The BBC: My Part In Its Downfall

The BBC has always been very Left-wing. But it didn’t used to be biased.

I should know because I was one of those identikit Left-wingers who worked at the BBC for 25 years. Everyone thought the same: Thatcher was mad, the poll tax was evil, immigration was a good thing, the rich should be taxed and nuclear weapons were immoral. These liberal-Left attitudes were shared by the vast majority of the people I worked with in the British Broadcasting Corporation. With a few exceptions.

I remember a quiet young man called Robbie Gibb who appeared in the BBC’s Millbank complex in Westminster in the 1990s when I was presenting BBC political programmes there. He was a Tory, so I was informed, as if he had some affliction which was unfortunate but which should be respected and not mocked.

And on the whole he was respected. The general view on the shop floor back then was that the BBC needed more political diversity in its own ranks. Though he did always appear just a little bit isolated. However, I can honestly say his views were much more respected on screen than off. We may have been Left-wing but we went to great lengths not to let it show.

I remember trying to persuade the late Enoch Powell to come on Westminster Live for nothing – he demanded a fee when it was not BBC practice to pay politicians. I didn’t agree with his views on race, nor did the producers of the programme, but we wanted his voice to be heard. The idea that someone who opposed immigration was not suitable to be broadcast was just not something anyone ever argued, to my knowledge.

You may say I’m being naïve here and perhaps I am. Of course our unconscious biases probably ended up being reflected in the kinds of issues that we showcased on news and current affairs. But this cultural bias in the BBC, a result of its recruitment of politically-literate humanities graduates, was counteracted by an almost religious observance of impartiality. It really was a kind of cult in the BBC then. Letting your views show on air was seen as just as much a violation of the BBC’s ‘mission to explain’, as the then BBC director general John Birt put it, but deeply unprofessional and uncool. At least that’s how I remember it. Others may have different recollections.

When Tony Blair was elected in 1997 everyone I worked with seemed relieved, glad, optimistic. Rejoice! The Tories were dead and buried. However, we all realised that we had to bend over backwards now to hold Labour to account over lobbying, spin, spending, defence, Europe and a whole range of issues. The idea that it was our job to amplify or validate Labour’s policies and prejudices would have seemed outrageous.

So when did this all change? Well I think I can just about date it to 2014 or so and the issue was climate change. For the first time the BBC said to its staff that this cult of impartiality should no longer apply. So no more platforming of critics of climate change like the former Tory Chancellor Nigel Lawson, the popular TV botanist David Bellamy, or indeed Piers Corbyn, the brother of the Left-wing Labour MP Jeremy Corbyn. The science was conclusive, said the BBC, declaring that there should be no ‘two sides-ism’ which might lead viewers to think that there was a legitimate argument against climate change.

The comparison was with Nazism. You would not give the fascist point of view in a debate nor would you platform a racist. Opposing climate change became ‘climate change denial’ – equivalent to Holocaust denial, which of course was illegal in Germany. That was the moment that the impartiality cult was dropped.

Now I agree that the scientific consensus is clear and that anthropogenic climate change is happening and that we are partly responsible for it. But the trouble with refusing to debate an issue is that it is no longer tested. It becomes a dogma. The whole crucial issue of what to do about climate change went by default. Whatever the popes of climate change said was automatically assumed to be true.

Oil and gas were simply evil and to be shunned, even though 75% of our energy is still derived from it. Cars were bad, flying wrong, central heating an infestation and industrial farming an affront to nature. This approach informed just about every BBC programme. As if in wartime, BBC programmes were all about how to do the right thing. How to rewild nature, install renewable energy, stop using chemicals, reduce car miles, use bicycles etc. Like supporting your nation in a war, going green was seen as a moral absolute to be promoted without question. Yet, the inconvenient truth, to paraphrase Al Gore, is that our society is inconceivable without energy and most of it still comes from carbon-based fuel and will do for many years to come.

