Diversity of workforce gives BBC a liberal bias, says Marr

THE BBC’S young, ethnically diverse, metropolitan workforce means that the organisation probably does have a liberal bias, Andrew Marr has said.

The £360,000-a-year political presenter said staff had to fight their bias “all the time” and if the BBC was “slightly tilted towards the liberal side of most arguments then that’s not surprising”.

Speaking at Henley Literary Festival, Marr said: “The BBC is a big public sector institution based in the big cities – Manchester, London, Bristol – with an abnormal proportion of younger people working for it. And therefore, because of where we are based, probably a higher proportion of people from ethnic minorities as well. So if we are slightly tilted towards the liberal side of most arguments, then that’s not surprising.”

But Marr, 61, said that he was reminded every Sunday when he presented the flagship Andrew Marr Show that people with “very divergent views” were watching his show and had paid for him to be fair-minded. “Most other organisations, you go with your tilt and you enjoy your bias – but we can’t, we’ve got to fight it all the time,” he said.

The admission comes at a time when BBC staff are under pressure to be more careful about expressing their opinions on social media. Presenters who want to voice opinions or carry out “partisan campaigns” on social media should not be working for the corporation, its new director-general said last month.

Tim Davie’s comments came after a series of impartiality rows involving stars such as Gary Lineker on Twitter, and Emily Maitlis, who was reprimanded over a monologue attacking the Government response to Dominic Cummings’s Durham lockdown trip.