The Noble Liar, by Robin Aitken, Biteback Publishing (updated June 30, 2020 with “A Corona Coda” preface).

Reviewed by Sean Naughton

The Noble Liar is just the perfect length for the impatient reader. At 340 pages, it’s long enough to make the author’s case, but short enough, if you’re impatient enough, to get through in a day – once you commit to it – which is almost inevitable given the cogency of the introduction. The possibility of a one-day reading is helped greatly by the clarity and quality of

the writing; you never have to reread a sentence, and you might not even need your glasses, given the very generous spacing of the print. Speaking of days off, the quality of the writing suggests either that the author is a master craftsman, or that he has had plenty of time to bring the book(s) to perfection. As an elite journalist with 25 years’ experience at the BBC, the former must be assumed; as a retired BBC journalist, the availability of enough time for careful rewriting can hardly be in doubt:

The BBC came along and offered me this handsome pension offer. I was 50. It was a pension which meant enough to get by on for the rest of my life. So I took it and wrote the book.1 Three books in fact. The Noble Liar is the third in a series: Can we trust the BBC? (2007), Can we still trust the BBC? (2013), and The Noble Liar (2018), repub-

lished in paperback in November 2020, with what the author calls a “Corona Coda.” The 2013 title is confusing in as much as it implies that in 2007 trust in the BBC was merited, whereas the answer to the 2007 question was a quite definite “No!”:

The clichéd critique of the BBC is that it is a nest of lefties which promotes a progressive political agenda and is bedevilled by political correctness. Depressingly, in my experience, the cliché comes uncomfortably close to the actual truth: the BBC really does promote a (never acknowledged) political agenda.2

Nit-picking aside, the author himself readily admits that his very perseverance might suggest a certain obsessiveness. That charge is only strengthened by the knowledge that before his early retirement, he had garnered a reputation within the BBC of being something of a highly respected and very dignified dissenter. After all, he presented to the Director General and to all 12 BBC governors, a dossier of evidence demonstrating lack of impartiality and outright bias in BBC news output. They completely ignored its warning but softened the blow with praise that it was “well written” and shortly afterwards with an offer the author could not refuse: early retirement. Well, I for one admire his dossier derring-do. This must have taken real courage, given that he was still quite young and married with two daughters. And I don’t begrudge him the early retirement, or an ounce of the satisfaction he must have enjoyed in writing the books since retiring in 2006. Having said that, the book(s) never sounds unduly vindictive or smug. Alongside the meticulous re-presenting of biased interviews and woefully lop-sided current affairs programmes, there is a real sense of sorrow at the demise of his beloved “Auntie,” as the BBC has been known from the earliest days, having been established in 1927. There is genuine affection and indeed admiration for former colleagues: “many of them tend to be very nice people, they tend to be very well-educated people, they tend to be middle-class people, they tend to be very congenial people, and the BBC is a very interesting place to work.”3 There is a kind of Bridesheadian mourning for lost innocence, a real sense of sadness at losing that mixture of pride and idealism he once felt at the very prospect of working for the BBC:

I joined up with the BBC, I was very proud to do so because I had imbibed with my mother’s milk that the BBC was the finest broadcaster in the world and that was a view that was very common amongst the population at the time and I thought, ‘Finally, I’ve got it made, finally I’m entering the hallowed portals.’4

THE PROBLEM AT THE BBC

The main thesis of the book(s) has two parts: that the BBC is not the impartial broadcaster she claims to be and, more seriously, that the BBC, for the most part unknowingly, aligns herself with and indeed champions what Aitken refers to as a progressive, secular, atheistic world view:

Right throughout the sixties, seventies, and eighties and indeed right up to the present day, the BBC has instinctively allied itself with any campaign which is transgressive.5

The books contain copious examples – programme summaries, interview transcripts, inquiry findings, opinion polls, personal testimonies and the like – of both BBC bias, and her invariable alignment with transgressive ideology on issues including abortion, divorce, contraception, homosexuality and gender ideology. The default alliances with transgressive ideologies are accompanied by what Aitken sees as the default BBC “left” positions on political, social and cultural issues, from hostility to things like the Royal Family, the empire, the police on the one hand, to a corresponding hostility to “rightwing” views on crime, immigration, education, Islam, and the family, on the other:

Most importantly, and overarchingly, this book explains how it is that the BBC has become so deeply hostile to social conservatism – that way of thinking, shared by tens of millions of us, which values a traditional moral code that emphasises virtues like patriotism, self-restraint, and decency.6

The BBC’s relentless hostility towards Donald Trump is a recurrent theme:

I find it difficult to recall any single BBC report on Trump which portrayed him in a positive light.7

A whole chapter is devoted to Brexit, the outcome of which Aitken considers has further alienated the BBC from “leave” voters, and from the “Get Brexit done” government of Boris Johnson, which they elected with a big majority in 2019:

For the BBC in particular the new dispensation is unusually challenging; the BBC now finds itself facing a government, and governing party, elements of which regard the Corporation as ‘the enemy.’8

Aitken readily acknowledges that the rejection of what he calls “social conservatism” is not peculiar to the BBC, but that the grievance against the BBC is compounded by two factors which make the betrayal all the more egregious: the BBC’s duty of impartiality, and the licence fee. These two issues are really one issue:

There is a solemn covenant that lies at the heart of the BBC’s relationship with the country, and it is this: in return for the licence fee revenue (a valuable privilege), it promises to tell the truth and to be impartial on all matters of public debate. This promise is broken on a daily basis, and, over time, its performance is worsening. The BBC’s world view, its composite ‘noble lie’, if you will, has become more pronounced, more dogmatic, more entrenched. On certain topics it barely tries to disguise its own prejudices any longer. Whether through carelessness or hubris it hardly even attempts to maintain the pretence of impartiality.9

The alleged breaking of this covenant is the central focus of the book. The people pay the licence fee – it remains a criminal offence

not to do so – but the people for the most part do not feel that the BBC is keeping its end of the bargain. As the author explains, the focus of the book is:

an examination of why there is such a gulf between the world as the media presents it, and the world as most ordinary people experience it. Why is it that so many people find no echo of their own opinions in the big media outlets that serve them? And this brings the British Broadcasting Corporation to centre stage. The BBC, by a very large margin, is the most important media organisation in the country, and to understand what has gone wrong, we need to examine this mighty institution in close detail.10

THE CAUSES

Aitken sets out in meticulous detail the overwhelming evidence of the BBC’s failure, as he and likeminded “socially conservative people” see it, to be impartial and to be representative of the people who pay the licence fee. The other purpose of the book(s) is to examine how and why this has come about. His thesis in this respect is that the post-war generation bought into and seek to perpetuate a series of “noble lies,” chief of which is “the noble lie” that following your unbridled instinctive desires will make you and your fellow man and your society happier and better:

The noble lie at the heart of this new morality is that we can, as individuals and as a society, dispense with an objective moral code without harmful consequences. The claim is that the old moral code was judgmental and harsh and based on a non-existent Deity who had supposedly laid down rules about human conduct; in fact, say the atheists, the rules were concocted by power hungry priests. The new moral code, they say, which dispenses with God altogether, allows everyone to live happier lives – free from the guilt that the traditional rules engendered. This idea has been successfully marketed to the country (after all, it’s not that difficult to persuade people to do what their instincts urge them to do) and, exercising our democratic free will, we have enshrined in law measures that overturn the old moral code…

[…] This is just an excerpt from the June 2021 Issue of Culture Wars magazine. To read the full article, please purchase a digital download of the magazine, or become a subscriber!

(Endnotes Available by Request)