The omertà on discussion led to the absurdity of the UK closing down the North Sea oil and gas industry, endangering tens of thousands of jobs, just so we could import the oil and gas we still need from abroad. The dogmatic rejection of ‘unnatural’ pesticides and herbicides ignored the reality that productive agriculture is impossible without them. The promotion of ‘clean energy’ ignored the fact that it isn’t actually all that clean and that constructing wind farms and the paraphernalia of renewable energy brings its own problems, not least unaffordable electricity bills which have left a third of the country in fuel poverty. Green is not always good.

The ‘no debate’ idea quickly spread from climate change to other issues. Transgender people insisted that there should be no debate about their existence any more than there should be debate about global warming. The BBC adopted this uncritically from around 2015. There is a famous discussion with Victoria Derbyshire and a group of four transgender advocates where Susie Green of Mermaids remarks that her own daughter told her “when she was four” that “God had made a mistake and she should have been a girl”. The academic and feminist, Germaine Greer, was summarily cancelled after she said that “just cutting off your dick doesn’t make you a woman”. The BBC installed an LGBTQ correspondent who became a kind of witch-finder general damning heresy against the transgender ideology, as the leaked report from the former BBC editorial adviser Michael Prescott exposed. Male sex offenders were referred to as women. Drag queens became ubiquitous. Gender transitioners were invariably celebrated for their ‘courage’. It took the Supreme Court and the Cass Review in 2024 to make the BBC question the gospel according to Stonewall.

Then of course we had Black Lives Matter and the UK media collectively took the knee after a black man died in police custody in Minneapolis. Militant demonstrators, who took to the streets during Covid lockdown, causing injuries to 27 police officers, were generally regarded as virtuous opponents of racism.

Donald Trump opposed climate change, critical race theory and transgender ideology so he was clearly an agent of the devil. Statements from Trump invariably included references to his ‘lack of evidence’ and ‘unfounded’ complaints. Many of his remarks were indeed outrageous and his claims unfounded. But so are the remarks of most politicians.

Trump became quarantined as a kind of moral infection. The objection to his policies became a kind of knee-jerk reaction to politicians of the Right like Nigel Farage who, along with the Daily Mail, became the butt of endless unfunny jokes on Have I Got News for You. The comedienne, Jo Brand, famously said that she wished the Reform leader had been pelted pelted “with battery acid” instead of milkshakes.

Comedy was the one area where the BBC felt it could be unashamedly Left-wing because if anyone criticised it they could be accused of lacking a sense of humour or being a supporter of the far Right. This became so ubiquitous on shows like the News Quiz, Dead Ringers and even the formerly hilarious Now Show that they became all but unlistenable even to people of the Left like me.

So we are where we are now, which is the worst crisis the BBC has faced over, yes, Donald Trump, race and transgenderism. The BBC has responded to criticism of editorial standards by its own adviser, Michael Prescott, by attacking the same Robbie Gibb, now a BBC governor, of leading a “Right-wing coup” in league with the Tory press. The Today programme turned into a party political broadcast on behalf of its right-thinking employees, thus inadvertently exposing the reality of political bias. It should have reported the crisis dispassionately and analysed the content of the Prescott Report into BBC bias rather than trying to deflect attention from it. The thin skein of BBC impartiality was finally ripped apart.

Perhaps it is impossible for the BBC to continue after this split. As critical friends like the former BBC politics presenter Andrew Marr and the former defence correspondent Mark Urban have pointed out, there is now a generation of activist-minded graduates running BBC programmes who think that they should, like broadcasters in wartime, be taking sides. They think the BBC should be promoting social justice, opposing environmental catastrophe and depriving anti-immigrant populists of the oxygen of publicity. Only they cannot do this and still be the BBC proper. Now that Reform is leading the opinion polls the BBC cannot exclude Nigel Farage or sack Robbie Gibb. The “coup” theory only points up the fact that there are many members of the BBC Board of Governors like Muriel Gray, formerly of The Tube, who could not exactly be called Tories.

The howls of anguish from the legions of BBC supporters on X only exposes the reality that the BBC now is biased as it always has been – but it has unfortunately stopped realising that it is.

Iain Macwhirter, a former BBC political correspondent and TV presenter, is a columnist for the Times and the author of Disunited Kingdom. This article was first published on his Substack page.