Today Programme

Kathy Gyngell clearly highlighted on The Conservative Woman blog yesterday the hypocrisy of John Humphrys revealed in his forthcoming memoirs, being serialised in the Daily Mail. Today she discusses further evidence of his double standards, this time over the Iraq Dossier affair.

How could he have continued to work on BBC Radio 4’s Today – drawing massive pay from the pockets of the public he professed to serve – with the concerns he says he had about the anti-Brexit bias of the BBC hierarchy and the Corporation’s general liberal left groupthink bias?

Some would call that fraud.

There is another glaring contradiction in his stance. Mr Humphrys declares that he still believes that the BBC is a wonderful institution, is a ‘tremendous and irreplaceable force for good’ and that the country is stronger because it exists.

How does he square such sycophantic hyperbole with his assertion that the flagship BBC programme Today and news output generally is infected with institutional bias? It’s a massive contradiction. Impartiality is a core BBC Charter obligation and his grave allegations are that the Corporation has been in breach of it at least since the EU referendum (as well as at other times, as outlined below).

Digging into the Humphrys archives unearths rafts of similar inconsistencies in his approach and conduct which suggest he has worked for at least the last 20 years in a bubble of what at best can be described as selective vision and hearing.

Much of what Mr Humphrys has put into his book is not new at all. In 2014 perhaps when he started drafting his memoirs? – there was no other obvious peg) and again in 2017 (h/t Is the BBC Biased?), he gave interviews to Radio Times which contained strikingly similar key points: that there was at the Corporation an all-pervading liberal outlook, and that the BBC’s reporting of the desire for EU withdrawal and concerns about high immigration levels had not properly reflected widespread public concern.

Then, as now, he was noticeably vague on detail. He seems to lay most of the blame on ‘bosses’ who were upset by the referendum result. Is his view that they have directly influenced programme content – and if so, who was it who followed their instructions? The Today editor? Presenters? Producers and behind-the-scenes staff?

In 2014, when the first Radio Times piece appeared, News-watch noted this point, and stated in a blog:

‘He doesn’t say in which interview, with which guests or how or when he arrived at the judgment . . . No, this “bias” happened at some undefined, mysterious time in the murky miasmic mists of the Blair era. It evidently made Humphrys queasy and uneasy, but back then, he and his chums above and below him in the BBC hierarchy did nothing at all about it. Now, though, says the great man, the bias is fixed – it’s a matter of regret, but move along there, folks, nothing to see: everything in the BBC garden is tickety-boo.’

News-watch has analysed over the years more than 1,200 EU-related interviews conducted by Mr Humphrys. Analysis in the News-watch reports highlight that his approach to Brexit was shot through with the bias he now seems to blame others for creating.

Two prime examples stand out. In 1999, when a thirty-something Nigel Farage was standing for the first time in the European Parliamentary elections as a Ukip candidate, most of the interview was taken up with suggesting that Ukip was, in effect, a maverick aberration. A News-watch blog observed: 

‘Farage said he simply wanted his country back on an amicable basis, and free trade; Humphrys’s stance was that this was ‘literally unthinkable’. . . . (he) did everything he could to attack the credibility of Ukip and asked nothing about the thinking behind the need for withdrawal. His opening gambit was to observe that it was “funny” (peculiar) and “puzzling” that Ukip was contesting seats in the European Parliament when it wanted to withdraw from the EU.’

Spool forward to the closing days of the EU referendum, and Mr Humphrys filed a highly unusual (in terms of its length) 27-minute Today item on attitudes towards immigration based on visits he made to Keighley in West Yorkshire, Shirebrook in Derbyshire and Hackney, east London. The News-watch analysis concluded:

‘Humphrys’s approach was heavily biased. In his world those who oppose immigration do so . . . from a position of prejudice. He . . . missed out numbers and rate of expansion – the key bedrock of opposition to current levels of immigration. Contributions of those who expressed concerns about immigration came across as shallow and prejudiced, a picture that was made worse by Humphrys’s repeated putting of “racist” claims to them. They had to deny they were racists, and were given only minimal space to advance their fears about numbers.

‘On the other side of the coin, Humphrys heavily stressed the contributions of those who were, in various ways – in their own estimation – victims of prejudice . . . Immigrants he spoke to wanted a better world, and had been thwarted in that quest only by white prejudice.’

