Des Freedman

Ten days ago, Andy Burnham stood outside Number 10 and announced a ‘circuit breaker for Britain, bringing forward the biggest changes in the last forty years’. One thing that won’t change is the use of British bases by American military aircraft bombing Iran.

John Healey’s resignation as defence secretary is the latest skirmish in a wider campaign to secure an increase in defence spending. Tom Stevenson described the Strategic Defence Review as the ‘object of a proxy battle between the armed forces and the Treasury’ and it seems that, for now, the Treasury is winning the battle over whether to stump up an additional £28 billion over the next four years. Most of the media, however, are on the side of the armed forces.

Two marches will assemble in central London tomorrow. One is championing the rights of Palestinians and commemorating 78 years of displacement and occupation; the other, organised by the far-right activist Tommy Robinson, is calling on supporters to ‘unite the West’ against Islam and immigration. Yet only the former has been widely described in the British media as a ‘hate march’. According to the Nexis database, there were only 29 stories referring to ‘hate marches’ between 1 January 1994 and 7 October 2023. Since then, 3152 stories have used the term, most of them focused on pro-Palestine protests. In other words, despite regular demonstrations of racism, hate, discrimination and bigotry on the world’s streets, more than 99 per cent of stories that mention ‘hate marches’ have been published since 7 October 2023 and have focused on anti-racist protesters.

From the revelations about Jimmy Savile in 2012 to the gender pay gap debacle in 2017, the BBC was for many years its own worst enemy. Now, confronted with a rampaging US president and increasingly confident domestic opponents, some of whom sit on the corporation’s board, the BBC is embroiled in a crisis that has so far seen the resignations of two senior executives and the threat of a billion-dollar lawsuit from Donald Trump.

When Israel bombarded Beirut on 27 September, killing hundreds of people, the BBC headline was ‘Beirut rocked by multiple blasts’. ITV News had ‘strikes hit Beirut’ and Sky ‘Beirut hit in multiple blasts’. None went for al-Jazeera’s straightforward and accurate statement: ‘Israel attacks Lebanon’ (which remains its main tag for the crisis). Yesterday evening, by contrast, the BBC headline was: ‘Iran launches barrage of missiles at Israel.’