BBC Trust

MPs are right to demand a clear-out of the lefty timeservers running the BBC

BBC Trust, Licence Fee | 27th February 2015 | by David Keighley

At last! MPs have finally confirmed that they want very radical changes in the way the BBC is run, including the decriminalisation and eventual axing of the totally anachronistic – and hated – licence fee.

At the heart of the House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee’s 166-page report is a key recommendation: that the Trustees – the rotten heart of the BBC – should be axed and replaced by a genuinely and rigorously independent body that ensures that the Corporation is run in the interests of audiences.

The current regime thinks their job is to champion the Corporation in its right-on lefty agenda – blatantly evident in everything it does – rather than holding it properly to account over editorial standards and the spending of £4bn of taxpayers’ money a year.

That’s exactly what has happened with Rona Fairhead, the new colourless chairman, who within weeks of her appointment in the autumn was telling MPs on the Culture Committee how wonderful the BBC’s output was. In more recent evidence to the Commons European Scrutiny Committee, she made it crystal clear that – despite massive evidence to the contrary – she believed that everything that was broadcast by the BBC about the EU was balanced, fair and totally within the Trustees’ remit.

Also typical of the sycophancy of the current Trustees is Richard Ayre. He worked at the BBC for almost 30 years, then had a brief spell on a quango after he took a fat BBC early-retirement pension (at only 50). He is now the Trustee in charge of editorial standards. Like so many at the Corporation he is a dyed-in-the-wool lefty and a gay rights champion. His espousal of right-on causes is typified by his role as a former Chair of Article 19, a campaigning human rights body whose agenda includes massive indoctrination over ‘climate change’.

During Ayre’s period in office, the Trust has formally adopted its own aggressive ‘climate change’ agenda after commissioning a highly-biased report on the subject. In effect, BBC coverage on this subject is now always outrageously skewed in favour of climate change activists such as Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund.

Recently, Ayre admitted to MPs (in the same hearing as Fairhead) that also during his watch as a Trustee, the Editorial Standards Committee – the final body in dealing with complaints from the public about content – had not upheld a single complaint about the BBC’s EU coverage in its entire existence (since 2007). In fact, only one in 5,000 complaints received by the BBC is upheld by the Trust and every aspect of its complaints regime is massively biased in the BBC’s favour.

Also typical of the BBC Trustees is current deputy chairman, Diana Coyle. She is married to a BBC journalist and is an economist and journalist. In that role she has made no secret of her strongly pro-Labour, and pro EU views.

Another Trustee is Lord Williams of Baglan. Who? Well, like Richard Ayre, his primary career was as a journalist in the BBC World Service, with its heavily pro-overseas aid agenda. In the 1990s, he switched to the UN and worked in the same rights agenda framework inhabited by Ayre’s Article 19. He had posts as information officer in gilded-cage UN offices in New York and Geneva before becoming advisor to Labour ministers Jack Straw and Robin Cook. His career path makes it very clear that he is unlikely to vote Ukip. In his Trustee biography, he boasts sychophantically that he has a ‘lifelong bond’ with the BBC ethos.

Massive evidence of the Trustee’s failings can be seen in their handling of complaints about EU coverage. In order to check ‘breadth of content’ , they commissioned former BBC trainee Stuart Prebble, who subsequently became the editor of Granada Television’s lefty ITV current affairs programme World in Action. Prebble was actually appointed to his role by a BBC Trustee David Liddiment, his former Granada colleague.

The subsequent report was a complete whitewash based on crassly inadequate methodology commissioned from former senior BBC news executives now working at Cardiff University. Prebble also took most note in his conclusions to evidence from BBC news executives, who told him how wonderful their programmes were.

In that context, the Media Committee’s report makes complete sense. What’s needed is a clearing of these Augean stables of lefty rectitude. Public service broadcasting needs in the United Kingdom a new force at its heart that understands that the BBC has to be genuinely independent and held to account.

Photo by dgoomany

Hall’s BBC Executive Board Climate Change Links

BBC Chairman, BBC Trust, Climate Change | 7th September 2014 | by David Keighley

Rona Fairhead, who David Cameron has parachuted in as new chairman of the BBC, is being grilled about her approach to the role by the Commons Culture and Sport Committee on Tuesday – and already questions of conflict of interest are being asked.

A former chief executive of the Financial Times group, she still owns a tranche of shares in parent company Pearson worth around £4.5m – and the BBC commercial arm BBC Worldwide has a deal with Pearson which involves the Corporation promoting some of its educational products. No doubt the BBC’s spin doctors will come up with reasons why that’s perfectly OK.