All this, coupled with other more detailed analysis in News-watch reports, boils down to the fact that Mr Humphrys is as responsible as everyone else at the Corporation for BBC bias. What he is alleging now will probably generate book sales, but do nothing to sort out the problems he identifies. Those inside the BBC bubble, Mr Humphrys included, are incapable of seeing outside it. And complacency of the type displayed by Mr Humphrys for at least 20 years (the period of News-watch analysis) has blocked any chance of a solution.

Will Mr Humphrys now be thrown to the wolves by the bosses he so clearly despises? No. The Corporation will carry on regardless. As it always does.

BBC Director General Lord Hall of Birkenhead has declared that the Corporation is on a mission to counter fake news.

He publicly announced this back in the summer at the Prospect annual conference – the day before the white-collar trades union announced it would be campaigning for a Brexit ‘people’s vote’.

Others who addressed the conference included arch-Remainers Hilary Benn and Rain Newton-Smith, the chief economist of the CBI.

Perhaps it might be a little unfair to judge Lord Hall purely on the company he keeps, but latest research by News-watch shows that under his stewardship, the Corporation has in fact now morphed into a major purveyor of the commodity he allegedly so despises – and especially that which will thwart Brexit.

Strong documentary evidence in this vein came to light recently when Guido unearthed an internal circular from BBC economics editor Kamal Ahmed, who is shortly to assume the elevated role of Corporation Editorial Director (whatever that means). From his lofty perch, he told BBC journalists that whatever Brexiteers might think, predictions from economists proved that leaving the EU is ‘rubbish’.

But how systematic within the BBC is the approach decreed and endorsed by Ahmed? How much has the fake news virus entered into the Corporation’s DNA?

News-watch is currently analysing the BBC’s coverage of the steps towards Theresa May’s reviled so-called EU ‘deal’ during the autumn, and as always, the devil is in the detail.

On September 17, as the Salzburg EU ‘summit’ unfolded, BBC’s ubiquitous reality check correspondent Chris Morris was in action on the Radio 4 Today programme. His mission? To tell listeners of the dangers of ‘no deal’ and to ram home to the maximum extent the chaos and misery which would ensue if Mrs May did not accept the terms on offer from her EU masters.

In this vein, a Morris voice-piece was prominent in that morning’s bulletins. He declared that a report from ‘a political research group’ warned that in nine out of ten areas of economic and legislative activity, it would not be possible to avoid ‘major negative impacts’ because time was running out to avoid ‘no deal’, and also that another major problem was that a 21-month transition period was not enough to be able to secure any free-trade deals.

The source of all this gloom and doom and Brexit impossibility?  Morris said the ‘political research group’ involved was a body called the Institute for Government.  Sounds authoritative, even-handed and ‘expert’?

That was clearly what Morris wished to convey, because he did not include any further details about the Institute. But dig about on its website debate and instantly several red-letter points central to the Brexit debate leap out.

First, it is chaired by Labour peer and ex-minister Lord Sainsbury of Turville, who, according to the Daily Telegraph, spent a cool £8m trying to avert Brexit. The report claims he created four different aliases so he could spend so lavishly.

Second, also on the board of the Institute are two other former Labour ministers, Baroness Amos and Liam Byrne MP; Sir Andrew Khan, the UK’s former permanent representative to the EU, who, surprise, surprise, is another fervent supporter of the EU; and Sir Richard Lambert, formerly editor of the Financial Times.  It is hard to imagine a more arch-Remain grouping.

But third, there is more: The Institute’s director (chief executive) is Bronwen Maddox, a former Times foreign editor, who then became editor of the Prospect current affairs magazine before taking up her current role.   Her views on Brexit are also pretty clear – she is a declared full-scale fan of George Osborne’s Project Fear.

For most people, details such as these would have sent a clear signal that the Institute would not exactly be sympathetic or even-handed in its attitudes towards the Brexit cause, and that any report by them must be handled with caution.  And a few minutes’ perusal of the report confirms that it is shot through with hyperbolic ‘no deal’  misery in the ‘Project Fear’ mould.

But to the BBC and Morris this was of no concern regarding impartiality, despite editorial guidelines which stipulate that sources with potential bias must be identified.

And not only that. Sharp-eared listeners would have also heard in the 7am bulletin a very brief mention that the Institute’s report was not merely being reported by the BBC – it had actually been commissioned by BBC News!

