It's time we gave the BBC a dose of their own cancel culture

I have worked with pretty much every major media organisation in the world, including those entirely controlled by despotic regimes, and by far the most biased and dishonest in dealing with me as a conservative has been the BBC.

This article was published in Bournbrook’s October 2020 print issue.

In 2015, before cancel culture was as en-vogue as it is today, I experienced it in full force. The brunt of that force was delivered by the BBC, our nation's supposed unbiased purveyor of objective news, existent solely due to our compulsory taxation in its support.

A few days prior to the 2015 general election, we at the Bow Group published a report calling for conservative voters to vote for Ukip in 12 identified seats where the Conservative Party was unlikely to win, or had a candidate unlikely to support Brexit. Today this would be an uncontroversial position, but at the time Conservative Central Campaign HQ (CCHQ) considered it worthy of a political assassination.

For context, in 2011 Harry Cole (now the political editor of The Sun but at the time at The Spectator), wrote a piece suggesting the Bow Group was bankrupt. It was false and The Spectator was forced to remove it; they have all since borne a grudge. In 2015 the host of the BBC's Daily Politics show was The Spectator Chairman Andrew Neil, and Mr Cole's then girlfriend Carrie Symonds (before she moved on to pastures Prime Ministerial) was the head of Broadcast media at CCHQ.

The BBC invited me onto the Daily Politics show to discuss our call for conservatives to vote Ukip in 12 seats. Instead of asking me why the Bow Group was breaking from our general tradition of supporting the Conservative Party in totality, Mr Neil had taken his instructions direct from Cameron's CCHQ and attempted to rabidly suggest I had lied about being President of the Conservative Party’s foreign arm in Madrid, though I was, and used this to discredit me as a liar.

While this perfectly describes the incestuous and skullduggerous nature of a Westminster often obscure to the public, it also describes the BBC's complicity in it, and how it has been allowed in recent decades to become an institution more often used to push the political agendas of the liberal Westminster establishment, rather than objective unbiased reporting of news events.

Every charge made against me by the BBC was false and manufactured in the cause of the similarly liberal metropolitan CCHQ bumping me off. The aftermath of these dark arts became the fuel for the Tatler Tory scandal which tore CCHQ to its foundations, but even when this was completely exposed the BBC still refused to apologise or accept any responsibility for their part.

I have worked with pretty much every major media organisation in the world, including those entirely controlled by despotic regimes, and by far the most biased and dishonest in dealing with me as a conservative has been the BBC.

If I was in the US I could switch it off and refuse to appear on their programming, but what sticks in the craw most is that we in Britain are forced to fund it via the near-compulsory taxation of a 'TV licence'. I am paying someone to take to the airwaves and at best insult me and my conservative colleagues, and at worst engage in conspiracies designed to eliminate me from public life.

This has now been the experience of countless public conservatives, most recently Dr David Starkey and Darren Grimes, upon whom the BBC again put forward the inappropriate critical opinion of their biased staff, rather than objective balance. In September 2020, I was able to draw to the attention of 400,000 people on Twitter that Frankie Boyle's BBC show was giving a platform to those who deadpan call for the genocide of white people. In reaction to the outrage caused by the exposure, not only did the BBC refuse to apologise or denounce blatant racism, they have proceeded to broadcast the perpetrator Sophie Duker every week since.

They operate with the arrogance of an organisation that is totally disinterested in accountability; that thinks it is above any law, and won't even admit wrongdoing when the evidence is overwhelming.

The BBC often cites criticism they receive from left and right alike as evidence that they are balanced. Whilst the BBC is far softer on the left than the right, they were never quite pro-Corbyn. They operate with a metropolitan liberal bias, and it permeates every facet of their broadcasting from drama, to comedy, to news. It is exceedingly rare now that anyone is even allowed to appear on the BBC that is not of liberal mind.

This clear bias and consistent abuse of their role has rightly led to the recent and sharp rise of the Defund the BBC campaign. The aims of the campaign are noble, but the problem with its objective to simply remove the licence fee is that doing so would gift one of the world's largest media organisations to the liberal left for free, creating overnight oligarchs. The BBC is the product of a hundred years of public taxation. We own it, and that reality should be reflected in our power to decide its fate.

The BBC problem won't be solved by simply replacing the Chairman or Director General, nor by simply removing the licence fee. After the compulsory licence fee is abolished we either need a process to democratise it and place the fee payers in charge, or it needs to be broken up and sold off.

The notion also that the proposed GB News will solve the problem of bias and imbalance in British broadcast media as a whole is naive in extremis. Rather than a genuine voice of the conservative movement, it will be yet another neo-liberal outlet inherent with all of the same Westminster establishment incest mentioned above. But even if it wanted to be a genuinely conservative outlet, it couldn't because of stringent UK broadcast media laws requiring all output to be unbiased. Of course this has allowed almost all outlets to operate with an unchecked liberal bias, but you can be sure that, as with the Darren Grimes case, any conservative outlet would be held to the letter of the law whilst others are not.

I won't get an apology from the BBC, and nor will the millions of licence fee payers it takes for granted and plays for fools. I will however play my part in their abolition, and I encourage everyone else to do the same. The time has come to teach the BBC that cancel culture can come home to roost.