Yesterday, Tom Pride at Pride’s Purge put up a piece pointing out that the same production company was behind two documentaries attacking Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters in the Labour party, one made for the BBC last year for Panorama, and the other broadcast this week on Channel 4’s Dispatches. The company behind both is Films of Record, whose managing director and executive producer is Neil Grant. Grant is a former chair of Brent East Labour party, who has had a feud going back twenty years with Ken Livingstone.
Mr Pride also concludes this piece with the news that it is cases like this
which have prompted the idea for a new investigative organisation – TORCHLIGHT UK – which will be shining a light into the dark corners of the UK establishment, revealing hidden connections between UK politicians, the media and big business. Keep an eye out in the next few weeks on how you can help. We will be naming names.
Of course, none of this exonerates either the Beeb or Channel 4 of breaking rules on broadcasting impartiality. The commissioning editors at both broadcasters presumably knew the company, and who Neil Grant was and his political history. They would also have made the decision whether or not to broadcast the programmes when they were finally made and submitted. The fact that they did, despite these films’ bias, shows that they are fully complicit. They wanted the programme to smear Corbyn and his supporters, and that’s precisely what they got.
I look forward to hearing more from Tom about TORCHLIGHT UK. This sounds like the kind of thing Lobster has been doing in the field of parapolitics for years now, connecting the dots between big business, the spooks and their influence on the parties and the trade unions. Robin Ramsay’s complaint was that there wasn’t enough of this kind of research being done by the Left any more. This was because the far right had started doing it, and so the Left had dropped it in order to avoid becoming discredited by association. The announcement of the forthcoming appearance of TORCHLIGHT looks like reversing that, and so shining some light into some very murky, grubby little places.
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