I didn’t watch Have I Got News For You last Friday. I’ve gone off the programme. It’s definitely past it’s sell-by date, in my opinion. Not only is it not as funny as it was when it first appeared in 1990 or thereabouts, I’ve got sick and tired of its right-wing bias.
Right-wing, when the Tories have also moaned about the Beeb being full of ‘woke’ lefties? Yes. A few years ago it was denouncing Putin’s invasion of the Ukraine, despite the fact that the Maidan Revolution was a very carefully planned piece of regime change by the Americans using the National Endowment for Democracy. The regime they had installed was definitely pro-western, and supported by real Nazis, who were goose-stepping around in uniforms taken from SS auxiliary units in the Second World War. And it seemed to me that the Russian and Russian-speaking Ukrainian population were being victimised, so under international law Putin, thug though he is, had every right to invade to aid them. But you didn’t hear this from the Beeb, and especially not on Have I Got News For You. Just more propaganda from the American and British establishments.
Ditto with the programme’s attitude to Corbyn. I stopped watching it because week after week, all you heard from Have I Got News For You was them pushing the anti-Semitism smears. Corbyn was an evil anti-Semite, and the Labour party was a foul, seething cauldron of anti-Jewish hatred. It was the standard media line, and shows the groupthink of the lamestream media. And it was the same on Friday, I gather.
According to a video put up yesterday by right-wing Youtuber and radio host, Alex Bellfield, the programme had included a comedian, Fintan Torbin/Toibin/Tobin, oh, whoever. Torbin was definitely a supporter of Starmer, and said that just when Labour looked like becoming a serious opposition, back came Corbyn. He then compared his supporters to fans of Bob Dylan, whom he considered to be just as infuriating. He said that they should all be killed by bombing Glastonbury. I’ve got a feeling this might be a reference to an incident at the festival a few years ago when the Labour leader appeared on stage, and was roundly greeted by the audience. That’s clearly rankled Blairites like Torbin for a very long time. It also makes you wonder about his hatred of Dylan. I can’t say I’m a fan of him, and some of his stuff is undoubtedly overrated, I’m sure. But it’s a bit much to talk about killing his fans.
Torbin’s joke is a clear example of Beeb anti-left wing bias. But not to Bellfield, who has a bitter hatred of the corporation. He has some kind of personal vendetta against them too, and so makes videos claiming that it’s full of ‘woke’, Guardian-reading lefties. pushing minority identity politics and gender confusion on the young. Now I think he’s right in that the Beeb does back, or wishes to be seen to back, anti-racist, feminist and pro-gay and trans policies. But when it comes to working class politics as a whole, the opposite is the case. It is very solidly pro-Tory, anti-Labour and anti-trade union, and has tireless and relentlessly pushed austerity, as the Kushner brothers have pointed out in their excellent book, Who Needs the Cuts?
Torbin’s unfunny joke obviously provoked outrage from the viewing audience. Bellfield considers this hypocritical, considering that Jo Brand was allowed to get away with a joke about stabbing Nigel Farage. Well, the arch-Blairite Labour MP Rachel Reed also made a comment about stabbing Corbyn in the front, but I don’t see Bellfield getting upset about that. Which shows just how partisan he is. He claimed that the outrage at Tobin’s joke was another example of the hypocrisy of the Beeb against right-wingers. He’s wrong. I think the Beeb, or at least the host, Victoria Coren-Mitchell, may have been genuinely surprised at the strength of the reaction against it. It seems to me that, considering their long record of pushing the anti-Corbyn line, the Beeb invited Torbin on because they knew he hated Corbyn and would make a suitable joke or comment about him. They just didn’t expect that a large, vocal part of the audience would take issue with it.
Just as the sheer strength of support for the Labour leader is causing problems for Starmer and the Blairites, who clearly hadn’t expected such opposition to their attacks on Corbyn and attempts to purge his supporters.
Robin Aitken, Can We Trust the BBC (London: Continuum 2007).
Robin Aitken is a former BBC journalist, and this book published 13 years ago argues that the BBC, rather than being unbiased, is really stuffed full of lefties and the broadcaster and its news and politics programmes have a very strong left-wing, anti-Conservative bias. Under Lord Reith, the BBC upheld certain core British values. Its news was genuinely unbiased, giving equal time to the government and opposition. It also stood for essential institutions and such as the monarchy, the constitution, the British Empire and Christianity at home, and peace through the League of Nations abroad.
This changed radically between 1960 and 1980 as the BBC joined those wishing to attack and demolish the old class-bound institutions. Now the BBC stands for passionate anti-racism, ‘human rights’, internationalism and is suspicious of traditional British national identity and strongly pro-EU. It is also feminist, secular and ‘allergic to established authority whether in the form of the Crown, the courts, the police or the churches.’ This has jeopardised the ideal at the heart of the Corporation, that it should be fair-minded and non-partisan.
Aitken does marshal an array of evidence to support his contention. This includes his own experience working for BBC Scotland, which he claims was very left-wing with a staff and management that bitterly hated Margaret Thatcher and made sure that the dismantlement of the old, nationalised industries like shipbuilding was properly lamented, but did not promote it as ‘creative destruction’ as it should, nor the emergence of the wonderful new information industry north of the border. A later chapter, ‘Testimonies’, consists of quotations from other, anonymous rightists, describing how the Beeb is biased and bewailing their isolated position as the few Conservative voices in the Corporation. He is particularly critical of the former director-general, John Birt. Birt was recruited in the 1990s from ITV. He was a member of the Labour Party, who brought with him many of his colleagues from the commercial channel, who also shared his politics and hatred of the Tories. He goes on to list the leading figures from the Left, who he claims are responsible for this bias. These include Andrew Marr, the former editor of the Independent, and the left-wing, atheist journo and activist, Polly Toynbee.
Aitken also tackles individual topics and cases of biased reporting. This includes how the BBC promoted the Labour Party and the EU before Labour’s landslide victory in the 1997 general election. The Conservatives were presented as deeply split on the issue and largely hostile to EU membership. The EU itself was presented positively, and the Labour Party as being united in favour of membership, even though it was as split as the Tories on the issue. Another chapter argues that the Beeb was wrong in challenging the government’s case for the Iraq Invasion. He claims that in a poll the overwhelming majority of Iraqis supported the invasion. The government did not ‘sex up’ the ‘dodgy dossier’ in order to present a false case for war, and it was wrong for the Beeb to claim that Blair’s government had.
The chapter ‘The Despised Tribes’ argues that there are certain ethnic or religious groups, who were outside the range of sympathy extended to other, more favoured groups. These include White South Africans, the Israeli Likud Party, Serb Nationalists under Milosevic, the Italian Northern League, Le Pen and the Front National in France, the Vlaams Blok in Belgium, American ‘Christian Fundamentalists’, conservative Roman Catholics, UKIP ‘and other groups who have failed to enlist the sympathies of media progressives’. These include the Orange Order and Ulster Protestants. He then claims that the Beeb is biased towards Irish Republicans, who have successfully exploited left-wing British guilt over historic wrongs against the Roman Catholic population. He then goes on to claim that Pat Finucane, a lawyer killed in the Troubles, was no mere ‘human rights’ lawyer but a senior figure in the IRA.
The chapter, ‘The Moral Maze’ is an extensive critique of a Panorama documentary claiming that the Roman Catholic condemnation of premarital sex and contraception was causing needless suffering in the Developing World through the procreation of unwanted children and the spread of AIDs by unprotected sex. This is contradicted by UN evidence, which shows that the African countries with the lowest incidence of AIDS are those with the highest Catholic populations. The Catholic doctrine of abstinence, he argues, works because reliance on condoms gives the mistaken impression that they offer total protection against disease and pregnancy, and only encourages sexual activity. Condoms cannot offer complete protection, and are only effective in preventing 85 per cent of pregnancies. The programme was deliberately biased against the Roman Catholic church and the papacy because it was made from the viewpoint of various groups with an explicit bias against the Church and its teaching on sexuality.
