Lobster on How the Beeb Became Tory Propaganda Outlet

Robin Ramsay has begun putting up articles on the latest issue of Lobster, no. 79, for summer 2020. In his ‘View from the Bridge’ section he has posted this piece, which was written  posted on Facebook by the former Beeb journalist, Marcus Moore, on how the Tories turned the Beeb into their own pet propaganda mouthpiece.

‘A number of changes made during the last seven years or so, spearheaded by David Cameron, have led to the corporation’s news and politics departments becoming little more than ventriloquists’ dummies. Of particular note are the following:

a) important posts at the BBC being filled by pro-government figures from the private sector (Rona Fairhead, David Clementi, James Harding,Robbie Gibb etc)

b) direct links with the manipulative tabloid press being strengthened by Downing Street giving important positions to dubious characters like Andy Coulson and Craig Oliver

c) the subsequent recruitment of people like Alison Fuller Pedley (of Mentorn Media), who is responsible for choosing who gets to be in the Question Time audience, and Sarah Sands (formerly of the Telegraph, Mail and Evening Standard) who now edits Radio 4’s Today programme

d) all of the above follows Cameron’s appointment, in June 2010, of John Browne (Baron Browne of Madingley) to the post of ‘Lead NonExecutive Director’ for Downing Street, his role being that of ‘recruiting business leaders to reformed departmental boards’ – Browne’s questionable history at BP notwithstanding (remember Deep Horizon!)

e) how all of this quiet, underhand activity has been largely unreported,but has given the current Conservative government immense power within fashionable and influential circles.’

See: https://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/free/lobster79/lob79-view-from-the-bridge.pdf

All of which means that the Beeb isn’t remotely an impartial broadcaster, as it purports to be and should be by law. I’ve said that the Beeb makes some excellent programmes. It does, and this season’s Dr. Who has been a case in point. But its news reporting is irredeemable.

As far as I’m concerned, everyone in it should be sacked, and especially Laura Kuenssberg and Nick Robinson.

Denis Thatcher’s Anger at BBC Skit on Tory ‘Culling the Poor’

Mike over at Vox Political and many other bloggers have criticised the Tory party’s attacks on the poor, the disabled and the unemployed by comparing them to the Nazis’ genocide of the disabled. Jeffrey Davies, one of the great commenters on this site, has often referred to the Tories’ anti-disability agenda by the Nazi’s own name for their programme: Aktion T4. Mike refers to it as ‘chequebook genocide’.

It seems that Mike’s and the other’s view of the Tories’ attempt to kill off the poor and weak through denying them benefits was shared in the 1980s by the BBC. This was the era of Maggie Thatcher’s jackbooted occupation of No. 10, and the comments by the BBC about her killing the poor sent her husband, Denis, into a ‘fearful bate’, as Nigel Molesworth would sa.

There’s a piece by Cahal Milmo in today’s I newspaper, reporting that Denis Thatcher sent off an angry letter to the Beeb’s chairman, Marmaduke Hussey, demanding that he sack the producer of the Radio 4 Today programme, after it broadcast a piece satirising Thatcher’s policies as a way of killing off the weak. The piece was broadcast in 1988, and its title explicitly compared Thatcher to the Nazis: ‘Thatcherism: Final Solution’. Apparently, Thatcher was so annoyed that she consulted legal advice, before deciding to abandon that avenue. Denis, however, whined to Hussey that

The extent and depth of political bias in the BBC is a matter of opinion, but this is a disgrace judged by any standard, however low. I cannot believe that a public broadcasting system can continue to employ a producer who published so foul and deliberate an untruth. Such gross professional misconduct can neither be excused nor condoned. (I, Thursday 21 July 2016, p. 20).

If the criticism was relevant then, it is even more so now. 590 people at least have died of hunger and poverty due benefit sanctions. 3.7 million are in ‘food poverty’, hundreds of thousands are being forced to use food banks, and 290,000 sufferers from poor mental health have seen their condition worsen due the pressure of constant testing. Thatcher was always accusing the BBC of ‘left-wing bias’, in the same way that modern Republicans in American whine and moan about the ‘liberal media’. It reveals her fundamental intolerance to independent criticism.

Unfortunately, it has had an effect. Jacky Davis and Raymond Tallis argue in the NHS-SOS that one reason why the Beeb has not reported the extensive privatisation of the NHS, or at least, not to any great extent, is because successive government have tried to bully and weaken it because of its ability to criticise. And so we now have a supine Beeb cheerleading for the Tories with Laura Kuenssberg as political editor of the news.

So far, the Tories haven’t tried to censor Mike and the other bloggers comparing the Tories’ killing of benefit claimants with Nazi policies towards the poor and disabled. The standard Tory approach to these criticisms seems to be to deny that any such thing is going on, and you must be wicked and ignorant for saying that it is. But this little snippet suggests that it must still sting them.