Impartiality means no one is allowed to disagree

It’s not the specific subject here but the background logic which worries:

It’s a line in a sprawling document, but it reveals something far larger: a familiar tactic of the anti-abortion movement in which human rights are undermined through the language used to describe them. Once you label a right as “contested” you no longer have to defend it – you only have to debate it. That’s the trick. “Reproductive rights” cease to be a moral or legal baseline but instead become a political position, the preserve of a particular tribe. It’s a move that drains the term of its meaning and, in doing so, erases the thing itself.

Reproductive rights are not a fringe invention of feminist campaigners. They are not a slogan. They are a set of internationally recognised legal principles…

Well, OK. But it’s the extension from this:

Because what’s really being tested here is not the BBC’s impartiality but the country’s moral memory. The corporation – a public broadcaster, funded and trusted by the people it serves – has a duty to reflect the rights that parliament has granted those citizens. To describe those rights as “contested” is to side with those who want to undo them.

There’s a cowardice masquerading as fairness in parts of the British establishment right now. Call it neutrality, call it objectivity, call it “due impartiality”: it’s the belief that standing in the middle of a moral question makes you reasonable, rather than complicit. But some things are not a matter of opinion. Women’s rights to their own bodies should not be considered “leftwing” – they are human rights. And if the BBC can no longer say that without fear of being accused of bias, then what’s really being censored isn’t just speech, it’s truth.

The declaration is thus that here we are, we’ve an absolute truth and no one on the BBC - and presumably elsewhere - can be allowed to contest that.

Which isn’t how a liberal nor democratic society works, no. Everything said about abortion and reproductive rights there could even be true but that’s still not how a liberal and or democratic society works. Everyone is free to question any of these supposedly settled questions. Even, the national broadcaster to discuss them if some significant fraction of the population disagree.

For of course this is not the only subject nor point where there are those insisting upon their revelatory truth. Immigration, climate change, the perils of inequality, the gloriousness of the NHS. These are, by a substantial fraction of the people, held to be immutable truths which no one should question. Many others clearing throats and preparing an ahem and an acshully.

Insisting that only the one revealed truth may be said is not just akin to it is the same as those earlier insistences that The Party is always right, the Caudillo thinks of everyone, even, that really old one of abortion is murder and people should be hanged for it. It’s only if people can question and discuss that we are able to change such ideas.

Tim Worstall