Iain Dale exposed as a fascist over BBC bias claim?

Now, the times that I have heard Iain Dale on 18doughtystreet.com, the internet TV station, or writing on his blog Iain Dale's Diary, berating the BBC for it's alleged Left-wing bias. Now, the truth. And it raises an ugly question, if the BBC has a Right-wing bias, and 18DS and Iain Dale believe the BBC to be a Left-wing bias, how extreme Right-wing does that make the BBC critics?

Johann Hari: Yes the BBC is biased - but to the right
The legitimate spectrum starts with the crazy-right and ends with centrist-liberalism
Published: 09 April 2007

With the appointment of Sir Michael Lyons as BBC chairman, one of the flabbiest, laziest clichés of British politics has been pushed out for another wheezy jog around the block. The right-wing press is spluttering it with one voice: the BBC is an institutionally left-wing organisation.

Lyons is obviously a "crony" of Labour because Gordon Brown commissioned him to produce dry reports into the fire service and local government funding - and under his leadership the BBC will continue to pollute the British body politic with their "liberal prejudices".

This is stated so often that nobody stops to ask: "Is this true? Where's the evidence?" In fact, the BBC's most famous and high-profile presenters today are figures of the right, and make increasingly little effort to hide it.

Andrew Neil - union-buster, former Murdoch lackey and cheerleader for Thatcher at her most foaming - presents all the BBC's live Westminster coverage, with six programmes. On This Week, he jeers at anybody who expresses left-liberal ideas as unwordly imbeciles, and is immediately reinforced by another Thatcherite, Michael Portillo. Only the poorly-prepared Diane Abbot is there to pout alternatives.

This bias runs across the BBC. Kevin Marsh, the former editor of the Today programme, admits now he had to "wrestle the Daily Mail" from his star presenter, John Humphrys', grasp every morning, and it shows. Humphrys' interviews are invariably flecked with a small-c conservative, the-country's-going-to-the-dogs groan.

Nick Robinson, the BBC's political editor, is a former chair of the Young Conservatives, and the biggest splash he has made is "debunking" Labour's claims about Michael Howard's tax plans at the last election. Michael Burke chairs The Moral Maze with bizarre claims that feminism has destroyed the world and subjugated men into cowering weaklings.

At the more populist end of the market, the BBC's right-wingery is often even worse. Chris Moyles spews a Littlejohnian agenda to millions on Radio 1 each morning, saying, "Yeah, I'm homophobic. I don't like the gays. It does my head in." He astonished the Oscar-winning actress Halle Berry in an interview by adopting a foul lordy-lordy-lord "black" accent, prompting her to ask with admirable restraint: "Are we having a racist moment here?"

He"s not alone: the likes of Jeremy Clarkson and Jon Gaunt (who, when I was last on television with him, advocated whipping drug addicts and prostitutes) are given hours of airtime.

Where are the assertive left-wing voices to counterbalance this? The few prominent BBC liberals - Andrew Marr, Jonathan Dimbleby, Jim Naughtie - do a far better job of suppressing their beliefs, because they know that if they slip, it will be splashed across the pages of the right-wing press for weeks. They are, anyway, firmly on the centrist part of the left: there are literally no prominent presenters who are anything like as far to the left as Neil, Moyles and Clarkson are to the right.

You can see this classic BBC "balance" in practice on Radio 4's The Moral Maze, where it is common to hear two barking-right voices - Melanie Phillips and Clare Fox - counterbalanced by a centre-right voice (Michael Portillo) and a meek watery liberal (Ian Hargreaves).

The legitimate spectrum starts with the crazy-right and ends with centrist-liberalism.

How did this happen? Part of the problem is that the perception of what is a "centrist" position in this country is distorted by a press that is way to the right of the British people. If you look at the opinion polls and, crucially, how people actually vote, this is a mainstream European social democracy that believes in fairly high tax and spending, and liberal social policies.

Look even at the halycyon days of the British right, the period they believe expresses the true longings of the electorate. At every single election where Margaret Thatcher was the leader of the Conservative Party, 56 per cent of the British people voted against her and for parties committed to higher taxes and higher public spending. It was an undemocratic electoral system, not a right-wing majority in the country, that made her Prime Minister.

Yet when the BBC genuinely reflects the real political centre, it is called "biased" by a press way out on the fringes of public opinion. Richard Littlejohn, for example, says the BBC is biased for broadcasting some programmes that reinforce the "eco-fascist" view that global warming is caused by man. In fact, along with virtually all the world's scientists, 84 per cent of the British people agree that current global-warming trends are caused by us and is a serious threat to the human species.

But the BBC listens to these complaints. While they are extremely sensitive to accusations of bias from the right, they all-but ignore much more well-founded accusations of bias from the left.

The amiable right-wing headbanger Janet Daley was recently invited along to an internal BBC think-fest to tell them how "socialist" they were, but nobody would think of inviting along a left-wing equivalent like, say, John Pilger to tell them they were "fascist". This is because, with such a hefty chunk of the press under their control, the right will always be able to scream louder than the left.

That doesn't mean that they (or we) have to listen. The first item in Sir Michael Lyons in-tray should be: deal with the bias that skews the corporation - to the right.

j.hari@ independent.co.uk