Aitken’s evidence is impressive, and I do accept part of his argument. I believe that the Beeb is indeed in favour of feminism, multiculturalism and human rights. I also believe that, the few remaining examples of the Beeb’s religious programming notwithstanding, the Corporation is largely hostile to Christianity in ways that would be unthinkable if applied to other religions, such as Islam. However, I don’t believe that the promotion of anti-racism and anti-sexism is wrong. And groups like the Northern League, Front National and other extreme right-wing political and religious groups, including UKIP, really are unacceptable because of their racism and should not be given a sympathetic platform. Their exclusion from the range of acceptable political and religious views is no bad thing.
But the book also ignores the copious documentation from the various media study units at Cardiff, Glasgow and Edinburgh universities of massive BBC Conservative bias. Jacky Davis and Raymond Tallis have a chapter in their book on the gradual, slo-mo privatisation of the NHS, NHS – SOS, on the way the media has promoted the Tories’ and New Labour’s project of selling off the health service. And this includes the Beeb. The Corporation was hostile to Labour after Thatcher’s victory, promoting the SDP splinter group against the parent party in the 1983 election, as well as the Tories. This pro-Tory bias returned with a vengeance after the 2010 Tory victory and the establishment of austerity. Barry and Savile Kushner show in their book, Who Needs the Cuts, how the Beeb excludes or shouts down anyone who dares to question the need for cuts to welfare spending. Tories, economists and financiers are also favoured as guests on news shows. They are twice as likely to appear to comment on the news as Labour politicians and trade unionists.
And we have seen how the Beeb has pushed the anti-Labour agenda particularly vigorously over the past five years, as it sought to smear Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party as institutionally anti-Semitic at every opportunity. Quite apart from less sensational sneering and bias. The guests on Question Time have, for example, been packed with Tories and Kippers, to whom presenter Fiona Bruce has shown particular favour. This has got worse under Johnson, with the Beeb now making it official policy not to have equal representation of the supporters of the various political parties in the programme’s audience. Instead, the majority of the audience will consist of supporters of the party that holds power in that country. Which means that in England they will be stuffed with Tories. Numerous members of the BBC news teams are or were members of the Tory party, like Nick Robinson, and a number have left to pursue careers at No 10 helping Cameron, Tweezer and Boris.
The evidence of contemporary bias in favour of the Tories today is massive and overwhelming.
With the exception of particular issues, such as multiculturalism, feminism, a critical and sometimes hostile attitude towards the monarchy, and atheism/ secularism, the BBC is, and always has been, strongly pro-Tory. The Birt era represents only a brief interval between these periods of Tory bias, and I believe it is questionable how left-wing Birt was. Aitken admits that while he certainly was no Tory, he was in favour of free market economics.
This book is therefore very dated, and overtaken by the Beeb’s massive return to the Right.
The BBC is infamous for its flagrant right-wing bias. Writers and experts like Barry and Savile Kushner in their Who Needs the Cuts, academics at the media research centres of Glasgow, Edinburgh and Cardiff Universities, and ordinary left-wing bloggers like Mike and Zelo Street have pointed out time and again that the corporation massively prefers to have as commenters and guests on its show Conservative MPs and spokespeople for the financial sector on its news and political comment programmes, rather than Labour MPs and activists and trade unionists. The Corporation relentless pushed the anti-Semitism smears against Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour party. But it has also promoted the privatisation of the NHS too through its biased reporting.
Biased Towards NHS Privatisation
Jacky Davis and Raymond Tallis’ book on the privatisation of the NHS, NHS – SOS, has a chapter by Oliver Huitson, ‘Hidden in Plain Sight’, discussing the biased reporting of the NHS’s privatisation by the media in general. Here, however, I will just confine myself to describing the Corporation’s role. The Beeb was frequently silent and did not report vital pieces of information about successive privatisations, such as the involvement of private healthcare companies in demanding them and conflicts of interest. On occasion, this bias was actually worse than right-wing rags like the Daily Mail. Although these ardently supported the NHS’ privatisation, they frequently reported these cases while the Beeb did not. When the moves towards privatisation were reported, they were often given a positive spin. For example, the establishment of the Community Care Groups, groups of doctors who are supposed to commission medical services from the private sector as well as from within the NHS, and which are legally allowed to raise money from the private sector, were positively described by the Corporation as ‘giving doctors more control’.
Lack of Coverage of Private Healthcare Companies Role in Privatisation
David Cameron and Andrew Lansley did not include Lansley’s Health and Social Care Bill in the Tories’ 2010 manifesto, because they didn’t believe they’d win the election if they did. But in all the two years of debate about the bill, the Beeb only twice reported doubts about the bill’s democratic mandate. (p.152). In October 2010, Mark Britnell was invited to join Cameron’s ‘kitchen cabinet’. Britnell had worked with the Labour government and was a former head of commissioning for the NHS. But he was also former head of health for the accountancy firm, KPMG, which profits greatly from government privatisation and outsourcing. He declared that the NHS would be shown ‘no mercy’ and would become a ‘state insurance provider, not a state deliverer’. But the BBC decided not to report all this until four days after others had broken the story. And when they did, it was only to explain a comment by Nick Clegg about how people are confused when they hear politicians stating how much they love the NHS while at the same time demanding its privatisation. (pp.153-4).
On 21 November 2011 Channel 4 News reported that they had obtained a document which showed clearly that GP commissioning was intended to create a market for private corporations to come in and take over NHS services. But This was only reported by the Groaniad and the Torygraph. The rest of the media, including the Beeb, ignored it. (pp. 156-7).
Lansley was also revealed to have received donations from Andrew Nash, chairman of Care UK, another private healthcare firm hoping to profit from NHS privatisation. But this also was not reported by the Corporation. (pp. 157-8).
In January 2011 the Mirror reported that the Tories had been given over £750,000 from donors with major connections to private healthcare interests since David Cameron had become their chief in 2005. But this was also not mentioned by the Beeb. (pp. 158).
The Mirror also found that 40 members of the House of Lords had interests in NHS privatisation, while the Social Investigations blog suggested that it might be as high as 142. The BBC, along with several papers, did not mention this. (pp. 158-9).
Sonia Poulton, a writer for the Heil, stated on her blog that 31 Lords and 18 MPs have very lucrative interests in the health industry. But this was also ignored by the Beeb, along with the rest of the media with the exception of the Guardian. (p. 159).
The Tory MP, Nick de Bois, was a fervent support of the Tories’ NHS privatisation. He is a majority shareholder in Rapier Design Group, which purchased Hampton Medical Conferences, a number of whose clients were ‘partners’ in the National Association of Primary Care, another group lobbying the Tories for NHS privatisation. This was also not reported by the Beeb. (pp. 159-60).
The Beeb also chose not to report how Lord Carter of Coles, the chair of the Co-operation and Competition Panel charged with ensuring fair access to the NHS for private healthcare companies, was also receiving £799,000 per year as chairman of McKesson Information Solutions, part of the massive American McKesson healthcare company. (p. 160).
There were other links between politicos, think tanks, lobby groups and private healthcare companies. The health regulator, Monitor, is dominated by staff from McKinsey and KPMG. But this also isn’t mentioned by the press. (pp. 160-1).
Beeb Falsely Presents Pro-Privatisation Think Tanks as ‘Independent‘
The BBC, along with much of the rest of the media, have also been responsible for misrepresenting spokespeople for pro-privatisation lobby groups as disinterested experts, and the organisations for which they speak as just independent think tanks. This was how the Beeb described 2020health.org, whose chief executive, Julia Manning, was twice invited onto the air to discuss the NHS, and an entire article was given over to one of her wretched organisation’s reports. However, SpinWatch reported that its chairman, former Tory minister Tom Sackville, was also CEO of the International Federation of Health Plans, representing of 100 private health insurance companies. Its advisory council includes representatives of AstraZeneca, NM Rothschild, the National Pharmaceutical Association, Nuffield private hospital group, and the Independent Healthcare Advisory Services. (p. 162).