Actually, her appointment may be smoke and mirrors and almost an irrelevance. The real power in the Corporation is vested in the Executive Management Board. It takes the day-to-day decisions about how its run.

The Trustees (of whom Fairhead will be chairman) is supposed to be the BBC watchdog, but since its inception in 2007 has in reality been pretty ineffective and packed with left-leaning climate change alarmists such as Alison Hastings and Diana Coyle.

Under former chairman Lord Patten, they pretty much sat on their hands while former Director General Mark Thompson presided over a bean feast of eye-wateringly massive pay-outs to departing executives, embarked on lunatic new technology projects that cost licence-fee payers more than £100m, and also spectacularly failed to act as senior Corporation editorial managers effectively suppressed the Savile story.

The executive management board is made up of a core senior BBC executives, such as former director of news Helen Boaden, who rather than being sacked, was moved sideways to Managing Director radio after huge question marks were raised about her conduct in the Savile cover-up.

But the board also has a range of outside non-executive and it is here that Director General Tony Hall has been making a raft of appointments that show how the BBC is likely to conduct itself in the crucial build-up to 2017 Charter renewal, and who are likely to be far more important in the shaping of BBC conduct.

Who are these people? A mixed bag of fiercely independent minds? Well no.

Step forward Sir Nicholas Hytner, Alice Perkins, Dame Fiona Reynolds, Sir Howard Stringer, and Simon Burke.

All, it is true, have impressive-sounding career paths. Hytner is the former director of the National Theatre; Stringer a former president of CBS, the US terrestrial broadcaster, and Sony, the Japanese conglomerate; Perkins is Chairman of the Post Office; Reynolds is a former Director General of the National Trust; and Burke, a retailer, has a career that started with Richard Branson’s Virgin and he is now a director of the Co-op Food division.

But scratch the surface, and familiar alarm bells start clanging immediately.

Alice Perkins hasn’t adopted the name of her husband – he’s the former foreign secretary Jack Straw. I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions about that in terms of her outlook.

Stringer has a very public obsession pursuing climate change alarmism. Under his leadership, Sony got into bed very firmly with all the usual eco militants in leading the charge towards a 50% reduction in carbon dioxide emissions, and he is a platform speaker at climate alarmist events such as this. This adulatory piece in the BBC’s house journal The Guardian says it all.

Reynolds , now the master of Emmanuel College , can be seen and heard here in full cry telling the students of St Andrew’s University that we are all going to fry and die unless we mend our wicked ways and all become as madly green as she is. And under Reynolds stewardship, the National Trust turned from being a body simply conserving our heritage to one screeching that climate change is a major national issue that affects us all.

Hytner is very careful about giving interviews about his political outlook. But my guess from a trawl of his background is that he was never a fan of Margaret Thatcher and he stresses the need for the arts to reflect ‘cultural diversity’ – often the code for the multicultural agenda.

Burke is also a bit of an unknown quantity – his career path too colourless to attract much attention – but he cut his teeth as a key lieutenant of the right-on green warrior Richard Branson, whose enlightened philosophy is to tell climate ‘deniers’ to get out of the way.

The problem facing the BBC as Fairhead’s appointment moves towards confirmation is not particularly who she is, or what she represents, but that the Corporation desperately needs input from genuinely independent radical-thinking figures who can shake up its slavish adherence to left-leaning ideology and outlook.

All the signs are that it is moving in the opposite direction. Tony Hall has surrounded himself with a coterie that shares his own worldview – and in turn, that’s exactly the same as that of the Trustees.

On Tuesday, the MPs on the Culture Committee will focus on Fairhead, but she’s destined to be an empty, toothless figurehead. The real power lies elsewhere.

Photo by Lepti

Bland Leading the Bland

BBC Trust | 11th August 2014 | by David Keighley

Sir Christopher Bland, who chaired the BBC from 1996-2001 – when the hated John ’dalek’ Birt was director general – has waded into the discussion about who should become new Chairman of the BBC trustees. .

According to the Guardian, he suggests that the current problem in finding a successor to Lord Patten, who was forced to resign as chairman for health reasons, is rooted in the structure of the Trustees. The reason? Because under the last set of BBC reforms back in 2006-7, the newly formed Trustees, who succeeded the former Governors, were put at arm’s length from the senior BBC management in order to be ‘independent’.

