Open Britain on the Corruption of British Democracy by Corporate Dark Money

‘Dear David,

Brexit, we were told, was all about regaining Britain’s “sovereignty” and being in control of our own destiny. But big money in British politics is a more significant threat to our future than unelected EU bureaucrats ever were.

Even though the Brussels bureaucrats have been removed from the equation, people still don’t feel they have a proper say in how this country operates. One big reason for that is the amount of money, often from opaque sources, sloshing around our political system.

Have you ever thought that the national picture painted by the likes of Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, and Rishi Sunak differs significantly from the one you see when you look around your own family and friends? You’re not alone.

Britain ranks among the most socially liberal countries in the world on key issues, and a substantial majority now reject many of the established economic assumptions of recent decades. But you won’t see any of that reflected in the current government’s agenda. Westminster is becoming an island of irrelevance, increasingly detached from the concerns of ordinary people.

There’s a reason for that. The government cannot hear the concerns of ordinary people over the hubbub of wealthy donors and other lobbyists with shady financial backers.

As part of our Parliamentary work, we’ve been researching just how broken the system is. In this longer-than-usual email, we’d like to share some of that with you.

Dark Money and Foreign Influence

The UK has particularly lax campaign finance laws. As a result, many donations get through that probably shouldn’t. Yes, there are permissibility requirements in place, but there are plenty of ways to evade them if you want to.

The term “Dark money” refers to donations whose origins are untraceable. Because the ultimate source cannot be confirmed, there is no way of knowing whether that money comes from the kind of person or organisation that shouldn’t have influence over our lawmakers.

One example of dark money is the “Proxy Donation”. These are donations made by one person, who would not be a permitted donor,  in the name of another who is. Some examples include:

• Ehud Sheleg, art dealer and former Conservative party treasurer, gave over £600k to the Tory party. Documents later showed that the money originated in a Russian account of Sheleg’s father-in-law – a former official in the old pro-Putin regime in Ukraine. Proxy donations are a complete blindspot in the law, so there was no legal mechanism to hold him accountable for it.
  
• Lubov Cherdukhin – back at it again – gave money to the Conservative party while her husband was receiving funds from business deals with sanctioned Russian oligarchs. She gave £50k to the Tories 8 days after Putin invaded Ukraine.
  
• Mohamad Amersi has given over £200k to the Conservatives and worked closely with Boris Johnson on key policy decisions. Prior to the donation, he was given a large deposit from a Kremlin-linked company secretly owned by Putin’s telecoms minister Leonid Reiman. 

“Shell Companies” are another way for dubious donors to evade the rules. According to Transparency International, 14% of LLPs established in the UK between 2001-2021 (21,000 companies) show signs of being shell companies. Here are some examples:

• Conservative mega-donor Lubov Cherdukhin, who once paid £160k to play tennis with Boris Johnson, was being paid out by a shell company secretly owned by Russian senator and Putin ally Suleiman Kerimov, according to the BBC.
  
• The offshore company Aquind is owned by a former Russian oil magnate and a Russian arms manufacturer. The company has donated heavily to the Conservative party.
  
• Top Labour MPs Wes Streeting, Yvette Cooper, and Dan Jarvis received a combined £345,000 from a company called MPM Connect Ltd, which has no staff or website and is registered at an office where the secretary had never heard of the company. 

“Unincorporated Associations” are nebulous groups with little oversight or legal classification. It’s essentially like ticking the “miscellaneous” box on a donation form when asked what kind of organisation you are.

• Tory minister Steve Baker’s “Covid Recovery Group” organisation (a parliamentary coalition of anti-lockdown Conservative MPs) received tens of thousands from a UA called the Recovery Alliance. It has no digital footprint, no registered members, and its finances are completely opaque. Opendemocracy has linked it to a number of other covid conspiracy campaigns and anti-lockdown groups. 
  
• Richard Cook’s “Constitutional Research Group” – of which he is the only listed member and chair – gave £435,000 to the DUP’s Brexit campaign. No one knows for sure where the money came from, but investigative journalists discovered his involvement in a number of illicit trades, including underground trash-dumping and fire-arms sales.
  
• According to Byline Times, 29 different opaque UAs donated £14 million to the Conservative party between 2010-2022. 

Big Money

Between 2001 and 2021, one-fifth of all political donations in the UK came from just ten men with an average age of 70. If that doesn’t indicate that we have a big problem, we’re really not sure what would.

