Why does the government want a gay quota for BBC management?
by Ross Clark, Spectator:
Of all the things wrong with the BBC, it would be hard to argue that a shortage of gay people making and presenting programmes is one of them. As Andrew Marr observed a decade ago: ‘The BBC is not impartial or neutral. It’s a publicly funded, urban organisation with an abnormally large number of young people, ethnic minorities, and gay people. It has a liberal bias, not so much a party-political bias. It is better expressed as a cultural liberal bias.’
Why, then, is the government intent on making the BBC even more gay? In one of the less-reported sections of this week’s white paper on the future of the corporation, John Whittingdale lays down a target that 10 per cent of senior leadership roles at the BBC be filled by LGBT staff by 2020.
Leaving aside for now the argument of whether we should have quotas for minority groups at all, a 10 per cent target for LGBT is bizarre. The official government figure for Britain’s LBGT population – obtained by means of a direct question posed to respondents in the Office of National Statistics’ Integrated Household Survey – is 1.5 per cent.
Related Posts
Tags
Share This
