How BBC's double standards are laid bare by Palestine and far-right protests

WHOSE voices get carried on the BBC’s airwaves? 

For decades, the BBC has traded on its reputation as the bastion of impartiality. But impartiality loses meaning when the corporation uncritically echoes far-right talking points, as it has done this week.

There will be those who argue in the BBC’s favour. No doubt the BBC itself – if it ever addresses such incidents – will say something like: “The host was playing devil’s advocate. They were just presenting the opposing view. It is their job to provide balance.”

There are some pretty glaring flaws in that argument. As an example, let’s look at the two major protest movements which have been making headlines this summer.

First, the asylum hotel demonstrations. A focal issue for the far right, these protests have centred around claims that asylum seekers in Home Office accommodation are living it up, getting rights and benefits that UK taxpayers do not.

Whether there is any truth to these claims (there generally is not) has proven immaterial to the BBC, which has parroted the protesters’ lines across radio and television, putting them to politicians to respond as if they are "legitimate concerns”.

In one particularly egregious example The National reported last week, BBC host Gary Robertson used the far right’s favoured term “indigenous population” and asked an SNP MP if demonstrators had a “point” that asylum seekers are living “in the lap of luxury”.

Julian Petley, a journalist and media professor at Brunel University, said the phrasing used by the BBC host was a “real worry”.

“What do they mean by indigenous?” he asked. “It's a very dangerous word to use, but it's perfectly obvious that what Reform UK is up to is trying to divide the population into in-groups and out-groups.

“The whole thing is a labelling phenomenon, and the BBC should be really, really, careful in the language it uses.”

Regardless of phrasing, the BBC chose to put the protesters’ views forward. OK.

Let’s now look at the second, much larger protest movement that has been sweeping the UK this summer: the pro-Palestine demonstrations.

Across these protests, there has been a common refrain: Israel is committing genocide and the UK Government, through inaction or worse, is complicit.

Pro-Palestine protesters take part in a demonstration outside the gates of Downing Street in July (Image: James Manning/PA) If the BBC was acting fairly, we should have had a summer of presenters asking Labour ministers: “Protesters say you are complicit in genocide in Palestine. Do they have a point?”

I have not once heard a question like that posed to a single MP, let alone a member of government. But as soon as the far right started spouting nonsense, the BBC felt a need to put it on the airwaves.

Why? If the only criteria for a statement to become a BBC talking point is that there are protesters saying it, why is it only the far-right statements that make the grade?

And there is another crucial difference here. The accusations of genocide against Israel, and complicity against the UK, are backed up by some of the world’s foremost experts on the issue. 

Amnesty International, for one, has said the Labour Government’s “disregard for its legal obligations to prevent genocide had contributed to Israel’s impunity and risked British complicity in serious crimes against international law”.

Through The National’s refugee series last week, we heard from a wealth of experts and former asylum seekers about the reality of the Home Office system. Not once did we hear any even remotely credible claims that asylum seekers trapped in hotels are living in the “lap of luxury”.

On balance, it appears that the BBC is more willing to amplify the lies of the far right than it is the reasoned legal opinion of an internationally renowned charity.

There is also a double standard elsewhere. 

Petley pointed to Rylan Clark’s controversial political rant on ITV’s This Morning on Wednesday. 

Echoing the same far-right talking points as Nigel Farage, Clark claimed that asylum seekers arriving in the UK were told: “Here’s the iPad. Here’s the NHS in reception of your hotel. Here’s three meals a day. Here’s a games room in the hotel. Have a lovely time and welcome.”

Rylan Clark's right-wing outburst was ignored by the BBC in a way that left-wing comments are notPetley said: “He was just sitting there spouting pure Reform lines, and there were three people sitting around the table all just kind of nodding as he went on and on and on.

“Well, hang on a minute. Gary Lineker gets fired for saying things on tweets, and here's this guy just vomiting up the Reform line round this table with the nodding donkeys.”

Clark has his own BBC Radio show every Saturday. But there has not been so much as a peep from the broadcaster, even when he was forced to post on Instagram defending them.

The point is clear: The BBC will seemingly tolerate far-right rhetoric in a way it simply would not from the left.

Petley said that, having reported on press “misreporting and misrepresentation” for 45 years, the situation in the UK was now “certainly more extreme and more imminent”.

“At least on one level,” the journalism expert said, “[the BBC] is being pulled along in the slipstream of the right-wing press.”

“I think that the BBC is terrified, actually, that if it doesn't follow up these stories, then the right-wing press will turn on them and say, ‘look, we've been writing these stories and the BBC is so left-wing it won't publish them’.

“The BBC is just like the Labour Party, in my view, in being scared by the right-wing press.”

Unless the broadcaster can find a definition of balance that is not just “what about what the far right has to say”, we will all be worse off.