Taking platitudinous guff to to new heights
Muslim
former assistant secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain
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Transcript of 28 Jan broadcast
Second Though script
Welcome to the Second Thought podcast. Today’s Second Thought is in response to what Ibrahim Mogra broadcast on TftD on 28 January 2026.
This broadcast was on BBC Radio 4, where the Today programme was hitting its stride. As usual, though, at about 7.45, journalism was paused for three minutes so that a priest of some sort could speak.
Mogra is a Muslim, an Imam based in Leicester.
Mogra didn’t make a catalogue of errors of fact and logic. Given how common such catalogues are on TftD, I guess that’s a blessing.
But, according to the BBC, presenters of TftD provide reflections from a faith perspective on people and events in the news.
Ibrahim didn’t even gesture toward his broadcast being in any way topical or related to a person or event in the news.
Having now listened closely to several hundred of these TftD broadcasts, while he’s clearly off-brief, I think that’s forgivable. In my experience, the less directly a TftD delivery is linked to actual news, generally, the better it is. My working hypothesis is that there is a strong correlation between quality and the amount of time available to prepare.
For example, in April 2025 Ephrim Mirvis anchored a broadcast on the events of Passover and the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Justice Grey ruling in the Deborah Lipstadt libel case that found David Irvine to be an antisemitic holocaust denier (among several other very unpleasant things). It remains one of the few good examples of a TftD broadcast.
Tellingly, it did not require Mirvis to respond to (or even look at) that week’s news. Both Passover and the anniversary were not about to change course. He likely had the Passover TftD slot bagged long in advance as the major Jewish festivals understandably coincide with Rabbinical Radio 4 bookings. He could also be reasonably confident that both Passover and Irvine would feature in news coverage. Not that it really mattered. If the quality is high, who cares if it’s topical? The BBC doesn’t apparently care that TftD is routinely and objectively terrible.
Which presents a good opportunity to recap what this podcast is all about. I really don’t like TftD, my heart sinks every morning when TftD is introduced.
There are barmy claims, comically earnest prayer-voices and the almost inevitable deviations from fact and logic. I’ve been a regular listener to Today for a little over half the 69 years that it’s been broadcast each morning from Monday to Saturday. For those unfamiliar, Today is a BBC Radio 4 news and current affairs programme that is broadcast to the whole nation. It routinely attracts among the finest broadcast journalists in the country, who present three hours each weekday morning some of the best objective news in the world.
Somewhat oddly, it is interrupted each day at around 7.45 for three minutes for a religious person to speak. I’m not alone in disliking this incongruous churchy interlude.
There were two relatively recent well-organised efforts (2009 and 2018) from humanist organisations and celebrities to have the BBC revise the slot on grounds that by having TftD presented exclusively by people of faith was counter to the BBC’s own editorial guidelines which demand due impartiality. Both attempts were dismissed with the argument that it was a religious slot and, hence, essential that presenters were religious. It’s pretty foolproof logic.
My objection is different. My objection is on grounds of quality. Persistent and predictable poor quality unbefitting the BBC. Specifically, TftD routinely broadcasts content that is counter to the other over-arching tenet of the BBC’s editorial guidelines, which requires that all the BBC’s broadcasting is duly accurate.
TftD routinely falls short of this requirement for accuracy. Worse, it is frequently awash with inaccuracy. Somewhat predictably, perhaps, belief is often presented as fact. Predictable, perhaps, but intolerable hogwash none the less. Far worse, is the frequency that false claims and logical errors are made without accountability. These false claims and logical errors are not accidental, they’re deliberately included to deceive. It seems unlikely that the presenters set out to deceive, perhaps they are so used to preaching with total immunity from criticism, they have lost sight of how deceit has been woven into their rhetoric. Or maybe they are of the view that truth is an acceptable casualty in pursuit of souls?
These lies and errors all pervert meaning and sense, and they are liberally scattered among a significant majority of TftD broadcasts. I can count fewer than 20 examples in a year of daily listening to TftD that contain no false claims and no failures of reasoning.
Hence, I want the BBC to stop such low-quality and error-ridden broadcasting. It TftD really did provide considered, cogent and insightful reflections on the news from a religious perspective, I could see an argument for it having a future of some sort.
