Neutral between Trump and BBC?

The BBC is under attack from Donald Trump and his cheerleaders in the UK, who have seized upon a trivial error in the editing of Trump’s 6 January 2021 speech urging his supporters to march on the US Capitol and “fight like hell”. The BBC has acknowledged the error (splicing together two separate sections of the speech) and the corporation’s director general, together with its head of news, have resigned.

But this is not enough for Trump and his British supporters (led by Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage and their man on the BBC’s board, Sir Robbie Gibb), who make little secret of their desire to neuter and ultimately destroy the BBC, abolishing the licence fee and placing British broadcasting under the control of right-wing commercial outfits like GB News.

You would think, wouldn’t you, that Britain’s newspaper of “peace and socialism” would have no hesitation in defending the BBC against this attack? But the problem for the Morning Star and its political masters at the Communist Party of Britain, is that they too hate the BBC.

While the corporation’s right wing enemies have seized upon the editing of Trump’s speech to accuse it of not just disliking Mr Trump, but of a more general liberal-left “metropolitan” bias, the paper is convinced the bias lies in the opposite direction. For years the paper has been denouncing the BBC for (in the words of a 2016 book by Tom Mills, enthusiastically plugged by them) “overwhelmingly reflect[ing] the ideas and interests of elite groups and marginalis[ing] alternative and oppositional perspectives.”

Of course, there is rather more reality behind their critique than there is to the claims of Johnson and Farage. For all its superficial political neutrality, when the chips are down the BBC has always been on the side of the ruling class: during the general strike of 1926 Lord Reith kept the Labour Party and the TUC off the airwaves altogether and during the 1984-85 miners’ strike the BBC manipulated footage of the Orgreave confrontation to make it look as though the miners had attacked the police when in reality it was the other way round (25 years later the corporation apologised). To this day, its news outlets consistently follow the stories prioritised by the right-wing press.

But the present attack from the right is a blatant attack on the BBC’s willingness to report some facts embarrassing to power, and at least to give a hearing to liberal and left-of-centre opinion. Nick Robinson (no leftist; a former chair of the Young Tories) was surely right when he said, on the Today programme: “There is also a political campaign by people who want to destroy the organisation that you are currently listening to.”

You can always tell when the paper is embarrassed by its own “line”: it retreats into waffle. Having failed to even mention the issue for days after it was headline news elsewhere, they finally carried an editorial (11 November) that described the BBC as “both an organ of state and a time-served buttress of ruling class hegemony”.

“These are factors which outweigh every other consideration” (this from a publication that shamelessly supports the Chinese media).

Attack

The next day, the editorial noticed who is behind the attack (“Trump is leading attack on democracy — the left must defend it”) but, despite that headline, there was not even a critical defence of the BBC, just the claim that it “is not and never has been a friend of the left. It is an arm of the bourgeois state … [it] worked might and main to undermine Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of Labour and has most recently given broad support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza” (the Corbyn claim is, at best, debatable and the Gaza claim is arguably libellous).

Noting the failure of the Labour leadership to stand up to Trump’s attack, the editorial concluded: “The maintenance of democracy cannot be left to the decayed remnants of centrist politics. They are incapable of offering the lead required… it thus falls to the left, inside and outside Labour, to rally the forces to repel the threat to our freedom.”

But if everything else they say on the issue were true, why should we bother?