Brexit and the BBC’s duty of impartiality

THROUGHOUT the referendum campaign, the Mail regularly congratulated the BBC on its evenhanded coverage of the debate. Three months later that brief flirtation with impartiality has evaporated and the corporation has reverted to its Europhile roots with a vengeance. Gone is any attempt to present the positive case for Brexit. Instead, the corporation has become the mouthpiece for embittered Remainers who refuse to accept the will of the people and hope to overturn the referendum result by stealth and scaremongering.

Day after day, endless airtime is given to these whingers, who trot out unsubstantiated claims that Britain will fall into an economic abyss if we leave the single market. (The fact there’s been nothing but good economic news since June seems to have escaped them.)

Only yesterday, the BBC led its morning bulletins on a ludicrous Labour stunt to ask the Government 170 questions about its plans for Brexit and gave sanctimonious shadow foreign secretary Emily (White Van Man) Thornberry a platform to suggest that the Leave vote had been a terrible mistake.

Later, during Prime Minister’s Questions, BBC assistant political editor Norman Smith sent the sarcastic tweet: ‘Stand by for another tumble on the pound following Theresa May’s remarks on the single market.’ He was wrong and the pound went up (and how interesting anyway that former Bank of England governor Mervyn King says the fall in the pound is ‘a welcome change’). But is this the impartiality we expect from the BBC?

In throwing its huge weight behind the campaign to undermine Brexit negotiations, the BBC is taking sides with a self- serving political elite against the democratic wishes of 17.4million ordinary people – all of whom help pay its wages.

This is our national broadcaster and the country’s most influential opinion former. As such it has a duty to be non-partisan. The BBC represents much of what’s great about Britain but this naked political prejudice is an affront to its charter principles and a betrayal of millions of licence-fee payers.