European Union Referendum Bill

Lord Pearson of Rannoch Excerpts

Wednesday 4th November 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, I beg to move the amendment standing in my name and those of my noble friends. I think that the new clause tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Pearson of Rannoch, is superior to my version, so I will not go into detail on mine.

I have found it a bit of a long and tiring day, so I ask permission to conclude my remarks from a sedentary position.

An Evening Standard report in April 2012 had extracts from a leaked report carried out by the BBC when my noble friend Lord Grade was in charge. It admitted bias on a range of topics. In that report Andrew Marr is quoted as saying:

“The BBC is not impartial or neutral. It’s a publicly funded, urban organisation with an abnormally large number of young people ... It has a liberal bias, not so much a party political bias. It is better expressed as a cultural liberal bias”.

As Mr Rod Liddle, a former “Today” editor, repeatedly says in his splendid column in the Sunday Times, BBC staff do not set out to be biased and believe utterly that they are neutral and represent middle England. They take their guidance from the Guardian, which they think is an absolutely centrist paper, with the Times a bit to the right and the Telegraph off the right-wing scale. I believe that recently some senior BBC insiders, such as Robin Aitken and Peter Sissons, have also confirmed that there are still institutional prejudices prevalent in the BBC. Of course, when accused of bias, the BBC denies it; but I can recall at least two occasions in the last 10 years when the BBC has said, “Well, yes, we looked at our coverage of immigration issues in the past and it was a bit biased but it’s all okay now”. I think it also said, “We looked at our coverage of the welfare debate and yes, it was biased in the past but we are getting it right now”. So that is the standard defence: we were biased in the past but we are perfect now.

When an organisation called Minotaur Media Tracking measured the level and content of the BBC Radio 4 “Today” programme’s coverage of the European Union, it found that the BBC gave less coverage to EU issues than the newspapers, gave roughly twice as much coverage to pro-EU voices as anti-EU voices and consistently presented the Eurosceptic case as wanting to leave Europe instead of the European Union. I read somewhere recently, but I cannot find it now, that the BBC has concluded that its past coverage of EU issues was slightly biased, but it is going to be okay in the future. In that case, I look forward to interviewers referring to the BSE campaign as the “Britain Stronger in the European Union campaign”—but I do not hold my breath for that.

The EU’s transparency website shows that £20,152,000 was disbursed to the BBC from EU funds between 2007 and 2012. A lot of that went to so-called research and development projects and to creating programmes to bring about change in countries outside the EU. In 2009 alone, the BBC got almost £1 million to,

“provide support for media capacity in the area of EU integration”.

Noble Lords may say that I am biased on this, but surely there is an element of conflict of interest somewhere which calls into question the ability of the BBC to police itself on EU matters when it is receiving funding from the EU.

My new clause suggests that broadcast coverage of this referendum is too important to be left to a combination of Ofcom and internal BBC policing. Everybody trusts the Electoral Commission for its impartiality. I suggest that for the duration of the referendum only, all media monitoring of TV and radio currently carried out by Ofcom and the BBC should be transferred to a unit under the control of the Electoral Commission. Noble Lords can read the subsections for themselves, and I will not bore the Committee by reading and explaining them. Indeed, I will go further: I know that this new clause is going nowhere, so I do not expect, and the whole Committee would not want, my noble friend to spend a long time demolishing the eight subsections and pointing out their inconsistency, inappropriateness, illegality and everything else that is wrong with them.

My intention is to highlight to the Government that there is a track record in the BBC of bias on EU issues and it would be intolerable if it continued right up to referendum day. No one wants to interfere with the independence of the BBC, but I believe that we should interfere with the bias of the BBC, since I believe it exists. All I want to hear from the Minister—my noble friends may wish for other things—in her wind-up tonight is what the Government will do to ensure that the broadcast media are absolutely fair, impartial and unbiased in all their reports, news and programmes leading up to polling day. As soon as the exit poll is issued, I do not care what happens. I beg to move.

