Poppy Coburn is a journalist.
Cronyism is rife in British politics. Nominally impartial public bodies have been stuffed with propagandists keen to push the limits of discourse against the wishes of the democratic majority. Well-meaning reformers face relentless shadow-briefing campaigns against them, and the law is unjustly wielded by one side against the other to foster culture-war division and strife. Now, can you guess if I’m describing the tactics of the Left, or the Right?
If you’ve been paying much attention to the news over the past few weeks, the culprit might appear to be obvious. Keir Starmer leapt upon the latest BBC impartiality row – over Gary Lineker’s tweets comparing the government’s asylum policy to Nazi Germany – to bash Rishi Sunak. The Conservative Party was attempting to “cancel” the broadcaster, according to the Labour leader, and the Prime Minister ought to “take some responsibility and stand up to his snowflake MPs”.
This attempt to reverse ‘cancel culture’ lingo to attack the Right, while inelegant, struck a chord with many self-described “sensibles”. The Lineker debacle was certainly a fortuitous time for Labour to launch its own review panel for the broadcaster to “secure independence”.
The Shadow Secretary of State for Culture, Lucy Powell, who is leading the party’s review, has made some interesting staffing choices. Steve Morrison, described as “a former Granada TV director of programmes” is also known for founding the ‘Third World First’ program, now known as People & Planet.
The group runs such campaigns as ‘Divest Borders’, which aims to “build a world free from borders”. June Sarpong is also on the panel, and has previously found employment as the BBC’s first Director of Creative Diversity. She’s written books entitled The Power of Privilege: How white people can challenge Racism and Diversify: An award-winning guide to why inclusion is better for everyone, and was also on the board of Britain Stronger in Europe. So far, so impartial.
It’s generally accepted that organisations like the BBC tend to be staffed by those with a left-wing outlook on life. Janan Ganesh of the Financial Times has blamed those of a conservative temperament for chasing money in the City rather than entering the poorly-paid public sector.
But this analysis is completely out of step with the clout many of these institutions wield. Linker, whilst clearly not representative of the average Beeb reporter with his £2 million salary, nonetheless has enough influence to frustrate the wishes of even Richard Sharp and Robbie Gibb, two appointees with a Conservative record given senior roles who are constantly named as examples of the aforementioned “Tory cronyism”.
Besides, even the BBC has another body to answer to – Ofcom, the quango David Cameron once promised to dismantle all the way back in 2009. The issue of bias is far too complex to be reduced to a handful of partisan appointees.
The BBC isn’t the only body organising against perceived governmental meddling. Just look at the work being done by the Sheila Mckechnie Foundation, which has spearheaded the creation of the Charity Reform Group (CRG).
Notable members include Halima Begum of the Runnymede Trust and Tim Naor Hilton of Refugee Action, who are both outspoken critics of the Conservative Party. The CRG isn’t content to “wait for doors to reopen” – presumably after the current Government gets drubbing at the polls – but has exhorted charity CEOs to wade into political debates with confidence.
Attempts to reform the charity sector have come to nothing. Despite the appointment of various Conservative figures, the party has shown no interest in repealing The Charities Act (2011), which is explicitly biased towards Left-leaning organisations operating under the protection of the ‘promotion of the equalities’ clause.
The fundamental significance that repealing this Act has is obvious when observing the disastrous Charity Commission investigation into the Runnymede Trust in 2021, after over a dozen Conservative MPs wrote to complain about the Trust’s criticism of the Sewell report.
The complaint was thrown out by the commission: never mind that the Trust’s Director, Halima Begum. described the government as pursuing a “white nationalist” agenda, and called Boris Johnson an “entitled Bullingdon Club brat”. The group has continued to receive taxpayer money through local councils. The Trust might self-evidently be biased to you or I, but in the eyes of the law it is not.
Even international organisations are hostile to the Conservatives: two weeks ago Britain, was downgraded by the pithy-named Civicus Monitor in their civic freedoms index for the government’s scrutiny of activist charities. According to the group’s website, the monitor is “a collaboration between more than 20 civil society organisations around the world, providing an annual update of the global relative health of civil society.” Britain was downgraded from “narrowed” to “obstructed”, placing us in the same bracket as South Africa and Botswana.
Airdropping ideological allies into hostile environments achieves little without the additional heft of a high-profile popular campaign to ‘reclaim’ an institution, or a legislative stick by which to ram through root-and-branch reforms. The Conservative Party does not provoke the culture war, it responds to it – but incredibly poorly. Impartiality has been a useful tool to maintain balance in the past but, as the culture war becomes increasingly heated, it may no longer be enough. I will refer to Robert Conquest’s second law: any organisation not explicitly and constitutionally Right-wing will sooner or later become Left-wing.
The Conservative Party is not wrong to try and regain some semblance of representation. But tactics matter: carelessness will only embolden those who seek to remove right-leaning figures from public life entirely. Emboldened by the prospect of a long-Labour regime, disgruntled ideologues are unlikely to hold their tongues in the name of fairness and balance. The BBC and large swathes of the third sector are reliant on public funding, and many of the initiatives pushed by left-leaning employees are incredibly unpopular. The Government shouldn’t engage in the underhanded tactics used by the Left, and should instead wield their popular mandate for legislative reform before they lose their chance.