He says being BBC chairman before the reforms was a much more important job: more directly involved in the management of the Corporation, and he argues that high calibre names are not on the shortlist for the current job because it’s a role not worth taking.

Sir Christopher thus appears to be arguing for the clock to be put back. But surely he misses the main point? The governors were abolished because all too often they took the side of BBC management rather than acting in true public interest.

The problem with the last reforms is rather that they did not go far enough. The current batch of Trustees – as News-watch has repeatedly shown – are from a liberal left background and mindset that mostly echoes that of BBC management, and means that the Corporation is blind to criticism of the bias in its output.

What’s needed now is not a return to those bad old days of Birt and Bland , but a radical restructuring which sees genuinely independent Trustees that ensure that the BBC is properly in touch with public opinion rather than the gilded Metropolitan elite of which Sir Christopher and his ilk are card-carrying members.

Photo by Tim Loudon

Hall’s BBC Executive Board Climate Change Links

BBC Chairman, BBC Trust, Climate Change | 9th July 2014 | by David Keighley

Who are these people? A mixed bag of fiercely independent minds? Well no.

Step forward Sir Nicholas Hytner, Alice Perkins, Dame Fiona Reynolds, Sir Howard Stringer, and Simon Burke.

But scratch the surface, and familiar alarm bells start clanging immediately.

Alice Perkins hasn’t adopted the name of her husband – he’s the former foreign secretary Jack Straw. I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions about that in terms of her outlook.

On Tuesday, the MPs on the Culture Committee will focus on Fairhead, but she’s destined to be an empty, toothless figurehead. The real power lies elsewhere.

Photo by Rajan Manickavasagam

BBC Trustees Cement ‘climate change’ Prejudice

BBC Trust, Climate Change | 7th July 2014 | by David Keighley

The just-published BBC Trust Review of impartiality and accuracy of the BBC’s coverage of science: follow up is an extraordinary, document which I think is virtually unprecedented in terms of partisanship in the broadcast arena. The BBC Trustees have reinforced with steely belligerence against those who dare to disagree, their 2012 ruling that, in effect, the debate about climate change alarmism is settled.

News-watch has previously highlighted that Fraser Steel, the BBC’s head of complaints, has recently decreed after a complaint from a Green Party activist that audiences must be made aware that climate sceptics such as Lord Lawson are totally outvoted by a ‘consensus’ of science, and is wrong in holding such ‘opinions’.

In BBC programmes, if ever he is invited to appear, he must therefore receive only ‘due impartiality’ (Trustee Newspeak for less airtime). The document published this week explains why he acted with such certainty.

This is a long and complex subject to deal with in a blog post, but the way the BBC arrived at establishing there is such consensus is a whole catalogue of biased decisions.

Act 1 was back in 2006-7, and is expertly detailed by Andrew Montford, who runs the Bishop Hill blog. Roger Harrabin, the Corporation’s chief environmental correspondent – himself clearly linked closely to green activism – persuaded BBC news chiefs to call a meeting of ‘scientists’ to seek advice on the topic about what was then called global warming. It turned out that, although the BBC tried desperately hard to conceal who these so-called ’scientists’ were, most of them were in fact fully-paid up leading eco-warriors, many linked to the EU, who were determined to foist their anti-capitalist views on the world via BBC airtime. They got their way.

Act 2 was in 2010-12, when the Trustees commissioned a report to see if that adoption of such partisanship was correct. They appointed for this ‘independent’ review Professor Steve Jones, who is a known climate change alarmist and had regular paid employment from the BBC in their science programmes. Somehow, the Trustees missed or glossed over that a) he is not independent, b) he is a biologist and not an expert on climate, and c) that he is a political activist who has broadcast that private schools are a ‘cancer’ in the education system.

The Jones report, which appeared in 2012 was therefore rather unsurprisingly a partisan political tract. It argued that climate change science was settled and that the BBC must work to virtually exclude from the airwaves anyone who disagreed with alarmism. The BBC was already doing that anyway, but the report gave the BBC the Trustees what they saw as the ‘independent;’ authority to continue with their disgracefully biased approach in this area of public policy that is costing the UK taxpayer countless wasted billions to pursue.

Spool forward to the latest report. Since Jones, the Trustees have been monitoring the science output further, and have asked the programme-making executives to respond to the points made.

The new document is a total charade and whitewash. Throughout, it s tone parrots without an iota of modesty that BBC science reporting is the best in the world.

The first section reinforces the commitment to bias by chillingly repeating that a ‘false balance’ between well-established fact and opinion must be avoided. That’s the BBC Trustees code for saying Lord Lawson has wrong-headed ‘opinions’ whereas those who support climate alarmism have been somehow proved right beyond doubt.