Another lobby group whose deputy director, Nick Seddon, and other employees were invited onto the Beeb to discuss the proposals was Reform. Seddon was head of communications at Circle, the first private healthcare company to take over an NHS hospital. Seddon’s replacement at Circle was Christina Lineen, a former aide to Andrew Lansley. None of this was reported by the Beeb. Their corporate partners included companies like Citigroup, KPMG, GlaxoSmithKline and Serco. Huitson states ‘Through Seddon’s and other Reform Staffs’ appearances, the BBC may have facilitated private sector lobbying on a publicly funded platform without making relevant interests known’. (163).
Beeb Did Not Cover Protests and Opposition to Bill
Pages 164-5 also discusses the Beeb’s refusal, with few exceptions, to interview critics of Lansley’s Health and Social Care Bill, the rightwing bias of panels discussing it and how the Beeb did not cover protests against it or its discussion in parliament. Huitson writes
At the BBC opportunities were frequently missed to provide expert opposition to the bill on a consistent basis. the RCGP’s Clare Gerada was largely the exception to this rule. Many of the most well-known and authoritative critics of the bill – the likes of professors Allyson Pollock or Colin Leys, doctors Jacky Davis and Wendy Savage from Keep Our NHS Public – never appeared on the BBC to discuss the plans. Davis recalls being invited to appear on the BBC a number of times but the item was cancelled on every occasion. ‘Balance’ is supposedly one of the BBC’s primary objectives yet appearing on the Today programme of 1 February 2012 to discuss the bill, for instance, were Shirley Williams (who voted in favour of the bill, however reluctantly), Nick Seddon of ‘independent’ Reform (pro-Bill), Steve Field (pro-Bill) and Chris Ham (pro-Bill). It’s difficult to see how that is not a breach of BBC guidelines and a disservice to the public. One of the fundamental duties of an open media is to ensure that coverage is not skewed towards those with the deepest pockets. And on that issue the media often performed poorly.
Further criticism of the BBC stems from its curious lack of NHS coverage during the climactic final month before the bill was passed in the House of Lords on 19 March. One such complaint came from blogger and Oxford Professor of Developmental Neuropsychology Dorothy Bishop, who wrote to the BBC to ask why it had failed to cover a number of NHS stories in March, including an anti-bill petition that had been brought to the House by Lord Owen, carrying 486,000 signatures of support. In reply, the BBC confirmed that the bill had been mentioned on the Today programme in March prior to the bill’s passing, though just once. Bishop replied:’So, if I have understood this right, during March, the Today programme covered the story once, in an early two-minute slot, before the bill was passed. Other items that morning included four minutes on a French theme park based on Napoleon, six minutes on international bagpipe day and eight minutes on Jubilee celebrations.’
Other BBC omissions include Andrew Lansley being heckled by angry medical staff at a hospital in Hampstead, as reported by both the Mail and Sky News. On 17 March a peaceful anti-bill march took place in central London. Those out protesting for their national health service found themselves kettled by riot police despite being one of the most harmless-looking crowds you’re ever likely to see. The protest and the shameful police response were completely ignored by the media, except for a brief mention on a Guardian blog. On social media numerous examples have been reported of protests and actions opposing the bill that were entirely absent from national coverage.
Then, on 19 March, the day of the final vote on the bill, the BBC ran not a single article on the event, despite this being one of the most bitterly opposed pieces of legislation in recent history – it was as if the vote was not taking place. The next day, with the bill passed, they ran a full seven articles on the story. Three days after the bill passed, Radio 4 broadcast The Report: ‘Simon Cox asks: why is NHS reform mired in controversy?’ Why this was not broadcast before the Lords’ vote is a mystery.
When the Bill was passed, the bill scrolling across the BBC News’ screen ran ‘Bill which gives power to GPs passes’. (166). Huitson remarks that when the Beeb and the other news networks reported that the Bill gave power to GPs and allowed a greater role for the private sector, it was little more than regurgitating government press releases. (p. 168).
Beeb Bias Problem Due to Corporation’s Importance and Domination of Broadcast News
Huitson also comments on the specific failure of the Beeb to provide adequate coverage of NHS privatisation in its role as one of the great British public institutions, the dominant role it has in British news reporting. On pages 169-70 he writes
Campaigners may not expect more from the Sun but they certainly do from the BBC, given its status as an impartial public service broadcaster whose news gathering is supported directly by licence fee payers. The BBC accounts for 70 per cent of news consumption on television. Further, the BBC accounts for 40 per cent of online news read by the public, three times that of its closes competitor, the Mail. Quite simply, the BBC dominates UK news. The weight given to the BBC here is not purely down to its dominance, however, but also because, along with the NHS, the BBC remains one of our great public institutions, an entity that is supposedly above commercial pressures. Many of the stories ignored by the BBC were covered by the for-profit, right-wing press, as well as the Guardian and Channel 4, so the concern is not that the organisation failed to ‘campaign’ for the NHS, but that it failed to report facts that other outlets found newsworthy.
The BBC’#s archive of TV and radio coverage is neither available for the public to research nor technically practical to research, but there are a number of reasons for confidence that their online content is highly indicative of their broader output. First, BBC online is a fully integrated part of the main newsroom rather than a separate operation. Consequently, TV and radio coverage that can be examined is largely indistinguishable from the related online content, as demonstrated in the examples given above. During the debate of Lansley’s bill, the BBC TV and radio were both subject to multiple complaints, the figures for which the BBC has declined to release.
Beeb’s Reporting of NHS Privatisation as Biased as Coverage of Miners’ Strike
He also compares the Beeb’s coverage of the bill, along with that of the rest of the media, to its similarly biased reporting of the miners’ strike.
The overall media coverage of the health bill brings to mind a quote from BBC radio correspondent Nicholas Jones, on the BBC’s coverage of the miners’ strike: ‘stories that gave prominence to the position of the National Union of Miners could simply be omitted, shortened or submerged into another report.’ (pp. 172-3).
Conclusion
The Beeb does produce some excellent programmes. I really enjoyed last night’s Dr. Who, for example. But the right-wing bias of its news reporting is now so extreme that in many cases it is fair to say that it is now a propaganda outlet for the Tory party and big business. It’s utterly indefensible, and in my view it will only be reformed if and when the newsroom and its managers are sacked in its entirety. In the meantime, Boris and the rest of the Tories are clamouring for its privatisation. Godfrey Bloom, one of the more prominent Kippers, has also put up a post or two in the past couple of days demanding precisely that.
If the Beeb was genuinely impartial, it would have defenders on the Left. But it is rapidly losing them thanks to its bias. And to the Tories, that’s also going to be a plus.
Thanks to the Beeb’s own Tory bias, it’s going to find it very hard to combat their privatisation.
And in the meantime they will have helped destroy the most valued of British institutions, the NHS, and free, universal healthcare to Britain’s citizens.
Ah, the allegations that the Tories are massively biased in favour of the Tories are clearly starting to upset the Beeb. The Corporation’s Director of News, Fran Unsworth, has appeared in the pages of today’s I newspaper for Tuesday, 5th November 2019, denying that the Beeb is biased and saying that allowing politicians to give their views is not platforming them. The I’s article by Richard Vaughan, ‘Political views are not our own, BBC tells viewers’, which reports her comments runs
The BBC news director has been forced to remind audiences that interviewing politicians does not mean the corporation endorses their political opinions.
Fran Unsworth told viewers that “interviewing is not platforming” and said that audiences will have their beliefs challenged as the country prepares for five weeks of generation election campaigning.
Journalists have been regularly booed and jeered at political events by audiences objecting to the line of questioning of a political leader.
