20.11.2025
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Twilight of the Beeb
The current crisis of the BBC is the outcome of long-term transformation of the wider British establishment, and its total subordination to the USA, argues Paul Demarty
Given the amount of nonsense being spouted about the BBC by the right at the mome nt, it feels necessary to state this at the outset: the notorious splice of two parts of Donald Trump’s speech undertaken by Panorama, and repeated by Newsnight, was not in fact misleading.
The BBC is perfectly capable of lies and misinformation, but in this case it took footage of the American president inciting a coup attempt, and edited it to leave the impression that he, well, incited a coup attempt. If this is misleading editing, then editing as such is misleading. It is no undeserved favour to the BBC to note that this whole hysteria is spectacularly disingenuous, and typical of the whinging, cringing resentment of the deranged right.
Yet still it comes. It is remarkable how quickly every grievance, legitimate and petulant, has been piled onto what looks increasingly like the Beeb’s funeral pyre. It is not for nothing that leftwingers and Palestine sympathisers have been quick to point out the corporation’s well documented partiality towards Israel, after all - including Yassamine Mather in last week’s Weekly Worker.1
On the other hand, it really is crazy to find the right attacking the BBC for anti-Israel bias, but there you go. Representative is Stephen Pollard, former editor of the Jewish Chronicle, who took that paper in a decidedly Likudnik direction, now frothing in the Telegraph. He accuses the corporation’s defenders of talking about “great rightwing conspiracies” in order “to deflect from the other examples of bias … over BBC Arabic, over its coverage of the Gaza war, and over how deeply in thrall it has been to the Stonewall agenda on trans issues”. The underlying problem is the BBC’s willingness to bend the truth in the service of a perceived ‘greater good’. “It doesn’t matter if the facts are wrong. Israel is the villain, so, so long as it’s seen as such, all is well.”2
Stephen Pollard, of course, could never be accused of bending the truth to suit a wider narrative - and it would be out of order to note that, during his editorship, the JC notched up an impressive 14 separate adverse Press Complaints Commission/IPSO rulings and several substantial libel settlements. And the Telegraph - surely nobody in such an august publication could ever be caught in the act of making a misleading quotation (or pseudo-misleading quotation, as is the case with Trump’s speech).
Pollard may even believe it, for all I know - just as he may really believe that he is unsuccessful on the dating scene due to his pro-Israel views,3 and not because he is a puffy-faced, roughly-spherical, middle-aged man with a toxic streak of self-pity. Indeed, he is not completely wrong in this general sense. There is a determinate political content to the supposed ‘impartiality’ of the BBC. It is precisely in light of this content that the impact of this absolute nothingburger of an accusation is potentially so disastrous.
There is a certain common rightwing conception of these failures of ‘impartiality’. That is, that the BBC draws its membership from the same broad class of university-educated liberal elites as the wider cultural sphere, including other media outlets and of academia. Its output thus reflects the ideological prerogatives of this ‘class’ (for the critics, if not for Marxist theory, this is a social class) and is thus systematically biased against intrinsically conservative popular common sense.
Commercial pressure
What is the British Broadcasting Corporation? It has its particular historical and institutional eccentricities, of course: the pietistic moralism of founder John Reith shaped its early history, just as the successive stages of competition from commercial broadcasters have shaped its later history. Yet we might step further back - what is a corporation, in the BBC sense? It is an organisation chartered to undertake some activity by the British sovereign.
Of course, we do not mean to get into some Lyndon LaRouche-style conspiracy theory about the direct power of the British royal family. The meaning of this loyalty to the crown should be interpreted rather, as we have had cause to mention recently, as the army’s oath to serve the crown is interpreted: a loyalty to the continuity of the British state, considered as a long-term project, apart from the short-term political cycles at work.
The BBC was founded in the autumn years of British global hegemony, and thus espouses a certain attitude - that there is something distinctive about British statecraft that endures even after decolonisation. It is a cousin, perhaps, to the Commonwealth: an instrument of soft power, but also sometimes a liability, since it is possessed by the ghost of national glory.
Rightwing media tycoons - above all Rupert Murdoch - have always hated the BBC, considering it an outrage that it is insulated, relatively speaking, from commercial pressure. (That is a simplification, but let it go.) The unspoken part of this hatred is that such insulation clearly results in better output, at least compared to the commercial bourgeois media. It is quite nice, on the whole, to just be able to watch a television show, without being constantly bombarded with adverts for dodgy personal finance and gambling websites.