And that’s a smoking gun. On the one hand, Editorial Director Ahmed is circulating notes to BBC journalists telling them that they must believe in and shout from the rafters the predictions of the doomsters of the IMF and the Treasury; on the other the BBC’s self-declared ‘reality check’ unit is commissioning and integrating slyly into its news agenda authoritative-sounding reports commissioned by the BBC to exaggerate to the maximum extent the dangers of ‘no deal’.

Question to Lord Hall: Is this not the very definition of ‘Fake News’?

The BBC Radio 4 Today programme is in dire trouble. It is haemorrhaging listeners and, according to latest reports, more than one million have deserted over the past year, bringing the weekly audience down to 6.7m.

This should, of course, be a matter of urgent and very significant concern. The reality is that in the UK, only the BBC – by dint of its guaranteed vast licence-fee income – can afford to put out such a heavily-resourced news and current affairs radio programme. If the Corporation can’t get it right with flagship programmes such as Today, it is failing in its core remit.

Those multi-million figures, by the way, are somewhat misleading. They are simply the total number listening at some point for a few minutes to the 17.5 hours each week of Today output. The peak audience (on which basis television audiences are measured) is normally no more than two million at 8am.

What is the reason for the sharp decline? Could it be the programme’s relentless alienating bias? And might it be that the format – devised more than 40 years ago – has ossified over the decades into a diet of engineered difficult-to-listen-to confrontation on lines dictated by the BBC’s Leftist, politically correct worldview?

Tim Montgomerie recently adroitly summed up this growing antipathy. Explaining why he had become an ‘ex-Today listener’, he said:

‘On reflection, it’s the lack of illumination on almost any topic (as much as the bias) that makes me glad to have finally broken free. The biases are to “the State must do something about X” rather than “how can X best be solved?”; to short-term gloom rather than to long-term context; to politics; to supra-nationalism; to liberalism over conservatism . . . and any bad news from Trump’s America over bad news from within Brussels’ empire (especially from Italy).’

The BBC, of course, is deeply disdainful and dismissive of such views. World affairs editor John Simpson summed up the Corporation’s stance when he declared in Radio Times: ‘I’m getting really fed up with the complaints and criticisms being directed at BBC News at the moment. Not so much from our usual critics, the hardliners on the Left and the Right, who habitually claim we’re biased because we’re not actually biased in their favour. No – it’s middle-of-the-roaders who are doing the complaining now.’

However the slump in Today listening is now so acute that the Corporation has been forced into remedial action. Enter stage left with much huffing and puffing James Purnell, the BBC’s director of radio, who, of course, was formerly a Blairite Labour minister. He emerged this week from the corporate shadows in Portland Place as the man with a plan for tackling the decline – even though before his appointment to his current role he had no direct broadcasting experience.

His wheeze? A daily 20-minute Today podcast, dubbed imaginatively Beyond Today. Which 1A 1AA committee thought of that?

To be fair, there is no doubt that media audiences of all kinds increasingly prefer to be in charge of their own agenda, and in line with that podcasts have grown in popularity, along with visual services such as Netflix. According to Ofcom, the number of weekly podcast listeners has increased from 3.2m five years ago to 5.9m in 2018. 

What appears to have got Purnell particularly excited, though, is that 49 per cent of these podcast enthusiasts are adults aged under 35, and because Today’s existing audience is significantly older, his plan envisages that the lost million oldies will be replaced by youthful eager-beaver trendies.

In line with that, Purnell has appointed 37-year-old Tina Daheley – previously a stand-in presenter of a range of BBC news programmes including BBC1 Breakfast – and Today reporter Matthew Price as the presenters of the new podcasts. They will be assisted by a production team of ‘mainly women’.

Their agenda? Well, Ms Daheley – whose Twitter account shows clearly her preferences – has not been backward in coming forward. She told the Observer: ‘Anyone who has been paying attention knows podcasts are hugely popular with under-35s, and if you’re serious about reaching that audience, it’s the logical thing to do. For me, a big thing is class and social background. We’re supposed to be holding a mirror to society and be representing them, but when was the last time someone who didn’t go to public school or Oxbridge presented the Ten O’Clock News?

