How the BBC sets a trap to make sure leftwing politicians never get a fair hearing
There’s a reason why so few truly leftwing politicians are visible in public life. Because the media’s role is to weed them out, discredit them, place them beyond the pale
Notice how the state and billionaire-owned media impose certain obligatory preconditions on politicians before they’re allowed to join the national conversation as respectable, and respected, participants. There are many examples, but let’s take two of the most obvious:
1. Do you condemn Hamas?
2. Does Israel have a right to exist?
Both relate to Israel, and both serve to strictly police political discourse – and in ways that extend far beyond the specific issue of Israel.
They offer an interviewer an immediate advantage in any exchange: from the outset, if the person being interviewed resists the imposed framing, he or she sounds like an extremist, like an antisemite.
Importantly, such preconditions, posing as a simple question, trap the interviewee – invariably leftwing politicians, or what the media like to call the “hard” or “far” left (very much in scare quotes) – into conceding at the start of the conversation the very ground they are trying to challenge.
I have addressed the demand to condemn Hamas before, in this article, so I won’t restate those arguments here.
Instead watch this short video of the BBC’s Nick Robinson interviewing Green party leader Zack Polanski and demanding that he affirm “Israel’s right to exist”. It is a classic of the genre. Note Robinson’s heavy framing of the question:
What we’re talking about is whether a state created by the United Nations, in the aftermath of pogroms and Holocaust, the worst act of racism in the history of the planet, has a right to exist or not. This is a question you have always dodged.
That’s very much in the “How many times a day do you beat your wife?” tradition of interviewing. In a post on X, Robinson again challenged Polanski: “Why is this a difficult question to answer?”
Both, let us note in passing, are Jewish. But only one is assumed to accrue moral standing in the exchange from their views about Israel.
We could easily turn the question around against Robinson:
Do you think the state of Israel – as a state illegally occupying and oppressing Palestinians for decades and committing the crime of apartheid, as determined by the world's highest court, and one deemed to be committing genocide according to a consensus of legal and human rights authorities as well as genocide scholars – has a right to exist?
Did apartheid South Africa have a right exist?
The answer to Robinson’s question is very simple. States come and go. They don’t have rights, people do. And importantly, according to international law, people enjoy the same, universal rights. Which is exactly why Israel as a state committing the crime of apartheid – as ruled by the International Court of Justice in 2024 – has no right to exist as it is currently constituted.
Polanski responded with the entirely reasonable assertion: “Israelis and Palestinians should have equal rights in a democracy.” Which was the solution accepted by the international community for black and white South Africans, post-apartheid.
And yet Robinson keeps interrupting Polanski, treating his sensible, moral position – one in line with his party’s new official policy that “Zionism is racism”, as determined by its members – as though it is proof of extremism, of antisemitism. As if Polanski is being slippery by refusing to accept what is, in fact, Robinson’s extreme premise.
Robinson is arguing that, even after Israel has been judged to be an apartheid state by the world’s highest court and to be committing genocide according to leading authorities on the subject, it should have an inviolable right to carry on exactly as it is.
Robinson’s implied position is that Palestinians and their supporters should simply shut up and live with the fact that Israel has been slaughtering and maiming hundreds of thousands of Gaza’s people. Nothing to see here, is Robinson’s message.
So who is the real extremist, who the real racist: Zack Polanski or Nick Robinson?
Power imbalance
Robinson’s approach is effective because leftwing politicians are typically trying to do something very different from centrist and rightwing politicians. Those in the Labour, Lib Dem, Reform and Restore parties wish to uphold the status quo, or at best tinker with it.
The left, currently best represented by the Greens, criticises the centre and the right for over-simplifying issues, often in dangerous ways, to foment knee-jerk, reactionary, scapegoating attitudes that serve to preserve the status quo and ignore power imbalances.
When the left analyses a problem, it tries to identify more precisely cause and effect, and reintroduce context that has been intentionally left out. The left understands that such context is excluded precisely to foster faulty diagnoses that blame the weak and protect the powerful.
