So what is it that the BBC is trying to prove about Brexit?
It looks increasingly that, as the dust settles on the referendum result, they are mounting an all-out campaign to find evidence to support the Corporation’s long-held belief that those who support ‘out’ are motivated by xenophobia and racism.
Last week, on BBC2, Newsnight, reporter John Sweeney chillingly gave a platform to a Pole in Harlow – and indeed seemed to encourage him to say – that Nigel Farage had ‘blood on his hands’ in connection with the suspected murder of a local Polish man.
This was before an inquest has been held, and before police had properly begun their investigations. But in the BBC’s book, here was race-hate in action.
The Harlow allegations were re-hashed and claims of post-Brexit xenophobia and racism heavily embellished on Monday night on Radio 4, in the first of a two-part series presented by Gary Younge called Eastern Europeansin Brexitland.
Younge visited Bristol and reported evidence that since the Brexit vote, the lives of virtually all the Eastern Europeans living there had become, in effect, a living hell.
According to Younge, the streets of Bristol had, overnight on June 23/4, turned into an overt, seething cesspit of prejudice. Eggs were being thrown at immigrants, they were so terrified of being identified as Eastern European that they were afraid to speak their own languages, their cars were being vandalised, they were being spat at and their children’s hair was being set on fire.
So who is Younge? For the uninitiated, he is an equalities campaigner who, it seems, has a brother who is a senior BBC executive, and who works primarily for The Guardian. Of course, many fine journalists work there, and it may be that what he reported from Bristol was a fair reflection of what is going on out in the sticks (in BBC terms): in effect, a breakdown of civil society and tolerance.
But then again, maybe not. Go through Younge’s past articles, and this is what he wrote on June 30, a week after the referendum result:
‘This (the result) did not happen overnight, and the sorriest conduct of the referendum campaign was only the latest indication of the decrepit state of our politics: dominated by shameless appeals to fear, as though hope were a currency barely worth trading in, the British public had no such thing as a better nature, and a brighter future held no appeal.
‘Xenophobia is no longer closeted, parsed or packaged, but naked, bold and brazen and was given free rein. A week before the referendum, an MP was murdered in the street. When the man accused of killing her was asked his name in court he said: ‘Death to traitors, freedom for Britain.’
Despite such overt prejudice (and poor writing) and huge assumptions about the Jo Cox killing, he was commissioned by the BBC to make this Radio 4 series. It seems that the sole intent was for him to go out and collect material that confirmed his view that the Brexit vote was nothing more than the ignorant expression of deep, underlying hatred and malaise.
That exactly chimes with the treatment of the Harlow murder. A third element of this naked display of BBC xenophobia-themed bias also came on Monday, in the latest in the series of Radio 4’s PM reports from what they have dubbed Brexit Street (transcript included on the News-watch website).
The show’s editors have claimed that this street in Thornaby-on-Tees is ‘typical’ of areas that voted for ‘out’, but it most certainly is not. Houses there sell for a quarter of the national average, and it has very high numbers of asylum seekers, because the local councils on Teesside are the only ones in the North East to have volunteered to take a high quota.
In the BBC’s world, Brexit voters, of course, are almost invariably downmarket, prejudiced against immigrants, talk in difficult-to-understand local accents and are relatively uneducated.
Emma Jane Kirby’s latest report ticked all the requisite boxes. She has already concentrated heavily on the suggestion that asylum seekers are disliked by the locals, have been forced into isolation, and are generally being treated as sub-human. Their only solace is the local church and a heroic Somalian refugee who has set up an asylum seekers’ football team.
On Monday, her first guttural, angry Brexit Street interviewee, ensconced with a pint in his working men’s club, complained that asylum seekers received benefits but did not work.
Emma Jane was duly deeply indignant. She told the surly Teessider that in effect, he was ignorant; they were asylum seekers so couldn’t work.
So let’s get this straight. The BBC commissions a series based on a street that it claims is ‘ordinary’ but most definitely is not, not least because an atypical, constant stream of asylum seekers has been housed there. It then highlights how badly these asylum seekers are being treated by the locals – and then starts to berate residents for, in effect, being intolerant and xenophobic, and then imputes that this is the reason for the Brexit vote.
BBC ‘impartial’ reporting in all its glory.
(Image: Ed Everett)