While there’s nothing inherently wrong with political donations, huge amounts of money coming from multinational corporations and the mega-rich does raise questions about who really calls the shots. Especially when they seem to get things in return. 

Here are some situations where extremely wealthy individuals and corporations used their financial heft to influence things: 

• In 2021, the Conservatives received £400k in donations from oil and gas companies while the government was deciding on new oil and gas licences.
  
• More generally, the Tories took over a million from oil companies between 2019 and 2021.
  
• From 2020-2022, the Conservatives took £15 million from the financial services industry, which they were certainly kind to when it came to dealing with banker’s bonuses.
  
• Labour MP Wes Streeting received £15k from John Armitage, former Tory party donor and manager of a hedge fund that owns half a billion dollars in US health insurance and private healthcare. Streeting recently came out in support of private hospitals.
  
• The “Leader’s Group” is a dining club of Tory super-donors that has given over £130 million to the party since 2010. The club’s billionaires and business moguls have been known to dine with Boris Johnson.

• In 2022-2023, controversial groups, including gambling giants, climate sceptic organisations, and evangelical Christian groups, made over £1 million in donations for staffing the Labour front bench. Recipients include MPs Wes Streeting, Rachel Reeves, and Yvette Cooper. Reeves alone received nearly £250k.
  
• Recently, Crossbench peer Caroline Cox received large donations from American evangelical Christian activists against gay marriage that used hateful language about Muslims. 

While the Conservatives often top the list when it comes to money in politics, remember that this is a cross-party systemic problem. The real issue is that the rules that are supposed to prevent the wealthy from buying influence just aren’t strong enough. We’ve allowed a situation to emerge where money can buy outcomes almost directly, and the mechanisms to detect the sources of that money are ineffective. Our system just isn’t fit for the 21st century. 

The first step to fixing any problem is admitting that there is a problem. Our political system is addicted to money, to the extent that we’re now shutting real people’s voices out on a regular basis.

As you know, Open Britain’s mission these days is to deliver a democracy that works for everyone, not just the rich and powerful. That means a political system primarily driven by people, not primarily driven by money. That’s what democracy was always meant to be about. 

As you might expect from what you’ve read above, we don’t take donations from shady think tanks or Russian oligarchs. All our work is funded directly by you, our supporters. We believe that having our work funded through small donations from a large number of people is the healthiest model of all, one that allows us to say what needs to be said to whoever needs to hear it. We hope you agree.

All the very best,

The Open Britain team

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Thank you!‘

Thomas Sowell Attacks British NHS Because Scared of Rise of Socialism in America

I thought so as soon as I saw his wretched video attacking the NHS yesterday. It struck me then as the act of a frightened man trying to discredit a rival political and medical institution. Yesterday Black American conservative Thomas Sowell put out a short video, just under five minutes, urging Americans to choose the American healthcare system over the British because it was better. Er, no. On so many levels. The American healthcare system is so dire that when Thatcher sent her personal private secretary Patrick Jenkin to America to see how it worked so she could do it to Britain, he joined the full-on cabinet rebellion against her when she tried to privatise the NHS. Yes, private American hospitals don’t have the crowding, and I dare say have more choice, than the NHS but that comes at a price. And more and more Americans are unable to afford it. As a result, good, hardworking, severely normal Americans have to say up years before they can afford the hospital care for American mothers to give birth. There is also a much higher infant mortality rate than Europe. Our NHS is no longer the world’s best because it has been comprehensively run down by the Tories and Blairite Labour for decades. But it’s still better than the American system. And the private American system is in crisis. Robert Reich put up a post on YouTube about how it’s falling apart. I’ll try to find it. A friend of mine trained as a doctor, and according to him, American private hospitals are being kept afloat by American public subsidies. As for the utilities, a number of American states have state-owned electricity companies that produce power more cheaply than private firms. In that sense, Reaganite capitalism is failing.

