BBC: EU Coverage

Lord Pearson of Rannoch Excerpts

Wednesday 7th May 2014 Grand Committee

Asked by

[Lord Pearson of Rannoch]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether, in the course of their renewal of the BBC’s Charter and Guidelines in 2016, they will take into account the BBC’s coverage of European Union matters, in the light of its recognition of the need for greater breadth in such coverage following publication of the report of the Independent Panel led by Lord Wilson of Dinton in 2005.

[Lord Pearson of Rannoch (UKIP)]

My Lords, noble Lords will be aware that the BBC’s charter obliges it to be impartial, wide-ranging and fair in its political output, and that,

“no significant strand of British public thought is knowingly unreflected or under-represented”.

I should declare an interest in that, since 1999, I and others have been sponsoring an analysis of the BBC’s EU output to see if it is meeting those obligations in that area. This research can be found on the news-watch.co.uk website, and is the longest-running and most detailed analysis ever undertaken of the BBC’s output. As I said in my last debate on this, on 11 March 2002,

“bias, like beauty, is often in the eye of the beholder”.—[Official Report, 11/3/02; col. 653.]

The News-watch research now includes over 6,000 hours of the BBC’s EU coverage across numerous news and current affairs programmes. More than 8,200 individual EU reports have been fully transcribed, and transcripts from some 5,000 guest contributions have been collected and analysed. The director of the programme, Mr David Keighley, has had a long and successful career at the BBC and in commercial broadcasting, and his CV can be found on the News-watch website. He sits as a justice of the peace.

By 2004, Mr Keighley and his team had produced such damning evidence of the BBC’s Europhile bias, including a complete failure to air the case for the UK to leave the EU, which was already a significant strand of British public opinion, that the BBC set up its first and only truly independent inquiry chaired by the former Cabinet Secretary, the noble Lord, Lord Wilson of Dinton. That inquiry broadly supported Mr Keighley’s conclusions, and so in reply the BBC made the commitments to which this Question for Short Debate refers. However, I have time to deal with only two of them. The BBC said:

“With specific reference to Europe our aims are … to offer our audiences across all platforms clear, accurate and accessible information about the way EU institutions work and their impact on UK laws and life”,

and, secondly,

“to ensure impartiality by reflecting the widest possible range of voices and viewpoints about EU issues; to test those viewpoints using evidence-based argument or informed opinion”.

I am sorry to say that the BBC has not yet fulfilled those promises. Let us look at the first aim, which is that the BBC would make sure that the British people could understand how the EU works and how it makes so much of our law. With our elections to the European Parliament only 15 days away, I would have thought it helpful if our people knew what they were actually voting for and how it fits into the EU’s law-making process. I would have thought it helpful if they knew that the power to propose EU legislation lies with the unelected Commission, and that the power is exercised in secret; that its proposals are then negotiated, still in secret, in COREPER—the Committee of Permanent Representatives, or bureaucrats, who are appointed by the member states—and that they then go to the Council of Ministers for further clandestine discussion and decision, with the European Parliament enjoying powers of co-decision at this late stage in the proceedings; and that the Commission and the Luxembourg court then become the Executive and sole arbiter of all EU law. I would have thought that it would also be helpful if the British people understood how wholly irrelevant their Parliament here in Westminster has become in that process and how even our Government have only some 8% of the votes in the Council of Ministers, where it has been outvoted on every one of the 55 objections that it has made against new EU legislation since 1996.

I would have thought that it was the BBC’s duty under its charter at least to try to explain the above process to its licence fee payers, but it has not done so and is clearly determined not to do so. When I have raised this failure with all the chairmen and director-generals over the past 14 years, the answer has been always the same: “Oh, but the EU is so boring”. Well, it need not be. What about a new series of “Yes, Commissioner”? You would not even have to make the jokes up—the script would write itself from pure fact. Indeed, in UK Gold’s second series of “Yes, Prime Minister” last year, we saw Sir Humphrey explaining to a bewildered PM how the EU works, and very funny it was, too. I have sent the Minister a three-minute clip of that and would be happy to send it on to other noble Lords who want it. There is only one catch: Sir Humphrey says that the President of the Commission is elected—perish the thought. So even Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn made a rare error on that one.

The other area where the BBC is in breach of its charter is in not allowing those who want to leave the EU the airtime to make their case. For instance, since 2005 the “Today” programme has allowed only some 0.04% of its airtime for withdrawalists to say why they want to leave, yet this is a view shared by upwards of 50% of the British people. The BBC almost entirely excludes Labour Eurosceptics from any debate on EU matters. Since 2005, only 0.09% of the “Today” programme’s guests on EU affairs have come from the Labour Party or the British left. The BBC prefers to view Euroscepticism through the prism of splits in the Conservative Party, with UKIP as the BNP in blazers— much more fun. It is not good enough for the BBC to reply that Nigel Farage has been on air a lot, if he and others are not given the space to explain how the EU works and, thus, the case for British withdrawal. There is one recent exception to that, as the BBC held a debate between Mr Farage and Nick Clegg recently. I suppose that it felt obliged to do so because LBC Radio and Sky had already done the same and it had proved rather popular. I bet that the BBC will not do anything like that again, if it can help it.

Finally, when the BBC deigns to commission what it pretends is an independent report into its output, the result is incestuous and incompetent to the point of dishonesty. I refer to the supposedly independent report last July by Mr Stuart Prebble, which has been taken to pieces by News-watch and exposed last month in a publication from the respected think tank Civitas, on whose website the whole depressing saga can be viewed. In a nutshell, Mr Prebble was not independent at all. He had been a colleague for many years at Granada TV of the BBC trustee—David Liddiment—who commissioned him and he had part-owned and run a company that made programmes for the BBC. He and the trustees commissioned the research directly from the former head of BBC news, Richard Sambrook, who is now at Cardiff University, where Richard Tait, a former editor of “Newsnight” and former BBC governor and trustee, also works in the same department.

Just for good measure, the Cardiff academic who led the research, Professor Karin Wahl-Jorgensen, had recently been employed by Brussels to analyse European media coverage about further EU integration and to discover why the UK is so sceptical about that prospect.

Unsurprisingly, Cardiff’s methodology was seriously flawed and unprofessional. It looked at only two one-month periods of the BBC’s output, in 2007 and 2012, which compares ill with the massive work done by News-watch over 15 years. Cardiff staff and friends in the leftwing media even managed to claim that their research showed that the BBC was biased in favour of Euroscepticism. They did this by simply ignoring 20 of the 21 pro-EU speakers on the “Today” programme in their 2012 survey period. Thus the Prebble report gave the BBC’s EU coverage a clean bill of health, which was, of course, gratefully accepted by the chairman, the noble Lord, Lord Patten, and the other BBC trustees. So far, the BBC has not replied to the Civitas-News-watch report, and Mr Prebble has merely accused them of running a smear campaign. I trust that the Government will join me in looking forward to a detailed response very soon.

So I ask the Government not to renew the BBC’s charter until they are satisfied that it is capable of fulfilling it. This afternoon, I have dealt only with the BBC’s coverage of the EU. Similar criticisms could be made of its coverage of immigration and manmade climate change, at least. In conclusion, I trust that the Government will ensure that the BBC’s editorial freedom is preserved, but with that freedom must come the fulfilment of the great ideals of its charter. I beg to move.