Because of its mandate for impartiality and its funding model, the BBC is the most scrutinised news organisation in the world. Which almost certainly contributes to it also being the most trusted news organisation in the world.
Most UK news outlets are politically aligned. Indeed, most are right-leaning (such as the Daily Mail, Telegraph and the Sun). Only two major outlets (the Guardian and the Daily Mirror) are left-leaning. So, for the most part, readers, viewers, browsers and listeners get to select the bias they want in their news.
The BBC bucks this trend by actively seeking impartiality. Which, of course, means that for an average reader of the Daily Mail or the Daily Telegraph, the BBC looks distinctly left wing.
The other major difference between the BBC and all the other news outlets, is that for all practical purposes, residents of the UK don’t have a choice whether or not to pay for the BBC.
Hence, much of the above-mentioned scrutiny.
Unlike the Mail and the Telegraph, BBC news goes out of its way to be accurate. Corrections are forthright and honest, not buried and obsequious. The BBC is not preaching to the faithful. It’s faithful to objectivity and manages all this this under considerable pressure.
Why, then, is the BBC’s religious programming given a free pass for claptrap? The BBC gives religious people a daily platform and allows them to broadcast what is objectively rubbish, deceit and sleight of hand.
Don’ get me wrong, I also think it’s ridiculous to have a sermon jammed into the news as though it were a weather report or a dip into sport or business. But if we have to have it, we should expect from it exactly the same quality and accuracy as the broadcast news that it interrupts.
On which note, back to Mogra. And the flaw- of his TftD broadcast.
His January TftD was awful. For a different set of reasons.
It was anodyne. Pointless. Banal. A staggering waste of airtime and opportunity. Remember that word, waste.
It bore no sign at all of preparation. I guess there’s a chance Ibrahim stepped in last-minute to cover for someone who dropped out. Even so, you’d have thought a professional preacher would have something pretty good in their pocket for just such occasions.
He delivered a sermon on how god cares only for what is in our hearts and not for our looks. No pithy relevance, no interesting twist. No modern take. Just three minutes of tiresome Hallmark philosophy.
Listen to this:
MOGRA: Someone may look as handsome and beautiful as a prince or princess, but if their heart is filled with hate, anger, jealousy, animosity, greed, miserliness, and revenge, what good is that beauty? To me, that person is ugly. On the other hand, someone may not be as handsome or beautiful, but their heart is filled with love, kindness, respect, friendship, generosity, and forgiveness, now that is a heart of gold. That is truly a beautiful person.
Truly a beautiful person?! Does he realise what he’s saying? More on that in a minute.
What a waste. He might just as well have explained for three minutes that the world would be a better place if only we’d all be much nicer to each other. It’s puerile twaddle. This went out live to one of Radio 4’s biggest audiences in the middle of a respected news and current affairs show.
And he had no excuse. He made no link to the news. Leaving himself unshackled by constraints of relevance. He could have said anything.
How telling that he chose to say, effectively, nothing at all.
This wasn’t a reflection from a religious perspective, it was nothing but cum-by-yah platitudes of the highest order.
By all means listen to the whole thing on BBC Sounds, or read the transcript on secondthoughtfortheday.com but what came before the above was more sentimental nonsense; 400 words of it. Three minutes that anyone who heard it will never get back. Some of the junk my kids used to watch was routinely streets ahead of this pious platitudinous guff.
And by the junk they used to watch I specifically mean Paw Patrol.
Mogra was objectively more puerile than Paw Patrol. That takes some doing.
Tell us something we don’t know, Ibrahim? Tell us something surprising. Tell us something insightful. Give us the benefit of your perspective? No one gives a rat’s arse how long you spend in front of the mirror or if you moisturise (yes, he went into both) but people will indulge you if you have something interesting to say.
If you haven’t got something to say, I’m sure the Today producers and presenters will be delighted to fill the gap. Just imagine how many items fail to make the cut for each show? And here you are squandering a priceless opportunity with Sunday-school drivel. Frankly, it’s insulting.