It then goes on to outline that this orthodoxy is being enforced by the holding of more meetings with selected ‘scientists’ and the creation internally of a ‘Science Forum’ (at what expense, one wonders?). This has already trained 75 ‘senior editorial figures’ in ensuring they understand where ‘consensus’ lies in the reporting of climate change. In other words, in true Harry Palmer style, they have been to a brainwashing boot camp to ensure they do not give too much airtime to Mr Lawson.

Even more chillingly, the document also reveals that the goal of senior management is now to create a centralised science unit which will ensure that What the BBC Knows To Be True in science is enforced across all the Corporation’s media platforms and that no-one transgresses the due impartiality rules .

The irony lost on the Trustees here is that this is not science, because science has never worked on consensus; so-called ‘truths’ are established by a robust process of continual ferment and experimentation. What the BBC Trustees are actually promulgating is a new Article of Faith: that they know they are right about the science of climate change because they have consulted the right people and they have told them that it is right to be alarmed. This new report shows they are pursuing that self-declared orthodoxy with an unfounded and reckless missionary zeal.

Photo by NASA on The Commons

BBC Prebble report into EU coverage ‘not worth paper it is written on’

BBC Bias, BBC Trust, News-watch | 25th April 2014 | by David Keighley

News-watch has written a paper for Civitas, the respected think-tank, that shows that the Prebble report into the BBC’s EU coverage ‘is not worth the paper it is written on’ and was not independent.

The Times says that the Civitas paper demonstrates that ‘the clean bill of health for the BBC (given for the EU coverage by Prebble) “raises serious questions” about the impartiality and competence of the BBC Trust, the oversight body that commissioned the study’.

The Civitas release about the report is here: http://www.civitas.org.uk/press/PRprebble.html

The full report is here: http://www.civitas.org.uk/pdf/impartialityatthebbc.pdf

DYKE: ‘BBC should be regulated by OFCOM’

BBC Chairman, BBC Trust, Licence Fee | 3rd January 2014 | by David Keighley

Photo by varresa

The vultures are circling increasingly around Lord Patten, who has been savaged – and is still under fire – for his handling of a series of problems, including the Savile inquiry and the House of Commons’ prolonged investigation into excessive pay-offs to senior executives.

Latest to join in the attack on the BBC chairman is Greg Dyke, the former BBC director general who was forced to resign in 2004 because he handled the corporation’s response to the Andrew Gilligan-Hutton inquiry ineptly.

It was alleged that instead of being on top of the journalism, and understanding where it had gone wrong, he thought – as those at the BBC so often do – that he could bluster his way through theissues of journalistic integrity that were raised, and rely on the stock BBC response of ‘we know we are right, because what we do is (almost) always right’.

Noticeably, Mr Dyke chose as platform for his ‘Patten is a busted flush’ attack on the BBC’s favourite newspaper, the Guardian.

Noticeably, too, Mr Dyke has called – in effect – for the BBC Trustees to be dissolved, a chairman appointed and future regulation (from the start of the new BBC Charter in 2016) to be allocated to Ofcom.

But would that solve any of the BBC’s problems? The core issue, as News-watch research has repeatedly shown, is that its journalism is not at all ‘independent’, or impartial, but dominated by left of centre thinking. Institutionally, it cannot see this, and refuses obstinately and systematically to countenance otherwise. Or to even discuss the issue, as the Commons EU scrutiny committee has found.

At the same time, Ofcom – a giant Quango set up by the last Labour government that costs £130m a year to run – has been accused by MPs such as Philip Davies of being dominated by bureaucrats who are drawn from exactly the same liberal-left mould as the current BBC Trustees (including Lord Patten). It is headed by Labour-supporter and placeman Ed Richards. Greg Dyke – who himself is a declared left-of-centre activist who supports both the LibDems and Labour – knows this. Perhaps that is why he wants Ofcom to take over.

In reality, it wouldn’t alter a thing about BBC journalism, but would make its control even more bureaucratic and immune from criticism.

BBC Trust ‘Failed a Primary Duty’

BBC Trust | 16th December 2013 | by David Keighley

The Commons public accounts committee has questioned whether the BBC’s governance model is fit for purpose in a damning indictment of its handling of severance payments to 150 senior managers.

