Why the BBC deserves to be defunded

It’s degenerated into a propaganda machine

Outside Broadcasting House, Wednesday 14th May 2025

In May, shortly after appearing on Radio 4 Woman’s Hour, I wrote about what a depressing experience it had been. I mentioned that I would be putting in a formal complaint about the way the show misrepresented me in an interview the following week with Sacha Deshmukh of Amnesty, formerly of Stonewall, and predicted that my complaint would get nowhere.

Reader, I’m sorry to say that I was right. I complained to the Beeb itself, was knocked back, complained to the regulator Ofcom, was knocked back, appealed and got a “nothing to see here”. I’m really not joking when I say that I would like the BBC to be defunded – on my specialist subject, sex’n’gender, it has been nothing short of a propaganda arm. It’s directly responsible for much of the social contagion that has seen trans identification rise so much among young people, for the staggering degree of misinformation about human biology that we see all around us, and for the enormous harm done to women by presenting the unreasonable and narcissistic demands of a tiny number of deranged men as the biggest human-rights issue of our times. We’d be better off without it, and every licence-fee payer would be £174.50 a year better off too.

I’m resharing my original article today for two reasons: first because of an excellent open letter just published signed by several organisations, including Sex Matters, the one I work for, calling on the Beeb to stop doing this. You can read it on SEEN in Journalism’s Substack.

The second is becaues because of the shocking decision – genuinely, even when I think I can no longer be shocked, it turns out I can – at the highest level in the Beeb to call the Minneapolis shooter “she/her”, and to knock back complaints about its decision to do the same with a British trans-identifying man who killed his husband with a samurai sword. (He was ruled unfit to stand trial, but a short hearing concluded that he had done it, which is why I’m saying “killed” rather than “murdered”). Here’s the Telegraph about the SEEN in Journalism letter.

Lots of people put in complaints about the samurai killer, and they all got the same stock response last week. The Beeb says that its style guide requires journalists to refer to people as they wish to be described, and that when it comes to criminals, it uses the language that is used in court. This amounts to saying: “We have a shitty internal policy that prioritises a fringe counterfactual belief system over accuracy and impartiality – which are legal requirements in our charter – and if an arm of the state, namely the criminal-justice system, decides to gaslight the nation, we will too.”

This isn’t journalism; it’s propaganda. And we’re being forced to pay for it via the licence fee. To say that I resent this, having worked in the commercial media sector for almost 20 years during which search engines and social media cannibalised nearly the entire revenue base of journalism, driving countless outlets to the wall, is a gross understatement. The BBC is in an incredibly privileged position, and it misuses that privilege so grossly that it deserves to have it taken away.

I’m sure lots of people will complain about the young man who killed two children and severely wounded others being referred to as a woman too, and almost certainly with no greater success.

Alright, here’s my original article. I was angry when I wrote it, and I’m even angrier now.