The fact-checking ‘specialists’ at BBC Verify were forced to delete a “thoroughly wrong” article accusing car insurance companies of racism, according to a whistleblowing report published in the Telegraph. The report reveals how the self-appointed arbiters of truth (a 60-strong team which costs over £3 million a year) wrote about a so-called “ethnic penalty” within the insurance firms, with the story appearing on BBC Breakfast, the One and Six O’ Clock News, Radio 1, Radio 5 Live and on TikTok. The article remained online for a whopping six months before it was finally deleted…
Michael Prescott, former independent adviser to the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines and Standards Board, wrote in his internal memo:
“BBC audiences were being encouraged to believe Britain’s major insurers were, intentionally or unintentionally, racist, and charging high prices to customers based on their ethnicity… For me, it was hard to imagine UK FTSE boards or executive teams conceiving of or sanctioning a policy to charge ethnic minority customers higher prices.”
Prescott found the story “so unlikely” he demanded an internal review, which exposed “multiple serious editorial problems“. When the BBC top brass were informed of all this, only the direct references to a phantom “ethnic penalty” were cut. Eventually, it was determined the whole article was so bogus it was quietly removed. No one was disciplined. This is the handy work of a team which, when not ‘fact checking’ the existence of dancers in bikinis, is busy congratulating itself on social media for exposing fake news and preaching about how “the truth matters”…
Shadow national security minister Alicia Kearns told Times Radio she would have put a precondition on a China trip if she were PM:
“I would have put a precondition that I was not going to go if I was prime minister, unless Jimmy Lai was coming home with me. I would also put a precondition in the six months leading up to the visit that I wanted a reduction in hostile acts against our country. But that’s not what we saw. And actually, in contrast, what we saw was clearly the Chinese Communist Party did put a precondition, which was that the new embassy in London had to be signed off. So why is it okay for China to set preconditions and to make very clear red lines about what they require for a visit, but we go without having put any ourselves?”