> Great Britain is becoming Little Britain. The UK is like a giant
Cayman Islands in 2016. They used to be the wise and perfidious
grownups in the geostrategic room, but now it's all about squalid,
petty things like Brexit, Scottish secession, anti-immigration;
British political extremes are thriving and the middle is dead as
mutton. They've lost their soft-power by the bucketful; people who
used to beg for their wise counsel now ignore them. What do they
want -- to be Airstrip One for any creep with a trailer-truck full
of cash? I've never seen them think so small.
BBC was trusted world wide, because listeners knew that it was funded by British tax payers, hence not beholden to local governments (even if beholden to the foreign office), and that generated a huge amount of goodwill towards the UK, even as the nations the BBC broadcast to still had the scars of British colonialism.
My mum tells me that at the end of WWII my grandmother dug up a radio buried in the garden and tuned into the Empire Service. Supposedly she was the only one with the news because owning a radio had been a capital offense during Japanese occupation.
I used to listen to the world service on shortwave when I was a kid in the 70s. Lots of news about places I'd never heard of and a lot more interesting than stamp collecting.
They have been caught using dubious tactics, such as applying dramatically different color filters on the same documentary being broadcasted in different regions.
> BBC World Service is also axing its Kyrgyz, Uzbek, Hindi, Bengali, Chinese, Indonesian, Tamil, and Urdu radio services while moving services in Chinese, Gujarati, Igbo, Indonesian, Pidgin, Urdu and Yoruba to digital.
> Although the station will be no more, Soliman said that content in Arabic would continue to be produced through a digital platform.
> "We will carry on with digital audio programmes," he said.
Holy shit this is some short sighted cost cutting. The BBC's regional language radios have been a massive source of soft power for the UK. It is ridiculous to willfully shut down such a massive tool for power projection.
Interesting - I thought one of the reasons aljazeera broadcasting started was because of the end of BBC Arabic coverage. It’s mentioned in the wiki page [1] but there must be some difference between the coverages/radios here because they seem different.
Edit: Wiki mentions the end of BBC Arabic channel - so that must’ve been the difference, radio vs video. Assuming Aljazeera radio will pick up the slack here too after the closure?
> Great Britain is becoming Little Britain. The UK is like a giant Cayman Islands in 2016. They used to be the wise and perfidious grownups in the geostrategic room, but now it's all about squalid, petty things like Brexit, Scottish secession, anti-immigration; British political extremes are thriving and the middle is dead as mutton. They've lost their soft-power by the bucketful; people who used to beg for their wise counsel now ignore them. What do they want -- to be Airstrip One for any creep with a trailer-truck full of cash? I've never seen them think so small.
[1] https://people.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/487/Bruce-St...