[Lord Pearson of Rannoch (UKIP)]

My Lords, my Amendment 61BA is similar to Amendment 60, to which I have also put my name and which has just been moved by the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra. I suppose the inspiration for both these amendments— I confirm that my amendment is also a probing amendment—is that we do not entirely trust the broadcasting media to be impartial throughout the referendum campaign, so we feel that they need a little extra assistance in this regard in the shape of the temporary broadcasting adjudicator suggested by this amendment. The noble Lord’s amendment suggests a temporary broadcasting authority.

My experience of the BBC’s EU coverage goes back to 1999, since when I and others have been sponsoring independent analysis of that coverage, to which the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, was good enough to refer. I had a debate in your Lordships’ House on 11 March 2002 which revealed the early results of our initiative, and another on 7 May 2014. Both debates are relevant to these amendments and suggest the need for them. Both amendments require the impartiality of broadcasters in dealing with the conflicting claims made by each side of the argument. However, my Amendment 61BA goes further and requires the new adjudicator to judge whether the BBC has covered a sufficiently broad scope of subjects about our EU membership to allow the electorate to reach an informed opinion about their future. Broadcasting bias is not only bias about the subject in question; there is of course also bias by omission.

I have singled out the BBC because only the BBC, under its charter and guidelines, has the duty to educate and inform. That duty would still apply to areas which may not have been raised by either side of the referendum debate. Your Lordships may feel that every conceivable argument under the sun will be raised by one side or the other during the campaign, but I am not so sure.

For instance, I suppose it is possible that neither side will deal with the founding big idea behind the project of European integration, which was that European nations had caused so much bloodshed that they had to be gradually emasculated and put under a new form of technocratic government—hence the EU’s claim to have brought peace to Europe since 1945. Hence also the almost unbelievable powers of the European Commission at the expense of national Governments. I am not sure that either side will go sufficiently into all this, and so I feel it should be the duty of the BBC to do so if they do not.

It can be difficult to know where you want to go if you do not know why and how you have got to where you are—the direction of travel. Even if the campaigns do touch on these areas, I fear they do not lend themselves to soundbites, and so they may be covered inadequately. If so, I suggest the BBC should examine them dispassionately and in some depth—and very interesting it would be, too.

In conclusion, I am happy to report that the BBC’s coverage of EU matters has improved recently. We have had John Gray delivering a learned critique of the euro on “A Point of View”. We have had an Icelandic politician assuring us that the UK would be welcome and better off in EFTA. We have had a Nissan executive explaining why his company would not necessarily relocate outside the UK if we left the EU. We have had Nigel Farage being interrupted only by rapid fire instead of his usual machine-gun treatment. Best of all, the wonderful Labour MP Kate Hoey has even been allowed to make some of the case, on the “Today” programme, for the UK to leave the EU.

These are all absolute firsts for the BBC. Nothing like them has ever happened before. I trust that they are the first signs that the BBC is at least going to try to be fair in the forthcoming campaign. But old habits die hard, and so I trust that it and the other broadcasters will welcome the additional encouragement proposed by these amendments.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Pearson of Rannoch]

My Lords, may I ask the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, whether he has actually read either of the two debates I referred to, from 11 March 2002 and 7 May last year? Is he also aware that the Wilson report of 2005, which was inspired by our analysis, found that the BBC was biased, both in its coverage and in what did not cover? It did not think it was deliberately biased but it was, nevertheless, biased at that time. Has the noble Lord also read the Civitas report on the Prebble whitewash of the BBC’s EU coverage, which was so incestuous as to be dishonest?

Finally, has the noble Lord read—and, if not, will he do so—the News-watch website, which goes into great detail and irrefutable fact on all these matters, and which comes to the conclusion that the BBC has been biased in favour of the project of European integration? I hope he will appreciate that I end my remarks with the hope that some small shoots are growing that give us the possibility that the BBC will be fair during the forthcoming campaign. However, I feel it needs some encouragement, at the very least from the noble Baroness when she responds to these amendments.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I deeply regret that I have not read the noble Lord’s debate from 2002 and I shall, of course, try to dig it out before I go to bed.