Their targets are a gentle song about “migrant” Paddington Bear and a reimagined Palestinian lullaby raising funds for humanitarian aid in Gaza.
The annual scramble for the Christmas No. 1 spot is underway, and this year’s frontrunners have triggered yet another round of contrived indignation from the culture war-obsessed right. Their targets are a gentle song about “migrant” Paddington Bear and a reimagined Palestinian lullaby raising funds for humanitarian aid in Gaza.
“Woke Christmas!” shrieked the Daily Mail, excitedly reporting that the BBC had been “warned” against promoting these tracks, warnings supposedly amplified by the broadcaster’s recent internal controversies over “anti-Trump bias” and the row over a Glastonbury performance by artists the Mail branded “Death to the IDF rappers.”
The paper eagerly quoted Conservative culture spokesman Nigel Huddleston, who said:
“With the BBC mired in a political bias scandal that cost bosses their jobs, the national broadcaster must think carefully about what it airs this Christmas.”
One of the ‘woke’ songs is ‘One of Us,’ written by Tom Fletcher of McFly. The song is about Paddington Bear, the beloved fictional character from Peru who found a home in Britain. Fletcher sings: “If you want to make him leave here then before you do there’s something I should say, I can’t imagine tomorrow without him. If he’s looking for a family, then he’s already one of us.”
Warm, uncontroversial lyrics to most ears, just not to one Tory source who insisted to the Mail that the song is a “thinly veiled comparison” to the 100,000 asylum seekers who came to Britain last year.
The paper claims that Fletcher will receive a “major boost” by performing on the Strictly Come Dancing quarter-final, apparently evidence of an insidious BBC plot.
Chasing Paddington Bear in the charts is an all-star version of the Palestinian lullaby Mama, Sing to the Wind, which will be released on December 12, with proceeds going to life-saving humanitarian support in Gaza. Brian Eno, Celeste, Leigh-Anne Pinnock, Dan Smith of Bastille, and the London Community Gospel Choir are all involved.
For this track, the Mail cites the thoughts of Frank Furedi, emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Kent, who said: “Interest in the Christmas number one is being hijacked by campaigners who want to build the largest possible audience for their issue.
“The BBC appears to be happy going along with turning Christmas into a celebration of its favourite political causes.”
This is the same Frank Furedi who has long fulminated against so-called cancel culture and who helped push Viktor Orban’s right-wing populist agenda in Europe. It’s the same Frank Furedi who George Monbiot accused of overseeing extreme right- wing libertarian campaigns “against gun control, against banning tobacco advertising and child pornography, and in favour of global warming, human cloning and freedom for corporations.”
The Mail also reminds readers that last year the BBC declined to play Freezing This Christmas, a track attacking cuts to pensioners’ fuel support. The song hit No. 1 on the download charts anyway, which rather weakens the argument that the BBC dictates the cultural mood and the rankings of songs in the charts.
The article ends with a token nod to balance, with a BBC spokesperson calmly explaining that the broadcaster has “no specific policies on tracks” and does not ban songs, with programming decisions based on audience and context, a perfectly rational position that undercuts the entire manufactured scandal. It is perhaps worth reminding that in 2013 on the death of Margaret Thatcher, the BBC refused to play the Wizard of Oz song ‘Ding, dong, the Witch is Dead’. Clearly those lefties at the BBC were at work then. Mind you, the song never did reach number one, just number two in the charts.
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