Strike a balance
Michael Vestey
As I've mentioned before, listening to Broadcasting House on Radio Four can sometimes be like wandering into a gathering of the Fabian Society or a Guardian editorial meeting. Thus it was last Sunday morning when, having returned from Italy, I hoped to hear some useful analysis of the international crisis we're facing.
Instead, much of the programme was given over to the pacifist view that the West should not respond with force to the terrorist outrages in the United States. First of all the Labour MP Tam Dalyell was interviewed tamely about his view that Parliament should be recalled to discuss the issue. This is a perfectly valid point of view but Dalyell made it clear that he saw it as an opportunity to put a brake on the government's support for the US. 'Violence met with violence simply breeds violence,' he told the presenter Eddie Mair. I can only presume he thinks that violence met with passivity breeds passivity.
This astonishing naivety was repeated in a report from New York, of all places, on various peace protests there. One woman vox-popped at an anti-war demonstration said, 'I wish we could just get along. I wish there was just peace and unity throughout the whole world.' Don't we all, ducky, but it's not like that, is it? The theme continued with two studio guests, both veteran 'peace' campaigners, an actor from Only Fools and Horses and Pat Gaffney, general secretary of the Roman Catholic pacifist movement Pax Christi. Gaffney thought there should be no war at the moment — or any moment — so as to 'create some kind of space within which a political, diplomatic approach can be made'.
Listening to this guff, a little fantasy of my own entered my head. I pictured the actor, Gaffney, Dalyell, Bruce Kent and all the other 'useful idiots' inviting Osama bin Laden for a cup of tea to thrash out the problem. 'Now look here, Osama, old chap, we don't want all this nastiness, do we? Is there room for a bit of a compromise on your stated aims to destroy Israel and kill every American on the planet? Milk and sugar?'
The only balancing voice came, surprisingly, from a Quaker and former peace campaigner who now teaches military strategy at the US Naval War College in Washington. He offered a sensible and accurate analysis of how to tackle bin Laden's terrorist group. But his seemed to be the only alternative view permitted. Couldn't Broadcasting House have found somebody in Britain to counter the pacifists and appeasers, to put the opposing view?
So Radio Four failed on Sunday morning. Interestingly, it was the normally more irreverent Sunday Service on Five Live that excelled. Gordon Brown's former spin doctor Charlie Whelan was in Bournemouth with Amanda Platell, whom he described as William Hague's former 'spin-nurse', for the Lib-Dem conference and the presenter Eleanor Oldroyd was in the studio with Andrew Pierce of the Times who is meant to balance Whelan's Labour views.
They interviewed Michael Ancram, the shadow foreign secretary; Henry Kissinger; the German ambassador to London; the Lib-Dem's Menzies Campbell; an Egyptian pundit on Egypt's own Islamic fundamentalists; an AEEU trade unionist on the crisis facing the airline industry; a former SAS man who'd fought alongside the Taleban against the Soviets; a former adviser to Robin Cook when he was foreign secretary; not to mention John Reid, the Northern Ireland secretary, on the situation in the province. This was an impressive line-up of the kind I would have expected to hear on Broadcasting House.
I also arrived back to hear about the row over the dropping of 'Rule Britannia' and 'Land of Hope and Glory' from the Last Night of the Proms. The utter feebleness of this brought a deluge of complaints to Feedback on Radio Four. Nicholas Kenyon, who directs the Proms, explained that Radio Three wanted 'something that went beyond national boundaries' at a time of international crisis. So what did he replace it with? 'Ode To Joy' from Beethoven's 9th Symphony, which he described as a 'hymn to universal brotherhood'.
It also happens to be the EU's so-called 'national anthem', so it's all right to play that but not Elgar. The truth is that for years certain sophisticates at the BBC, confusing patriotism with nationalism, have been itching to ditch 'Land of Hope and Glory' and 'Rule Britannia' from the Proms but haven't dared. They found their excuse last week and there's no certainty that they'll be back next year. A remarkably silly decision.
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