo has recalled how his own father, a Spanish Republican scholar and poet of gentle disposition, almost jumped for joy when Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, Francoist Prime Minister, was blown up by a car-bomb in Madrid in 1973. I think many readers will understand the scholar’s reaction and will instinctively  have echoed it when the Brighton bomb went off eleven years later. Though most may have thought that had the bomb done the job expected of it an even more fascistic militarist junta would have been imposed on Britain. As it happens the Brighton bomb killed my local MP who was replaced by Michael Portillo. Portillo won one of the safest Tory seats in Britain.. Had he taken a leaf from Tip O’Neill’s book -“All politics is local” he  would probably hold it still and today be Prime Minister. For he is very able. Instead he took it for granted.His arrogance echoed that of a member of Parliament quoted in THE GRUB STREET JOURNAL in the 1790s –

“Gentlemen,

Yours received and am very much surprised at your impudence in troubling me about the excise. You know what I know very well, that I bought you. I know what perhaps you don’t know, that I am about buying another Borough- and now may the curse of God light upon you all; and may your houses be as open to the excise men as your Wives and Daughters were to me when I stood candidate for your Corporation.”