The revelations about the security services vetting BBC employees are chilling. (Thanks to Mr Dillow and Ms Rigg for putting me on to them.) They must cast a long shadow. Although anti-communist* (and fellow-traveller) vetting was abandoned almost thirty years ago, many of the young men (usually) recruited in the 1970s. '80s and even '90s, will have moved on to senior and middle management. As Chris Dillow writes:
The men who were selected as “sound” in the 70s and 80s hired the senior people who work there today. And they are likely to have had a bias towards people like themselves - “sound” people. Path dependence thus generates a bias against subversives even if overt vetting has ended.
Is it any surprise that the BBC gives inordinate coverage to reactionary organisations like UKIP or, before them, the Referendum Party?
* The security services were not so worried about those with fascist tendencies, it seems. That is presumably how Guy Burgess became a BBC producer, working the same trick as with MI6, cloaking his communist sympathies behind membership of a pro-fascist club.
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