BBC News has its blind spots, to put things mildly, but it is - finger in the air - approximately 40% more truthful than the Telegraph; that is not because the latter is run by worse reactionaries, but because it is driven to cretinous sensationalism by the direct commercial pressures at work. I think often of an incident ably narrated by Peter Oborne at the time of his departure from that paper:
On 22 September [2014] Telegraph online ran a story about a woman with three breasts. One despairing executive told me that it was known this was false even before the story was published. I have no doubt it was published in order to generate online traffic, at which it may have succeeded. I am not saying that online traffic is unimportant, but over the long term, however, such episodes inflict incalculable damage on the reputation of the paper.4
In fact insulation from direct commercial pressure comes at a cost. Though funding for the BBC is hypothecated, theoretically insulating it from direct government interference, its charter is periodically up for renewal, and political appointments to the board of the BBC Trust are common - a matter dramatically highlighted by the role in the present scandal of Tory apparatchiks like Robbie Gibb and, indeed, Tim Davie. At the end of the day, the BBC is an apparatus of the state, no less a state broadcaster than the Soviet First Programme. Part of its utility to the state is the fig leaf of its independence, so it has enjoyed a certain level of protection from direct interference - but that has been leaking away for years.
Despite the fact that its main adversaries are the private Tory media (or Reform media, in the Telegraph’s case …), the present downward trajectory of the BBC arguably began in the last period of Labour government, when the corporation went to war with Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell over the ‘dodgy dossier’ promoting the invasion of Iraq. With the death of whistleblower David Kelly, that became enough of a scandal to lead to the Hutton inquiry, which resulted in a lamentable whitewash of the government position (no worse than one could expect from a judge who cut his teeth in Northern Ireland at the tail end of the Troubles).
Hutton whitewash
Though the Hutton whitewash became a scandal of its own, it proved - in the short term - a great opportunity for Blair and co to bring the BBC to heel. Director general Greg Dyke resigned; Andrew Gilligan, the Tory journalist whose reportage had caused all this drama, was cast into the private sector.
Since then, the corporation has become ever more risk-averse. Its approach to the tendentially more hostile Tory governments after 2010 was basically cringing and supine; perhaps Murdoch would have got his way and succeeded in getting the BBC dismembered to his great advantage, had his own business operations not triggered their own vast media-political scandal with the phone-hacking affair of 2011. This wariness has tended to bloat the managerial bureaucracy of the corporation - partly a matter of ever more intrusive editorial oversight, and partly a matter of keeping people on the payroll on good money, so they do not leave and denounce the BBC on the way out.
The tendency has thus been for the BBC to become less defensible in general over time. Its fear of its own shadow leads to violent bias in favour of the right - which, however, will never be enough for its beneficiaries. It is dependent on an esoteric form of regressive taxation - the TV licence fee - which is plainly unsustainable, as linear TV is steadily displaced by ad-hoc streaming; but it can ill afford to have the licence fee really come up for reconsideration when the BBC is surrounded by enemies.
The Iraq invasion was not merely a traumatic event for the BBC: the scale of opposition reflected a correct gut instinct on the part of the masses, yes, but also a profound split within the British establishment. One side - victorious in the end - prized the ‘special relationship’ with the United States above all else; the other still dreamed of pursuing some distinctive British policy, shaped perhaps by a certain residual pro-Arab sympathy in the deeper reaches of the foreign office. The BBC - an integral part of this wider establishment - was a place where such a fight could be had.
But now the fight is over: British submission to the US is entirely complete, as is obvious from the present government’s comically degrading toadyism towards Donald Trump, including in its response to the current BBC scandal. It is possible to ask, at this point, whether we even have an establishment to speak of. The natural party of government, the Tories, is on the ropes; the natural alternative party of government, Labour, is in a state of acute disarray. The threatening challenger - Reform UK - is for practical purposes a US media operation with a fractious political party tacked on.
This whole situation is perhaps trickier for the left than it first appears. We are obliged to denounce the attacks from the right, since the basic problem they have with the BBC is that it accurately described Donald Trump’s self-coup, and that it dared even to mention the mass deaths inflicted on Gaza by the Israeli state. Insofar as we are so obliged, we come in some sense to the defence of the BBC.
Yet we have something in common with the right. We both must conclude that the BBC, as representative of the British establishment as it actually exists, is largely obsolete. We both believe that this older British establishment, even were it possible to reconstruct, should remain safely in the dustbin of history.
We diverge largely when it comes to what must supplant the corporation, in the end. For the right, it is a matter of bringing things ‘up to date’ by ensuring that there is no popular media outlet available that cannot be directly bribed through advertising, or otherwise subordinated to American state interests. For us, it is a matter of creating media with real institutional heft outside of both British state interests and the market (and, behind the market, American state interests).
We continue to insist that the construction of such a media requires a mass workers’ party. That is the potential alternative institutional skeleton - a means of production and distribution, that is able to go places the bourgeois media never can.