The BBC’s loathing of rural Britain is clear
Thank goodness farmers are persistent types, because when it comes to the Government’s new inheritance tax policy, it takes some effort to separate fact from fiction.
Will only a few hundred farms be affected, as the Treasury insists, or will the majority be clobbered by Rachel Reeves’s tax raid, as others claim?
For many landowners the question is literally existential – so nothing could be more important than getting to the truth. Where better to turn for an impartial assessment than the BBC, which has a whole team of crack journalists and other experts dedicated to weighing the evidence in cases of claim and counter claim?
Just one problem: the corporation’s supposedly impartial fact-checking service does not appear to be an entirely reliable source of information.
In a highly embarrassing blunder, the “forensic investigation” team at BBC Verify has been forced to correct its own report, after accidentally citing a Labour Party activist as an “independent” source.
The corporation presenting a fully paid-up member of Sir Keir Starmer’s party as impartial? Who’d have thunk it! Sadly, it’s hardly the mother of all surprises. This is, after all, the BBC we are talking about.
The whole place is so riddled with Lefties that it’s hard to distinguish one from another. All too often, supposedly “balanced” audiences on its political shows are anything but.
Then again, BBC Verify’s core offer is impartiality – so wheeling out a member of any political party to give evidence in such a debate without revealing their party political affiliation is particularly mad and bad.
Granted, it takes a few minutes on Google to discover Dan Neidle’s links to the Labour Party. Given his day job – running a non-partisan company to improve tax and legal policies – it’s not something he shouts about.
Nonetheless, unearthing his political leanings does not take Watergate levels of inquiry. There they are, for all to see, in a “quick personal disclosure” he posted on X on June 14. In a breezy “by the way” style, he told his 169,000 social media followers that he is not only a member of the Labour Party, but sits on its most senior disciplinary body.
As he was running a company that makes great shakes about being independent, during the general election campaign, he presumably thought it wise to put it out there before someone else did so on his behalf.
How can all those well-paid investigative supremos have failed to pick up information this obvious?
In his defence, Neidle has been highly critical of certain Labour Party tax policy proposals in the past. All the same, including his evidence in this particular exercise seems most unwise.
All it does is fuel the impression among farmers and many others who support them that the thoroughly metropolitan corporation cannot be bothered to subject this particular rural policy to the kind of rigorous analysis of which it claims to be so proud.
It speaks to a blind spot where the views of those outside the metropolitan elite are sidelined. Alas, the farmers don’t have their own version of Victoria Derbyshire to fact-check the fact-checkers.
Giving their take on how many estates will be affected, BBC Verify echoed Treasury arguments about the use of allowances to reduce the liability. Like the Chancellor, they maintain that the real threshold at which inheritance tax will now have to be paid on farms is not £1 million – the figure that has made all the headlines – but £3 million.
Very few farms in the UK are worth that much. Those familiar with just how hard HMRC makes it to use inheritance tax allowances – and the way they shrivel by the year as levels remain frozen in the teeth of rampant inflation – are unlikely to be remotely reassured.
For his part, Sir Keir Starmer can hardly hide his satisfaction with the corporation’s reporting, encouraging those still unclear about who is telling the truth – his government, or farmers, to look at the BBC’s assessment.
In the face of the increasingly bitter backlash, it is clear that the Prime Minister intends to do what he always does when he has no good answers: keep mechanically repeating the same old lines, now spoon-fed by the BBC.
Addressing this week’s protest in central London, Jeremy Clarkson – who owes his career to the corporation – wondered when the organisation became “this infernal Government’s mouthpiece?”
Well, quite. Given this week’s woeful performance, he is more than entitled to ask.