A BBC delve into Keir Starmer shows just what a joke Auntie has become (Image: PA/Getty)
Did you know the BBC has a truth verifying unit which is supposed to meticulously root out misinformation and present us with the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth?
Nope me neither till this week. But it did make me laugh. Mostly because so many of us have seen time and again that the only facts the BBC presents to us these days are so heavily biased to the left as to be farcical.
Take this week, when their 60-strong "forensic investigation" fact-checking team (it’s called Verify) was totally discredited after it deleted a statement backing ministers' claims about how many farms would be affected by the Government’s tax grab on farmers.
The Government insists just 500 will be affected, the farmers say its thousands. In fact the Country Land and Business Association claim 70,000 farms will be hit by the tax which is information the BBC truth-checkers failed to acknowledge or report.
But still for 17 whole days this supposedly crack team was adamant that the Government's figures – not the farmers' – were “likely” be right.
Which in itself is a hard to believe. How would a bunch of nerdy fact-checkers at the BBC who rarely leave their urban bubble and know nothing about farming or rural life know better than the farmers and landowners?
But still they stuck to their little fairy story – until Keir Starmer started boasting about the BBC backing him which made it look as if the BBC was working for him and Verify wasn’t the supposedly impartial organ its supposed to be.
It all triggered a row about bias after which the BBC promptly deleted its supposedly impartial “findings.” And good job it did because it’s since been discovered the fact-checkers' meticulous research looks like it was done by a bunch of amateurs, not a supposed crack team of investigators.
First, they confused acres with hectares (they didn’t know a hectare was 2.4 times bigger than an acre) and completely misrepresented the number of farms that would be affected.
Second, they used outdated statistics. And third, they turned to a supposedly “independent” expert called Dan Neidle, who isn’t the vaguest bit independent as he’s a long-time Labour activist, a member of Labour’s National Constitutional Committee and an advisor to the Labour Party.
Did these meticulous fact-checkers not check that?
In a nutshell, what that this means is that these so-called “stats” produced by Verify look like they were designed to come out in the Government’s favour to back up its claims about how many farms would be affected.
What the Hell is happening to this country when we have a Government that lies to our faces and a state broadcaster that is aiding and abetting them?
What the Hell is it about the word impartial that the BBC doesn’t understand? Every week we see blatant instances of it flouting this very important condition of its charter. It’s almost like it knows that now a Labour Government is in power its charter WILL be renewed in 2027 and it can go on throwing licence fee payers' money about with gay abandon, never having to account for a penny of it.
Maybe that’s why the facts about the farmers were so blatantly misrepresented – to make ministers look like they knew what they were talking about. Which they don’t.
And if that wasn’t the case – if it’s just a case of not-very-clever people doing their research and getting it wrong – then they shouldn’t be bloody fact-checkers because they clearly wouldn’t know a fact if it bit them on the backside.
Remember during Brexit when the BBC’s fact-checkers always came down on the side of Remain? It’s like in Lefty BBC world when they want something to be the truth they’ll move Heaven and Earth to make it look like it is.
Which is precisely why people don’t trust the BBC any more. It’s also what prompted Jeremy Clarkson this week to wonder when the BBC became “this infernal Government’s mouthpiece”.