So the BBC has upheld a complaint! That’s the good news. The bad news, however, is that it declared that it had been wrong to interview a former chair of Labour Friends of Israel without informing audiences of his links to the country.
In other words, our national broadcaster seems to suspect itself of being in league with a plot to hide a pro-Israel bias from audiences. When you are pointing the finger at yourself as part of an Israelophobic conspiracy theory, that takes the insanity to a whole new level.
The case involves Lord Walney, a former Labour MP who became a crossbench peer in 2020. He appeared on the BBC to discuss Palestine Action in his capacity as the government’s former independent adviser on political violence and disruption.
His expertise on the matter is extensive. His excellent “Protecting our Democracy from Coercion” report, produced for the Conservative government, made a number of powerful recommendations about combating violent protest and disruption, from Just Stop Oil to the Gaza marches. (The new Labour government put it in the bin.)
When I interviewed him on my podcast, The Brink, the peer described how a sensible solution for repressing Palestine Action was contained in his mothballed report
“One of my recommendations,” he said, “was that we could have a new bar for, effectively, for prescription below the terrorist threshold. This is a criminal protest organisation… You wouldn’t call them terrorists. You wouldn’t have an up to 12-year criminal penalty.
“You’d hopefully avoid some of this debate, and with Palestine action, you could have stopped them on that five-year journey before they reached the process where they were finally proscribed.”
The genius of this new category, which would ban the group without equating it with Islamic State, was so obvious that it was quite astonishing that it was disregarded by the Government in favour of the cack-handed approach we have seen.
Why on Earth did the government ignore Lord Walney’s eminently sensible recommendations? According to a report in the Times last October, the government reviewed his role as “anti-extremism” tsar “months after he warned that far-left groups were trying to undermine UK laws”.
In other words, his hugely illuminating report, the result of years of hard work – which covered all types of extremism, not just the hard-Left – was dismissed by the Labour government because he had fallen out of favour with the Left.
Which brings us back to the BBC. As the JC reported last year, during the Gaza war, Auntie’s internal complaints unit rejected every appeal against the BBC Arabic service submitted by US-based pro-Israel media watchdog, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (Camera), which lodged more than 100 complaints.
By contrast, when it comes to Lord Walney’s supposed connections to Israel – which, on the face of it, look eminently innocent and reasonable (what on Earth is wrong with Labour Friends of Israel?) – the broadcaster throws up its hands and blames itself for being part of the Zionist lobby, or something.
On a positive note, I suppose it shows that the BBC does have some capacity for admitting wrongdoing. The only problem is that it has quite the logjam of failures to address, and top of the list should be its bias against all things Israel. One day, perhaps. One day.
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