When the BBC aired a doctored video of Donald Trump appearing to directly encourage violence during the ‘January 6’ Capitol riot of 2021, it was aiming to influence the 2024 US election.
This is par for the course. The BBC has always been the propaganda arm of the British state, which has never had any qualms about riding roughshod over democracy.
The BBC are liars
In the 1940s, the BBC lied about the extent of anti-colonial sentiment in India to justify British rule. And then, in the 1950s, it whitewashed British atrocities in Kenya.
In the 1970s, the BBC explicitly ramped up its pro-Tory bias in the face of industrial unrest, reaching a pinnacle in the 1980s, when it doctored footage of the Miners’ Strike to cover up police violence.
In the 2000s, the BBC was weaponised by the ruling class to whip up support for wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
And in the 2010s, it repeatedly and systematically attacked Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader and urged support for the Tories, including editing in fake applause for Boris Johnson’s speeches during the 2019 general election.
The BBC has always been a consistently reliable prop for the British ruling class. This is what culture secretary Lisa Nandy means when she says the BBC is a “national institution” and a “vital” part of “our national story and our democracy”. For this, you can safely read “a vital institution for maintaining the rule of the British establishment”.
Nancy even went as far to label the BBC’s World Service as “a light on the hill for people in places of darkness”!
We can only assume that those “places of darkness” are the countries plundered, exploited, and bombed by British and western imperialism – all crimes which this proverbial “light on the hill” continues to cover up and defend.
Like the majority of their counterparts in the USA, the British ruling class saw Trump as a threat to the stability of their system. So – true to form, and like any good state institution in a bourgeois democracy – the BBC acted to mitigate that threat.
A hidden war
So far, so good. That Trump documentary was just a normal day in the office for BBC executives. But unusually, this time the lies have cost the jobs of the Director-General Tim Davie and the Head of News Debroah Turness. So what’s going on?
Partly, it’s because the target of their lies this time wasn’t working class people or Britain’s colonial subjects. Instead, it’s the notoriously litigious man who won election to the US presidency.
The British ruling class didn’t want Trump. But now that they’ve got him, they have to suck up to him. Without US imperialism Britain is nothing, so they’ve mobilised all arms of the state apparatus to appease Trump, from the Prime Minister to the monarchy.
Now it’s the turn of the BBC to pay tribute, with the heads of two of its chief executives, and possibly some cash to throw into the bargain.
But that’s only one part of the story. The source of this scandal was not Donald Trump, who has just jumped on the bandwagon like the opportunist he is. It was instead a leaked memo from within the BBC accusing the corporation of bias, and giving the Trump documentary as just one example.
Leaks like that don’t just happen by accident, nor do resignations of Director-Generals and CEOs happen lightly. And it is totally unprecedented for both to resign at the same time.
There’s a war going on in the murky depths and dark recesses of the state, which is now breaking to the surface inside the BBC.
The ruling class at war with itself
Over many centuries the British ruling class has sculpted a state machinery that helps it maintain power. The BBC is part of that. But this only works as long as the state – which the BBC is a part of – is seen as neutral. Otherwise far fewer people would respect its authority.
In order to maintain the BBC as a reliable institution, everything is run behind the scenes, away from the prying eye of the public. The Beeb is controlled by a shadowy group called the BBC Board, who make all of the key decisions, and has five direct political appointments by the government itself.
But by centralising all of the decision-making into one body, this hidden civil war has spilled out into public view all the more visibly. It was from within the Board itself that this factional struggle erupted. And as a result, the searchlight of public opinion is shining into the boardrooms of Broadcasting House.
The contradiction between the BBC’s role as ruling-class propaganda, and the need to cover that up with supposed “independence”, is the cause of the war that’s raging right now in the BBC.
On one side you have those who understand the value of the BBC being seen as “independent”. They want to maintain trust in the broadcaster so that it can be used as an effective establishment propaganda machine at critical moments. The outgoing Director-General and much of the British establishment is in this camp.
On the other side you have those who don’t care about the perceived “independence” of the BBC or any state institutions for that matter. In fact, they argue, most people have lost confidence in these institutions already, so we might as well mobilise them explicitly in the interests of the ruling class.
This is the camp of Boris Johnson, who, when he was Prime Minister, took this approach to the Tory party, parliament, the judiciary, and even the monarchy. It’s Johnson’s appointee to the BBC Board, Robbie Gibb, who has used this Trump documentary to strike a blow against the Director-General and others in the enemy camp.
It’s a neat irony that the weapon Gibb has been able to use in this war is a documentary about Trump, who is himself the biggest practitioner of ripping the mask off liberal democracy to reveal the snarling face of the capitalist class underneath.
A war without victors
The fact is that both sides are right, in their own way. Confidence in the institutions of the British state is at record lows.
Within the BBC itself, a deep crisis has been brewing for many years. Alongside declining license fee income – itself a result of declining trust – 100 journalists recently revolted over the BBC’s pro-Israel bias; Gary Lineker was publicly ousted for his pro-Palestine views; and scandals erupted over misconduct allegations against Huw Edwards and Greg Wallace
The same story is true of the rest of the establishment. No one trusts politicians, everyone hates the police, the military can’t hit its recruitment targets, the prisons are collapsing, the courts are overwhelmed, the Queen is dead, Charles is invisible, and Andrew is disgraced.
This is a dangerous situation for the ruling class, which needs a strong state in order to rule. The perceived independence of the BBC is one of the last things it has to hold on to, and it’ll fight tooth-and-nail to do so. This is the government’s approach at the moment: “yes the documentary was a mistake – but in general the BBC is great and should be defended”.
However, those who say that the BBC is “too left-wing” and effectively needs to ditch any attempt to appear neutral are correctly realising that class polarisation is deepening and big battles are coming. They’re going to need every weapon they can get to fight the class war, including the BBC.
The reality is that this is a disagreement between a majority and minority wing of the ruling class over the best way to deploy the BBC against the working class. Do they want the mailed fist openly on display, or covered by a velvet glove?
This is becoming a fevered discussion within the ranks of the establishment, and breaking out into scandal at the BBC, because anger among the working class is growing.
Left figures like Polanski and Sultana are on the rise, and the Palestine movement has shown the scale of anti-establishment feeling in Britain. The hammer blows of a weak economy and an upcoming brutal budget will turn the temperature up even more on the industrial front.
Ultimately, the power of the workers’ movement will render the internal wars of the ruling class irrelevant. This scandal at the BBC is merely a tremble in the treetops as the hurricane builds. Every state institution will be exposed and blown away by the coming storm.