‘The BBC gets a lot out of me. I should be thinking: “This is brilliant, I’ve got this whole area locked off, I tick all of those boxes in terms of strategy – young women, brown people, so-called C2DE demographics” – but I wish there were more of me. I had to work twice as hard and be damn good at my job to develop my career. I was doing 19 jobs and working for months without a day off [to get noticed] but there should be more people who look like me.’

So there we have it. Mr Purnell’s strategy to win back the Today deserters is not to address issues of bias, or to make an atrophied programme format less BBC agitprop and more accessible. Rather, it’s to ram yet more opinionated ‘diversity’ – in all its multi-faceted Corporation splendour and zeal – down our gullets. Whether we like it or not.

The first edition of Beyond Today was published on Tuesday.  What had it to offer? Exactly the same BBC diet, with Evan Davis and someone from the BBC’s favourite think tank, the Institute of Fiscal Studies, warning that more money needs to be spent on public services.

The morning after being ‘caught up in a scuffle’ at the University of the West of England (a scene that BBC Somerset’s James Craig described as ‘very aggressive and unexpected’), found Jacob Rees-Mogg being interviewed on BBC Radio Four’s Today programme.

The purpose of the interview was not, though, the previous night’s headline-making attack on him, which was sufficiently intimidating to draw condemnation from both Labour’s Shadow Education spokesman Angela Rayner and the Lib Dems’ Jo Swinson.

It was not this at the front of presenter Nick Robinson’s mind. He neither bothered to inquire what had happened (which would have given him an account from the horse’s mouth), nor asked after his interviewee’s wellbeing, or even what Mr Rees-Mogg made of this assault on free speech.

His intent was quite otherwise.

It was to force an apology from Mr Rees-Mogg – the politician who undoubtedly is the biggest threat to the BBC’s pro-EU ‘remainer’ stance.

Jacob Rees-Mogg had, Mr Robinson said in his introduction, ‘claimed in the House of Commons . . . that Treasury officials had fixed their economic forecasts in order to show that all options other than staying in the EU customs union were bad’.

What a terrible slander on the oh-so-neutral Treasury. It had to be rectified, to be sure. Enlisted in this project was the Head of the Centre for European Reform, Charles Grant, ‘the man who he claimed had said all this’.

The interview that followed was a BBC classic of its kind – based on a false premise, staggeringly imbalanced questioning and finally laying a flaky claim to the moral high ground.

The full transcript can be found here.

Suffice it to say the item was not premised on the possibility that Treasury officials were again flouting the nation’s will (true to their ‘Project Fear’ form) by fiddling the figures, this time to keep us in the customs union, aka the EU. No, it rested on the false premise that leaving the customs union, though implicit in the Referendum vote to leave and underlined by Mrs May’s decision to create a department to negotiate independent trade deals under Liam Fox, was newly up for discussion and the latest reason for reviewing the ‘leave’ decision.

As for the way the interview was conducted, it was what we have come to expect – interruptions and harassment of the few pro-Brexit interviewees that the BBC deigns to invite to undergo a predictable drubbing.

Indeed, it was a masterclass. Nick Robinson’s non-stop interrupting and talking over Jacob Rees-Mogg was possibly a record – by my count 18 times to just once for his other interviewee, Mr Grant.

Robinson not only gave JRM the much tougher time but allowed Charles Grant to get away with outrageous claims about the impact of a changed tariff regime.

On one level, you could say, it was par for the course, just more evidence that Brexit is challenged massively on the BBC; that no stone is to be left unturned when it comes to demolishing the case for Brexit, whereas Remain perspectives will always be projected as much more attractive and credible.

So it is absolutely to Mr Rees-Mogg’s credit that he gave an admirably clear account of his own position and stood his ground even in face of Robinson’s final (in full stern-headmaster moral-high-ground mode) questioning of his character:

‘A last word to you, Jacob Rees-Mogg, let me ask you this if I may, because this is why, in a sense, this row matters. There are some people who’ve presented you in the past as a sort of amusing backbench eccentric. You’re now, you’re a leading figure in terms of backbench Brexiteers, and many ministers say you are a likely candidate to be our next Prime Minister. Do you not accept that to accuse civil servants of rigging official forecasts is not the behaviour of a man who wishes to lead this country?’

Despite the insulting nature of the question, reprobate Rees-Mogg floored him with his reply. Following the Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro school of thought, he walked towards the fire and repeated, yes sir, the Treasury had fiddled the figures. He refused to be bullied.