Last week, an audience member at the launch of Labour’s election campaign catcalled the BBC’s political editor Laura Kuenssberg, blaming her for the party’s failure to win a majority in the 2017 election.
When Ms Kuenssberg pointed out Jeremy Corbyn did not secure enough votes to gain a majority in 2017, an audience member shouted, “No thanks to you, Laura.”
During the Conservatives leadership campaign Sky’s political editor Beth Rigby was subjected to booing by Tory activists for asking Boris Johnson a question.
Ms Unsworth told audiences to expect a range of political opinions to be given air time by the BBC. She reiterated that airing political opinions is not endorsing them, and the BBC will not seek to create a false balance in its general election reporting.
She wrote: “We have one simple priority over the next few weeks – our audiences. They have a wide range of views, and political allegiances, and we are here to serve all of them, wherever they live, whatever they think, and however they choose to vote.
“We do not support ‘false balance’. There are facts and there are judgments to be made. And we will make them where that is appropriate.”
Ms Unsworth has cited Ofcom research indicating that audiences tended to shy away from spaces or programmes in which their opinions will be challenged.
Just who does Unsworth and the Beeb think they’re kidding?
There is an abundance of evidence that the Beeb is extremely biased against Labour. I’ve blogged before about how the media monitoring units at Glasgow, Edinburgh and Cardiff universities found that the Beeb was far more likely to talk to Conservative politicians and spokesmen for the City about politics and the economy than Labour politicians and trade unionists. And Barry and Saville Kushner, the authors of Who Needs the Cuts? attacking austerity, state that the Beeb and the media generally far prefers talking to Tories and other politicians and economists, who support the wretched Tory policy. They won’t have on trade unionists or politicians that oppose them. When these voices do appear, they are shouted down or rapidly cut short in what they have to say. The Beeb is very definitely platforming the Tories. Only the other day I reblogged a graphic from EL4JC showing just how biased the Tories were in their selection of guests for their news and politics panels. These are mostly Tory, but Centrist politicians are also included more than the Left. To deny that this is not platforming the Tories is ridiculous.
And then there’s the issue of the bias of the interviewers. Like regarding the anti-Semitism smears. In fact, Labour is the party with the least anti-Semites within it, as I’ve said. The witch hunt to root out anti-Semitism isn’t about Jew hatred at all. It’s a cynical ploy by the Blairites to purge the party of Corbyn’s supporters, which they’ve tried to do on risible, trumped up charges. As they’ve done to people like Ken Livingstone, Jackie Walker, Tony Greenstein, Martin Odoni, Marc Wadsworth and Mike. The right-wing Zionists hate Corbyn and his supporters because they criticise Israel for its brutal treatment of the Palestinians. The Tories and the political and media establishment, on the other hand, are simply using the accusations as a useful tool to smear Labour, because they’re really afraid of a government that will overturn Thatcherism and actually help ordinary working people. Which naturally include Jews.
Hence whenever a Labour politician is interviewed, as John McDonnell was on Sunday, there are questions about the anti-Semitism issue. But the Tories have a higher level of anti-Semitism in the ranks, and a vicious strain of Islamophobia. But this is certainly not subjected to the same scrutiny.
And then there’s the insulting treatment they give ordinary Labour politicians, and the stunts they pull for the benefit of the right. Like the mass resignation of Blairite Labour MPs, which was announced on the Andrew Marr show, appears to have been planned with the show’s producer. Fiona Bruce has disgraced Question Time by gaslighting Diane Abbott and falsely claiming that the Leave campaign did not break electoral law. And when she did ask a tough question of a Conservative panelist, she tried to soothe it all over by telling him she was ‘just teasing’. And so on ad nauseam.
Unsworth’s comments about Ofcom don’t cut any ice either. Not when the Beeb has received a massive number of complaints about the flagrant bias of their Panorama documentary about anti-Semitism in the Labour party. Mike’s posted an extensive critique of this journalistic travesty, as have very many other left-wing blogs. And a complaint has been made to Ofcom or the relevant authorities. There’s even a documentary being made and about to be released about the programme’s bias.
Unsworth is, I believe, simply lying through her teeth when she claims that the Beeb is not biased. It is, and provably so. And she insults us by telling us that isn’t. But the fact that she has had to try to defend and rebut the accusations show how they’re biting.
Good. Let’s continue until every last shred of credibility the Beeb has for its news reporting is gone and the Corporation is forced to admit its bias and correct it.
Mike over on Vox Political has reproduced a series of tweets showing a video produced by EL4JC. This is a graph showing the cumulative proportion of left, right and centre guests on various Beeb news and politics programmes. The columns in the graph increase as the figures for each day and programme is added to the sound of Greig’s ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King’ from the Peer Gynt suite. This ends by showing how massively biased the Beeb is in its selection of guests. Here’s a shot of the last image.
As you can see, the Beeb is massively biased in favour of the Right. Those guests, who are not from the Right are drawn far more from the Centre than the Left. One of those, who retweeted the image, Julie Houghton, commented
this is appalling. Retweet everyone and share. Sick of seeing right wing nutters having such a biased platform. Handed to them on a plate by the BBC & don’t get me fucking started on right wing lying newspapers, distorting the truth. Something has to change.
Yes, it does. And this analysis of Beeb bias won’t surprise anyone – not on the Left at least. Barry and Saville Kushner in their book, Who Needs the Cuts, tell how the Beeb on its news programmes always featured people supporting austerity to the exclusion of trade unionists, Labour politicos and protesters arguing otherwise. When these dissenting voices were allowed on, they were quickly silenced, or in some cases actually shouted down by the presenters. The media research departments at Glasgow, Edinburgh and Cardiff universities have also produced reports into Beeb political bias. They concluded that the Beeb is far more likely to have speaking on their programmes Conservatives and spokesmen from the City than Labour politicians and trade unionists.
But why this massive bias now? Mike also reproduces this image, containing a tweet from a former BBC newsman, Marcus Moore, and a graphic about the career of Sarah Sands, now editor of the Radio 4 Today programme.
Moore’s statement that this all follows Cameron’s decision to appoint John Browne, formerly of BP, to the government department responsible for recruiting management and senior executives from private business to reformed government departments also deserves comment. I don’t doubt that Moore’s absolutely correct in that the ultimate responsibility for all this lies with Cameron. But Tony Blair was also keen to have the BBC parrot lines spouted by New Labour. And the appointment of private business people to the heads of government departments was not only a New Labour corporatist policy, but also that of the Nazis in their promotion of private industry. Not that the Beeb wasn’t biased in favour of the Tories long before that.
So where should people go for proper information?
Mike suggests that people would be better served taking it from social media, and the independent sources that so terrify the establishment media. So much so that there are now groups like Stop Funding Fake News, who adopt a spurious concern to prevent people getting their news from extremist sources. By which they mean websites like The Canary, which supports Jeremy Corbyn, but is not ‘extremist’ nor does it retail false information. The establishment claim that people taking their information from online sites like The Canary is not only fueling extremism, it is also destroying the ideological consensus built by people all reading and watching the same newspapers and news programmes. In other words, they’re afraid that people are moving away from them and their influence is being undermined by their online competitors.
Good.
The lamestream media are all pushing, to a greater or lesser degree, the same Thatcherite policies that have done so much damage to our country, and have destroyed so many lives – of the unemployed, the poor, and the disabled. It deserves nothing but our contempt, and people are far better advised looking at excellent left-wing blogs and sites like The Canary, The Skwawkbox, Novara Media, Evolve Politics, Vox Political, Zelo Street, Another Angry Voice, the Disability News Service and so on.
But Mike’s piece also concludes with a tweet from Mike Smart, warning people only to take their anger out on Beeb news programmes. Otherwise they will play into the hands of the right-wing and corporate shills wishing to privatise the Beeb altogether.
