From the river to the sea, time to ditch the BBC

Surely, this is it. Surely, after decades of scandal, bias and provocations, the shameless BBC has run out of road. A week ago, the focus was on the corporation’s refusal to call people who murder babies terrorists; since then, it has reached new lows in political propaganda and junk journalism. The BBC is a stranger to truth and accountability and a grave embarrassment to Britain. It is high time it was broken up and its salvageable elements sold off.

Since the corporation’s first, amoral response to the massacre of Israelis more than a week ago, it has raised its game to become a serious contender for the Pravda/Isvestia award for malevolent, but pathetically transparent, propaganda of the 1950s Soviet “Record tractor production in the Caucasus” school. The Arabic department of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis has identified six BBC journalists and one affiliated freelancer as broadcasting anti-Israel bias. 

BBC News Arabic reporters on social media endorsed comments lauding Hamas as freedom fighters and describing the massacre of Israelis as a “morning of hope”. Does that sound like an acceptable view by the employees of an organisation holding a royal charter, or, indeed, by any moral human being?

One senior correspondent tweeted: “Israel’s prestige is crying in the corner.” Mahmoud Sheleib, a senior BBC News broadcast journalist, joked about a woman whose grandmother was abducted by Hamas receiving an “inheritance”. BBC reporters on social media also described kidnapped Israelis as having been “arrested”. 

Between September last year and June this year, the BBC admitted that its Arabic service on six occasions wrongfully omitted from its reports the practice of targeting civilians in Israel. The committee denounced the BBC’s bias in stern terms: “The ‘dual-narrative’ tactic, i.e. using speculations and half-truths to build an ‘alternative perspective’ that would discredit well-corroborated stories from Israel, is regrettably not new to BBC Arabic either.”

Most insensitively and obscenely, BBC Arabic produced a programme suggesting that the massacre at the Kfar Aza kibbutz did not actually happen. Its headline read: “Hamas rejects accusations that its gunmen carried out atrocities in the Israeli Kfar Aza village.” Oh well, that’s it, then. Far be it from the BBC to question any claim by the honourable gentlemen of Hamas. The programme even emphasised that Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s Middle East editor, was simply repeating what he had been told by Israeli forces at the site.

It’s funny, when you think of how many times the term “Holocaust denier” has been used on the BBC to discredit individuals of right-wing opinions, fairly or unfairly. Did the BBC’s “journalists” not have the basic intellect to ask themselves, if the massacre did not happen, why so many Israeli families are heartbrokenly mourning their murdered families, including babies? Are they play-acting? Is it all a hoax to discredit decent Hamas practitioners of genocide? And how must the many bereaved families in Israel regard the BBC – and, by extension, Britain – for trivialising their grief and the worst mass murder of Jews since 1945?

But, as it transpired, those were just the nursery slopes of BBC bias. When a rocket killed Palestinians in a Gaza hospital, how did the BBC team react? Did they take into consideration the complexity of the security situation, the possibility of a false-flag episode, the initial absence of reliable information? No. They opted, as a knee-jerk response, to blame Israel. 

Jon Donnison told viewers of BBC News: “The Israeli military has been contacted for comment and they say they are investigating. But it is hard to see what else this could be really, given the size of the explosion, other than an Israeli air strike or several air strikes, because when we’ve seen rockets fired out of Gaza we’ve never seen explosions of that scale.”

The BBC is not only biased, but incompetent. American and other intelligence analysts have now credibly claimed that the hospital was destroyed by a badly controlled rocket fired not by Hamas, but by Islamic Jihad. Why was the relevant desk at the BBC not aware of that possibility and why had it not done its basic homework by acquainting itself, via open-source intelligence, including defence think tanks and published situation papers, with the ordnance currently in the possession of such groups as Islamic Jihad?

The BBC would rather opine than inform itself. This is not a new situation: the corporation has been rotten to the core for decades. An illuminating moment came on 2 March, 2005 when James Naughtie, bookies’ favourite for the Nobel Prize for Sanctimony, memorably asked on the Today programme: “If we [sic] win the election, does Gordon Brown remain Chancellor?” That Freudian slip exposed the systemic rot at the BBC to even the most deluded members of the public.

