Over the years, you will have read me fervently praising the BBC. All children of the old empire carry this faith in their hearts. We are, literally, a dying breed. My father, an atheist and born sceptic, was an avid believer. He made me listen to the six o’clock news on the World Service every day. That was the only time in the day he devoted to me, his youngest child.
As I get older, that belief remains, but gets weaker, mainly because the globally admired broadcaster has been captured by the right and certain interests. It has lost its soul and identity, its sense of mission. More dismayingly still, the institution surrenders to power and, simultaneously, appears to push out staff members who won’t comply. Many have left and blossomed elsewhere – Sangita Myska, for example, and the brilliant ex-Newsnight journalist Lewis Goodall, both of whom are now with LBC .
Furthermore, the veil of impartiality is now so threadbare, it barely covers the corporation’s now scarred face.
Between 2010 and 2017, unelected Brexit cheerleaders appeared in almost one out of four Question Time panels; Green Party reps, in contrast, were on around 8 per cent of shows. Farage was always on; now it’s his apprentice, Richard Tice. GB News has a free pass on the political shows. But not left wingers from the Labour Party.
The neutering of established BBC values and the draining of superb talent from across radio and TV has barely registered because some of our most prominent newspapers are owned by those who want to see the BBC die. Its entertainment shows, like The Traitors and Strictly Come Dancing, are still brilliant but its current affairs coverage is tepid and timid.
Insider-destroyers killed off the news channel’s paper reviews and Dateline London, a weekly political show featuring British and overseas journalists which had a massive global audience. Now they are neutering Newsnight and other key programmes. Panorama, shortened and underfunded, is no longer an agenda-setting show.
In 2020, Peter York, the astute social observer, and Professor Patrick Barwise warned us about that concerning shift in their book, The War Against the BBC. The bosses there eschewed the evidence presented by its authors. Now Alan Rusbridger, editor of Prospect magazine, who previously edited The Guardian, has penned a striking expose of ideological enemies within, and backroom devilries at the BBC.
In her MacTaggart Lecture in August 2022 the former Newsnight presenter Emily Maitlis averred that an active agent of the Conservative Party “was shaping the broadcaster’s news output and acting as the arbiter of BBC impartiality”. More recently, Nadine Dorries made claims about sinister operators controlling the broadcaster. Turns out Nad was not that mad after all.
Among them is Sir Robbie Gibb, the most hyperactive BBC board member, who once wrote in the Telegraph: “There is a default Left-leaning attitude… The BBC has been culturally captured by the woke-dominated group think of some of its own staff.”
But, asks Rusbridger, who gets to decide what “impartial” means? How impartial is Gibb himself? And is he “part of a larger scheme to capture the heights of the once independent broadcasting landscape in this country? It’s murky”.
It really is. Gary Lineker is savaged for his progressive tweets; Andrew Neill, when a star BBC presenter, could express anti-liberal views freely and vehemently.
Gibb seems to overstep his position, interfere, issue orders and is obeyed. Apparently he told Newsnight staff to follow the rules or “get stuffed and leave”. Even more powerful and unaccountable is a Tory fixer, close to Sir Robbie and Dominic Cummings, one Dougie Smith, who, writes Rusbridger, is “so under the radar that he doesn’t even officially exist”. And you thought such dark arts prevailed only in communist countries. Does Ofcom look into any of this?
In their book, Barwise and York conclude that the BBC, “despite its faults, is incalculably valuable to Britain and the world”. Though the broadcaster often makes me mad or woeful, I have to agree with them and defend it. So should you.
Alistair Campbell, the former Labour PR bulldog, now tame and cuddly, is very rich and popular. I have not succumbed to the charm. Rightly, it seems. At a recent public debate, a young voter told him that she and her mates were unsure they could vote for his party because of Starmer’s failure to call for a ceasefire in Gaza.
His response? “Get off your high horse and vote Labour,” adding “there’s no such thing as a perfect candidate. Abraham Lincoln was not a perfect human being, Nelson Mandela was not a perfect human being.”
Starmer in the same firmament as Lincoln and Mandela? Really?
Campbell added that the Labour leader was probably trying to maintain a good relationship with US President Joe Biden – yes, just like Tony Blair when he stood with George W Bush and went to war in Iraq. Then came this, most brazen assertion: “I know Tony didn’t lie, I know I didn’t lie.” We now know that man has not undergone personal transformation or reinvention. He’s merely redecorated himself.
On Saturday I was invited to the wonderful Victorian Wilton Music Hall in London to share a song that means a great deal to me. These sessions are titled OneTrackMinds, described by the inventive creators as a “cross between Desert Island discs and Ted Talks“.
I chose an old Bollywood song about fierce, daring love, and described moments in my life when I chose unsuitable boyfriends and lovers and faced insults and abuse, sometimes severe punishments. Some purple bruises are still visible. People later came up and wondered how I had not only survived, but seemingly thrived and carried on being rebellious. Familial intolerance, I replied, made me fierce and fearless. As I told my late, older brother: “You can hit me, but you cannot beat me.”
Forgive me if you think I am obsessed with the Palestinian cause. How can you not be at this terrible time? A book just arrived in the post, sent by the publisher after reading my columns on Gaza. Titled Against Erasure, it is written by two Spanish authors, Teresa Aranguren and Sandra Barrilaro, who have put together a photographic memory of what the Palestinian nation was before 1948, when European powers expiated their guilt about the horrific Holocaust and created Israel.
I absolutely defend Israel’s right to exist. But fake stories often told to justify its acts must be challenged. By 1949, 418 villages had been wiped out, countless people displaced. Since then, revisionists have claimed the land was empty before it became a Jewish homeland. Here are pictures of farms, fruit, shops, happy people to disprove that. Palestinians lost their land. But, as this book testifies, they refuse to lose their history.
login
who are we?
contact us
qosheapp
Toi Staff
Gideon Levy
Belen Fernandez
Andrew Mitrovica
Mort Laitner
Nikkei Editorial
Rami G Khouri
Ali Fathollah-Nejad
visit website
