The BBC’s editing scandal has reached the House of Commons. Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy made a statement by the government this evening on the ongoing crisis, which is fortunate given the Starmer administration are known as bywords for probity, competence and even-handedness: ‘Same Teir for Everyone Keir’ as the PM is popularly known.
There needed to be ‘firm, swift and transparent action’ from the BBC, according to Nandy. Receiving that advice from this government of all people is a real gut punch. Like being overtaken on the M6 by the Flintstones car. There are Saharan sandbanks which are quicker, swifter and more transparent than HM’s government.
The BBC, said Nandy, ‘stands apart’ when it comes to the quality of its news and is a ‘light on a hill in times of darkness.’ It was like a speech from a Powell and Pressburger film about a plucky HR department. Which is basically what this government believes itself to be; the last workplace harassment complaint form between civilisation and barbarism.
It is apparently also ‘genuinely accountable to the public it serves’ – which is why the only reason we found out about its dodgy editorial practices was through a memo leaked to a newspaper. Nandy’s main thrust was ‘nothing to see here’, as if the BBC had been involved in a minor bicycle prang or been caught scrumping for apples in Uncle Rupert’s orchard as opposed to incurring the wrath of the world’s most powerful man and self-immolating what remained of its reputation as a result of its own dinner party myopia.
She then made the insane claim that ‘high quality programming is essential to our democratic and cultural life’. I mean I like a costume drama as much as the next woman but the end of Lark Rise to Candleford wasn’t the Fall of Rome.
Yet Nandy was nowhere near the maddest person in the chamber. Sarah Owen gave a deranged conspiratorial rant that hit all the obvious boxes – this wasn’t actually about the BBC at all but about Donald Trump, GB News, the Russians, Farage and Robbie Gibb. None of it was related, none of it was joined up, none of it made any sense. I’ve said it before, if some of the rants which middle-class liberals get away with as ‘informed opinion’ were delivered by someone at a bus stop, the individual in question would be gently ushered into the care of a local mental health professional.
Naturally, there was extreme mawkishness alongside the delusion – lots of talk of ‘Our BBC’, a la ‘R’NHS’. To John Slinger the BBC was ‘a beacon of fearless impartial journalism’. To Alex Mayer, it was ‘unique and special and ours’. Throughout, Nandy kept replying that the BBC ‘belongs to us all’. Well, up to a point, Comrade Copper. It hasn’t seemed to belong to Jewish people, women or indeed, anyone who believes in basic biological reality very much lately.
Somebody with a couple of different opinions sits on a board and they act like it’s the Beer Hall Putsch
Stella Creasy, a woman for whom self-awareness is a distant and entirely unexplored concept, like the atmosphere of Pluto, went on another verbal meander about political interference. The problem is, of course, that what actually happened is that New Labour apparatchiks and fully paid up commissars of the Blairite regime were front and centre at the Beeb for decades and decades and now, God forbid, somebody with a couple of opinions different to the totally dominant cultural behemoth of progressive, smug liberalism sits on a board and they act like it’s the Beer Hall Putsch. As their logic runs, a scandal that suggests a serious liberal/left-wing bias within an organisation can only be solved by stringing up one of the few Tories left in the building. That, or it’s a simple case of shooting the messenger rather than addressing the manifest problems exposed. It will not surprise you to hear that the only Labour MP who acknowledged the scale of the problem was Graham Stringer, who accused the BBC of ‘manipulation with a purpose’. It’s a pity Stringer’s sensible advice is usually about as welcome in his party as a diagnosis of tertiary syphilis. Which, given their reaction to many of his even more innocuous suggestions, some of them may in fact be suffering.
Still, the real tin foil hat award went to Manuela Perteghella of the Lib Dems, who made out that it was all a conspiracy from inside directed by Sir Robbie and designed to undermine the public’s trust. Even Nandy gently pushed back on that, in an attempt to reintroduce the MP for Stratford-upon-Avon back into reality. All of it was yet another example of how our political elites have learned absolutely nothing from the past decade, will continue to hector and blame the public and find it literally impossible to identify any problems with those who they think of as on ‘their’ side. With friends like these, the BBC really doesn’t need enemies.
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