Which is why this interview will not be the end of it. Jacob Rees-Mogg must know he can expect little sympathy from the BBC on any count – whether he be beaten up or prevented from speaking – and that they will trash his character if they can. It will be personal now.

For it is deep in the BBC’s DNA to ridicule or smear any advocate of conservatism or politician really prepared to challenge the Left, which is what JRM does. It has proved an effective way of demoralising the Tory Right. If the BBC’s previous form is anything to go by they will be out for his blood.

And the BBC has the resources. Look at what they were able to throw at the Cliff Richard story, discarding any decent journalistic principle in the process.

Clever, clear-thinking and calm, the hated by the Left Jacob Rees-Mogg poses the most significant political challenge  to the BBC’s Leftist pro-EU orthodoxies in years. So will he be the subject of BBC special investigations? Will BBC favourite Anna Soubry, featured again this morning trashing the Brexiteers, be enlisted to help? Will we see his country house from BBC helicopters circling above, or BBC journalists set to the task (metaphorically speaking) of investigating his dustbins? It is not beyond the realms of imagination.

Photo by James Cridland

The BBC seems to have appointed Radio 4 Today presenter Nick Robinson as its defender-in-chief.

Back in April, he told those who thought the Corporation was biased against Brexit that they were wrong. The referendum was over, so there was no longer a need to strike a balance between the two sides.

He has been in action again, this time delivering a speech in honour of his friend, the former BBC Panorama editor and media pundit Steve Hewlett, who died of cancer at the age of 58 earlier this year. It can be read in full here.

The message? In Robinson’s opinion the BBC is doing very well indeed, thank you. News output is not biased. This is proved, apparently, by that complaints emanate from all parts of the political spectrum and there are appearances by such controversial figures as former Chancellor of the Exchequer Nigel Lawson.  Of which, more later.

The first thing to note is that his analysis is not based on any verifiable evidence.  No surveys seem to have been conducted.  On top of Lord Lawson, Robinson picks out mentions of Nick Griffin here, of Nigel Farage there, to show the inclusion of the ‘right-wing’ figures.  But none of his observations are backed up by anything other than his own subjective judgments.

And he conveniently misses out here that almost every time Mr Farage has been interviewed by the BBC, he has been treated as a racist, told he is incompetent – and very rarely asked about withdrawal itself. More recently, too, of course, he was shamefully and ludicrously accused on BBC2 Newsnight of having ‘blood on his hands’ over the death of a Polish man in Harlow when nothing could be further from the truth.

Robinson claims that the BBC is: ‘…staffed by people who – regardless of their personal background or private views – are committed to getting as close to the truth as they can, and to offering their audience a free, open and broad debate about the issues confronting the country.’  Well that’s OK then. Of course they are.

His analysis boils down to that the BBC – in Robinson’s estimation – is a beacon of light and trust in an increasingly dark world.  The biggest threat to journalistic integrity comes from elsewhere: the ‘fake news’ and commentary on websites such as Westmonster. They, unlike the BBC, spend their time peddling untruths and rumour and are making social and political divisions far worse.

Yet his invective is deeply flawed and It takes only moments to unpick it. Take Lord Lawson’s appearance. He is mentioned as an example of someone who was invited (in August) to appear on Today, even though many thought he should not be allowed to outline his views on climate change. Robinson claims that this was an example of the BBC’s even-handedness and fairness.

But what he then adds proves sharply otherwise. First he stresses that Lord Lawson got his facts wrong – and then claims ‘we’ (the magnificently unbiased staff of the Corporation?) ‘must say so’.

This, however, was a risible misrepresentation of what actually happened. First, Lord Lawson only appeared at all because the arch-global warming alarmist Al Gore was first invited on Today. He was treated with kid gloves, with virtually no challenge, as he outlined that man’s impact on the climate was intensifying to catastrophic proportions.

To ‘balance’ these highly contentious claims, the interview with Lord Lawson was then arranged. But the odds were stacked against him in that he appeared with with two other alarmist figures who countered his every claim.

Lord Lawson made one minor error over statistics. But he immediately owned up to it and a correction was issued. His slip did not affect his basic points that Gore and the climate alarmist faction have been making outlandish and scientifically unsupported claims for years, and continued to do so.