As pressure over partisan reporting mounted, the following year the corporation hosted an in-house navel-gazing seminar to discuss whether the BBC was biased. Those attending cheerfully concluded that it was, but the bias was to the left, so that was all right. Andrew Marr summed up the gathering’s conclusions that the corporation “is not impartial or neutral. It’s a publicly funded, urban organisation with an abnormally large number of young people, ethnic minorities and gay people. It has a liberal bias, not so much a party political bias. It is better expressed as a cultural liberal bias.”

Clearly, there was no need for action, for drafting in a few conservatives for balance, or anything disturbing like that. A public service broadcaster with a royal charter was not impartial or neutral, but so what? Move on, please, nothing to see here. Yet, when it came to defending its unjustifiable revenue stream from the egregious licence fee, this champion of liberalism was anything but. Between 1995 and 2018, a total of 2,203 people were sent to prison for non-payment of the licence fee.

Why should anyone pay £159 annually to an organisation whose tedious and mendacious programmes they do not want to watch? Why should the BBC act as gatekeeper to more than 480 more popular television channels, parasitically profiting from their success? This exaction is beyond intolerable. Like many statist impositions, it is only tolerated out of habit, as a familiar part of the landscape. It is time to remove that blight from the national horizon.

It can confidently be predicted that the fainéant Tory government will do nothing – its failure to abolish the licence fee during thirteen years in government says everything about its irrelevance. Apparently, ministers are “looking at” ending the link between the licence fee and the Consumer Prices Index (CPI) – Hallelujah! Could this conceivably save single mothers £5 a year? There is talk, too, of moving to a different funding model after the BBC charter runs out in 2027.

This Tory government will have run out long before the charter, one of the many reasons being its elitist Stockholm Syndrome complicity with abuses such as the licence fee. The fee should have been abolished in 2017, the charter scrapped by now and the surviving flotsam and jetsam of the corporation left to fend for itself. For the BBC fat cats in James Savile House, Portland Place the living is easy, at licence payers’ expense.

Tim Davie, BBC director general, is paid £525,000 (3,302 licence fees) to preside over this national disgrace. No doubt the corporation considers it an honour for the 3,302 helots to support him. The only way in which this injustice will be righted is if the British public decides collectively to stop paying this atrocious impost. If ever there was an appropriate moment for this to happen, it is now. Who would be jailed, if millions withheld payment, especially with the government proposing to end custodial sentences of less than a year, due to its culpable inability to house prisoners?

The BBC is a grave embarrassment to Britain. Aunty is now repulsive in every aspect. It is no coincidence that, as early as the 1940s, George Orwell named Room 101 in the Ministry of Truth after his office at the BBC. The corporation has become a reflection of the dystopian society it has helped to create. Recent events have exposed the squalor of present-day Britain.

Up against the Cenotaph, a platform was erected from which the kind of hate once bawled at Nuremberg was amplified, a few feet away from the monument to our wartime heroes, many of them Jewish, who died to defeat that grotesque movement. The many sarcastic videos online labelling the scenes of the anti-Semitic rabble “This is Britain” expressed a mounting revulsion.

Britain has lost its voice: it is represented to the world as a hate-filled hellhole. Support for Hamas is blatant. The young women leading the inane primary school playground chants clearly had no empathy with the women raped and murdered in Israel. The default position of these closed minds is that the atrocities did not happen. The younger generation is shown, in the latest poll, to be anti-Israel. For those who believe there are more than 100 genders, such gullibility is natural. 

Today, 14 per cent of Britain’s population is foreign-born, but still immigration is increased: how many future jihadists among them are flooding in? Recent street scenes are not reassuring. Labour has had to hold crisis talks as the Corbynista wing insists on a shift to an anti-Israeli stance, with 31 Labour-held constituencies controlled by the Muslim vote. All the hysteria about “Islamophobia” has facilitated this culture of hate that is poisoning Britain, exempting its promoters from contradiction or denunciation.

It has been fostered most strongly by our supposedly impartial, royal chartered “public service broadcaster”. A free-market society does not need a state broadcaster, the epitome of an authoritarian regime.

The BBC is doomed. Its American counterpart, the Washington Post, is cutting 240 jobs, as it is estimated to lose five million subscribers and $100m this year alone. Pluck the BBC off the licence payers’ teat and it will wither in the hostile environment of competitive, online news access and comment, like the dinosaur that it is. From the river to the sea, time to ditch the BBC.

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