The BBC’s Left Turn Has Endangered Its Own Existence

The British Broadcasting Corporation is a century-old anachronism—as many in the BBC freely admit. It is unique in being financed by a poll tax of £175 a year served on every household with a TV, whether they watch its output or not.

And, increasingly, they don’t, if they are under 35 or have conservative political views. Last year the BBC lost nearly £1 billion to the Great Switch-Off, as it has been called. But it still raised a tidy £3.8 billion, enough to finance a lot of “Trump Bad” programs, LGBTQ celebrations, and unfunny left-wing comedy shows.

Though it may lose a chunk of this if the American president, Donald Trump, is successful in suing the BBC for defamation over its misrepresentation of his Capitol speech on January 6. Unable to find a clip of the then-president actually calling for a riot, the flagship BBC current affairs show Panorama made one up by splicing two unrelated sentences together. It was the most disastrous edit in BBC history.

So how did this curious institution, whose independence is supposedly guaranteed by a royal charter renewed every 10 years, survive for nearly 100? How can the UK government compel people to pay for this state-sponsored option when there is a myriad of high-quality streaming services to choose from?

Well, in the past, people were prepared to pay the license fee because it seemed pretty decent value for the money. Back in the days of terrestrial broadcasting, many viewers, especially in the U.S., regarded the BBC as the best broadcasting service in the world. This was largely down to the absence of intrusive commercials and the presence of world-leading arts and science documentaries like Civilisation and The Ascent of Man in the ’60s and ’70s, presented by Kenneth Clark and Jacob Bronowski respectively. These programmes could never be made today because they were written and presented by middle-aged white men with humanist values. Such people are no longer valued by the BBC.

The corporation also justified itself, rightly, on its reputation formed during the Second World War for impartiality and objectivity in news and factual programs. I worked at the BBC as a political reporter and presenter for over 25 years; in my day, impartiality was almost a cult. The vast majority of BBC journalists even then were of the liberal left, myself included. But it was considered extremely bad form for this to be apparent in any programs.

The idea that it was the BBC’s job to privilege and promote certain political agendas was considered obviously flawed, not least because we realized it would be impossible to justify the license fee if the corporation excluded the views of the large number of conservative viewers and listeners.

So when did all this change? In my view, the decline and fall of the BBC began, not with its notorious Trump edit, but with its passion for climate change. More than a decade ago the BBC decided that this was an issue about which there should be no debate, no “two-sidesism”. The science of global warming was unarguable, so critics of climate change like the Conservative former chancellor, Nigel Lawson, or the popular botanist and broadcaster, David Bellamy, should not be allowed to air their views lest someone believe them. Climate change denial was, in the BBC view, equal in moral infamy to Holocaust denial.

This “no debate” principle spread rapidly through the corporation. LGBTQ people said there should be no debate over transgenderism because… well, just because. The BBC famously amplified the 100 genders fallacy in its children’s programs and showcased groups like Mermaids, which advocated sex change for minors. BBC news guidelines required journalists to refer to natal male sex offenders as women. Pronoun mandates spread like a disease across the corporation’s staff of 21,000. Doctor Who became an almost comic parody of bien-pensant BBC attitudes—Doctor DEI.

Then came Black Lives Matter. A man died in police custody in Minneapolis, and the UK media went slightly mad over race, slavery and anti-colonialism. Diversity and inclusion became the new religion, and heretics were vilified. One of the BBC’s favourite feminist comedians, Jo Brand, famously “joked” that the populist politician Nigel Farage should be pelted with “battery acid” instead of milkshakes.

But times change, and so does politics. The middle-aged white man the BBC loves to hate, Nigel Farage, is likely to be the UK’s next prime minister, according to opinion polls. A leaked report from an independent adviser on editorial standards, Michael Prescott, confirmed what had been obvious to many viewers: The BBC has been assiduously promoting minority beliefs like transgenderism and has essentially abandoned impartiality in its treatment of immigration, climate change, and conservative politicians.

So how could the BBC intelligentsia not realize that it was destroying any justification for the license fee? As critical friends of the BBC, like the former BBC diplomatic editor, Mark Urban, and the former BBC politics editor, Andrew Marr, have pointed out, a new generation of activist journalists have colonized the broadcaster. This was partly a result of two decades of DEI hiring policies and partly because nearly every graduate of an elite university in the UK is left-wing.

These new guardians regard journalism not as a job reporting news stories but as a vehicle to promote social justice, oppose climate catastrophe, and celebrate immigration and multiculturalism. There’s nothing wrong with having these views. But the BBC cannot survive by turning itself into the Guardian of the airwaves.

The BBC lost the plot by turning left just at the moment when the British people were turning right. It is very difficult to see how the BBC can now default to its original mission of impartiality. The gospel according to DEI is so deeply ingrained in the BBC culture that it would take a radical clearing out of key staff to get the corporation back on track.

The BBC’s director general, Tim Davie, and head of news, Deborah Turness, have indeed resigned because of editorial incompetence and the corporation’s misrepresentation of Trump. But that isn’t enough. Elite voices in and out of the BBC still insist that they are determined to defy what they see as a right-wing coup. They seem incapable of understanding that privileging liberal-left attitudes is not compatible with public service broadcasting. 

Even the UK’s Labour government is now seriously questioning the sustainability of the license fee. Donald Trump’s $5 billion legal action could be the last straw. “Go woke, go broke” may be the BBC’s epitaph.

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