The left has lots of ideas about how to change society for the better at home. It wants greater fairness. It wants to challenge the power of big corporations more interested in hoarding profits than the good of society. It wants affordable housing. It wants to protect and expand the health service. It wants to make sure schools work for everyone, not just the rich. It wants to protect jobs and ensure people are paid a decent wage. And so on.
These are popular policies. Which is why the centre and right spend lots of time paying lip service to them while doing nothing to achieve them.
The left wants change to actually happen. Which is why it demands redistribution of wealth and the overhauling of political and economic structures that benefit a tiny group of the super-rich.
The centre and right, meanwhile, find ways to deflate these demands so that austerity can be maintained and elite wealth protected. The economy isn’t growing sufficiently to allow for more public spending. The markets will panic if spending constraints are loosened. Security threats mean money cannot be directed away from “defence”. Profligacy will make us uncompetitive in global markets. And so on.
The left is trying to disrupt this status-quo narrative. It offers an alternative vision, one that focuses on how the accepted political framing is designed to avoid scrutinising the way our societies have been structured to protect wealth and powerful interests. The left doesn't want to tinker. It seeks to transform.
Which is why the left is seen as a threat by the billionaires and by western states captured through the privatisation of public services and utilities. The billionaires control not just corporate media but state broadcasters like the BBC, and use them to launder their own propaganda: that our societies can be run only as they currently are, diverting money upwards towards the already rich.
Consistent values
The job of interviewers like the BBC’s Nick Robinson is to impose preconditions, like the two “questions” above, to pull the ground from under leftwing politicians.
The left espouses universal values: it believes that all people have the same rights by virtue of being human, not because of the colour of their skin, or because of their nationality, or because of their belief systems, or because of their sex or sexual orientation, or because of their age or state of health, or because of their wealth.
That requires a consistency from the left, both at home and abroad, that the centre and right can easily discard when it proves inconvenient.
Which is precisely why “Does Israel have a right to exist?” is such great gotcha question for use against the left. It strips out complexity and context to pose as a “straightforward” question that can only answered in the affirmative: “Yes.”
It demands of the
left that it jettison its supreme values of moral consistency and universal rights. It must do so as a precondition for being given permission to talk.
Robinson’s question, for example, foregrounds one right – that of Israeli Jews to security – over another: that of Palestinians not to be ethnically cleansed, not to be forced to live under apartheid rule, not to be subjected to genocide.
No true leftist can accept the premises of Robinson’s question. Which makes the ease with which Labour, Lib Dem, Reform and Restore politicians are able to answer it with a simple “Yes” all the more horrifying.
The state of Israel’s theoretical “right to exist” is a switch and bait. As a matter of fact, Israel does exist as a state – beyond question. And as a matter of fact, it exists as a state by denying the right of many ordinary Palestinians to exist as people and as a community. Of the two conflicting rights – the right to oppress and the right not to be oppressed – the second right clearly is of more importance and in greater need of protection.
There is a reason why there are so few truly leftwing politicians visible in public life. Because the media’s role is to weed them out, to discredit them, to place them beyond the pale, to other them.
It’s extremely difficult for leftwing politicians to advance through the discourse policing of a state and billionaire-owned media whose very job is to prevent the political left from gaining exposure for its ideas, ideas that challenge the hoarded wealth of the billionaire class. It’s a vicious circle – and meant to be.
If left-wingers adopt a confrontational approach, rightly treating the rigged premises of interviews with disdain – the George Galloway model – they are portrayed as extreme, bullying, populist, terrorist-sympathising and, of course, antisemitic. The wider public is alienated.
If left-wingers prefer respectful disagreement and dialogue, engaging with the rigged premises of interviews – the Jeremy Corbyn model – they are accused of being extreme, evasive, populist, terrorist-sympathising and, of course, antisemitic. The wider public is again alienated.
Zack Polanski is now trying to pick his way between these two poles to find a third way. Firm but reasonable. Assertive but not hectoring. Polite but not evasive. He is a master interviewer. But even he is struggling to manage interviews that are so heavily loaded against him.
None of this is fair. How could it be? The billionaires have all the wealth. They own everything, including the media. Why would they allow a level playing field, fairness in the public square, when fairness would end in only one outcome: their being stripped of their privilege?
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