Mar 2023 – diary of a lone man

Sunday Night Thoughts on the BBC’s ‘Impartiality’

12.03.2022

Throughout my academic career, my work (including drafts first sent elsewhere of published work in top journals and publishing houses) has been criticised for being ‘subjective’, ‘biased’, ‘partial’, etc. Why? Because I write as a British Asian man from a working class background, for my mother (a poor, foreign immigrant from an oppressed community). Because I criticise the racial bias in the law. Because I don’t pretend, like the scholars from the majority background, that my work is ‘objective’. I don’t believe in ‘objectivity’ or ‘abstraction’ when it comes to social comment and analysis. You shouldn’t either. Because your background, culture, childhood, life experience – how people treat you in this society – affects everything you think.

So, it was with great sympathy that I saw how Gary Lineker was treated because he pointed out the xenophobia in the government and the law’s treatment of refugees. Like me, they (the %^#*s, tried to stamp out his valid criticisms of the law because this is not the story that racist (neo-imperialist) power likes to tell itself.

However, let us not blindly support Lineker just because those in power tried to silence him. Is it right that the BBC should be ‘impartial’? Let us consider the following points.

Isn’t it funny that when the BBC pundits criticised Qatar for the World Cup during its sports broadcasts and abandoned its ‘impartiality’ to criticise a Muslim country in this climate of xenophobia and Islamophobia, nobody was kicked off the TV? Hmm. Seems like there is no rational explanation for why that happened except that you don’t have to be ‘impartial’ when it doesn’t involve Western politicians in Western countries. After all, they are just brown people with no ‘objective’ knowledge.

Actually, throughout my whole adult life, I have watched the BBC trash Indian people in practically every news story they run about India. I’m not saying Indians don’t have problems. But you read a story about rape and apparently Indians have a ‘rape culture’, when rape incidents are only marginally higher than in the rest of the world and the statistics are suspect anyway for various reasons, such as families trying to stop teenage relationships outside of arranged marriages and pretending that rape is happening when it isn’t. Description of Indian politics talks about right wing authoritarianism which you would never know existed in Tory culture in the UK. You read a review of a movie and it says it represents the widespread misogyny of Indian males. Really? In my house, we worship the mother goddess on my mum’s side and the women are involved in all the decision making at the highest and lowest level. Hindi films can be a one-actress show unlike films in the West and still draw audiences. Apparently, though, this is all ‘impartial’ reporting and is in no way racist.
Is the BBC saying that when you see the most vulnerable people in need of shelter and safety (ironically, from political oppression) literally being treated like garbage instead of humans, you should stand by and be silent? Is this the meaning of impartiality? Perhaps we should film murders happening and do nothing to prevent them as well? Is that impartiality? To stand by while the government and the law in this country violate the basic tenets of humanity? Even when this is political response to a political problem of asylum from oppressive regimes (as though everything doesn’t involve politics)?

When I was at school, we were taught that all media has bias and we were taught how to analyse news stories so that we could detect this bias. This was when I was twelve years old. Apparently, the argument we are supposed to swallow from the BBC goes against the compulsory government mandated education that I received as a ****&^%$ child…

To reiterate a point above, is it possible to achieve impartiality about news and current affairs? Isn’t everything somehow political? News ‘facts’ aren’t hard facts like science and maths, and even scientists and mathematicians have the humility to acknowledge that numbers and scientific perceptions of the universe around us depend upon our human perspective and limitations. Apparently, though, the BBC is like the Western God that has objective, omniscient, unlimited knowledge.

To conclude, isn’t it funny that every time you criticise the law in this country for being racist and the government for being racists, even when it is patently obvious, suddenly you are ‘partial’, ‘subjective’, ‘wrong’? It’s almost like they want to silence us while their racism remains completely ‘objective’ and ‘impartial’. Almost as though they are always right no matter what they want to do and no one is allowed to offer any alternatives and no one will ever listen to any criticisms. Because They (the media, the government and its law, the powerful) are literally the Western God with an (arrogant) total knowledge… But of course, this comes from a partial man with a limited knowledge and the humility to acknowledge that his is just one perception. So it must be wrong, right? Because it is not ‘impartial’…

The Refugee Boat – Some Thoughts on an Alternative History of Transport

10.03.2022

If you go to a transport museum, the likelihood is that you will see ultra-expensive vehicles which were at the cutting edge of technology. These cars, buses, trains and trams would have had all the modern conveniences and would have been fairly safe, even if safety standards in the past were laxer. In terms of production, an entire army of workers would have been involved in the construction, probably an ‘international’ team (by which I mean white Europeans).

The history you would find in such museums would be progressive, a story of increasing rationality, efficiency, cost-effectiveness, capitalism, big business. A story the rich tell themselves to celebrate the world that they have created: the globalised, interlinked world of transport convenience. Where, theoretically, there are no physical barriers to community, commuting, connection.

Standing out in stark contrast to this ‘Whig’ version of history is the humble refugee boat.

The refugee boat is fairly inexpensive. It is the mode of transport of the poor, the desperately oppressed seeking a better life in the only way that they can given their losses in the lottery of life and birth. The refugee boat, while not the worst piece of technology ever invented, is still pretty primitive. The standard image is the unpretentious dinghy, clearly unfit for the purpose of a long journey by the sea in dangerous waters. Travel by sea is itself one of the longest, most inconvenient, inefficient and deadly forms of travel, where you are seemingly at the utmost mercy of nature. There are no modern conveniences. Hardly any water to drink, hardly any room for food. No toilet. There is no safety. There is probably more than a 50:50 chance of death. What about the production? The workers that made these products were probably exploited in sweatshops in economically less dominant countries around the globe.

The history of the refugee boat is the unadulterated, unpolished history of transport in our times. History is not always written by the victors. It is also written by the losers. The refugee boat is the testament to the fact that our modes of travel are not objectively the best. They are merely fit for the types of people and the societies that use them. The transport history in museums is the product of capitalism and the reign of the rich. The transport history of the undocumented migrants is the product of those that power has missed out, those that capitalism has downtrodden.

The unvarnished history of the refugee boat – which the media presents as a horrible throwback to primitive times, a history which is now culminating in government interception of such travellers and their lives being thrown away like trash somewhere else, as someone else’s problem – is the real history of travel beyond propaganda, advertisement, embellishment, cultural narcissism. This is the real story of the world that the ultra-rich have created: a world where you can’t even travel from one country to another to try and better your life. A world in which you are tied to the place you were born and the lack of opportunities there. Why can’t anyone tell this history?