Lindsay Hoyle
Main Page: Lindsay Hoyle (Speaker - Chorley)
Mr MacNeil
I want to help the hon. Lady by saying that I hope her ambition is greater than just matching the voice of people from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. I hope that the ethnic minority voice will be stronger than ours, which we sometimes feel is not strong at all. I wish her well.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. We have an informal 10-minute limit, and the Members who are intervening were hoping to be next on the list. I would not like to have to put them down the list.
Dawn Butler
I am coming to the end of my speech, Mr Deputy Speaker.
I completely agree with the hon. Gentleman. My ambitions for my community are always as big as possible and know no bounds.
My next plea relates to the “The Real McCoy”. There has been a long-standing campaign for the BBC to bring the show back, but one of the reasons that has not happened is that the archive has apparently been lost. If so, that says to me that the BBC felt—[Interruption.] An hon. Member in a sedentary position just kissed his teeth, which I am sure Hansard would not be able to print, but it basically means that what happened was very bad. [Laughter.] Will the Minister please investigate whether the archive has been lost? If it has, it is a shame and it shows that the BBC had little regard for such a funny, legendary programme.
Finally, the BBC is under threat from the internet. Many groups and communities run their own programmes online because their voices are not being heard. I was part of Star Media and had a show to connect with the Somali community. It will be a shame if the BBC does not grasp the nettle and run with our suggestions.
Kwasi Kwarteng
Indeed, I was. The Guardian is the only newspaper that consistently misspells my name. I just wanted to get that out.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
On that basis, we will want to know when it improves.
Dr Huq
That is a hazard for people with a name like mine or the hon. Gentleman’s. The sooner we take steps to acknowledge and address this situation, as we are doing today, the better. He is right that this is a sector-wide issue across the media.
It goes without saying that the nation’s front rooms should be illuminated by more than just white people, and clichéd representatives of white people at that. The late sociologist Stuart Hall used to talk about representations and reality. There is a circuit between them and they feed off each other.
Sadly, “The Black and White Minstrel Show” was not a complete one-off. As my viewing habits progressed, there was ITV’s “Love Thy Neighbour”, which ran from 1972 to 1976—a situation comedy in which the situation was having a black family next door. It seems absurd now. Astonishingly, the TV Times trailed the programme with the line:
“You can choose your friends but you can’t choose your neighbours”.
Also on ITV, there was “Mixed Blessings”, which the British Film Institute describes thus:
“Christopher and Muriel are in love. But since he is white and she is black, their marriage raises tensions among their respective families.”
The BFI—this programme is now a BFI classic—says that it
“understandably reflects the confused racial attitudes of the time”.
Confused.com! The racist ranter Alf Garnett in “Till Death Do Us Part” was on the BBC. We can excuse the other two because they were on a commercial broadcaster. All of these things are now excused. It is like Jimmy Savile’s crimes. These things were acceptable in the ’70s, which was a pre-politically correct time.
We can cite examples of where we have not really moved forward. Sorry, I missed another programme—“It Ain’t Half Hot Mum”. There is a bit of a pattern in these things, because they all demonstrate an inferiority. In that show, it was with Asians. There are academic theories that show that things like slavery are based on the inferiority of another race. These programmes, to some extent, had that sort of attitude at their core.
A current programme I would cite, which has been going since 2012, is “Citizen Khan”. If I did not know what the year was—I do not know if people know that programme. It is the everyday tale of a Birmingham family of Muslims, but they are really quite backward. Again, it relates to the point about Islamophobia made by my hon. Friend the Member for Streatham (Mr Umunna), who is no longer in his place. There is a beardy-weirdy chap. They are not quite cutting off people’s hands, but I could imagine that being in a future episode.
The Minister for Culture and the Digital Economy (Mr Edward Vaizey)
I am grateful, Mr Deputy Speaker, to have the chance to respond to this important debate. When a Minister is told that he has to spend a Thursday afternoon responding to a debate, particularly on the day of the Tory parliamentary away day, and realises that by being in the Chamber he will miss the company of his colleagues at a luxury country hotel—you can imagine the thoughts that went through my mind. But the cloud was lifted when I saw the subject of the debate. As many Members will know, this is a subject close to my heart and I am grateful for the kind words that have been said about some of my work.
Before I move on to the issues, I want to pay significant tribute to the right hon. Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy) for his barnstorming speech. It was an absolute tour de force—the great MP at his best, reminding us of his great qualities, lighting up Twitter like a fire and making some points that, in my view, were completely unanswerable. He set the tone of the debate, and the other reason the cloud has lifted is that all hon. Members have made fantastic speeches bringing great passion, emotion and knowledge to the debate. It has been dominated by the issue of BME representation in broadcasting, but I must acknowledge those Members who have stretched the definition of diversity.
Let me briefly acknowledge, although he is no longer in the Chamber, for reasons I cannot fathom, my hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Wight (Mr Turner), who took diversity to mean more coverage of Brexit.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
May I just say that the h G did advise the Chair that he needed to get to Oxford, even if others did not?
Mr Deputy Speaker
It is the third time it has been in use; I think we are all getting used to it, luxury hotels and all.
Mr Vaizey
Anyway, my hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Wight has apparently gone to an undisclosed location, so I apologise for misrepresenting him. If he had been here, he would have heard the Opposition spokesman explain that the Secretary of State has the director-general of the BBC in a small room and is dictating that the BBC covers only Brexit opinion, so that point is covered.
The hon. Member for Sunderland Central (Julie Elliott), who sits on the Select Committee, rightly brought up the importance of the BBC’s representing the whole nation as regards the regions and as regards its presence throughout the country. I acknowledge what she said both about where the BBC is physically present and about the people who are represented and who work for the corporation. Those points were well made.
My old friend the Member for the Outer Hebrides, the hon. Member for Na h-Eileanan an Iar (Mr MacNeil), representing the top—we had my hon. Friend the Member for Dover (Charlie Elphicke) in the Chamber earlier, representing the bottom, as it were—pointed out the importance of language diversity and talked about the huge success of BBC Alba. It was good to hear his colleagues acknowledge the additional funding that the coalition Government pushed towards that—that is, the extra 2 million quid that BBC Alba was not expecting to get, which was fantastic.
The prize has to go to the hon. Member for Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey (Drew Hendry), who took “diversity” to mean more Scottish football on the telly. We all want to see some Scottish clubs playing in the league cup. We would like the English league cup to turn into a league cup where Scottish clubs can play English clubs. That is what viewers want. If anyone wonders about the importance of sport, that simple statement by me will dominate all news coverage.
Mr MacNeil
The ambitions of Scotland are higher. We do not want to play just across this island. We want to dominate in Europe again, as Celtic did so magnificently in 1967, being the first non-Latin team to win the European cup. But the Scottish team will do that only if it gets the funding. The broadcasters have to step up to the mark to make sure that the money is coming in as it should.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
We must be careful not to get into history, which is where Scottish football may take us.