For days now the BBC‘s many Left-wing friends and favourites have been flooding onto the airwaves to defend the corporation.
They have declared that it is absolutely not biased, and is a treasure of impartiality. All serious people, including the BBC’s own High Command, know perfectly well that this is not true.
Some of them have even explained why – its narrow, self-perpetuating recruiting base which instinctively repels and rejects conservatives.
And you will struggle to find anyone on the Right who has claimed in the last week that the organisation is truly impartial. If it were, then surely it would have been defended by both ends of the political spectrum.
This campaign has only underlined the sad truth, that despite getting £3.8billion each year from the public, the BBC gives far more respect to those who share its metropolitan prejudices than to those who don’t.
There has also been an attempt by BBC partisans to suggest that the whole nation should defend its national broadcaster against what they argue is interference in our affairs by President Trump.
Well, if such interference were in prospect, so we should.
But the BBC has handed Mr Trump its own head on a plate, by what all fair-minded people accept was a grossly misleading and indefensible editing of his January 2021 speech.
The lecture’s sponsors chose the Dutch academic Rutger Bregman (pictured) for a recent BBC Reith lecture
The BBC has handed Mr Trump its own head on a plate (stock image)
If Mr Trump is now taking revenge, it is because the BBC’s bias and lack of judgement placed it in the power of the White House. If that bias was in doubt, The Mail on Sunday can today reveal yet another instance of it.
The BBC’s Reith lectures do not always sparkle as they once did, in the days when giants of thought, music, science, literature or action such as Bertrand Russell, Robert Oppenheimer, Stephen Hawking, Richard Hoggart, Hilary Mantel, and Daniel Barenboim, were invited to deliver them.
But what, in 2025, can have possessed the lecture’s sponsors to choose the Dutch academic Rutger Bregman, 37, to follow in their footsteps?
Mr Bregman is not a figure of the Right. He is keen on open borders and on ‘universal basic income’ under which everybody, rich or poor, working or unemployed, would be paid a fixed sum every month.
He is much beloved by The Guardian newspaper. And it appears that, in tune with such views, he is also a stringent critic of Donald Trump.
Reports from the audience for the first lecture entitled A Time of Monsters (recorded but not yet transmitted) suggest Mr Bregman made some of the standard-issue Left-wing criticisms of the US President. Well and good.
We and the USA are free countries and attacks on those in power are very much allowed.
But two simple points arise. First, would the BBC have engaged a Reith lecturer who would defend Mr Trump? Will it ever do so? No, and no.
Second, given that it has just been caught out doctoring a report of one of the President’s speeches, to make it look bad, and will probably be sued by him for doing so, doesn’t this begin to look like a pattern?
It is for the BBC to decide how it handles this development.
But can this tottering giant be granted another Royal Charter at the end of 2027, without having to accept a far more explicit and stringent agreement on its duties to the paying public?