Now Sowell has put out another video with the title that more Americans are falling for socialism. ‘And it’s bad’. Naah. America has a very respectable socialist tradition going all the way back to the Knights of Labor in the 19th century. From what I can see, socialism may even have been stronger in the US in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It seems that former president Barack Obama has also stirred things up a little by saying that America needs single-payer healthcare. Of course, it’s a bit rich that he says that now, when he refused to implement it in office and went for Obamacare instead, which is based on a Republican plan from Newt Gingrich. What the west needs is a return to the social democratic consensus of a strong welfare state, properly funded public healthcare, nationalised utilities and strong unions. The consensus that gave Britain a rising standard of living up to the 70s. A form of politics that could and should stop the movement to the far right as immigrants get blamed for the poverty caused by neoliberalism. But obviously even this mild form of socialism is anathema to someone like Sowell, who’s a fan of the discredited economics of Milton Friedman.

Monetarism died in the late 1980s. Reaganomics and Thatcherism have run their course. And the Tories have run out of candidates for prime minister so they’re recycling old ones like Johnson and Rishi Sunak.

Hurrah for socialism and down with neoliberalism!

Liz Truss Co-Author of a Report Which Demanded Savage Cuts and a £10 Charge to See the Doctor

This is another piece from the Mirror which reveals precisely what a prize right-wing scumbag Liz Truss is. According to the article, ‘Liz Truss report demanded vast cuts and £10 fee to see GP – ‘true colours’ in full’ by the paper’s political editor Dan Bloom, the Tory leadership contender was the joint author of a 2009 report published by the think tank, Reform, calling for massive cuts to public spending. This included cutting pensioners’ benefits, doctors’ pay by ten per cent, and imposing a £10 charge for seeing the doctor.

The article begins:

‘Liz Truss is accused of showing her “true colours” in a paper that called for vast spending cuts and a £10 fee to see your GP.

The runaway favourite to be Prime Minister was one of seven people who wrote a 44-page slash-and-burn policy document for the 2009 Budget.

The ‘Back to Black’ paper for the Reform think tank recommended cutting £28bn in a year by introducing “user charges for GPs” and whittling 10% off doctors’ pay.

It also demanded ministers “remove pensioner gimmicks” to save £3.2bn, force civil servants onto a four-day week with a 20% pay cut, and hike the pension age at the last moment.

And it called for major military projects to be axed – including the Royal Navy’s planned aircraft carriers HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales.

Despite her being Deputy Director of Reform at the time, Ms Truss’ campaign bizarrely claimed: “Co-authoring a document does not mean that someone supports every proposal put forward.”

Despite saying it shouldn’t be in 2009, a Truss ally insisted the likely Prime Minister does believe in an NHS free at the point of use – and she’ll not cut GPs’ pay or defence spending as PM.

Ahead of tonight’s Tory hustings in Manchester, an ally argued: “The purpose of a think tank is to put forward bold, radical ideas in the hope the government will pick up one or two.”

A campaign spokesman added of the document written 13 years ago: “This is a nearly two decade old document written against the backdrop of Labour bankrupting the economy.”

But Labour deputy leader Angela Rayner said: “Liz Truss’s track record shows her true colours. She is out of touch and out of step with the public.’

The article can be read at: https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/liz-truss-report-demanded-vast-27781979

Ah, we’re back to the old ‘high spending Labour’ refrain, in which Labour is accused of bankrupting the economy and that savage cuts to public spending, meaning primarily the NHS and the welfare state, are needed. Do I believe that somehow, in the past thirteen years, she’s had some kind of conversion to Nye Bevan’s vision of an NHS that provides everyone with care, free at the point of use?

No. Because she’s a liar in a party of liars.

Remember the last election when an independent fact checking organisation found that while Labour had made no untrue statements, the number of lies the Tories told was off the scale in the thousands?

And the Tories don’t believe in the NHS. Not since Maggie Thatcher wanted to privatise it, but was only prevented by a massive cabinet revolt. Since then they’ve privatised everything they could, starting with the ancillary services and progressing to the medical services, as these have been contracted out to private medical companies and hospitals. And the other year various Tory scumbags were demanding an expansion of the list of services for which fees could be charged.

If she doesn’t believe in these cuts now, it’s only because that they’re a political liability. It looks to me very much that she strongly believed in them when Cameron was in power and Gideon, sorry, George Osborne was chancellor.

You cannot trust her with the NHS.

You cannot trust her to look after the elderly.

And you cannot trust her on defence.

Get her out, and her foul party with her.

