The BBC’s new director-general, Matt Brittin, is currently telling licence-fee payers how brilliant the Corporation is.
A glossy promotional film accompanying its 2025-26 annual report – launched during coverage of the World Cup final on 19 July – features highly paid BBC presenters praising the organisation whose generosity they enjoy. Brittin and BBC chairman Samir Shah insist that editorial standards are being tightened and the much-criticised complaints system improved.
If they are, the BBC has a funny way of showing it. News-watch has lodged a detailed complaint about one of the most blatantly one-sided pieces of Brexit broadcasting the Corporation has produced in the 27 years News-watch has monitored EU-related output.
BBC Radio 4’s series Politically: Ten Years After Brexit – timed to mark the tenth anniversary of the Brexit referendum – consisted of ten programmes and had 20 main contributor appearances. In nine of the ten programmes, there was not a single contributor who made the pro-Brexit case. The full report is here.
Only one clearly pro-Brexit expert appeared in the entire series: IEA economist Julian Jessop. He supplied just 4.6 per cent of all the words spoken by the main contributors. More than 95 per cent came from speakers who concentrated on Brexit’s costs or discussed it without advancing the case for its benefits.
There was also presenter bias. Alex Forsyth delivered 6,552 words herself – more than any contributor. Her narration, questions and conclusions repeatedly pushed the same message: Brexit meant damage, disruption, lost opportunities and broken promises. In sum, the series was not an impartial inquiry into Brexit. It was a ten-part, all-guns-blazing, full-frontal attack on it.
The first programme, on the economy, paired Jessop with Sunday Times economics editor David Smith. That at least showed the BBC knew how to arrange a balanced clash of opinion in a pre-edited programme. But it never did so again. The trade programme contained no advocate of Britain’s independent trade policy. The immigration programme included nobody to make the democratic case for ending EU free movement. The regulation programme had no supporter of regulatory independence. The farming and fishing programme contained nobody capable of explaining why leaving the Common Agricultural Policy and Common Fisheries Policy might have been desirable.
Even more astonishingly, a ten-part series supposedly impartially assessing the impact of Brexit contained no programme on its central purpose: the restoration of democratic self-government. There was no serious discussion of parliamentary sovereignty, the ending of the supremacy of EU law, freedom from the European Court of Justice or the recovery of Britain’s independent treaty-making powers. The word “democratic” was not used once in the series. “Democracy” appeared only in connection with Hong Kong.
The BBC chose the criteria by which Brexit would be judged – and chose almost exclusively those favoured by its opponents. Forsyth’s choice of language made the position unmistakable. Introducing the trade programme, she said, “One prize, according to Leave supporters, would be the ability to strike independent trade deals with other nations. The cost? Increased friction with the EU.” The benefit was merely something claimed by Leave supporters. The cost was presented as fact.
At the beginning of the economic programme, she announced that there was a “broad consensus among most economists” that Brexit had damaged the economy. She made the claim before either economist had spoken and repeated it after Jessop had challenged the calculations behind it. The conclusion had been delivered before the discussion began.
Jessop was also treated differently from every other expert in the series. Forsyth introduced his Institute of Economic Affairs as a “right-wing free market think tank”. It was the only ideological label attached to any organisation in all ten programmes. No equivalent warning was given about UK in a Changing Europe, whose pro-EU researchers and senior associates appeared across five episodes. The Centre for European Reform, which exists to advance European integration and opposed Brexit, was not ideologically identified. Nor was the European Commission background of another contributor disclosed. The sole contributor making a recognisably pro-Brexit case was politically labelled. The network of organisations broadly hostile to Brexit was presented as neutral expertise.
News-watch presented all of the above evidence to the BBC in a formal complaint about breach of impartiality. The Corporation acknowledged receipt and told News-watch that it was being investigated. It promised a response within 20 working days.
Two days later, Gordon Rayner reported the News-watch findings in the Daily Telegraph. The BBC’s response was categorical: ‘This series was made in line with the BBC’s editorial guidelines which require the highest standards of impartiality.’
So what exactly is the complaints department investigating? Before News-watch had received even the first-stage response, the BBC had publicly acquitted itself. The facts had supposedly been referred for examination, but the conclusion had already been issued to a national newspaper.
This shows the complaints system is little more than a charade. How can the officials handling the complaint now approach it impartially? Are they free to conclude that the series breached the guidelines after the BBC has publicly declared that it met the ‘highest standards’? Or is their real task to construct a post facto justification for the verdict already handed down by the press office?
The timing could scarcely be more embarrassing. The BBC’s annual report, published on 14 July, acknowledges the damage inflicted by repeated editorial scandals. Brittin and Shah promise higher standards, greater accountability and an improved complaints process. Yet within days, the Corporation demonstrated exactly why the system commands so little confidence.
The BBC did not say – as due process surely requires – that it would consider the detailed evidence. It did not say that the complaint was being investigated and that it would be wrong to prejudge the outcome. It bluntly declared that the series was impartial without offering a word of evidence in support.
This comes soon after the Executive Complaints Unit (ECU) partially upheld an earlier News-watch complaint about a single Today programme report on Brexit which hinged on the 2024 Mansion House speech by Andrew Bailey, Governor of the Bank of England. The ECU accepted that the programme had breached impartiality by presenting the case for closer alignment with the EU without acknowledging the alternative case for making fuller use of Brexit freedoms.
That ruling took around 18 months to be decided. Within days of it, BBC Radio 4 broadcast a ten-part series in which the same alternative case was almost entirely excluded. When News-watch complained, the BBC took two days to announce that there was no problem.
Nor is this a single lapse from which no wider conclusion can be drawn. The Forsyth series did not emerge from nowhere. It is the latest instalment in a pattern News-watch has documented since 1999, across dozens of surveys and the line-by-line analysis of millions of words of BBC output. It is a pattern the Corporation has never addressed – and, as things stand, one it has no means of even detecting. That record, and what it should mean for the charter now being negotiated, I will detail in a second article.
The Corporation is now asking licence-fee payers to believe that it has learned from its failures. But the evidence is brutally simple. Nine programmes out of ten in the series contained no pro-Brexit contributor. The one clearly pro-Brexit expert supplied only 4.6 per cent of contributor speech and was the only one given an ideological health warning. The presenter added more than 6,500 words of framing and commentary which overwhelmingly reinforced the anti-Brexit case. The constitutional and democratic purpose of leaving the EU was virtually erased.
Then, before its complaints process had examined the evidence, the BBC declared the series impartial. The glossy advertorial launched at the World Cup final claims the BBC is changing. The handling of this complaint proves that it is not.
