Welcome back to Waste Watch with Dia Chakravarty.
The BBC World Service has reportedly secured an additional £27 million grant from the Treasury for the year ahead on top of its £104 million baseline funding.
Advocates of the BBC often remind us of the significance of its World Service around the globe. Articles have appeared in this paper warning against the “institutional vandalism” of axing the World Service’s Arabic, Persian or Chinese outputs. The former Director General of the Corporation Tony Hall has termed the World Service “one of the UK’s most important cultural exports”.
Lord Hall was not wrong in the slightest, nor was he exaggerating the cultural importance of the BBC’s international arm. It is impossible to fathom the influence the World Service has on countries and peoples thousands of miles away from London. Growing up in South Asia in the 80s and the 90s, it was the BBC’s World Service which served as a window into the world outside my own.
Competition has emerged over the years, but it remains one of the most trusted, well respected sources of information, news and analysis around the globe.
Why then am I not thrilled about my tax money bolstering this unique arsenal of British soft power, particularly at a time when we are told it has a crucial role to play in countering Russian and Chinese propaganda?
It is because on too many occasions over the years, the World Service itself has been found to be promoting propaganda which is decidedly against the BBC’s obligations under its Charter to “reflect the United Kingdom, its culture and values to the world”.
Back in 2021, an investigation into BBC Arabic Service found that homophobic slurs were being aired without criticism to the channel’s 42 million viewers worldwide. Comments from viewers read out on shows produced at the Broadcasting House in London would include condemning gay men as “perverts” and calling for two gay Mauritanian men who had already been arrested for holding a birthday party to be imprisoned for life.
When challenged by campaigners, a BBC spokesperson simply said this: “[t]hese broadcasts did not meet our editorial standards and we apologise to our viewers.” As far as we know, nobody was actually held accountable for this incident, nor was an apology offered in Arabic on the Arabic service.
The BBC World Service bosses apparently deemed it more important to appease a culture of homophobia than to reflect the “culture and values” of the United Kingdom, as stipulated in its charter, against which the Service’s funding is secured.
That same year, the Peter Tatchell Foundation reported that the BBC’s “Persian service has promoted the homophobic views of the Iranian regime”. The LGBT community in Iran had expressed outrage about a “BBC Persian website post that called LGBTs ‘faggots’ and an ‘abomination’ and compared them to opium addicts and people who commit incest”.
Just the previous year, a 31-year-old Iranian man was hanged publicly by the Islamic Republic of Iran. Iran is a country which continues to carry out the execution of homosexual people in the name of “moral principles”.
Again, in a blow to accountability, and angering campaigners, the BBC merely admitted the language used was “inappropriate”. While certain words were removed from the website following the outcry, Mr Tatchell claimed that was done in such a way that “nobody reading the website apology would know what the BBC is referring to”.
It will come as no surprise then, that the World Service’s former Chief who held the role until July this year, stands accused of appearing to defend Hezbollah, as she “claims it is wrong to talk about the group controlling ‘strongholds’ and denies areas are closed to outside observers”.
This is despite “evidence that Hezbollah had established several weapons manufacturing facilities and infrastructure in Beirut’s Dahiya neighbourhood alone”, as reported in this newspaper.
This problem with the World Service isn’t restricted to the bosses, but runs deep into the organisation. A particularly worrying allegation, given the element of dishonesty involved, emerged in the wake of Hamas’s terrorist attack on October 7 last year when a journalist working as a special correspondent for BBC Arabic appeared to write two variations of a story – one in English, the other in Arabic – that contained differing accounts of the Oct 7 massacre of 1,400 Israelis.
An interview with a Hamas leader was published in English and in Arabic.
The latter failed to include the evidence (which appeared in the English version) showing the true depravity of the attacks in which civilians were targeted, merely stating that “a senior Hamas leader has insisted that his group did not kill civilians in Israel, stressing only conscripts were targeted”.
The scale of the problem became evident when several other BBC Arabic journalists – all on the BBC’s payroll paid for by British taxpayers – appeared to justify on social media the killing of Israeli civilians by Hamas.
One BBC Arabic journalist tweeted, “Israel’s prestige is crying in the corner”, while others endorsed tweets likening the terrorist group Hamas to freedom fighters, as well as describing the October 7 atrocity as a “morning of hope”. Another joked about the abduction of an Israeli grandmother as Hamas’s “inheritance”. These are just a handful of examples.
As ever, the BBC has claimed they are “investigating this matter”. The spokesperson insisted, “We take allegations of breaches of our editorial and social media guidelines with the utmost seriousness, and if and when we find breaches we will act, including taking disciplinary action”.
But there appears to be no update on the findings of the investigation.
Until the BBC World Service is able to prove that it has well and truly cleaned up its house and can be trusted as a representative of the values of the country, it has absolutely no business taking a penny from its taxpayers.
Please share share examples of public spending in your personal and professional lives which you consider to be a waste of taxpayers’ money. You can email us your stories – either in writing or as voice notes – at wastewatch@telegraph.co.uk