Carol Vorderman, who presented a lightweight, non-political, music-and-chat programme for 2½ hours on Saturdays on Radio Wales, has been fired by BBC Wales management for anti-Tory political opinions she has expressed on her personal social media accounts.
Wynne Evans, who presents a lightweight, non-political, music-and-chat programme for three hours every weekday on Radio Wales and also appears regularly in various BBC Wales TV programmes and S4C programmes made by the BBC, is an open Tory who actually hosted a Tory fund-raising event alongside Boris Johnson in 2020. For this brazen breach of the BBC’s ‘impartiality’ guidelines he was “spoken to” and that was the end of the matter.
Here is confirmation, if it were needed, that BBC Wales doesn’t represent Wales at all. The Tories have not won a majority of Welsh votes since the introduction of universal suffrage and are deeply loathed here. But, because BBC Wales has no connection to or sympathy with Wales and is merely a branch of the British/English State where embedded Toryism prevails and anti-Tory sentiment is anathema, Carol Vorderman’s accurate social media description of the Tories as “a lying bunch of greedy, corrupt, destructive, hateful, gas-lighting crooks” means she must be banished from the airwaves even though such views are mainstream and unremarkable in Wales. And meanwhile Wynne Evans is given the freedom to spew his inane, creepy drivel across every BBC Wales platform even though the gurning insurance salesman’s enthusiastic endorsement of Toryism is shared by just 10% of the Welsh population. BBC Wales, like the UK government, is as usual contemptuously treating Wales as nothing more than an English possession without its own voice, values, culture and politics. In the increasingly authoritarian British State despising the Conservatives is barred but adoring them is perfectly acceptable. This is now the BBC’s definition of ‘impartiality’.
The odious people in charge of BBC Wales are the problem. Crawling and cringing to London’s demands is a way of life in ‘New Broadcasting House’ and they never stand up for Wales or attempt to foster a Welsh-specific outlook. They are treacherous colonial viceroys, rewarded handsomely for doing the bidding of their masters and keeping a tight lid on Welsh creativity and actualisation. Little wonder then that the BBC Wales output is so insipid, castrated and superficial, almost entirely given over to producing derivative, undemanding dross for the ‘network’ supplemented by a tokenistic sprinkling of embarrassingly brain-dead and instantly forgettable offerings for Wales, which seem to exist solely to justify their lavish, ever-expanding property portfolio in Cardiff.
The treatment of Carol Vorderman is despicable, and what’s worse is the complete lack of solidarity from BBC Wales staff. When Gary Lineker was similarly threatened last year, his colleagues in London took industrial action to stop his victimisation. However BBC Wales workers, to their eternal shame, summoned up not a whimper of protest.
BBC Wales is the loser. Unbowed, Carol Vorderman says she intends to increase her attacks on the wicked Tory government to try to provide some of the critique, the facts and the analysis that the BBC and the rest of the rightwing media so calculatedly suppress. Her principled opposition will definitely be well worth listening to – and one thing’s for sure: it won’t be available on “your” BBC.
Picture: Daily Mail