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A new report has revealed more hard evidence of the BBC’s anti-Brexit bias. We also examine Britain’s entanglement in the EU’s support loan to Ukraine, and what the appointment of Ed Miliband and Hamish Falconer in the Foreign Office could spell for UK-EU relations.
The BBC’s anti-Brexit bias continues
A new report by the organisation News-watch has revealed further evidence of the BBC’s anti-Brexit bias. The culprit this time was the recent BBC Radio 4’s series Ten Years After Brexit – timed to mark the tenth anniversary of the Brexit referendum. News-watch’s report systematically analysed the content of the series’ 10 episodes, with the main findings as follows:
- Of the 20 guests interviewed by presenter Alex Forsyth, only one (IEA economist Julian Jessop) was pro-Brexit, supplying just 4.6 per cent of contributor speech. Nine of the ten episodes contained no pro-Brexit contributor at all.
- Jessop was also the only contributor given an ideological label (the IEA was described as a ‘right-wing free market think tank’). The various pro-EU individuals and organisations that appeared across the series were presented as neutral experts.
- Presenter Alex Forsyth’s narration repeatedly framed Brexit as damage, disruption and broken promises.
- None of the episodes addressed the central purpose of leaving: democratic self-government. The word ‘democratic’ did not appear once; ‘democracy’ only in connection with Hong Kong.
The report was given substantial coverage in The Telegraph by Gordon Rayner. Next week, BfB will be publishing a blog written by News-Watch’s managing director, former BBC journalist David Keighley, in which he will not only deconstruct Ten Years After Brexit’s catalogue of biases in detail, but turn attention to the BBC’s revealing response when presented with evidence of its own biases. Watch this space.
British participation in EU-Ukraine support loan
This week has seen the EU approve Britain’s participation in the EU’s €90 billion loan framework for Ukrainian defence. This means British arms suppliers will be merged into the EU’s procurement framework as a third-country participant. It is yet another example of a British government failing to utilise our post-Brexit position, in which we are free to sell directly to Ukraine on a finance deal of our own. By merging with the EU, British support is submerged, underselling ourselves as an ally. The UK even helps underwrite the scheme’s borrowing costs, in proportion to the contracts its firms win – paying, in effect, to compete inside an EU programme. Barely a week after concluding the UK-Swiss FTA – a triumph for UK independence – the government has reverted to acting as though we are still beholden to EU norms and strictures. It suggests that our political establishment has not really assented to the notion that Britain is free to make its own trade deals and aid its foreign allies.
Miliband and Falconer in the Foreign Office
As part of Burnham’s reshuffle, Hamish Falconer has been appointed ‘Minister for Intergovernmental Relations and European Relations’, taking over responsibility for EU relations from Nick Thomas-Symonds. Under Starmer, Thomas-Symonds had been charged with enacting Britain’s ‘dynamic alignment’ or EU reset policy. David Maddox for The Independent notes that, although there is ‘no strong evidence of him [Falconer] being a rejoiner’, the diplomatic conveniences and niceties from edging nearer to Europe might attract Falconer, who is a seasoned diplomat.
More direction might be discerned from the appointment of Ed Miliband as Foreign Secretary. Of course, Burnham seems in part to have done this for prudent high-political reasons – namely, to quarantine Miliband from within Cabinet and as an influence over domestic policy. Interestingly, although Miliband backed a second referendum and supported a customs union and single-market alignment in the Brexit parliaments, by 2021 was claiming one ‘has to’ ’embrace’ Brexit ‘because that argument is over’. But what this means in practice in 2026 and beyond is anybody’s guess. It seems likely that Starmer’s reset policy, which has so far undone Brexit behind the scenes and beyond parliamentary scrutiny, will be continued.
What we’re reading
Andy Burnham is comically out of touch by Gareth Roberts for The Spectator
Gareth Roberts exposes the unreality of Burnham’s progressivism, finding something more resembling a ‘psychosis than an opinion.’ To Roberts, Burnham’s clock still reads ’30 April, 1997’: his invocation of Thatcher is parochial rhetoric distracting from the present crisis of mass immigration and the impending debt crisis.
Starmer’s Indian takeaway by Katie Lam MP for The Critic
Katie Lam is making sure that Starmer has no positive legacy for future historians to write about: she takes apart Starmer’s FTA with India, presenting it as evidence of Britain being duped by India’s demand that Indian workers have free movement. Indian workers who can come to Britain under this agreement are able to avoid National Insurance for half a decade, with it paid instead at far lower rate into the Indian system. Lam suggests that such a deal is unfair, given the scale of India’s economy relative to Britain’s, and that we shouldn’t have to sacrifice our own workforce when negotiating free trade deals.
