THE BBC annual report for 2020-21 was published on Friday. TCW has secured an early draft of the statement of Richard Sharp, the former banker recently appointed BBC chairman, before it was refined by the Corporation’s 300-strong spin department.
Statement from the Chairman:
I have been in my post for only a few weeks, but rest assured that – in line with all my predecessors – any scepticism I might have had about the Corporation has now dissolved, because all the nice people here have shown me the error of my capitalist-based ways.
I see now that the BBC is universally revered, virtually without flaws and is the best broadcasting organisation in the universe. That nice director general chap Mr Davie and his team have assembled a brilliant array of bamboozling stats to prove it (pp 2-6 of the report). Any idea that the licence fee is not unrivalled value for money is poppycock and is supported only by Right-wing bigots.
During the pandemic, I am delighted that every ‘they’ in our huge news machine, the biggest in the world, reaching at least 100 per cent of the UK population, worked their little socks off in making sure that fear was whipped up among the unenlightened plebs out there to the maximum extent.
There is no question – because our brilliant Fact Check unit has concluded so – that the BBC must play its part towards the Great Reset now under way. Whilst maintaining our impartiality, I am satisfied that every sinew of our news effort is being directed towards achieving that. Thanks to the pandemic, all the hard work over the past two decades in showing the horrors of climate change can now come to fruition in defining the new world order.
There’s particularly good news in relation to Brexit. I know we narrowly failed in our task of thwarting a Leave vote, but that’s irrelevant now. Thanks at least partly to the efforts of our staff, Boris is now fully converted to Globalism in all its forms and he has seen that the need to submit to international law and globalist ideology is far more important that the nasty nationalism that was expressed in the Little Englander fervour whipped up by Farage and his ilk.
We are particularly proud of the performance during the pandemic of our Bitesize educational offering for children. By ramping it up, we allowed the main teacher unions to pursue unhindered their objective of keeping schools closed for as long as possible.
Children, of course, benefited massively from our output. As well as rightly making them terrified about viruses and about facing life without a mask, it also gave us a new springboard towards generating further hysteria about global warming. A renegade journalist foolishly suggested that there might be some benefit from climate change, but it is a measure of our effectiveness in pursuing the Great Reset that this item was rapidly taken down.
I am pleased to report that the staff member in question has been relieved of his front-line duties and has now been redeployed in the Diversity and Black Lives Matter targets section. Once there, he will soon see the error of his ways.
Of course, there have been attempts to discredit us during the year, and I will address them unflinchingly.
One is that, sadly, misguided audience members hit us with almost half a million complaints during the year. Our complaints process is designed to deter as many people as possible and thus those who persevere must have a screw loose, but it is important that we appear to treat breaches of impartiality and quality seriously.
I am very satisfied therefore that Ian Hargreaves – who, of course, was appointed by a very distinguished former director general, and Labour Party adviser, Lord Birt, to work as BBC director of news – chairs the committee which is investigating this rise. Professor Hargreaves was also an editor of the New Statesman and an adviser to David Miliband when he was Labour foreign secretary, and so I am satisfied he will be rigorously neutral in his approach to his role.
We know, of course, that we get complaints from the Left and the Right of politics, so it’s a no-brainer that we must be balanced in our output.
Another thorn in our side during the year was the Dyson review, which criticised the BBC’s handling of the 1995 Panorama interview with Princess Diana. Former director generals Lord Hall and Lord Birt, however, have now outlined how this was all interviewer Martin Bashir’s fault, and so that’s okay then.
(Here the unedited draft ends; what follows is from the final Sharp statement at p10 of the annual report)
‘The Board has resolved to reflect on Lord Dyson’s review and identify the lessons to be learned which may be relevant today . . . Impartiality is not only an essential prerequisite for the existence of the BBC. It also offers us a great opportunity to define ourselves globally as the preeminent purveyor of facts in an era of partiality, misinformation and malign state influence.’
Well, of course, Mr Sharp.
