It’s more Irish/Scottish than English. 
My surname is scottish even if it’s also found in East Anglia. My great grandparents came from the region in scotland where the name is common.
I was bought up in Devon and consider myself as a Devonian Scot. 
Oh: … and I know why your small now! 
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McFlobs? 
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Probably should be McYockleFrog by now after more than 1/2 my life in France.
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If you all want to start a thread on Surname derivations please go ahead.
Twas a challenge that could not be ignored!!
When the grey conseervative lady speaks out then maybe the policy is outrageous
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She’s not as stupid as she looks yet she’s still a fuckwit!
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This Fiona Bruce shit is creating some great memes.
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Remind me again why we’re not on the path to fascism…
Churchill or something, isn’t it??
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BBC being exposed as they should. I’m sure I’ve called them right-wing in the past, mostly as a retort when they are somehow called left-wing by a minority. But I don’t actually believe that.
What it says in that article about needing to keep communication channels open to the government makes a lot of sense to me. As we know the Tories have a stranglehold on almost all the print media in the UK, so they can take their pick. BBC need that access to not be left behind. And they sold their soul for it. Though I feel they have always been favourable to the Tory message, even well before Brexit, but now they have taken to an extreme to keep access to the government open.
What is fact is that the BBC is not impartial. Evidence is piling on now that this isn’t the case.
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Bingo.
It makes all their performative nonsense even more galling.
Oh fuck. I’m just catching up now on what this Fiona Bruce bizzo is about. “Friends of his say it did happen and it was a one-off”. Trivialising domestic violence, and as an ambassador of Refuge, then complaining she was ‘hung out to dry’ (she was reading off a sheet and not via IFB so she knew what she was saying) by BBC? You take the cake this week, Fiona Bruce.
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Yep. She has really outed herself in the last few weeks.
Tory apologist. She can fuck right off.
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The BBC is starting to creep into the territory of a state broadcaster rather than a public service broadcaster. Of course the public is still obliged to pay their annual license fee for this. It’s always been a rule of thumb for me - one should not have to pay for propaganda.
The galling thing with all this is that the BBC and the whole system of public service broadcasting is one that is widely admired by liberal democracies around the world. I have spoken to various people who have lived under oppressive regimes and they all say that the BBC (usually the World Service) was the one news source that they all implicitly trusted. They appreciated that it was from a British perspective but that what was included was true and reliable.
It’s yet another case of something that Britain has done well being denigrated be dark forces.
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I wonder whether some are still going to say that “oh but it makes right-wingers upset so it must be lefty-communist”?
As ever, guess who nailed it 40 years ago…
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Arguably the BBC is still one of the more objective news casters around the world, although there was a noticable change around Brexit with kuessenberg and her unprofesionality colouring her reporting.
It is I think also worth noting that this is a time where Freedom of Speech is pressured in the West, with sensitvity readers altering the work of Roald Dahl as to not offend some imaginary people who would be offended by straight speaking and a bit caustic language that children would laugh gleefully at.
I think it’s a combination of factors. The BBC being more dominated by Tory opinion due to ties and the times being that of general censorship in regards to what language you can use both in litterature and in politics.
Besides the point, but surprised no one is talking about the abominable censorship of Roald Dahl’s work. For several weeks this has been the talk in the Norwegian press and Norwegian authours have banded together, a fair few of them, writing letters to their publishers, demanding protection against such opressive censorship of their intellectual work after their death. It’s really the topic to discuss in Norway these days, the censorship and “sanitation” of litterature in the UK and what the fuck has happened with the UK where a publisher thinks that this is okay or in any form or way acceptable to do.
So this is a clear trend in the UK and it is scary as hell to watch.
Personally, the fact that there is so little uproar in the Uk regarding the sanitation of Roald Dahl’s work frightens me more than the stupid clamp down on Lineker, which I see as far less dangerous because it is bound to fail. The sensitivy reading and sanition seems to succeed though and with frighteningly little resistance and is therefore in my view perhaps more insidious and damaging…
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I think you (and many other people) do underestimate the psychological consequences of language. It’s odd that you speak out against propaganda, but yet deny that negative stereotypes in children’s literature can very much affect how they think, not just about others around them, but also about their own selves, in a very negative way that can damage self-esteem, and also lead to unconscious reinforcement of such negative stereotypes in future interactions with others.
By that logic that it’s okay to include “a bit caustic language that children would laugh gleefully at”, why do we censor sexual themes or cussing in media? Children would laugh gleefully at that too after all.