Robinson also did not mention that immediately after Lawson appeared there was an outcry – reported at great length on the BBC –  from climate activists, including the BBC’s own favourite populist ‘scientist’ Brian Cox, who said Lord Lawson’s appearance should never have been allowed. To ram home  Lord Lawson’s error, two more alarmists appeared on Today. They both rubbished everything Lord Lawson had said – with barely a squeak of opposition from the programme’s presenters.

This adds up to a ratio of at least 5:1 against Lord Lawson. This is the sort of ‘fairness’ that actually operates at the BBC on controversial issues. For more than a decade, the Corporation has accepted that climate alarmism is warranted and, arguably, its reporting in this sphere adds up to its own campaign to prove it.

The conclusion? Nick Robinson’s speech as a whole, and especially in the mention of of Lord Lawson was, to put it mildly, disingenuous. His appearance on Today did not show, as Robinson claimed, that the BBC allows dissenting voices to appear and is fair to them. The reality is that the BBC has a skewed agenda in this domain, and any opinions expressed by Lord Lawson were both swamped and twisted. So, too, with Nigel Farage.

Robinson accused in his speech those who write for blogs of living in a bubble. Even if they do, it’s nothing compared to the one surrounding the BBC’s approach to editorial impartiality.

Photo by Chatham House, London

This is a guest post from Craig Byers of Is the BBC Biased?

A couple of mornings ago Today sent a reporter to a fruit farm in Godalming and brought back a large punnet of Brexit-related gloom. Nick Robinson introduced the report with these words:

There’s a warning today from Britain’s berry growers that Brexit could crush the industry.

Zoe Conway’s report included various hard-working, efficient migrant workers (as she portrayed them) worried about their future, plus farm managers fearing the collapse of their business. One farm owner was asked if he regretted his Leave vote, especially if it leads to what Zoe called a “hard Brexit”. No contrasting views featured in Zoe’s report.

That’s par for the course, of course. But tied in with that piece was the reporting that very same morning of the results of a survey among soft berry producers – a survey the BBC itself had commissioned (for reasons known only to itself but guessable by others).

The main BBC News website report on the survey (by Emma Simpson) is striking for the way it tries to spin its own findings. The BBC’s spin is deeply negative about Brexit and conducive to advancing arguments in favour of retaining free-movement:

UK summer fruit and salad growers are having difficulty recruiting pickers, with more than half saying they don’t know if they will have enough migrant workers to harvest their crops.

Many growers blame the weak pound which has reduced their workers’ earning power, as well as uncertainty over Brexit, according to a BBC survey.

The results themselves, cited later in the article, are strikingly at odds with the mood music of the report as a whole:

These results say to me that only 3% of the surveyed farmers are seriously alarmed about “migrant labour shortages’. Another 18% are a bit worried. And what the other 79% (though the figures don’t actually add up to 100%)? Well, they either say they have have enough seasonal workers or aren’t sure if they’ve got enough. In other words, that 79% don’t sound alarmed about the situation, despite the BBC’s alarmist headline.

I think this is a clear case of BBC bias (conscious or unconscious).

And it’s far from being the first time that the BBC has spun its own surveys in a favoured direction.

Who can forget the particularly blatant way the BBC spun its own survey on the attitudes of British Muslims back in 2015? While many other media outlets led with the astonishing finding that 27% of British Muslims expressed  some sympathy with those who carried out the Charlie Hebdo massacre the BBC heavily pushed the “Most British Muslims ‘oppose Muhammad cartoons reprisals'” angle.

Plus there was some very dodgy reporting by the BBC’s News at Six and the BBC website into young people’s concerns, also in 2015, where both the TV bulletin and the website article omitted all mention of the third biggest concern of the polled young people – immigration. And it was another BBC poll to boot.

And there was Newsnight and the BBC website’s blatant attempts to rig the debate before freedom of movement was granted to Romanians and Bulgarians back in 2013, where the BBC twisted its own survey by pushing the ‘Few planning to migrate to UK’ angle. Others quickly pointed out that the BBC’s own figures actually suggested a massive influx of Romanians and Bulgarians was coming.

As you’ll note, all of the above have immigration as a running theme, whether directly or indirectly. And all of them were spun by the BBC in the same way – the pro-immigration way.

Photo by Ahmad.Helal