It is of course a favourite of Christmas pasts, present, and possibly future?
Currently, this video of “Ding, Dong – The Witch is Dead” has had 1,173,398 views.
The BBC has got caught up in a huge row, regarding what to do with the playing of the single, “Ding Dong – the Witch is Dead” tomorrow, as described here:
“The Wizard of Oz song at the centre of an anti-Margaret Thatcher campaign will not be played in full on the Official Chart Show. Instead a five-second clip of the 51-second song will be aired as part of a Newsbeat report, Radio 1 controller Ben Cooper said. Sales of Ding Dong! The Witch is Dead have soared since the former Prime Minister’s death on Monday, aged 87. Mr Cooper called the decision “a difficult compromise”. The song is set to take the number three spot in Sunday’s countdown, according to the Official Charts Company.”
Nick Cohen (@NickCohen4) was seething in the Guardian today:
“The worst that can be said of the Tory press and the BBC is that they have now sunk to the level of the Chinese Communist party. Since MGM released The Wizard of Oz in 1939, few have found the Munchkins’ chorus – “Ding dong! The Wicked Witch is dead/ Wake up sleepy head, rub your eyes, get out of bed” – obscene or subversive in the least.
But Britain’s surreal conservatives did not want the BBC to ban the song because its words were libellous or a breach of the criminal law. They hated the song not because of what it said but because the intention of the left wingers who bought it was to celebrate the death of Margaret Thatcher.
The silencing of the Munchkins must rank as one of the most inept acts of censorship Britain has seen. The days when the Radio 1 playlist made or broke a song’s chances went with the invention of the web. Neither the Daily Mail nor the parliamentary Conservative party appeared to know that if you want to ban a single today, you need to compel YouTube and iTunes to take it down.”
As part of the airbrushing of the Thatcherite approach to life generally, Ken Clarke has been touring the studios to imply that Mrs T stopped him from implementing some of his more “radical reforms” of the NHS in the 1980s. The implication of this is that Thatcher would have balked herself at the current outsourcing of the NHS through section 75 of the Health and Social Care Act, taking the NHS a step further along the route of privatisation? Yet, the regulations of section 75 Health and Social Care Act have been hastily rewritten to give a camouflage of integration for drafting which essentially says that all contracts must be put out to competitive tendering except for the generally unlikely of situations. The legal profession is currently with their ‘backs to the wall’, with the introduction of competitive tendering. As the NHS continues in its subtle draining of resources compared to increasing demands of the population and of technological developments, ‘free choice’ in the NHS has been cushioned with the sweet pill of ‘we cannot pay for everything’, meaning a competitive market where there are winners. And there are losers.
That is choice in action. None of this fluffy saving your local hospital, as you might have been enticed to believe through legislative instruments such as the Localism Act. A choice when money talks; the customer is King. Never mind the fact there are some services in medicine, NHS, which can’t be cherrypicked as readily as others, such as hernia operations. Sod the fact that mergers and acquisitions of a plc is more profitable than an immigration and asylum case from Zimbabwe, that is the market in action. Get real.
Of course, I am being utterly ironic, in case my sarcasm does not convey well through the medium of the blogosphere. But here we an ideology of the market talks driven by money, where it is hard to get in the way of consumer choice. The BBC we keep on being told is not actually part of the State, and is independent from the State. And yet, we have this perplexing situation where the BBC does not cover legal aid cuts, apart from a noddy guide right at the end on how to self-litigate, and does not cover the NHS reforms, apart from a completely unhelpful guide on how you can be relieved that your GP will not ‘look any different’.
So, if the BBC is not part of the state, why is it given “special treatment”? The Conservative ethos is about parity, rather than “equality” which is a rather left-wing word. To use the NHS analogy, why has the Government not made more of an effort to remove “barriers to entry” for competition? Why does the BBC retain the “licence fee”, which in any other sector would be considered a “state subsidy”? If it is not actually the State, is there not a danger that the BBC has become too close to the state, even if it is officially independent?
The problem is that the “Ding Dong – the Witch is Dead” is not defamatory across all jurisdictions in this age characterised by globalisation of media. It is a central tenet of English law that freedom of expression is a qualified cherished human right. Nor can a convincing case be brought to my knowledge that it contravenes the Public Order Act in this jurisdiction – you can for example freely play the video from YouTube above, download it from iPlayer, play it on Spotify. It is tricky for invoke the ‘moral outrage’ argument, as there is arguably substantially a greater degree of moral outrage that 40% of work capacity decisions made by ATOS have to be overturned on legal review. It may be a song which is in “very poor taste”, but we have only very recently visited how the English law does not sanction affairs which are in such taste (see for example the Twitter joke trial).
If any publicity is good publicity, is it possible that this decision by the BBC has made more people about the existence of the song than otherwise would have been possible. By playing 3 seconds of it is to deny genuine choice of the consumer, of this neoliberal market which, despite the recent airbrushing, Thatcher was most definitely fond of. Thatcher was in favour of a smaller state, which makes the pill that “the nation’s broadcaster”, the BBC, has decided not to play the song in full so ironic. If this were a test of Thatcherite principles, the single would have been played in full without any questions asked. And if people didn’t buy enough “I love Margaret Thatcher” copies to displace it, that’s tough.