Worse, while making grossly improbable claims of his own virtues, he reinforced the conflation of morality and aesthetics, of goodness with beauty. Let’s listen again
MOGRA: but their heart is filled with love, kindness, respect, friendship, generosity, and forgiveness, now that is a heart of gold. That is truly a beautiful person.
No. This is a good person. Perhaps Mogra believes that they have a beautiful soul but what he said is as backward as it is lazy as it is supporting the very effect he’s apparently seeking to criticise. We load too much value on looks.
It’s easy to avoid, you can make the same point with book covers instead of beauty.
This conflation was made repeatedly, directly as we just heard, and also obliquely with the inference that princes and princesses are beautiful. Although, I’m guessing that Mogra has paid little attention to the physical appearance of actual princes and princesses. Monarchical families are an excellent advert for the perils of inbreeding. For an example, just run an image search for the Habsburg chin?
And, who the hell did you think you were informing? You think 10-year-olds haven’t worked out that beauty isn’t an entirely reliable sign of general goodness? And that a book should not be judged by its cover? And yet those 10-year-olds already suspect that publishers know covers matter? There’s something interesting in there and it’s not difficult to find.
With thousands of choices and a premium on time, human brains evolved the use of heuristics to make all sorts of decisions, including book purchase decisions and goodness of people decisions. Heuristics are mental short cuts that were once obviously essential for our survival. Today, they remain essential but to avoid being paralysed by analysis, doubt and mental exhaustion. As opposed to avoid being eaten. Our brains evolved to be energy efficient, to react quickly and to make workable decisions. The heuristics that result are frequently illogical and they are rarely precise but they explain a great deal about how we engage with the world in which we live.
One of these evolved mental shortcuts is to equate attractiveness with health, youth and fertility. We have to consciously reject our brains’ default behaviour to make a more considered judgement of someone’s goodness, or otherwise. Frowning on someone for not looking more than skin deep is like being disappointed that the pope is catholic. Framing all that frowning in a religious context while not exploring what’s actually going on, is arrogant and obnoxiously judgemental. Ibrahim raises an infinitely interesting subject and then fails even to scratch its surface.
Mogra clearly had no intent on finding or saying anything interesting or insightful.
Next time Ibrahim (assuming you don’t have the gumption to hand proceedings back to the Today programme) please give the listeners something to think about.
Except next time just happened ( it was on Saturday 7 February) and it was more of the same. He did it again. No reflections of people or events in the news. Nothing novel, interesting or useful. He wasted three minutes telling us that Muslims are taught not to waste food.
Well, thank you, Ibrahim, what an insight!
It’s like he preparing public information announcements for some medieval version of the boys brigade. What’s he going to run with next? Will we be encouraged to teach homeless people to fish so that they will never again be short of a meal? Or perhaps he’ll reinforce the importance of writing thank you letters for birthday presents?
Listen to this:
MOGRA: I think of all the restaurants and hotels, and the amount of food that ends up in the bins every day. This happens throughout the world. All that food, good food, posh food, sometimes untouched food, wasted. Here’s what I will do. I will dish out only what I know I can finish on my plate. Better still. I should dish out a little less. Because I can always have a second helping if I need more.
He did, though, slip up. Perhaps by mistake he allowed something of modest interest to escape. He explained that in the Quran, a prophet describes wasteful people as siblings of satan.
MOGRA: I read the Quran every day. It warns me not to be wasteful. Eat and drink, but don’t waste, it says. It describes wasteful people as brothers and sisters of Satan. Now, I know that may sound a bit harsh. But it’s to underline a point.
A bit harsh? You don’t say, Ibrahim. Pray tell, how you feel the misdeeds of murderers should be underlined? Given that Mogra’s religion has notoriously violent factions at some of its extremities, this might put the willies up anyone about to scrape into the bin the food that their children just refused.
But let’s take him at his word, and the words of his prophet. People who waste should be regarded as the brothers and sisters of satan. Ibrahim Mogra, you have twice in three weeks wasted an incredible opportunity to broadcast something meaningful or insightful or even thoughtful to a nation of news radio listeners.
You chose to broadcast empty, platitudinous nursery stories.
The wastrel here is you, Ibrahim. Is it then your contention that we should regard you as no better than a brother of Satan?
Reflect, please, on that.
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