Well Said, Paxman

Well done, Mr Paxman, for speaking out in support of our nation and the glorious British Empire. I salute you.

The BBC Newsnight presenter has turned his fire on his own paymasters with an out-spoken attack on the BBC’s spending.

He likened the corporation to a declining empire over its lavish use of licence fee-payers’ money to fund building projects.

In an interview for the Radio Times, Paxman questioned the logic of moving the BBC out of its west London Television Centre base to the newly renovated Broadcasting House in central London:

 “No, they’re all far too politically correct, I’m afraid." 

But he added:

“Funny though, isn’t it, that they always said that the way you know if the British are going to decolonise is when they start building massive government buildings – that was certainly the case in India. And the BBC’s much the same. What organisation – at a time when it has no money, allegedly – would move from cheap square footage in west London to Oxford Circus?”

The veteran broadcaster said it was “nothing short of a scandal” that the history of the British Empire was not taught more widely in schools, and that it was dismissed as a “thoroughly bad thing”. 

Timothy Belmont wholeheartedly concurs. 

Paxman said:

 “I think there is a belief that there is only one way to view it, and that therefore we can pass an easy judgement on it. There are lots of things that we should think were appalling, because they were appalling. The slave trade is a case in point; the opium trade is another one. But the idea that that is a complete picture is the thing that I quarrel with, and seems to be the basis of the judgement that it was all a bad thing. And because it was a very bad thing, we don’t need to think about it any more. It’s all parcelled up and consigned.”

He also criticised former Prime Minister Tony Blair over his public apologies over our role in the Irish potato famine and the slave trade:

“You should apologise for things that you have done, that you recognise that perhaps you shouldn’t have done or regret; but apologising for things that your great, great, great, great-grandfather or grandmother did, seems to me a complete exercise in moral vacuousness."