Ding Dong over Thatcher song makes the BBC no better than China
The BBC's decision to censor the protest track from The Wizard of Oz recalls the Chinese Communist party
Nick Cohen
The Observer, Saturday 13 April 2013 16.45 BST
The Wicked Witch: jubilant Munchkins just out of shot. Photograph: www.kobal-collection.com
In 2011, Chinese censors tried to erase mentions of jasmine from its state-policed web. They banned shops and markets from selling the plant. They cancelled the 2011 China international jasmine cultural festival. They even plucked from the web a video of President Hu Jintao singing Mo Li Hua, a Qing dynasty paean to the jasmine's delicate flowers.
It wasn't that the communists objected to jasmine in particular or climbing and rambling plants in general. They were frightened because, after the "jasmine revolution" in Tunisia, anonymous voices had called for a jasmine revolution in China. The paranoid authorities were censoring jasmine's symbolic meaning; the hidden message known only to initiates.
The worst that can be said of the Tory press and the BBC is that they have now sunk to the level of the Chinese Communist party. Since MGM released The Wizard of Oz in 1939, few have found the Munchkins' chorus – "Ding dong! The Wicked Witch is dead/ Wake up sleepy head, rub your eyes, get out of bed" – obscene or subversive in the least.
But Britain's surreal conservatives did not want the BBC to ban the song because its words were libellous or a breach of the criminal law. They hated the song not because of what it said but because the intention of the left wingers who bought it was to celebrate the death of Margaret Thatcher.
The silencing of the Munchkins must rank as one of the most inept acts of censorship Britain has seen. The days when the Radio 1 playlist made or broke a song's chances went with the invention of the web. Neither the Daily Mail nor the parliamentary Conservative party appeared to know that if you want to ban a single today, you need to compel YouTube and iTunes to take it down.
Ham-fisted though it may be, the attack on The Wizard of Oz tell us much about the authoritarianism of British conservatism and the cowardice of the BBC. It proves that the right can be just as politically correct as the left. Thatcher's supporters might have tried to win the argument. They might have said that it is contemptible to celebrate the death of a sick old lady, who had been the democratically elected leader of a free county. They might have directed our attention to her grieving friends and family. They might have pointed out that Mrs Thatcher left power 23 years ago and it is politically illiterate to blame her for the ills of the present. They might, in short, have tried to have convinced their opponents of the justice of their cause in free debate. Instead, they tried to silence.
As for the BBC, what is there left to say about it? Can it show The Wizard of Oz again? Can it only run the film after the 9pm watershed? Must the announcer warn: "This children's story contains Munchkin choruses that some viewers may find offensive"? Its decision to ban every part of the song except for a five-second clip in a news report shows clearly something that many people outside the media rarely understand: the BBC folds under pressure.
During the debate on the politicians' plans to regulate the press and news websites, many people have asked why journalists should worry when regulation works so well at the BBC. The behaviour of the BBC last week explains why. Tory MPs and the Daily Mail picked on the BBC rather than iTunes or YouTube because they knew they had a chance of winning. Any other media organisation might have said it stood by the principles of free speech. If music buyers had, for whatever reason, put a song in the charts they had a duty to play it.
Because the BBC is funded by a licence fee everyone must pay, because it is in the end a state broadcaster, it is far easier to intimidate. "Free speech is an important principle," said Tony Hall, its director general, as he struggled to explain his behaviour. Politicians know he doesn't mean it. They understand that if they make life hard enough for the corporation it will abandon its principles.
Why do you think that during her decade in power Margaret Thatcher never privatised it?
