The BBC, the Liberal Democrats and the NSPCC may look and sound moderate but their agenda can be anything but.
Warnings of “ravenous wolves” hiding in sheep’s clothing have been evocative ever since the metaphor was recorded in Matthew’s gospel (7:15) two thousand years ago.
This definition examines three modern-day ‘wolves in sheep’s clothing’: the BBC, the Liberal Democrats and the National Society for the Protection of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) – and the three different sheep-like disguises they employ.
The BBC wolf hidden behind a sheep-like voice
conservativehome.com’s definition of ‘red corner questioning’ notes one aspect of the BBC’s bias against conservatism.
In ’Revolutionaries with RP accents’, Michael Gove notes how this bias is hidden behind, among other things, the Received Pronunciation of announcers like Charlotte Green and Brian Perkins:
”While the form of Radio 4 is conservative, and dear to many of us for that reason, the content reflects a different temperament. Radio 4 operates, as so many British institutions do, on two levels. Its structures reflect the natural conservatism of the British people, but the worldview of its guiding spirits is more naturally radical, leftish and Guardianista. From the Royal Opera House to the Foreign Office, the same combination of traditional outward forms legitimising bien-pensant attitudes is at work.
The most successful left-wingers in British life have been those, such as Clement Attlee, whose personal style has been most bourgeois. It was no coincidence that, during the 1980s, the greatest threat to moderation within the Labour Party came from one sect, Militant, which insisted on a certain douce respectability from its adherents, demanding that they appear suited and tied, while other Trotskyists wallowed in combat-jacketed irrelevance.”
The Liberal Democrat wolf hidden behind a sheep-like moderation
The Liberal Democrats triangulate themselves as Britain’s most moderate political party – sandwiched between the ‘extremes’ of New Labour and the Tories. This purported moderation and a disavowal of negative campaigning has appealed to many people who disdain yah-boo politics. Many of the churchgoers drawn to this moderation are unaware of many immoderate LibDem positions. They have included:
- Hostility to church schools
- Restrictions on Christian broadcasters
- Undermining the unique status of marriage
- Gay adoption
- Undermining parental choice over sex education
- Contraceptives for children
- Legalising dangerous drugs
- Hard core porn for teenagers
- More sex shops
- Legalising prostitution.
The NSPCC wolf hidden behind a sheep-like mission
Criticising a charity that has the declared mission of stopping “cruelty to children” seems a little dangerous. But an elevated-sounding mission should not shield the NSPCC from full accountability to the public and to potential donors.
The NSPCC does do some good work in caring for needy children despite its high administrative costs and its involvement in the tragic death of Victoria Climbie.
But it is the NSPCC’s obsession with a couple of politically correct causes that justifies its place within this definition. Its high-profile campaign to ban all smacking runs counter to most people’s idea of parental authority (and to the important CST principle of subsidiarity). The NSPCC also led the campaign against Section 28 that, until abolished by Tony Blair, protected schoolchildren from the promotion of homosexuality. Section 28 may have been too focused on the dangers of homosexual propaganda in schools but the appropriate response to that weakness was to widen protection for schoolchildren – not to fret about its narrowness.
The NSPCC is not the only politically correct charity. The once-Christian Barnardo's charity published a major report on child welfare in 2000 without mentioning marriage and the benefits it brings to young people.
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