Abstract

Within the British conservative movement, the hard right is identifiable and significant. The hard right tends to believe that Britain’s cultural institutions, such as the BBC, have an embedded anti-conservative bias. For them, the Corporation represents everything that is wrong with the ‘liberal metropolitan elite’ that, they believe, controls key institutions. This article explores the contribution to this narrative made by the popular historian and combative political commentator Paul Johnson, a prominent public figure in the UK and USA for many decades. Johnson’s potent melding of social, political, and economic critiques of the Corporation represented a significant deepening of an ‘anti-BBC mood’ on the British right. This article contextualises the cultural logic explicit in Johnson’s critique of the BBC and the wider ‘liberal establishment’. It does so by contrasting Johnson with the influential cultural theorist Richard Hoggart, who shared Johnson’s view that, during the latter part of the twentieth century, the original mission of the BBC was severely eroded. Examining Johnson’s thought provides important insights into the character, strengths, and weaknesses of the hard right view. What emerges is a profound disjunction between the certainty and forcefulness with which hard right narratives are put forward and their deep contestability.

中文翻译：

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保罗·约翰逊与英国极右翼的文化逻辑

摘要

在英国保守派运动中，极右翼是明显且重要的。极右翼倾向认为，英国广播公司等英国文化机构存在根深蒂固的反保守偏见。对他们来说，公司代表了“自由主义都市精英”的一切错误，他们相信这些精英控制着关键机构。本文探讨了流行历史学家和好斗的政治评论家保罗·约翰逊（Paul Johnson）对这一叙述的贡献，他是英国和美国数十年来的著名公众人物。约翰逊对公司的社会、政治和经济批评有力地融合在一起，代表着英国右翼“反 BBC 情绪”的显着加深。本文将约翰逊对 BBC 和更广泛的“自由主义建制派”的批评中明确的文化逻辑置于背景中。它通过将约翰逊与有影响力的文化理论家理查德霍加特进行对比来实现这一点，后者同意约翰逊的观点，即在二十世纪后半叶，BBC 的最初使命受到了严重侵蚀。检验约翰逊的思想可以为我们提供关于强硬右翼观点的特征、优点和缺点的重要见解。所出现的是强硬右翼叙事的确定性和有力性与其深刻的争议性之间的深刻脱节。