Yesterday Mike put up another article showing why the Beeb can’t be trusted to host the proposed debate between Tweezer and Jeremy Corbyn. When May first announced that she wanted to debate the Labour leader over Brexit, Corbyn replied that he would relish it, and that it should be on ITV. That’s his prerogative as the person challenged. He preferred the ITV format, which would simply be the two politicos going head to head.
But this hasn’t suited the Tories nor the Beeb, which would also love to host the debate. May’s director of communications, Robbie Gibb, was a member of the Beeb’s newsroom before joining her team. And he’s definitely been angling for his former colleagues at the Corporation to get the debate. And so the Beeb, and much of the rest of the corporate media, has been claiming that May’s proposal is a challenge to Corbyn, despite the fact that he’s already accepted. According to the Canary, Corbyn’s distrusts the Beeb’s proposal because it gives Beeb editors too much power to frame the questions and rig the debate. Matt Zarb-Cousin and others on Twitter have remarked that the Beeb seems to have been trying to get this debate for several weeks. On the 6th November there was mention of an interview with Dimbleby, and on the Torygraph this last Monday, 26th November 2018, the Beeb said they’d hold a ‘Question Time’ style session if Corbyn refused. Others followed, casting scorn on the idea that the Beeb’s debate would be impartial.
They’re right. As Mike has pointed out, the Beeb has form regarding deceptive political reporting. It was also this Monday, on Newsnight, that the Beeb included Lynn Hayter, a Beeb actress and fake Pastor of a miniscule internet church, in a debate about Brexit, trying to pass her off as a real vicar.
And this is far from the only piece of such deception the Beeb has made. Others have included packing the audience and panel at Question Time with members of the Tory party, and very biased reporting against Corbyn and the Labour regarding the anti-Semitism smears. Quite apart from the fact that one after another of the Beeb’s news teams has been shown to be a member of the party, and has left to join the Tories PR department. Furthermore, Ray Tallis’ book, NHS SOS, also has a chapter on how the BBC’s reporting of the privatization of the NHS actually supported it, instead of challenging it.
Tony Greenstein, I think, in one of his articles mentioned how, when the government passed legislation allowing the CCG commissioning groups in the NHS to purchase private medical services, the Beeb declared that it gave GPs more freedom, rather than describe it for what it was. It was, he states, pure state propaganda. It’s one example of a very long line. I can remember how, in the 1980s when Thatcher was cutting public services and the welfare state, the Beeb declared after the announcement of yet another round of such cuts that it was ‘more self-help’. Which was how the Tories wanted us to view it, rather than realise that it was simply yet more denial of needed state aid to the poor and vulnerable.
And Barry and Saville Kushner in the book, Who Needs the Cuts, have shown that the Beeb gives unequal airtime to those, who have swallowed the pernicious lie that austerity is necessary, and scream down dissenting voices from activists and trade unions. That is when the latter are even allowed on air. And academic media monitoring bodies at Cardiff and Glasgow University have shown how the Beeb gives far more space to employers, Conservatives and bankers over Labour members and trade unionists.
The Beeb is massively biased and should not be allowed to host the debate between Tweezer and Corbyn.
And more and more people are realizing this. A few days ago, the left-wing Vlogger Gordon Dimmack attacked the Beeb for its bias in its reporting of Julian Assange. He has also similarly criticized the Guardian for its bias, partly over Israel. At the end of that video, he announced that the mainstream media was so biased and untrustworthy, that he was going to use instead news from the New Media sources on the internet. This means sites and blogs like the Canary, whose very capable editor, Kerry-Ann Mendoza, so frightened and outraged the hacks at the Guardian a few weeks ago that they tried to ban her from being the speaker at an event to honour Black journalism.
And the new media is also rattling the Beeb. The Radio Times this week carries yet another self-serving article promoting Question Time, and lamenting the fact that politics in Britain is becoming increasingly polarized because fewer people are watching it, preferring instead to get their news from sources that match their own opinions.
I have zero sympathy. If people are switching off Question Time, it’s no-one’s fault but the Beeb’s.
They have been biased towards the Tories for a very long time, and people have always known and realized this. But with other sources of information instantly available on the Net, which can tell you what the Beeb isn’t, the Corporation’s lies and omissions have become glaringly obvious to more and more people. If the Beeb wants to get more people to follow its news coverage, then all it needs to do is become genuinely impartial.
But I fear that this is too much for the Corporation, which responds to any criticism about its pro-Tory bias by sending its critics pompous letters about how its journalists are trained to be scrupulously impartial. Even though a casual glance at the Six O’clock News reveals that the Beeb is anything but.
Corbyn definitely should not bow to pressure to debate May on the Beeb, and viewers are definitely advised to get their news from the other, great news organisations on the Net to correct the bias of the state broadcaster.
Tweezer at the Tory conference last week announced that austerity is over. However, as Mike reported over at Vox Political, this doesn’t mean that the government is going to reverse their policy of cutting benefits and services. From from it. Further cuts are on their way.
In this video from RT of Prime Minister’s Question Time, Jeremy Corbyn asks if Tweezer’s announcement isn’t ‘one great big con’.
He says
Eight years of painful austerity, poverty is up, homelessness and deaths on our streets is up, living standards down, public services slashed and a million elderly are not getting the care they need, wages have been eroded, and all the while, Mr. Speaker, all the while billions were found for tax giveaways for big corporations and the super rich. The Prime Minister, Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister declared she is ending austerity but unless the budged halts the cuts, increases funding to public services, gives our public servants a decent pay rise then isn’t the claim that austerity’s over a great big Conservative con?
He’s absolutely right. And as Mike has also pointed out, we’ve heard these lies before. They were said a few years ago, when the Tories were also in trouble. It’s just another version of the tactic every Tory government makes when an election’s coming: they immediate claim they’re going to cut taxes, or do something else to make it seem that ordinary people will be less poor. Then, once they’ve been re-elected, all this is reversed and its back to taxing and cutting services for ordinary working people for the benefit of the rich.
As for austerity, when it comes to this government the word is a misnomer. Austerity is what our parents and grandparents went through in order to pay for the NHS. It meant rationing continued long after the end of the War, but it was ultimately worth it. The NHS has proved its worth millions of times over in the countless lives it has saved, as well as the ordinary process of saving limbs and organs and preventing and curing ordinary disease. And everybody has benefited from it.
This austerity, however, was brought about because the banks over the other side of the Atlantic crashed due to colossal mismanagement. Brown bailed them out in order to stop a global collapse of finance capitalism. All this was partly due not only to the banks themselves, but to the insistence of consequetive neoliberal governments from Reagan onwards, including Bill Clinton’s, that the banks should be regulated with a ‘light touch’. That meant repealing the legislation protecting the country and its investors from the antics that caused the crash. And Brown was fully behind the same policy over here, which resulted in the failure of the Bank of Scotland.
The austerity Cameron embarked upon is unnecessary, as Barry and Savile Kushner have shown in ther book, Who Needs the Cuts. If you invest in the economy so that it expands, tax receipts will increase as well. But the establishment in industry, politics and the media all heartily support cutting benefits and the welfare state. Those that dare to challenge this consensus, like poverty campaigners and trade unions, are ignored. If they appear on radio or TV, they will be shouted down.
And despite Cameron’s lie that ‘We’re all in it together’, it’s the poor that are most affected. People are being pushed further into poverty, spiralling debt and starvation. Nearly half a million people are now only able to keep body and soul together thanks to food banks. The Tories are going ahead with their privatisation of the NHS.
And while the poor are being forced further into misery and despair, Cameron, Tweezer and the rest are making the rich even richer through massive tax cuts.
Austerity is indeed a massive lie, and it’s high time the Tories – the party of liars – suffered for it at the polling station.
This is the third part and final part of my article on the interview with Abby Martin on the Jimmy Dore Show. She’s a tireless critic of American imperialism, and the presenter of the Empire Files on TeleSur English, and before that, on RT.