The committee’s chairman, Margaret Hodge, said its investigations into the pay offs – which included cross-examination of BBC chairman Lord Patten and director general Lord Hall – had uncovered a culture of cronyism that allowed the liberal use of licence fee payers’ money. This had led to 22 of the 150 payments exceeding contractual limits.

And MPs have also raised questions whether some of the eight BBC staff who gave evidence to the committee may have deliberately misled their inquiry.

The Daily Mail reported that Tory committee member Steve Barclay was angry that Mrs Hodge had watered down elements of the findings and in particular that it had failed to criticise BBC chairman Lord Patten for refusing to name all of the BBC staff who had received pay offs.

These are the full conclusions and recommendations of the committee:

1. As part of its efforts to cut costs, the BBC has significantly reduced the number of senior managers it employs, from 624 in March 2010 to 445 in March 2013. In the course of our inquiry into the departure of the BBC’s former Director General, George Entwistle, we became increasingly concerned about the scale of severance pay for departing senior BBC managers. We therefore asked the National Audit Office to carry out a review of severance payments. The National Audit Office found that in the three years to December 2012, the

BBC gave 150 senior managers severance payments totalling £25 million.

2. It is unacceptable for the BBC, or any other public body, to give departing senior managers huge severance payments that far exceed their contractual entitlements. The BBC paid more salary in lieu of notice than it was obliged to in 22 of the 150 severance payments for senior managers in the three years to December 2012, at a cost of £1.4 million. Some of the justifications put forward by the BBC were extraordinary. For example, the former Director General, Mark Thompson, claimed that it was necessary to pay his former deputy

and long-term colleague Mark Byford an extra £300,000, not because the BBC was obliged to, but to keep Mr Byford ”fully focused’ instead of “taking calls from head hunters”. This increased Mr Byford’s severance payment to more than £1 million. Recommendation: The BBC should ensure that severance payments do not exceed what is absolutely necessary.

3. There was a failure at the most senior levels of the BBC to challenge the actual payments and prevailing culture, in which cronyism was a factor that allowed for the liberal use of other people’s money. We were not able to account for every case in which a manager who approved a settlement in excess of contract entitlement themselves later benefitted from a similar arrangement. We believe this contributed to the prevailing culture at the top of the BBC whereby giving inflated severance payments to departing managers was an acceptable way of cutting senior manager numbers and salary costs. We share the view of the BBC’s Director General, Lord Hall, that the BBC had “lost the plot” in its management of severance payments in recent years. We welcome the changes that he has made to cap severance pay.Recommendation: The BBC should remind its staff that they are all individually responsible for protecting public money and challenging wasteful practices.

4. The checks that the BBC Executive applied to severance pay for senior managers were totally inadequate. The non-executives who sat on the BBC’s Executive Board Remuneration Committee failed to provide an effective check on severance pay for the BBC’s most senior staff. In turn, the Executive failed to exercise sufficient oversight of the 40 BBC staff involved in authorising severance payments to departing senior managers. For example, senior BBC executives were seemingly unaware, until it was brought to their attention by the National Audit Office, that one departing manager received £141,000 more than their contractual entitlement. Responsibility and accountability must be clearly defined and transparent, not only at senior levels but across the organisation, to satisfy the licence fee payer that public money is being used appropriately.Recommendation: To protect licence fee payers’ interests and its own reputation, the BBC should establish internal procedures that provide clear central oversight and effective scrutiny of severance payments.

5. It beggars belief that the BBC Trust could not locate key documents about the most significant restructuring in recent years of the BBC’s Board and the associated severance payments. These documents, which included proposed payments to the BBC’s former Deputy Director General, Mark Byford, came to light after the BBC Trust Unit had concluded it held no such documents. The documentary evidence also suggests that the BBC wrote to Mr Byford to confirm his severance terms before these terms had been approved by the

Executive Board Remuneration Committee. Poor documentary records contributed to the confusion and lack of transparency about what had been proposed, discussed and approved. Recommendation: The BBC Executive and the BBC Trust need to overhaul the way they conduct their business, and record and communicate decisions properly.

6. By choosing not to challenge very large individual severance payments, the BBC Trust and its officials failed to fulfil one of its primary duties, which is to ensure the rigorous stewardship of public money. The BBC Trust approves the strategy for executive remuneration but does not examine its implementation in detail. The witnesses from the BBC Trust told us that they do not question individual payments as they are operational decisions for which the BBC Executive Remuneration Committee is responsible. In our view, this is too narrow an interpretation of the BBC’s Trust’s responsibilities. Recommendation: Given its overarching responsibility for the stewardship of public money, the BBC Trust should be more willing to challenge practices and decisions where there is a risk that the interests of licence fee payers could be compromised.

