We need to talk about BBC “impartiality.”
You may have seen the news today that the BBC have forced Gary Lineker out of his role on Match of the Day, as a response to his tweet on Tuesday (March 7th). He was responding to the Conservative Parties new ‘Stop The Boats’ policy, which the government themselves admitted may in fact breach human rights laws, with the prime minister saying he was “up for the fight” predicted in British courts. Suella Braverman said “We want to ensure that people understand they shouldn’t make the journey in the first place because they will be removed if they do so.” The law, if it passes, will apply retrospectively with anyone arriving “illegally” from Tuesday at risk of deportation. In totally unrelated news, here is point number 8 from the 25 points of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party, published in Germany on February 24th 1920.
Anyway, back to Gary Lineker. He tweeted on Tuesday his opposition to this policy and language used by Suella Braverman. He said “There is no influx. We take far fewer refugees than other major European countries. This is just an immeasurably cruel policy directed at the most vulnerable in language that is not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s.” Now, I don’t know about you but it seems to me the only mistake Mr Lineker made was that he said the 30s, when actually this language was being used in Germany a full 19 years before War was declared.
As mentioned, Gary tweeted this. He didn’t say it on any official BBC platform, he didn’t say it on any national TV or radio. He said it on his own personal twitter account, and he never suggested his view represented that of the BBC. The vast majority of the responses to his statement have been incredibly positive, that is of course unless you are a member of the Conservative party, or one of their major donors. Let me introduce to you, Richard Sharp.
Richard Sharp was a Banker who worked for JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs, and he happened to be the boss at Goldman Sachs of someone you may know, goes by the name Rishi Sunak. He also acted as advisor to Boris Johnson during his tenure as Mayor of London, and as unpaid advisor to Rishi Sunak when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer. He is also a major donor to the Conservative Party, with at least £400,000 donated, and in January it was reported by the Sunday Times that he had helped then Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, secure an £800,000 loan. Richard Sharp is also Chairman of the BBC. A role he was announced for weeks after that previously mentioned loan was secured. He took over from Tim Davie - the current Director General of the BBC, and a man who was deputy chairman of the Hammersmith and Fulham Conservative party in the 1990s.
So, Gary Lineker has been made to step down from his presenting role at the BBC for breaching “impartiality” rules, and he will remain suspended until he and the BBC can come to an “agreement” about his social media use. To be clear: A man used his fundamental right to free speech, to criticise his government, and has now been suspended from work at a company where the two biggest powers are directly connected to that government, and he cannot come back to work until he changes how he speaks about that government publicly.
Impartiality. Defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as not supporting one person or group more than another synonym neutral, unbiased. Now, I could get into the discussion about how impartiality when it comes to matters of politics is an oxymoron, because when one group is actively oppressing and denying people basic human rights, saying nothing enables it to continue and therefore puts you on the side of the oppressor. I could do that, but I just wrote a piece about how everything is political so I won’t repeat myself. And also, it’s not needed. I don’t need to dig deep to explain the issue, because if that’s the definition the BBC are working from, they seem to have a real interesting interpretation of what that means. Because they didn’t have a problem when Alan Sugar tweeted these:
And they didn’t have a problem when Gary himself tweeted this after the 2019 election.
Remember Tim Davie, who I mentioned earlier? Well, in October 2020, he set out new guidelines for BBC staff, stating that they should avoid expressing their personal views on current issues of political controversy (which he called 'virtue signalling') on their own private social media accounts in what he said was a move to reduce perceived bias in the BBC. He also said this would include a ban on news reporters taking part in "public demonstrations or gatherings about controversial issues". Davie later said that journalists could attend events such as Pride marches if they were "celebratory" and not "taking a stand on politicised or contested issues.” He also issued a ban on presenters or people appearing on BBC programming from wearing pins or badges in support of the Black Lives Matter movement. The claim, of course, was that they were political and broke impartiality rules.
Interestingly though, they are absolutely fine with presenters and people appearing on BBC programming wearing a poppy badge in November. In fact, I remember there was uproar in 2015 when Strictly Come Dancing professional Tristan McManus, who is from Bray in Ireland, appeared on the show without one. Nevermind that the wearing of the poppy is overt support for the military - one of the key political divides, and something more traditionally supported by those on the right of the political spectrum.
The other news from the BBC today is that an episode from the upcoming Wild Isles series, the last that will feature Sir David Attenborough on location, will not be broadcast out of fear of sparking rightwing backlash.
So, you can’t tweet criticism of our conservative government, but you can praise them. You can’t wear a badge that is in any way political unless the politics of it is typically more conservative. You can make factual television provided the facts won’t upset conservatives. Does that sound like impartiality to you?
But the core issues here are twofold. Number one, it is absolutely farcical to suggest an organisation that is headed by a major donor to the Conservative Party, and a man who ran as a Conservative councillor, and spent much of the 90s actively involved in Conservative politics, is in any way, shape or form impartial. In fact, it’s about as far from impartial as you could be without appointing a sitting MP to the role of Director General.
Number two, and this is perhaps the one we should be most concerned about. It is insidious for any organisation to effectively tell it’s employees “you can either work with us, and keep your mouth shut, or you can speak but not work.” That is not impartiality, that is censorship, and when you censor people’s ability to speak, you enable people to oppress. As Edmund Burke once said “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”