No wonder Liam Fox called the BBC biased – facts don’t cut it in Brexit Britain
Sometimes politics needs new adages to go with the old ones, so how about this: if you’re a member of the Cabinet writing to the BBC to accuse them of biased coverage, you are probably losing.
It will come as no surprise that the subject in question is the disgraced former Defence Secretary and current still-disgracing International Trade Secretary Liam Fox, who has demanded a meeting with the BBC director general over the corporation’s apparently “biased coverage” against Brexit. It is behaviour that has prompted the Liberal Democrats to accuse him of “behaving like a tinpot dictator”.
“I cannot recall a single time in recent times when I have seen good economic news that the BBC did not describe as ‘despite Brexit’,” Fox has written in his letter. If you think these words have a ring of familiarity to them, you’d be right. Not because anyone has actually said them on the BBC, but because Liam Fox himself said the same thing in the House of Commons a fortnight ago.
The BBC is used to being accused of Brexit bias. It was not so long ago that Remain MPs and Brexit MPs traded open letters to the BBC on the front pages of supportive newspapers, in scenes only marginally less enlightening for the British public than lies painted down the side of a bus.
Given that, in these Through the Looking Glass times in which we live, Liam Fox’s job is to fly around the world negotiating free trade despite it being against international law for him to do so, perhaps we are beholden to pause for longer and consider that the dire economic news all around us is in fact good news.
The BBC has not specifically clarified whether this meeting request will be granted, but we can only look forward to the days after which its frankly unpatriotic behaviour has been set straight. When, for example, the pound hitting new lows against the euro just in time for the summer holidays can be reported as the good news it really is. When shifting from the fastest growing economy in the G7 to the slowest in a single year is correctly reported as the good economic news it is, and Fox and the rest can finally get the credit they deserve.
It will not always be easy for the BBC to follow Fox’s diktat, however. What should they do, for example, when a pro-Brexit trade minister called Liam Fox says in a live interview that a trade deal between the UK and the EU should be “one of the easiest free trade deals in human history” and then a week later says he is not “optimistic” about it happening?
What do they do when that same minister, who gave an utterly bizarre conference speech on the “glorious joy of free trade”, is simultaneously fighting to pull his country out of the world’s largest and most successful free trade area?
How should the BBC report an International Trade Secretary saying, “The only reason that we wouldn’t come to a free and open agreement is because politics gets in the way of economics”, when it is explicitly his politics and no one else’s that is getting in the way? That it is his Government, for example, that has made a red line out of the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice, making a free trade agreement more complicated by whole orders of magnitude?
It is still almost two years until Liam Fox’s department is actually allowed to do anything, despite the international junkets and the speeches on what we must now call the chlorine-washed chicken circuit. Whether his most recent return to the Cabinet is still happening by then, we cannot know in these unpredictable times. But if it doesn’t work out for him quite how he might have hoped, well, everything in life happens for a reason, despite Brexit.