The British Broadcasting Corporation’s reputation has collapsed, alongside its ratings. Half a million people cancelled their licence fees in 2023. The BBC saw a two per cent decline in sales volumes, and collected £80 million less in licence fee income last year. These wounds were not solely inflicted by competing streaming platforms, or young people choosing short-form video over Sir David Attenborough. Even my Boomer grandparents — for whom the television is a primary sense organ — have switched off. The British public are growing sick of the anti-white bias and intersectional agenda that has infected the state broadcaster.

The problem with the BBC is one of representation. Hannah F. Pitkin provides a useful definition: 

Representation, taken generally, means the making present in some sense of something which is nevertheless not present literally or in fact. […] What matters is being made present, being heard; that is representation.

Any representation effort values something over another, and feels it warrants raising the salience of. So what does the BBC believe warrants being “made present” in its programming? Its 50:50 “Equality Project” purports to be “a toolkit designed to help production teams improve the range of their on-screen contributors in terms of gender, disability and ethnicity.” While the BBC insists that “there is no ‘one size fits all’ model and no specific quota to fulfil”, the name implies a modus operandi to achieve parity among presenters between women, ethnic minorities, unorthodox sexual and gender identities, and heterosexuals, men, and the white majority.

This is reflected in the viewing figures, last reported by the BBC in 2022. Due to 50:50 mandating half of all BBC news coverage be delivered by women, the women still watching the BBC rated the coverage more favourably. However, overall audience numbers are shrinking. While 50:50 promises “No compromise on quality”, viewers are voting with their remotes. Fifty-one percent of the population surveyed use BBC services weekly; down from seventy-one percent in 2015. A microcosm of this is Doctor Who: with the revival losing half its audience since becoming obsessed with gender and sexuality activism with Whittaker and Gatwa’s incarnations. Only a dwindling subset of Woke true believers still tune in, like the last Japanese soldier stationed on a remote island who still believes the war is going on. Not feeling seen on screen, many are tuning out.

The 50:50 scheme doesn’t concern itself with intellectual diversity either. Exempting the occasional inclusion of Matt Goodwin on Politics Live, or pillorying of a Reform spokesman by a Question Time audience of activist plants, the BBC’s coverage is bland and Blairite. Panellists on political shows are indistinguishable flavours of establishment liberal. But one needn’t bother with differences of opinion when one’s politics have been defined as apriori correct. By believing in a fundamental human sameness beneath superficial cultural differences and material iniquities — the anthropology of liberal philosophy — then calling oneself “diverse” and “democratic” while having complete homogeneity of opinion is intellectually consistent. You need only represent a global buffet of superficial immutable characteristics, while regurgitating the same narrative across a twenty-four hour schedule. 

The broadcaster spends more time on drag queens than the socially conservative opinions of those in the Red Wall. The BBC ran seven profiles on drag queens in April. (Unrelated to the eponymous Fools’ Day.) Last week, another piece lamented how inflation has made drag acts’ costumes “very expensive.” I’m sure Downing Street will declare a state of emergency by nightfall. The BBC’s GCSE resource, Bitesize, promotes the gender-bending practice to children as indistinct from pantomime. This is despite the point of panto being to mock the absurd sight of a man dressed as a woman; and the disconcerting intentions of self-professed drag pedagogists to “introduce queer ways of knowing and being into the education of young children.” This is hardly representative of the pastimes of most Brits.

If its programming isn’t representative of majority opinion, or delivering market competitiveness with rival streaming services, then what is the purpose of the 50:50 scheme? What is being made present, if not the concerns of the viewing public?

In short, the BBC has become a ethnic and sexual-preference patronage scheme, layering the utopic liberal world they’d like to live in atop the England that still actually exists. Commentators aren’t wrong when they pejoratively label the BBC as being “Woke”. As Eric Kaufmann recently wrote, Woke means making “sacred totems [out] of historically marginalized race, gender, and sexual identity groups.” Its means of doing so, as literal communist Ash Sarkar said, is “the redistribution of power, wealth, and land along race, gender, and class lines.” (Somewhat of a tautology, when Sarkar redefines “working class” to mean “diverse” students.) The purpose of every beam in what Curtis Yarvin calls “the Cathedral” — the architecture of a total state — is to evangelise the gospel of egalitarianism. Every effort must be made to make viewers believe they are living in an antiracist, antisexist, trans-inclusive world. Any suggestion to the contrary becomes a deviation from the consensus reality constructed by state-funded programming. In the process, it lines the pockets of the ambassadors of these marginalised groups — like June Sarpong, paid a £267,000 salary to make “inclusive” content three days a week.

An example of the success of this attempt by the media to raise the salience of the plight of minority grievance groups is that, in the aftermath of 2020’s BLM riots, Americans surveyed overestimated that black Americans comprised forty-one percent of the population, and self-described liberals thought police shot more than ten thousand unarmed black suspects every year. The actual numbers are fourteen percent of the population, and an average of twenty-two suspects killed by police each year. What is being represented by the likes of the BBC is not reality, but a race-conscious present to transition to an egalitarian, antiracist future. 

This race consciousness often becomes a cudgel, wielded against the history of those who are English by ancestry. Salience of the English as an ethnic group is only allowed when saddling them with the lodestone of unique historical guilt. Depictions by Horrible Histories cast white Britons as both thieves of riches from foreign lands, and not responsible for building their own civilisation in the first place. This guilt is an anachronism: given the British Empire’s crusade to end the trans-Atlantic slave trade was the most expensive foreign aid venture in world history. But what is being represented, then, is that the BBC regard its core fee-paying demographic as a bigoted nuisance. No wonder they aren’t paying anymore.

What lurks beneath the BBC’s insistence that we need more “diversity” on screen is an insidious desire to reduce the presence of native English people on their own national broadcaster. It is anti-white racism, window dressed as a benevolent effort to overcome discrimination through quotas. As Harrison Pitt has noted, the likes of Humsa Yusuf, decrying the hu-whiteness of Scottish institutions, would not be out of place on Rwandan radio, or in the pages of Der Stürmer, were they speaking about Tutsis or Jews. But because it targets the white British majority, racism is fair game. Double points if directed at straight men.

The Labour government has committed to continue to fund the BBC until at least 2027. But if it continues to enact an ideological vision, rather than deliver a return on investment for those paying, expect to see growing cancellations and calls to defund the regime’s most recognisable mouthpiece in the years to come.