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Sunday, March 15, 2015

Privatising BBC3 would be as pernicious as Isis destroying Iraq’s historic sites

If BBC3 is sold to the free-market fundamentalists we’ll lose the very idea of public broadcasting within a decadeWhen so-called Islamic State destroyed historic sites in Iraq, I was wary of making judgments of other cultures, and gave these exuberant young men the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps shattering the statues was mere high spirits, like when Greeks trample wedding crockery? Or perhaps it was the fault of MI5?Of course, we also sacrifice our heritage to ideology. Say goodbye to Paolozzi’s Tottenham Court Road murals, trashed by terrorists of Transport for London; to Oxford’s ancient Port Meadow horizon, occluded by death-cult developers; and perhaps to the BBC, the greatest cultural achievement of any 20th-century democracy, soon to be poleaxed by free-market fundamentalists as pernicious as the statue-smashers of so-called Islamic State. Continue reading...


READ THE ORIGINAL POST AT www.theguardian.com