Panorama Documentary on Unnecessary Operations in Private Medicine

This should annoy and frighten the Tories’ friends in the private medical industry. Next Monday, 16th October 2017, the BBC’s documentary programme, Panorama, is examining the issue of unnecessary operations performed by surgeons in private hospitals. The programme’s entitled ‘How Safe is Your Operation?’, and the blurb for it in the Radio Times reads

Jailed surgeon Ian Paterson profited from hundreds of unnecessary operations, but do his crimes reveal wider failings in Britain’s private healthcare? Reporter Darragh MacIntyre investigates whether some private hospitals – and those working within them – have put profit before patients. (p. 74).

The programme’s on at it’s usual time of 8.30 pm on BBC 1.

I’m not remotely surprised by this. Private medicine pays doctors and surgeons according to the operations they perform, and so there is a financial incentive to perform unnecessary operations to boost the doctor’s or surgeon’s pay. American surgeons perform far more operations than their British counterparts because of this. And this problem has always been there. I can remember a similar documentary being shown when I was a schoolkid back in the 1980s.

Apart from this, private medicine is also much less efficient than state medicine. It’s more expensive, and because of the financial costs involved in treating the long term sick or disabled, which risks a corresponding lack of profits, it tends to concentrate on providing care to the healthy. Private hospitals are smaller than those of the NHS, and have fewer patients. On its own, there’s very little demand for it in the UK, which is why the Tories and Blairites have been running down and privatising the NHS piecemeal, in order to generate artificially a demand for private medicine.

Labour Promises £37 Billion More for NHS While Hunt Peddles Away from Media

The current crisis hitting the NHS isn’t an accident. The Tories – and Blairites – have had a decades-long policy of privatising the NHS and starving it off funds going back to the days of the molten Tory tin goddess herself, Maggie Thatcher. Thatcher wanted to privatise the NHS as part of her campaign to destroy the welfare state as a whole. That she couldn’t was down to two things – there was a massive cabinet revolt, as they realised it would be, er ‘highly courageous’ in the words of Sir Humphrey in ‘Yes, Minister’. In other words, they knew it would cost them the next election. Also, her private secretary Patrick Jenkin actually visited America and found that there healthcare system is rubbish, with 55 million people unable to afford their health insurance before Obamacare, and about 30,000 folks dying every year due to lack of medical care.

But this didn’t stop her or them. She wanted to engineer a situation where 25 per cent of Brits would have private medical insurance. And over the next three decades and more the Tories and the Blairites opened up more of the NHS to private industry through the Private Finance Initiative and other schemes whereby private hospitals and clinics are now contracting in to provide services for the NHS, while the NHS is being privatised, starved of funds and broken up.

Even as far back as the 1970s Britain actually gave less funding to its health service than the other countries in what is now the EU. And that funding has been further slashed as part of a spurious programme of cutting the deficit by the Tories.

Jeremy Corbyn has said he intends to reverse this. He will find an extra £37 billion for the NHS, including £10 billion to correct the hardware problems, which left our health service vulnerable to hackers last weekend.

See Mike’s article at: http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2017/05/15/a-tale-of-two-jeremys-corbyn-offers-37bn-to-help-the-nhs-hunt-runs-away/

So where does this leave the Tories?

Well, as the TV host Victoria Derbyshire tweeted, they had seventy years to solve the problems of the NHS, but didn’t.

One of the journos at the Beeb, Jon Ironmonger, doorstepped Jeremy Hunt, the Health Secretary, for his comments on Labour’s pledge. The result is very telling. Hunt kept his mouth firmly shut, and peddled off as fast as he could into the London traffic.

Like May, Hunt depends on first being programmed by the spin doctors at Tory Central Office. Without Linton Crosby to type the soundbites into ZX 81 1 Kilobyte powerhouse that is his brain – for those of you, who remember ’80s home computers – Hunt and the rest of them have nothing to say. And so they disappear as fast as they can into the smoke and petrol fumes.

South Mead Hospital and the Manufactured NHS Funding Crisis

The BBC’s local news programme for the Bristol area, Points West, reported tonight that the city’s Southmead hospital is in a financial crisis, and needs something like a further £48 million. This is in common with very many NHS hospitals across the country. And it’s not accidental. The contributors to the book on the privatisation of the NHS, NHS-SOS by Jacky Davis and Raymond Tallis, make the point that under Labour the NHS was kept within budget. They further point out that the budget should be sufficient for its needs now. It isn’t, because of the way the system is being broken up and privatised from within. The result of this is that money is not allocated to where it is needed. Furthermore, the NHS is being deliberately starved of funds, so that more services can be awarded to private sector hospitals, and private sector firms encouraged to take over NHS hospitals, as so many have been before. Now it seems Southmead hospital is one of those slated to be given to private sector management. Or amalgamated with another hospital under a PFI programme.

