Richard Bacon's show - his own Guardianista views are markedly transparent, most notably in almost screaming at rare right of centre invitee Jon Gaunt and repeatedly cutting him off in the summer, and again in November - seems to have them lined up on some kind of rota at times. It's not a scientific sample, of course, but my experience of his godawful show consists of either his fawning over vacant ideologies put forward by lefty slebs, or arguing with the few who rock up to his studio with opinions which aren't right-on enough. Oh yeah, and his mutual ego massaging with fellow lefty Boyd Hilton can sometimes raise eyebrows ... their disagreement about whether Rush Limbaugh was just insane or very insane was perfectly, err, politically-balanced, I thought.
But then, it would seem the execrable Bacon is only following the general ethos of his channel. For example, The Freedom Association are rightly irked at their 'impartial' BBC treatment at the hands of Alan Davies and privately-educated lefty, David Baddiel this morning.
Speaking 1h 23m into the Alan Davies Show on Radio 5 Live today, David Baddiel called the libertarian Freedom Association "a very, very right wing kind of sub-BNP, slightly posher version of the BNP".Davies's quips about TFA founder Norris McWhirter possibly being a friend of Mosley and wondering if he owned a brownshirt didn't help matters, either.
Quite heavy political fare for a radio programme about ... football!
It got me thinking, because I attended TFA's Freedom Zone at the Tory Conference in October and all I saw was a whole load of MPs, MEPs, Councillors, journalists, policy wonks, and at least one Marxist talking about free trade, civil liberties, and freedom of movement. Considering the BNP's manifesto advocates trade restrictions, top-down control and immigration bans, I must have been lax in missing the debates where kicking out the 'fuzzy-wuzzies', protectionism, re-nationalisation, and the introduction of the death penalty for drug dealers were discussed.
Yet they may as well have been, since BBC listeners will now be of the opinion that TFA's founder, Norris McWhirter, was not averse to sticking pins in golliwogs while he was alive, and that TFA - who almost none of the show's listeners will have been aware of before today - don their ties every morning and set off to restore the purity of the 'indigenous' English race.
One could argue that Baddiel and Davies's nonsense was just a bit of larking around and not an attempt at lefty bias, but being tagged as a racist organisation is deeply insulting, very damaging to any reputation, and a demonstrable inaccuracy by a BBC presenter and his politically-naïve guest who was childishly pissed off that McWhirter didn't talk about the Guinness Book of Records show when he visited Baddiel's private school.
The Freedom Association's Director, Simon Richards, is complaining to the BBC about it and asking others to do the same. I don't blame him, to be honest.
