Tories go to war with BBC
THE Tories were at war with the BBC over Left-wing bias last night as Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn prepared for a crunch debate on Question Time this evening.
Conservative central office lodged a complaint with the corporation yesterday over the treatment of Home Secretary Amber Rudd by a TV audience described as ‘the most Left-wing ever’.
The Tories are demanding that the BBC review its rules for audience selection for tonight’s Question Time debate in which the Conservative and Labour leaders will both field questions from the public. A senior Tory source described the mood as furious, saying: ‘The BBC have got to sort this out fast – it is just not acceptable to have such an obviously biased audience.’
Boris Johnson also expressed concerns about Wednesday night’s debate in which Miss Rudd took on Mr Corbyn and senior figures from five other parties.
The Foreign Secretary said the audience was ‘probably the most left-wing the BBC has ever brought together’, with Labour supporters joined by ‘all the supporters of Plaid Cymru and the Liberal Democrats and the Scots Nats – when you put them together you had this incredible echo chamber for all sorts of Leftwing nonsense’.
Miss Rudd was heckled and subjected to mocking laughter for defending government policy while Mr Corbyn was repeatedly cheered during the debate, which was watched by 3.6million viewers. Mrs May’s joint chief-of-staff Fiona Hill is understood to have ordered a formal complaint to BBC director general Lord Hall about the debate, demanding that there is no repeat of the bias in tonight’s TV audience.
Tory candidate Peter Bone said the BBC needed a major shake-up after the election.
‘Any fair-minded person watching that debate would conclude that it was biased against the Con- servatives to a remarkable degree,’ he added. ‘If it was meant to be balanced, then somewhere in the selection process someone has made a serious slip.
‘They have to do better tonight or the programme will be another farce. The party is absolutely right to object.’
But despite the concern, the BBC said it would be using similar methods to select tonight’s audience. Question Time producers will ensure the audience has roughly the same number of Conservative and Labour supporters, despite the fact that the Tories have more backing in the polls.
Seats will also be offered to those who support the minority parties or are ‘undecided’. Most of these minority parties are Left-wing, so the overall audience will be skewed to the Left.
The BBC said: ‘ The Question Time Leaders Special… is a very different programme from the Election Debate, with only one party leader on stage at a time.
‘The majority of the audience will be Labour or Conservative, meaning the party leaders will have an equal number of their supporters within the audience.
‘The Question Time team are very experienced at bringing audiences together and we are confident it will be fair and balanced.’
ON Wednesday morning this paper published what was – by any measure – a document of political significance. A secret Labour policy paper showed Jeremy Corbyn’s plan to throw open the UK’s borders to low and unskilled migrants.
With the election days away and mass migration a huge issue to the majority of voters, you might expect the story to merit significant coverage by the national broadcaster.
But the BBC barely mentioned it. Why? Was it, as we suspect, because it was helpful to the Tories – with their strong immigration policies – and unhelpful to Labour, many of whose voters fear more immigration will harm their living standards?
Instead, as the day wore on, it became clear there was only one thing the BBC cared about. Not Brexit, the defining issue of our times, nor the NHS and social care.
No, it was the BBC’s own election debate programme which filled the bulletins, as reporters treated Jeremy Corbyn’s cynical U-turn on turning up like the Second Coming, and demanded imperiously to know why Theresa May wasn’t attending.
As it was, the 90-minute debate showed the BBC at its very worst. The programme was ugly, uninformative, biased, unedifying bear- pit television which discredited everyone involved.
Even by the low level of political discourse at this election, the standard of debate was pitiful. It was also blatantly unbalanced, with five politicians from the Left – and by golly how unimpressive they were – ganging up on Home Secretary Amber Rudd and the unappetising Ukip leader Paul Nuttall.
Presenter Mishal Husain was tragically out of her depth as a moderator, and allowed cheap yah-boo politics, endless interruptions and brazen hectoring. Worst of all, the audience was unashamedly skewed. Indeed, its bias against the Conservatives and Ukip was so obvious, even prominent Left-wingers commented on the imbalance.
Seemingly made up almost entirely of vocal Labour sympathisers, the audience behaved like a baying mob, booing every conservative point of view and heckling Miss Husain when Mr Corbyn – cheered throughout – was put on the spot. In the circumstances, Miss Rudd performed admirably – especially as her father had passed away just 48 hours earlier. She landed clear blows on Mr Corbyn’s economic illiteracy and by the end, stood head and shoulders above her toy-town rivals.
We have expressed our admiration before for the neutrality and objectivity of the corporation’s journalists in the lead-up to the EU referendum. Sadly, it is difficult to apply either word to its election coverage. The truth is the tone and texture of so much BBC output, whether comedy shows or current affairs programmes, betrays a distinctly anti-Tory tinge.
Normally, this paper doesn’t approve of politicians complaining about the BBC, but in this instance, Downing Street is absolutely right to register a formal protest.
Typically, BBC executives have refused to apologise, or accept anything they did was wrong. Instead, they blamed the polling company, ComRes, which selected the audience – and claimed, risibly, that the Left- wingers in the audience were more vocal.
With another election special tonight, this time in York – like Cambridge, the first debate venue, a strongly Remainer city – the corporation must urgently learn the lessons of this fiasco. Without assurances of neutrality, Mrs May would be well within her rights to pull out, and her party justified in never again turning up to a BBC election debate.
Wednesday night’s television demeaned the BBC, the political process and democracy itself.