It’s disgusting. This is the result of nearly forty years of Thatcherism, including Blairite New Labour and Cameron’s and May’s Conservatives. This needs to be reversed. The only politician, who is interested in doing so is Jeremy Corbyn. He needs to be supported. In the meantime, I urge everyone concerned at the privatisation of the NHS to read Davis’ and Tallis’ book.

Jeremy Hunt’s Smirk, the Junior Doctors’ Strike and the Privatisation of the NHS

A few days ago Mike over at Vox Political put up a piece about how the veteran Labour MP, Dennis Skinner, had told Jeremy Hunt to take the smirk off his face in parliament. I am not surprised Hunt is smirking, as I think he and his masters – David Cameron and George Osborne, really want the junior doctors to go on strike, no matter what they say to the contrary. And it’s disgusting that they should.

It’s all about appearing strong and combative, you see. Maggie gained much of her support by being combative and showing she was ruthlessly ready to crush all opposition. During one industrial dispute – I think it may well have been with the teachers – she privately remarked that there was some leeway to reach an agreement with the teachers. But she didn’t want to take that route, because it would make her look weak and conciliatory. And so she went about, as Roy Hattersley so memorably remarked, ‘like a bargain-basement Boadicea’. It was important for her image, and those of her followers like Norman Tebbitt, to be seen as towering political colossi standing up to the bloated power of the union bully-boys. That’s how they presented themselves during the Winter of Discontent, the Miners’ Strike, and all the other trade disputes, regardless of whether they were right or wrong.

And my guess is that’s what Hunt, Cameron and Osbo hope they can do now. Provoke an industrial dispute, and then pretend that they’re protecting the ordinary, suffering people of Britain from stroppy, overpaid and lazy workers. That’s they way they’ll present it. You only have to look at every report of every strike in the pages of the Scum, the Express, the Torygraph, and the Heil.

And you can see how the Tories hope to sell their privatisation of the NHS. They’ll start with articles in the Scum and the other parts of the Tory press, telling everyone that they’re bring the discipline of private investment, and its greater resources, to the ‘strike-hit’, financially struggling Health Service. Private investment, they will tell us, will mean greater investment and help ease the tax-burden on poor, hard-working people. Which as we’ve seen, really means all the rich multi-millionaire fat cats bankrolling the Tory party, who are currently soiling themselves at the prospect of getting their mitts round the NHS.

And they there’ll be all the advertising by the NHS’ new, private masters. They’ll put adverts on ITV, Channel 4, 5 and the satellite and cable channels, telling everyone how they’ve been providing healthcare for ‘x’ number of years, their hospitals are really wonderful, how you can be seen on the same day. They’ll also, no doubt, start selling discount deals for those ready to pay that little bit more on their private health insurance policy. They might even try to go the populist route by trying to tell the public that they can now have their own little piece of this British institution, if they get their shares in now. Though as they’re doing it by the back door, because of how unpopular it’s going to be, I actually doubt they’ll pursue this approach.

This is how they want to do it, and it’s sickening.

As we’ve seen from all the other privatisations, the results are going to be worse service, longer waiting times, closures, plus a massive increase in disparity in health across the UK. It’s already the case that you can live years longer if you’re a middle class person living in a middle class area. Well, if you’re poor after the privatisation of the health service, and live in a poor area, your healthcare will be correspondingly poor.

Just like it was before the foundation of the NHS.

But Jeremy Hunt can smirk. He and many of the other Tories have investments and connections in private healthcare companies. He’ll make a tidy pack out of the fees they’ll charge for our healthcare.

Boot out Hunt, Cameron and Osborne, and support the junior doctors. Before Hunt kills us. He’s doing his best to make us all heartily sick already.

Vox Political: Anti-Labour Bias on Question Time Prompts Mass Outrage

The pro-Tory bias at the BBC becomes every more blatant. Mike over at Vox Political has this story, http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2016/01/15/bbc-question-times-right-wing-panel-sparks-anger-from-viewers-and-labour-mps/ about a report in the Mirror that the bias in the selection of the panel on Question Time was so right-wing that the Beeb has received a storm of criticism from the public, and the leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn. The Labour MP, Cat Smith, was the only left-wing member of the panel. The others were a Tory cabinet member, someone from UKIP, and two journos from the Murdoch press.

