Mick Hartley

Rob Burley, a former senior BBC editor, writes at UnHerd on the BBC’s capture by trans ideology:

It allowed its pursuit of younger audiences and an obsession with Diversity & Inclusion to skew its editorial judgement and marginalise women. This investigation exposes the extent of that capture. Based on my own experiences at the BBC, and numerous conversations over many months with members of staff, past and present, it reveals the scale of the problem and the difficult task ahead.

Assessing the damage, one former senior BBC executive who worked closely with Davie is particularly damning. ​“I’ve never been an enemy of Tim’s,” he tells me, “but I think that shows, again, his inability to understand what journalism does. He’s not a journalist. And that’s the problem.” One senior presenter despairs for an organisation out of touch with its licence-fee payers: “We seem obsessed with drag queens. We are in a terrible mess at the BBC.” Another wants drastic action: “There’s no sign of anyone getting a grip on anything,” he tells me. “The only solution is getting rid of them all. It’s like cutting out cancer. You have to just do it.”

Stonewall, as ever, was at the centre of things.

It was the BBC’s job to resist being carried along on a wave of activism and concentrate on impartiality but too many of its staff, including its executives, were pre-disposed to view the transactivist position as inherently progressive and therefore good. By absorbing the transactivist world view, the new Style Guide seriously compromised the BBC’s ability to be impartial when the controversy around the issue exploded a few years later. But that wasn’t the only problem.

In 2015, having delivered marriage equality for gays and lesbians, the hugely successful lobby group Stonewall decided to focus its energies on transgender rights. This was a perfectly legitimate move — although an ultimately disastrous one — which became a big problem for the BBC. At the time that Stonewall made this fateful decision, the Corporation was already a paying member of Stonewall’s Diversity Champions programme which offered advice, “inclusion strategies” and a nice logo to advertise your commitment to diversity. It was also registered with Stonewall’s Workplace Equality Index. The more the BBC reflected Stonewall’s approach in its internal policies, the higher it scored on the Index, and it was keen to do well as the nascent diversity and equality movement took hold within the management. So, when Stonewall added the letter “T” to the “LGB”, giving fresh impetus and credibility to the transgender rights agenda, the BBC found itself aligned with one side of the argument.

This seamlessly embedded the politics of transgender self-ID into the BBC’s HR and corporate policy, just as the Style Guide had embedded it into its journalism. The BBC, we should note, wasn’t an outlier. This was happening everywhere. And there was no resistance. As Gavin Allen, a senior manager and member of the BBC News Board from 2014 to 2021, remembers it, people were blinded by the power of the Stonewall brand. “Stonewall was a credible organisation,” he tells me. “If they said ‘X, Y, Z,’ we thought, ‘Oh, Stonewall, oh God, maybe they’re right, and we’re on the wrong side of history.’ Then you realise, ‘Wait a minute. This is horseshit.’ But unfortunately, that was way too late.”

“I heard that phrase, the ‘wrong side of history’, in so many bloody meetings,” remembers one very senior executive I spoke to. Meanwhile, women were speaking up but being ignored. The BBC seemed to work on the basis that if it was OK with Stonewall, then there was no need to check.

Yes, very much on the wrong side of history, as it turns out.

Much of the blame for all this, I think, goes back to the Birt revolution in the 90s, which believed that the old-fashioned way of presenting the facts of the news needed to be enhanced by analysis. The traditional journalistic “who, what, where, when, how” framework represented, they argued, a “bias against understanding”, and the most important question, for Birt and his followers, and the one that should be answered first, was “why.” So the BBC would not only report the news: they woud explain it for us. And since the BBC was then and still is largely staffed by progressives straight out of Oxbridge, the results were inevitable.

[And not only in the case of trans ideology, but Israel and Palestine too. So, for instance, Jeremy Bowen can report on the supposed Israeli strike on the Al-Ahsi hospital, killing hundreds, but when the truth emerges – that it was a mis-fired Islamic Jihad rocket that hit the hospital car park – he says he has no regrets about his initial report. Because the facts are of less importance than the underlying deeper “truth” that the BBC needs to impart to us: that the Israelis are murdering bastards and the Palestinians are the poor victims of this brutal aggression.]