For the Health of the Country, the BBC Must Be Defunded

The TV licence burdens hard-pressed households struggling to meet inflated energy, food and council tax bills with a compulsory charge of £180 – a charge, especially in the current economic climate, that needs to be cogently justified and widely supported. In addition, the white paper outlining the terms of the Royal Charter’s renewal is due to be published this year, giving the need to justify the statutory levy even greater urgency.

Those who support the tax – usually but not always Leftists – claim that the cash generated pays for impartial and trusted news coverage, cultural enrichment and the extension of British influence abroad – claims that are of course utter hogwash. Once more, the fact that some Conservative panjandrums make similar assertions – giving cover to an organisation saturated with far-Left groupthink – reveals why the party did nothing remotely conservative during 14 wasted years in office.

Let’s begin with the BBC’s feted and entirely illusory impartiality. In a recent debate hosted by the Spectator magazine on whether we should abolish the licence fee and defund the BBC, Charles Moore, the Daily Telegraph columnist and official biographer of Margaret Thatcher, rightly argued that we should, stressing the loss of trust incurred by its partiality on a whole host of subjects as the primary reason. The licence fee can only be justified if the BBC’s output is trusted, he made clear, and it can only be trusted if its output is impartial.

Moore went on to give examples of Auntie’s unconscionable ideological biases. It is pro-immigration, pro-Gaza, anti-Israel, anti-Brexit and displays an almost rabid hostility to Nigel Farage; its Climate Editor Justin Rowlatt has one misanthropic message when it comes to climate change, as does ubiquitous English naturalist Chris Packham. Moore lamented the fact that we know what Jeremy Bowen, Lyse Doucet and John Simpson think about Gaza when, as a national broadcaster supposedly committed to objective reporting, we should not. He outlined a litany of prejudice and an abject failure to uphold its own impartiality rules.

Jeremy Bowen deserves a special mention here. In a 2024 report into the BBC’s coverage of the conflict in Gaza, 16 pages were dedicated to Bowen’s inaccuracy and unrelenting anti-Israel vitriol. According to the Asserson report’s analysis of his BBC podcast, The Conflict: Israel–Gaza, co-hosted with Lyse Doucet, 90% of its output consisted of anti-Israel bias. And let’s not forget his breathtakingly arrogant shrug after discovering that the al-Ahli hospital blast was not the fault of the blood-thirsty Jews – as he erroneously and recklessly claimed – but the fault of a stray rocket fired by a terrorist organisation – the same terrorist organisation that he unquestioningly parrots when reeling off Palestinian casualty figures. Bowen is indeed an incurious propagandist, a malignant charlatan as uninterested in truth as he is in the antisemitic hatred fomented by his lies. He has a lot to answer for.

As do many of his BBC colleagues. The Asserson Report “identified more than 1,500 breaches of the corporation’s own editorial guidelines, including on impartiality and accuracy, during the first four months alone of the Israel-Hamas War”. Once more, the broadcaster was forced to pull a 2025 documentary, Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone, after it came to light that the programme’s narrator was the son of a Hamas official. In the recent Spectator debate, Alison Pearson, arguing alongside Charles Moore, went as far as to say that the BBC is institutionally antisemitic. She cited the uncontested and fanciful claim made by Tom Fletcher, the UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, that, if the Israeli blockade were not lifted, 14,000 Palestinian babies would die within the next 48 hours. This was in May last year and, needless to say, Fletcher’s warning hasn’t hitherto materialised, leading him to issue, not quite an apology, but an admission that he should have been more precise with his words. It was a 21st-century blood libel broadcast, completely unchallenged, by the BBC. In the same month, two Jews were shot dead in New York. One can only wonder if the BBC’s lies are fanning the flames of antisemitic violence around the world.

Yet the BBC’s bias goes way beyond the confines of the Gaza conflict. Last year, Michael Prescott exposed Auntie’s flagrant propensity to breach its own impartiality rules regarding Donald Trump. In a leaked internal memo, the national broadcaster’s former standards adviser revealed Panorama’s manipulation of Trump’s January 2021 speech in Washington DC. By splicing together two completely separate, unrelated parts of his address, the editor made it look like he was overtly fomenting insurrection. Both the director general, Tim Davie, and head of news, Deborah Turness, were forced to resign over the matter.

But, quite frankly, they could have resigned over any number of the other failures highlighted in the 19-page memorandum. For example, according to Prescott, the BBC’s Arabic service is riddled with anti-Israel coverage, transgender stories display a lack of balance and the broadcaster’s historical content is characterised by “distorted narratives” about British colonialism and slavery. Even Andrew Marr admits a liberal bias – and he’s a liberal who worked at Broadcasting House for many years.

The evidence is incontrovertible. Indeed, during the Spectator debate, John Sopel, arguing against defunding the organisation he did so much to damage, didn’t even attempt to challenge his opponents’ accusations of institutional bias.

Michael Gove, his tokenistic conservative sidekick – chosen, I’m sure, to provide a veneer of bipartisan support for the organisation – launched a confusing and more than a little contradictory defence. On the one hand, he conceded the existence of a liberal-Left bias, even in the 1960s when Hugh Greene, the then Director-General, adorned his office with a grotesque caricature of Mary Whitehouse, as if this somehow precluded the demand for more objective standards today. On the other, he strongly defended the institution, professing the assiduous impartiality of the “overwhelming” majority of its journalists. He stated that his opponents had only cited a handful of bad apples, conveniently ignoring the Asserson report and the Prescott memo, as well as the wealth of evidence that included his previous concession and the fact that he himself, unaware of the irony, could only think of one impartial BBC journalist, Chris Mason. It was a futile defence mired in contradiction.

Another, marginally more convincing argument rests on the assertion that the BBC enriches the cultural fabric of the nation and extends Britain’s global reach. John Sopel believes defunding the organisation would be an act of cultural vandalism equivalent to the Taliban’s destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan or the Islamic State’s iconoclastic extirpation of the ruins of Palmyra. Wow! High praise indeed. Apparently, the BBC is as culturally significant as the classical remains of an ancient Middle Eastern civilisation. Okay, as Michael Gove posits, the BBC does fund five orchestras, support high art and culture and provide excellent coverage of state occasions, like the Coronation and the Queen’s funeral. But equivalent to the UNESCO World Heritage site of Palmyra? That’s hubristic nonsense.

As is its fabled global reputation. It may have a Persian Service, an Arabic Service, it may even have a permanent seat in the White House briefing room. But that’s a historic quirk. The US President has launched legal proceedings against it for deliberate misrepresentation and many diasporic Iranians refer to its Persian Service as Ayatollah BBC. Its lack of impartiality has obliterated its global reputation. It is a mouthpiece for the West’s enemies, conspiring to erode rather than extend British influence around the world. Sorry, but the Symphony Orchestra isn’t worth the candle.

The BBC is rotten to the core, responsible for stirring up antisemitism, anti-Westernism and besmirching Britain’s global reputation. John Sopel’s claim that the abolition of the licence fee would be an act of cultural vandalism misses the point. The BBC has already been vandalised from within, by Leftists like Mr Sopel, and it’s now in the process of vandalising the nation it’s obligated to represent and strengthen. Let’s put it out of its misery.

This piece first appeared on Joe Baron’s Substack, which you can subscribe to here.