Few people know precisely how furious President Trump is at the BBC‘s butchering of the words he used on the day his supporters marched on the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
As readers will know by now, the corporation’s flagship current affairs show Panorama spliced together two phrases spoken that day by Trump – a full 54 minutes apart – to suggest disingenuously that he had deliberately incited violence.
Shortly after Panorama’s doctoring of Trump’s speech was made public, the President and I met at Mar–a–Lago in Florida.
‘Is this how you treat your closest ally?’ he asked me. And, frankly, it’s impossible not to sympathise with his exasperation.
The truth is that an institution set up by Lord Reith in 1922 to ‘inform, educate and entertain’ has moved light years away from that original mission statement.
A broadcaster that was once widely respected for unbiased reporting and wholesome family entertainment has become a byword for sleaze, hypocrisy, arrogance, anti–Semitism and worse.
For years, the flawed BBC has lurched from crisis to crisis, scandal to scandal. No sooner has Jimmy Savile been posthumously exposed as Britain’s most prolific sex offender than the BBC’s top newsreader Huw Edwards is revealed to be a paedophile.
Gary Lineker, until recently the corporation’s highest–paid star, equated the political response to illegal immigration to the politics of Nazi Germany – while the rap act Bob Vylan was allowed to turn the Glastonbury Festival into a carnival of anti–Semitism by chanting ‘Death, death to the IDF’, live on BBC TV.
The BBC is rotten to the core and its overhaul is long overdue, writes NIGEL FARAGE
In truth, the organisation is rotten to the core. And I believe that its overhaul is long overdue. In particular, the licence fee as we know it has to go – and for good.
Contrary to false rumours spread by my critics, Reform UK does not wish or intend to abolish the BBC in its entirety. We want to keep –and enhance – what’s good about the corporation. Its news reporting and the World Service are critically important to our national life – though a commitment to true impartiality must run through the newsroom, top to bottom.
But all the other areas the BBC currently covers, including drama, entertainment, sport and education, should be hived off and funded separately by subscriptions, advertising or a blend of both.
I’ve no objection to these channels keeping their BBC branding – but they must compete against other media organisations in the open market, and sink or swim on the basis of their creativity and inventiveness, not because they have a multi–billion–pound sugar daddy in the shape of the long–suffering licence–fee payer.
This would leave only the provision of news to be publicly funded. It’s important to remember that around a third of the cost of the BBC World Service is already covered by the foreign affairs budget – so there is a precedent for paying for the BBC by other means, including direct taxation.
Regarding the provision of news itself, we are yet to determine whether this would be best funded via subscription, adverts or general taxation. But one thing is certain, it would be offered at a tiny fraction of what the BBC currently costs us all. Most importantly, to justify its continued role in national life – and especially if it is to receive public funding – the BBC must act as a global beacon for British values and culture.
We the public, who pay for it, would expect nothing less.
That will require a fundamental change in the BBC’s outlook, and an end to the institutionalised Left–wing bias that is so evident in everything from its international news coverage to its unfunny comedy panel shows.
Director General of the BBC Sir Tim Davie stepped down after a report detailed how Panorama used spliced footage of Donald Trump’s Capitol Riots speech in 2021
Let us be frank: the licence fee is an appallingly regressive tax, the same to a billionaire as to a bankrupt. Those who do not stump up the £174.50 annual fee are liable to a fine – and anyone who fails to pay a fine imposed by a court faces being sent to jail.
It is a significantly under–reported fact that women – who are responsible for just 25 per cent of offences overall – make up no less than 74 per cent of those convicted of licence fee offences. This is a national scandal.
In government, the Conservatives were in thrall to the BBC establishment. Former Tory MP Nadine Dorries, now a proud member of Reform UK as well as a Daily Mail columnist, was determined to push through root and branch reform when she was Culture Secretary.
But when Nadine proposed a thorough review of the BBC and how it operates in the modern digital world –announcing that the renewal of the BBC’s Royal Charter in 2027 would be the last in its current form – the Tory Cabinet went bananas and tried to block it. Even Conservative backbenchers refused to countenance any tampering with the BBC.
Multiple recent scandals have shown that Nadine was right all along.
I can promise her and the British people that a Reform government will not be afraid to take on the cultural pillars of the old Left–liberal establishment – from the universities to the BBC. Even if Labour renews the BBC Charter in 2027, we will do all we can to change it.
Meanwhile, despite the clouds of scandal swirling around Broadcasting House, the BBC carries on as if nothing has changed or ever will. The Mail on Sunday has just revealed that this year’s prestigious Reith Lectures, named after the corporation’s founding father, will be delivered by a Dutch author called Rutger Bregman.
This charming intellectual has previously compared the electoral success of President Trump and even myself to the rise of fascism in the 1930s, apparently describing us – and remember, we are leading every national poll at the moment – as ‘a bit fashy’.
This, to borrow one of the BBC’s own self–congratulatory phrases, is what you pay your licence fee for.
Once upon a time, as some of us are old enough to remember, the BBC used to close each day’s broadcast with a recording of the National Anthem.
But now it is time to play a funeral dirge for what the BBC has become: an elitist monolith funded by the British public, which devotes itself to pouring scorn on our great country’s history, culture, sovereignty and democracy.
The BBC can have a future beyond 2027. But it should be as a national news broadcaster that serves the British people, rather than treating viewers with contempt – and over–taxing us for the privilege.