Dore and Martin discuss how the Empire and the Deep State loathes Trump because he ain’t good for the Empire’s image. After Bush had nearly pushed Americans towards revolution, Obama managed to placate people, and win them back to the Empire. But Trump is worse for the Empire because he’s such an a**hole and psychopath. There are people, who are just as psychotic. Paul Ryan, another Republican, hates the poor. But Trump is ramping up the Empire to colossal levels. There are now troop surges in Afghanistan, and the formation of Africom to deal with Somalia. Everybody’s heard of a horrific massacre committed by one of the warlords, and blamed on al-Shabaab. But what you aren’t being told is that week before his village was subject to a bombing raid which killed a load of kids. Martin talks about Trump’s hypocrisy and cynicism. He attacked Killary for the way she sold arms to the Saudis, but has been more than willing to sell them arms himself so they can kill civilians in Yemen. Under Trump, there has been a 400 per cent increase in drone strikes, and a 75 per cent increase in civilian deaths. Under Bush and Obama, the US military just killed every military-age male in a given locality. Now they’re carpet-bombing whole villages. Just like the Israelis kill Palestinians. Well, Trump said he would kill not only the terrorists, but also their families, in direct violation of the Geneva Convention. Unfortunately, he has not honoured the promises Martin hoped he would, like normalising relations with Russia.
And then they get on to MOAB – the Mother Of All Bombs. This ‘mini-nuke’ – actually a conventional bomb that approached some of the destructive power of a nuclear device – was dropped on a cave system in Afghanistan. They said it only killed terrorists, but there were people in that area, and we won’t know if it only killed terrorists, because nobody’s allowed in there. Martin describes ISIS as a barbaric death cult – which is true – but states that this doesn’t give us the right to kill the people, who live in these countries. She makes the point that the applause which greeted the MOAB attack was a dehumanisation of the Afghan people and the victims of this weapon.
They then discuss whether some of the people on the Right, who supported Trump, may now be disillusioned with the orange buffoon. Many people probably voted for him because they thought he was anti-interventionist. But he hasn’t been. This might be because the military-industrial complex and the warfare state are beyond his control. Martin hoped that this part of the Republican based would speak out, but she was disappointed. The base is just interested in having a more efficient War On Terror. They aren’t speaking out about Venezuela, nor about the push for war with North Korea, they just don’t want us to fund al-Qaeda. As for Trump himself, he was never anti-interventionist. He just appeared so as it was a useful stance against Killary. He doesn’t have to surround himself with generals, who just want war because with every new invasion they launch, they get another star on their jacket. They two then discuss how nobody knows why America was in Niger.
I realise that this is an American programme, discussing American issues. But it also directly and acutely affects us. A number of our politicos have attended Republican conventions, and one of Trump’s British buddies was Nigel Farage. The Tories have been copying and utilising Republican policies since Maggie Thatcher took over as premier in the 1970s. And New Labour did the same with the Clintonite wing of the Democrats, adopting their stance against the welfare state, and introducing neoliberalism, deregulation and privatisation, including the privatisation of the NHS, into the Labour Party.
The situation is rather different over here in Blighty, as we are now lucky enough to have a real Socialist as leader in the shape of Jeremy Corbyn. But New Labour is desperately trying to hang on in the shape of Progress, Labour Friends of Israel and the Jewish Labour Movement. And they have been using the smearing of decent anti-racists, the majority of whom are Jewish, as anti-Semites and their expulsion from the party as a weapon to purge their left-wing opponents.
As for imperialism, we are still riding on the back of America’s coat-tails, trying to be a world power by exploiting the ‘Special Relationship’. And so we support their wars in the Middle East, and the looting of these countries’ state industries and the brutalisation and impoverishment of their peoples.
Our media isn’t quite as bad as the Americans’ just yet. The news over here does accept that climate change is real at least, and there are still news reports about the poverty caused by austerity and Tory cuts to the welfare state and health service.
But it is heavily biased towards the Tories. The Beeb is full of public school, very middle class White guys, and its news and editorial staff have contained a number of high profile Tories, several of whom have left their posts to work for the party under Cameron and May. ‘Goebbels’ Robinson and ‘Arnalda Mussolini’ Kuenssberg are members of the Tory party. Robinson led a whole series of Tory groups, while Kuenssberg spoke at a fringe meeting in the Tory party this year.
The Kushners noted in their book, Who Needs the Cuts, that the Beeb does not allow anyone to question austerity, and it is just assumed, entirely falsely, as true and necessary by the rest of the media. And academics from Cardiff, Edinburgh and Glasgow Universities have noted that the Beeb is far more likely to talk to Tory politicians and managing directors about the economy, than Labour politicos and trade unionists.
And the war on alternative media is happening in this country as well. The Tories would love to close down RT. We’ve already seen them join in the baying mob accusing it of being Putin’s propaganda arm interfering with British democracy over here. All the while being very silent about how the Israelis were caught trying to get the people they don’t like removed from May’s cabinet. We’ve seen them criticise Labour MPs for appearing on the network, while ignoring their own people, who also have. And May got on her high horse to write a letter to Alex Salmond telling him not to take up a job as presenter with the Network.
And the bots and algorithms cooked up by Google and Facebook to protect us all from ‘fake news’ are having an effect on ‘controversial’ read: left-wing bloggers and vloggers. They direct potential readers away from the sites the corporations have decided are a threat to democracy. Mike’s suffered an inexplicable fall in the readership of some of his articles, and some of his posts have had to be reposted after mysteriously vanishing from Facebook. Even before then, there was an attempt to censor Tom Pride over at Pride’s Purge by claiming that his site was unsuitable for children. The pretext for that was some of the coarse humour he employs in his satire. This is nothing compared to some of the language you will hear on YouTube. It looked very much like his real crime was sending up Dave Cameron and the other walking obscenities taking up space on the Tory benches.
What Abby Martin says about the media and the crimes of Empire describe the situation in America. But it also describes what the neoliberal elites are doing over here.
We have to stop this. We have to take back parliament, and end the warmongering. Now.
The BBC: The Myth of a Public Service, Tom Mills (London: Verso 2016).
I managed to pick up a copy of this book, which came out last year, yesterday while poking around one of the secondhand book shops in Cheltenham. The BBC has become increasingly very blatantly biased against the Labour party, trade unions and the left in general. The Corporation has huffily denied this, but it’s been the subject of academic critiques by Edinburgh, Glasgow and Cardiff academics, who have concluded that there is a very real bias towards the Tories and business leaders, and against Labour MPs and trade unionists. According to the back flap of the dust jacket, Tom Mills is another academic – a lecturer in sociology and policy at Aston University, and a former co-editor of the New Left Project.
The blurb on the front flap states
The BBC is one of the most important institutions in Britain; it is also one of the most misunderstood. Despite its claim to be independent and impartial, and the constant accusations of a liberal bias, the BBC has always sided with the elite. As Tom Mills demonstrates, we are only getting the news that the Establishment wants aired in public.
Throughout its existence, the BBC has been in thrall to those in power. This was true in 1926 when it stood against the workers during the General Strike, and since then the Corporation has continued to mute the voices of those who oppose the status quo: miners in 1984; anti-war protesters in 2003; those who offer alternatives to austerity economics since 2008. From the outset much of its activity has been scrutinized by the secret services at the invitation of those in charge. Since the 1990s the BBC has been integrated into the market, while its independence from the government and big business has been steadily eroded. The BBC is an important and timely examination of a crucial public institution that is constantly under threat.
Barry and Saville Kushner have also pointed out how the Beeb and its journos unquestioningly accept the necessity of austerity, rarely inviting on their programmes anyone dares say otherwise. When they do, the interviewer promptly throws a fit and shouts them down. They heard one instance of this while listening to a radio interview on Radio 4 with a leading trade unionist, who was very abruptly stopped when he tried explaining that there was absolutely no need for it. See their book, Who Needs the Cuts.
