BBC News Impartiality: Government's Role

[Hannah Bardell in the Chair]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the Government’s role in upholding the impartiality of BBC news coverage.

It is an honour to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Bardell. I refer the Chamber at once to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. I am grateful to have secured time for this important debate.

The BBC is a much-treasured national institution. Its news service is relied on by millions of British people and others around the world. Impartiality is rightly the foundation stone of the BBC’s operational guidelines and the very reason why it has garnered the trust of its users over many years. Its journalists provide an invaluable public service, often in trying and sometimes even dangerous circumstances. It is with great regret, though, that I have concluded that the BBC’s impartiality has been brought into disrepute. The BBC has found itself at the centre of ever-increasing controversy in recent years, and the organisation’s coverage of the Israel-Hamas war has led it comprehensively to fail the British public.

Will my right hon. and learned Friend give way?

I will make a little progress, then I will give way. The tragic events in Israel and Gaza undoubtedly pose a challenge to any media outlet given the strength of feelings that they elicit. However, a careful review of BBC output shows a clear failure to uphold its obligation to impartiality. In doing so, BBC News’s broadcasting and online content has actively inflamed community tensions here in the United Kingdom, fuelled the appalling rise in antisemitism and, in at least one particularly shocking case, harmed diplomatic efforts to bring an end to the violence.

Before we move on to the in-depth part of my right hon. and learned Friend’s speech, is not one of the problems with the BBC that it lays down rules then just ignores them? For example, what Gary Lineker wants to say is up to Gary Lineker. However, if the BBC says, “You do not have the right to do that,” when he then does it and waves two fingers, does that not completely undermine the BBC’s editorial content?

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. The BBC’s failure to adhere to standards and deal with those problems when they arise is a fundamental, systemic and systematic problem; I will come on to that.

Will the right hon. and learned Gentleman give way?

Will my right hon. and learned Friend give way?

I will give way to the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon).

I thank the right hon. and learned Gentleman for bringing forward this debate. I apologise to him and to you, Ms Bardell, for not being able to be here throughout; I have a meeting with a Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office Minister. The right hon. and learned Member is right to set out the case on Israel and Hamas. If we look at the BBC’s bias against Brexit and Northern Ireland, it cannot even name our country right; indeed, its correspondent is called the Ireland correspondent. My goodness me. How long will it be before the BBC understand that when the Welsh correspondents are called Welsh correspondents and the Scottish correspondents are called Scottish correspondents, the people of Northern Ireland should have a Northern Ireland correspondent? We are part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. That is who we are. The quicker that the BBC catch on, the better.

The hon. Member makes a good point. The examples of biased content are great in number, and I simply do not have the time to document all of them.

Will my right hon. and learned Friend give way?

I will share a sample in a moment, but I will give way first.

One of the most worrying examples of biased content on the BBC was their coverage of the bombing of the al-Ahli Arab Hospital, where its rush to accept the Hamas allegation that it was caused by Israel genuinely created problems on the ground and made it harder to resolve things. It had a real-life impact. That is an example of how the BBC needs to be much more careful in its coverage of Israel.

My right hon. Friend makes a good point, and I shall come on to that in more detail momentarily.

BBC News has been roundly and deservedly ridiculed for its abject failure to identify Hamas as a terrorist group. Under immense pressure, the BBC eventually chose to acknowledge in its ongoing coverage that Hamas is proscribed in the United Kingdom, but it still refuses to explicitly label it as a terror group. That double standard was clear for all to see just weeks after Hamas’s heinous pogrom on 7 October, when BBC News immediately reported on its website an incident in Brussels as a “terror attack” linked to Daesh. Not only is the BBC failing to uphold the law of this country when it refers to Hamas as anything other than a terror group, it is effectively becoming complicit in Hamas’s well-orchestrated disinformation campaign.

The most dangerous example of the dissemination of disinformation during the current conflict came on 17 October—as my right hon. Friend the Member for Chipping Barnet (Theresa Villiers) has said—when the BBC inaccurately reported that Israel was responsible for an explosion in the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital. BBC News’ breaking news Twitter account hurriedly notified its 51 million followers:

“Hundreds feared dead or injured in Israeli airstrike on hospital in Gaza, Palestinian officials say.”

BBC News’ international editor Jeremy Bowen told television audiences that “hundreds” had been killed and “thousands” injured after the hospital was “destroyed” in what he described as “the attack”—terminology that would clearly lead viewers towards the wrong impression that Israel was responsible.

There was an urgent Israeli investigation into the explosion at the hospital, subsequently independently confirmed by non-Israeli sources, which revealed that the incident was in fact caused by a misfired terrorist rocket launched by Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Even then however, BBC News saw fit to present claims and counter claims on its website, as if there was some sort of moral equivalence between a democratic state whose leaders are elected by their people and whose courts deal with their government, and a genocidal terrorist group that oppresses its people and murders children and innocent civilians.

Will my hon. Friend give way?

I will in a moment.

That particular incident at Al-Ahli Arab hospital had profound real-world implications. It led to the cancellation of a Head of State-level regional peace summit and violent protests erupting across the middle east, and the World Jewish Congress said it contributed to a spike in antisemitism globally—including the burning of synagogues in Tunisia and Germany. Such were the repercussions of that one misreport.

Reasonable people accept that mistakes can be made in any profession. However, it was the dismissive nature of the BBC’s response to the Al-Ahli coverage debacle, and the continuing pattern of troubling output since then, that does not reassure that lessons have been learned. Disgracefully, when Jeremy Bowen was interviewed about the incident he dismissively said he did not “regret one thing”, and that he did not

“feel particularly bothered about that.”

Bowen seemingly downplayed Israel’s discovery of evidence—including guns—that confirmed Hamas’s military operations within Gaza’s Al-Shifa hospital, saying it was “not convincing”. Perversely though, he said

“wherever you go in the Middle East you see an awful lot of Kalashnikovs and it’s not inconceivable that…I dunno…perhaps the security department of the hospital might have them.”

Repeated preparedness by the BBC to disseminate unverified claims provided by a proscribed terrorist group with a track record of disinformation should trouble us all.