So no bias there, then!

It’s interesting reading the comments to this post as well. Most are from people, who stopped watching it because of the right-wing bias. The last time I blogged about the Beeb’s bias, I received some very interesting comments, which added further information and background to this issue.

One of them, Nosuchthingasthemarket, posted:

All good points – but you could also mention the salient fact that the political editor at the BBC is a former head of the Young Conservatives and was first accused of bias (over and above the BBC norms) as early as 1995; when he was working on Panorama.

Further information was added by the commenters over on Mike’s blog, who posted their response to his reblogging of my article on the Corporation’s bias. I know this is convoluted, and slightly incestuous, but the comments are worth repeating here.

Daniel Margrain wrote:

The BBC was founded by Lord Reith in 1922 and immediately used as a propaganda weapon for the Baldwin government during the General Strike, when it was known by workers as the “British Falsehood Corporation”. During the strike, no representative of organised labour was allowed to be heard on the BBC. Ramsay McDonald, the leader of the opposition, was also banned.

In their highly respected study of the British media, Power Without Responsibility, James Curran and Jean Seaton wrote of ‘the continuous and insidious dependence of the Corporation [the BBC] on the government’. (Routledge, 4th edition, 1991, p.144)

John Pilger has reported:

‘Journalists with a reputation for independence were refused BBC posts because they were not considered “safe”.’ (John Pilger, Hidden Agendas, Vintage, 1998, p.496)

In 2003, a Cardiff University report found that the BBC ‘displayed the most “pro-war” agenda of any broadcaster’ on the Iraq invasion. Over the three weeks of the initial conflict, 11% of the sources quoted by the BBC were of coalition government or military origin, the highest proportion of all the main television broadcasters. The BBC was less likely than Sky, ITV or Channel 4 News to use independent sources, who also tended to be the most sceptical. The BBC also placed least emphasis on Iraqi casualties, which were mentioned in 22% of its stories about the Iraqi people, and it was least likely to report on Iraqi opposition to the invasion.

http://www.medialens.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=639:bbc-bombast-propaganda-complaints-and-black-holes-of-silence&catid=24:alerts-2011&Itemid=9

Joan Edington also commented on their bias towards privatised hospitals, and against Scots Independence.

It’s taken a long time for a lot of people to realise this bias. So many simply refused to believe that the good old BBC could be anything but impartial. Sadly, it has been obvious to me, and anyone who pays attention to the detail of news, that it has been getting worse for several years.

I first really noticed it in 2012 when the Welfare Reform Act came into play. There were interviews with patients at new PPI hospitals saying what wonderful treatment they had, while similar interviews of patients at traditional NHS hospitals always highlighted the negatives.

Up to this point I was ALMOST giving the benefit of the doubt about bias, thinking that maybe it was because they had sacked so many journalists that they could no longer carry out their own research.

However, since then, virtually all reports have claimed an event as true rather than saying “according to the government”. This is no more than propaganda.

The final nails in the coffin, to me and many Scots, was their blatant backing of Better Together during the Scottish Referendum in 2014 and a totally discredited “Scottish Labour” during the GE in May 2015. Mind you, these were probably not noticed by 90% of the UK population.

I am extremely sad about this situation since the BBC does make some very good programmes. It’s sports coverage used to be by far the best, back in the days before it had to compete with the money available to the commercial channels. It seems that we are to lose all that, simply because their once trusted and respected News Department can no longer lives up to that title.

My guess is that the BBC behaves with this bias because it is the British Broadcasting Corporation. It is the official, established state broadcaster, and so represents the views of the Establishment. It is supposedly impartial, and my guess is that many of its staff genuinely believe they are, but as the official state broadcaster the establishment bias is at the very core of its ethos and raison d’etre.

Hence the Tory party political bias, and the pro-War agenda. The upper classes have always been the backbone of the armed forces, ever since the feudal warriors of the Middle Ages. And the war in the Middle East is being ostensibly waged to protect Britain and defend and export her values of democracy and civil government. The opposite is true, of course. It’s done to for the interests of multinational industry, and the freedom of western capitalism to steal and exploit the resources of the Middle East. And so when the Beeb decides that its going to discuss the contemporary war on terror, it all becomes very establishment and official.