The anti-Labour bias is acutely obvious in Laura Kuenssberg’s treatment of the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn. It was also very evident with the reports on the Six O’clock news by John Pienaar and George Alagiah. Any number of people have complained about Kuenssberg’s flagrant bias, and got the same shirty treatment from the people in the media bubble. Those, who dare to complain, like Guy Debord’s Cat, get a haughty letter from one of its apparatchiks pompously informing them how the Corporations journalists are all scrupulously impartial, and they are mistaken. And the hackettes in the Groaniad immediately got on their high horses to claim that those criticizing la Kuenssberg were just doing it because they were sexist chauvinists, like the Bernie Bros in America. Which also didn’t exist, but were made up by Killary and her minions as a way of explaining why few people, including women, actually like this highly entitled, neoliberal, establishment figure, who befriends blood-soaked war criminals like Henry Kissinger.
And despite the Beeb’s protestations, several of their own journos don’t buy this rubbish either. Robert Peston, now the Beeb’s economics editor, was asked three years ago what he thought about the claims that it had a liberal bias. Peston replied that, on the contrary, the Corporation was ‘completely obsessed with the agenda set by newspapers’, naming the Heil and Torygraph. He added that it ‘quite often veers in what you might call a very pro-establishment, rather right-wing direction’. He forthrightly said that the claims that the Beeb is left-wing is ‘bollocks’. (p. 106).
But such claims have been around since the BBC was formally incorporated as a nationalized industry. When it was just a cartel of radio manufacturers and broadcasters, the Conservatives were accusing it of a Socialist bias. Glancing through the book reveals that there have been repeated attempts by the Tories to make it reflect their views. In 1947 Churchill launched one of these. Some of the most significant occurred in the 1970s with Keith Joseph and the other neoliberals around Maggie Thatcher. They got very upset in 1974 when the respected American economist, J.K. Galbraith, presented a series critiquing corporate power and the rise and crisis of industrial society, including Marxist and Keynsian perspectives, The Age of Uncertainty. This was too much for Joseph and the rest of the frothing mad Tory right. Galbraith was no liberal. He identified as Conservative, but had said the unsayable. Galbraith stated in the introduction to the ninth episode of that, ‘The Big Corporation’, that it was a myth that the consumer is sovereign and the corporation respond to their preferences, efficiently allocating society’s resources. The reality was that ‘corporations influence government, influence the consumer. Only the textbooks say otherwise.’ Joseph and Geoffrey Howe then organized a campaign to have another series set up, examination the question from a pro-Hayekian, free market perspective, presented by Milton Friedman. This was the Milton Friedman, who enthusiastically rejected democracy after realizing that his Chicago School would always been a minority. He therefore championed General Pinochet, who was also an enthusiastic Monetarist, when he overthrew the Marxist president of Chile, Salvador Allende, in a Fascist coup.
One of the most revealing sections is the chapter discussing how the Beeb’s massive pro-business bias was established about nine or so years ago, way back at the start of century around the year 2000. It was set up, and the treatment of business affairs expanded, by Greg Dyke. Dyke was a member of the Labour party, and a crony of Tony Blair. This explains why the Tories were constantly howling about how he was a dangerous Socialist, and there was a left-wing bias at the Beeb. In fact, Dyke had imbibed the same Thatcherite, neoliberal views as Blair, despite the continued whines that the Beeb had an ‘anti-industry culture’. It’s another example of how politicians on the nominal left, like Blair, took over and expanded the Conservatives’ neoliberal programme.
As for pro-Fascist bias, this even afflicted that great founder of the Beeb, Lord Reith. In 1933 Reith made a speech declaring that it was possible for someone to spread democratic values without being a democrat. Two years later, in 1935, he made a speech praising Mussolini. He personally believed the country needed a dictatorship. Fortunately, the rest of the Beeb’s governors and controllers didn’t, and forced him out.
This is interesting, as it’s an aspect of Reith’s life I hadn’t heard about before. There have been biographies of him – one of which was published in the 1990s, and, I think, reviewed by the Financial Times. However, from what I can remember, what was said about Reith’s personal failings was about his own puritanism, repressed homosexuality, and guilty infatuation with another man. I can’t recall any mention of Reith being a supporter of Fascist style dictatorship, although it should also be said that he despised the Fascists’ thuggery.
It would be too much to say that the corporation is pro-Fascist. They’re very proud of a quote made during the crisis of 1974, when one of the journos announced that the Beeb isn’t impartial – it’s strongly pro-democratic, and passionately feels this needs to be cherished. On the other hand, broadcasters tend to be Conservatives. And one aspect of the Conservative mindset is authoritarianism. See some of the pieces on YouTube discussing this by left-wing news sites like Democracy Now and so on. This would explain why they give more respect than they should to extreme right-wing movements like the BNP and UKIP. Guy Debord’s Cat has written about this over on his blog, if you want further information.
The book also places Mary Whitehouse, the moral crusader, who became the scourge of broadcasters from the 1960s onwards. Whitehouse is still a notorious figure today for her campaign against all manner of smut and filth on television with her group, the Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association. A year or so ago there was a book about her and her correspondence with the Corporation, Ban This Filth. Mills states that she is looked upon as an eccentric figure. Misguided, but essentially harmless. This isn’t quite the case.
Whitehouse was linked the Tories, and a friend of Maggie Thatcher. She and they thought that there was a plot by a left-wing elite to foist all this degeneracy and moral chaos on the British public. It’s a view that’s now become firmly established within the Right. And there was a very strong political dimension to her campaign. She believed that the liberal elite wanted to create sexual permissiveness and anarchy in preparation for a state of political anarchy, in which the fundamental institutions of British society would be torn down. And like many a bonkers conspiracy theorist, she was convinced that this was all being coordinated by Moscow. These days she’d probably be on Infowars with Alex Jones, along with nutters frothing about imaginary satanic paedophile rings operating out of Boston pizza parlours by Hillary Clinton, and those who think that the government is run by a secret cabal of aliens from Zeta Reticuli.
As for her views about political anarchism, this was also held by MI5, much to the amusement of the real anarchists in the Anarchist Federation. See one of the pieces on modern anarchism in the anthology of anarchist literature, Anarchism, edited by George Woodcock.
The book concludes that Reith’s vision of the Beeb’s role was the same as that as Matthew Arnold, the headmaster of Rugby, in his book Culture and Anarchy. The alienated laboring poor were to be incorporated into the culture and political structure of British society, but firmly under the leadership of the upper classes. The brief period when British society and the BBC had become more egalitarian due to rising affluence and the economic and social changes of the 1960s, has disappeared. This is partly due to the collapse of Communism. There is now no longer an exterior threat demanding that certain concessions be made to the working and lower middle classes, so that they don’t become too radicalized. Neoliberalism has increased poverty and jobs are precarious. At the same time, power has become more distanced and centralized amongst a powerful coterie of Oxbridge-educated managers. And just as this has occurred in industry and wider British society, so it as has also occurred in the Beeb.
This is an important study of the Beeb’s institutional right-wing, pro-Establishment bias. It’s another refutation of the Beeb’s repeated, and increasingly spurious claims of impartiality. Since Corbyn became leader, more people have become aware of how hypocritical and specious these claims are. It’s why more people are getting their news and information from the internet, and sites you can really trust. Sites like Vox Political, Tom Pride, Johnny Void, Another Angry Voice, DPAC, Kitty S. Jones, the Canary, the Squawkbox, Guy Debord’s Cat, Tony Greenstein and others too numerous to mention.
These people convey real news, and their under threat from the big corporations Google and Facebook, who only want you to view and read approved corporate, neoliberal propaganda. It’s why they’re demonetizing left-wing news shows like Democracy Now, The Young Turks, the David Pakman Show, Secular Talk and Sam Seder’s Majority Report, and changing the rules on Facebook to make it difficult for people to access the left-wing blogs.