7. Our examination of severance payments exposed a dysfunctional relationship between the BBC Executive and the BBC Trust that casts doubt on the effectiveness of the BBC’s governance model. The unedifying disagreements between witnesses and the conflicting accounts of what was disclosed about individual severance payments are symptomatic of a wider breakdown in the relationship between the BBC Trust and the Executive. At present the governance model is broken. The Trust and the Executive have a limited amount of

time to demonstrate that the current governance model can be made to work. Recommendation: The BBC Trust and the BBC Executive need to ensure that decision-making is transparent and accountability taken seriously, based on a shared understanding of value for money, with tangible evidence of individuals taking public responsibility for their decisions.

BBC Chairman ‘disgracefully’ stonewalls EU Scrutiny Committee

BBC Trust, European Scrutiny Committee | 29th November 2013 | by David Keighley

BBC Chairman Lord Patten has refused to give evidence to the Commons European Scrutiny Committee about the BBC’s coverage of EU affairs.

His refusal follows an earlier Scrutiny Committee hearing in which Newswatch gave evidence that the BBC was failing in its Charter duty to report EU affairs to an extent that allowed audiences to understand properly the issues involved.

Scrutiny Committee chairman Bill Cash followed up by asking Lord Patten to appear before his members to explain why the BBC was apparently under-reporting such a vital area of public policy. Conservative MP Philip Hollobone, in a question to Bill Cash on the floor of the House said:

“The British public not only expect us to scrutinise EU legislation in this place but want to see us doing it. Does my hon. Friend find it extraordinary that the chairman of the BBC Trust should refuse to appear before his Committee? Does that not send a very bad signal to all the other Select Committees of this House, and what can we, as the House of Commons, do about it?”

Mr Cash replied:

“This is all covered in the report—we make extensive reference to it and include the correspondence that was exchanged between the chairman of the BBC Trust and me, as Chairman of the Committee. I think that most people would conclude that his not appearing voluntarily before the Committee to give evidence was really quite disgraceful.”

Newswatch primary evidence to the European Scrutiny Committee is here:

And the supplemental evidence is here:

The report of the European Scrutiny Committee containing reference to Lord Patten’s refusal to appear before

it is here:

The debate about the European Scrutiny committee containing Philip Hollobone’s question is here:

A decision by BBC Trustees to reject a complaint about the BBC’s EU coverage was a ‘farce’

BBC Bias, BBC Trust, News-watch | 28th November 2013 | by David Keighley

A decision by BBC Trustees to reject a complaint about the BBC’s EU coverage was a ‘farce’, leading Eurosceptic MPs Kate Hoey and Philip Hollobone have said.

The complaint – based on research by Newswatch – centred on an edition of Newsnight last January which covered David Cameron’s decision to announce a radical overhaul of EU policy to include a referendum on withdrawal.

Mr Hollobone, who has written to BBC Trustees attacking heir ruling, said: “The programme featured 17 Europhiles pitched against one person who supported withdrawal. It was blatant imbalance.

“Yet the BBC says this did not matter because this was not a major news event and they were

therefore gauging reaction to the proposal from politicians and those affected by it. That’s the sort of sleight of hand excuse that shows that the BBC complaints process is completely rotten and stacked against complainants. They make the rules, they interpret them and they kick out most of them on the most spurious reasoning.”

A succession of top BBC executives, including former DG Mark Thompson, and more recently former head of television news Roger Mosey, have admitted that BBC EU coverage has been totally biased against the withdrawal case.

Mr Hollobone added: “Our complaint showed in detail that on the day of this major development in EU-related policy, this edition of Newsnight did not properly take into account the withdrawal case, and indeed went to absurd lengths to stuff the programme full of figures who wanted to shoot down both the idea of a referendum and the case for withdrawal.

“In terms of BBC coverage it was thus par for the course, but the Trustees have now performed a farcical series of contortions to argue the programme was fair”.

He added: “The BBC complaints procedure is clearly not fit for purpose because no-one involved is genuinely independent. It exists to protect the BBC’s back rather than the proper investigation of bias. It’s time for major change”.

Kate Hoey said: “I have grave concerns about how the BBC is going to be impartial during the coming debate on our relationship with the EU and a referendum. Chris Patten as a former EU commissioner really must prove he has left his Europhile position behind him and that he can ensure genuine impartiality”

Read the Newswatch-researched complaint here.

Photo by rockcohen

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