Don’t let them get away with this. Support your favourite left-wing blogs and news shows.
Looking through the chapter on British television in John Clute’s Science Fiction: The Illustrated Encyclopedia (London: Dorling Kindersley 1995), I found this entry for the forgotten SF drama 1990. Produced by Prudence Fitzgerald, with scripts mainly written by Wilfred Greatorex, this ran for 16 episodes from 1977 to 1978. Clute writes
In 1990s totalitarian Britain the welfare state is all-powerful. A maverick journalist helps infiltrators from the freedom-loving United States, and assists British rebels in fleeing there. Intended as a dire warning of trade-union socialism, the series’ caricatures in fact make the venture risible. (P. 101).
The Wikipedia entry for the series also adds the following details along with other information on its plot, characters, cast and crew:
The series is set in a dystopian future in which Britain is under the grip of the Home Office’s Public Control Department (PCD), a tyrannically oppressive bureaucracy riding roughshod over the population’s civil liberties.
Dubbed “Nineteen Eighty-Four plus six” by its creator, Wilfred Greatorex, 1990 stars Edward Woodward as journalist Jim Kyle, Robert Lang as the powerful PCD Controller Herbert Skardon, Barbara Kellerman as Deputy PCD Controller Delly Lomas, John Savident, Yvonne Mitchell (in her last role), Lisa Harrow, Tony Doyle, Michael Napier Brown and Clive Swift.Two series, of eight episodes each, were produced and broadcast on BBC2 in 1977 and 1978. The series was never repeated but was released on DVD in 2017. Two novelisations based on the scripts were released in paperback by the publisher Sphere; Wilfred Greatorex’s 1990, and Wilfred Greatorex’s 1990 Book Two.
and includes this description of the show’s fictional background to its vision of a totalitarian Britain:
Exposition in this series was mainly performed by facts occasionally dropped into dialogue requiring the viewer to piece together the basic scenario.
This state of affairs was precipitated by an irrecoverable national bankruptcy in 1981, triggering martial law. In the general election, only 2% voted. The economy (and imports) drastically contracted forcing stringent rationing of housing, goods and services. These are distributed according to a person’s LifeScore as determined (and constantly reviewed) by the PCD on behalf of the union-dominated socialist government. As a consequence, the higher-status individuals appear to be civil servants and union leaders. An exception to this are import/export agents, which appear to be immune to state control due to their importance to the remnants of the economy. The House of Lords has been abolished and turned into an exclusive dining club. State ownership of businesses appears to be near-total and prohibition of wealth and income appears to be very high. The reigning monarch is male due to the unfortunate death of the previous monarch (queen Elizabeth the 2nd) but his identity is never made clear. The currency is the Anglodollar (replaced the pound sterling in 1982 due to economic collapse) which appears to have little value overseas due to the international boycott of British exports. The armed forces have been run down to the extent that they are little more than an internal security force. This is made clear in one episode where the RAF is depicted as consisting of little more than a handful of Harrier Jump Jets and a few dozen counter-insurgency helicopters. Despite this National Service has been re-introduced (via the Youth Behaviour Control Act 1984 which enforces conscription and Genetic Crimes Act 1985, which makes sexual offences punishable by hanging). It is said that in 1986 two Army Generals and a retired Air Chief Marshal attempted a coup against the government, but it failed.
There’s also a Wikipedia entry for Greatorex, the show’s creator, which states
Wilfred Greatorex (27 May 1921–14 October 2002)[1] was an English television and film writer, script editor and producer. He was creator of such series as Secret Army, 1990, Plane Makers and its sequel The Power Game, Hine, Brett, Man At The Top, Man From Haven and The Inheritors.[2] He also wrote the screenplay for the 1969 film Battle of Britain.[1] He was described by The Guardian newspaper as “one of the most prolific and assured of television script-writers and editors from the 1960s into the 1980s”.[3] Starting off as a journalist, he got his big break as a TV writer on Lew Grade’s ATV service writing dramas about journalism, such as Deadline Midnight and Front Page Story.[3]
As a TV script editor he also worked on series such as Danger Man[1] and was also creator/producer of The Inheritors, Hine and The Power Game.[1] Papers discovered at a Norfolk auction house in 2011 reveal that ‘Hine’ had a budget of £84,000, the equivalent of close to £1m some forty years later.
In 1977, he came up with the dystopian drama series 1990 for BBC2, starring Edward Woodward. Greatorex dubbed the series “Nineteen Eighty-Four plus six”.[4] Over its two series it portrayed “a Britain in which the rights of the individual had been replaced by the concept of the common good – or, as I put it more brutally, a consensus tyranny.”[3] The same year he also devised (with Gerard Glaister) the BBC1 wartime drama Secret Army. The show later inspired the sitcom parody ‘Allo ‘Allo!.[5]
The show’s clearly a product of the extreme paranoia that gripped the Tories in Britain during the mid-1970s. The total collapse of the economy seems to have been inspired by the country’s bankruptcy in the mid to late 1970s, when the country was forced to go to the IMF. It also shows the fears that the Labour party was planning some kind of extreme left-wing coup. This was the decade when the Times was urging the formation of a national government, and various figures in intelligence and politics were considering organizing a military coup against the minority Labour government. Ken Livingstone also states in his 1987 book, Livingstone’s Labour, that MI5 had also compiled a list of subversives, including journalists, politicians and trade unionists, who were to be rounded up and interned in a camp somewhere in the Hebrides. Behind much of this paranoia was the belief, held by James Jesus Angleton, the head of the CIA, and many others in the Tory party, including Maggie Thatcher, that Harold Wilson was a KGB spy.
The series has long been forgotten. I can’t remember ever hearing or reading about it, apart from the entry in Clute’s Encyclopedia and the Wikipedia pages. The show was clearly quite successful at the time, as it lasted two seasons, but I can’t remember anyone I knew having watched it, or even mentioning it in the school playground.
Nevertheless, this is interesting, as the series was clearly written from an extreme right-wing stance, albeit one of that was shared by much of the Tory media during the 1970s. It definitely shows the alarm the Tories and a large section of the middle class clearly felt at trade union militancy and the Labour left’s desire to extend nationalization, as well as the experiments with worker’s control under Tony Benn. In fact, despite the accusation often heard during the ’70s and ’80s that Labour wanted to nationalize everything, the party only wished to take into public ownership 25 more companies. This is far from complete nationalization. As for worker’s control, this was confined to three firms, which were failing anyway. These eventually collapsed, but many of the workers involved in these projects felt that the experiments had been worthwhile and had shown that workers could run businesses.
And it also shows how blatantly biased the BBC could be against the Left.
There’s been considerable discussion on blog’s like mine and Mike’s about the Beeb’s bias against the Labour party and especially Jeremy Corbyn. Mike’s put a number of articles commenting on this bias. The BBC claims it is impartial, and whenever anybody complains about the bias in its programmes, as Guy Debord’s Cat did recently, they receive a bland, and slightly pompous reply telling them that they’re wrong. Researchers at Cardiff, Edinburgh and Glasgow universities have found, however, that the Corporation is far more likely to interview, and treat respectfully the opinions offered by Conservative MPs and experts from the financial sector, than trade unionists and members of the Labour party. Barry and Saville Kushner have commented on how the Beeb uncritically accepts and promotes the idea of austerity in their book, Who Needs the Cuts, to the point of shouting down anyone, who dares to disagree. There’s even been a book published exposing the Corporation’s bias, The BBC and the Myth of Public Service Broadcasting.
The existence of this explicitly anti-Socialist SF drama shows how far back this bias goes. In many ways, I’m not surprised. The corporation is largely staffed by members of the upper middle class. It’s one of the country’s central institutions, and so reflects the views of the established political, business and media elites. Hence it shared the British right’s groundless fears of some kind of radical socialist takeover in the 1970s, and their bitter hatred the Labour party and Jeremy Corbyn today.
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