BBC labelled pro-EU after featuring just one Brexiteer in 10-part Brexit series

A campaign group has accused the BBC of featuring just one Brexit-supporting contributor on its 10-part series on Britain's decision to leave the EU.

News-Watch suggested the broadcaster had deliberately ignored the benefits of Brexit to portray Britain’s departure from the EU in a mostly negative light.

The radio series, Politically: Ten Years After Brexit, featured just one Leave-supporting contributor, Julian Jessop of the Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA).

According to a 97-page report by News-Watch, the other 19 guests all talked of the costs of Brexit or analysed its negative consequences.

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The report also accused the BBC of failing to inform listeners of the background of contributors who had previously demonstrated a pro-EU background.

Sarah Main was introduced as a former director of the Campaign for Science and Engineering, but listeners were not told the group had formally opposed leaving the EU’s Horizon research programme

Mujtaba Rahman, from the consulting firm Eurasia Group, was also previously an economist at the European Commission.

Meanwhile, Sam Lowe, who was introduced as a consultant at Flint Global, was also a senior research fellow at the anti-Brexit think tank the Centre for European Reform.

While the report identified nine occasions where a positive consequence of Brexit was mentioned in the series, News-Watch suggested none of these were explored in further depth.

These benefits included vaccine development, gene-editing divergence, lower US tariffs and the Turing Scheme, the replacement for the EU's own Erasmus Scheme, which allows students to study and work around the world.

There was also no mention of sovereignty, one of the Leave campaign's most prominent arguments.

Mr Jessop’s employer, the IEA, was described as a "right-wing, free-market think tank", but no labels were attached to the anti-Brexit organisations.

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Former BBC journalist and managing director of News-Watch David Keighley said: "Ten years after the Brexit vote, the BBC has once again shown that it remains pro-EU to the core. This Radio 4 series did not examine the evidence impartially.

"It buried the benefits of Brexit beneath a deluge of claims about the benefits of EU membership, EU alignment and EU regulation.

"The bias was not only in the choice of contributors. It was in the presentation itself. [Presenter] Alex Forsyth’s summaries repeatedly turned contested anti-Brexit judgements into BBC conclusions. That breaks the basic rule of impartial broadcasting.

"The BBC is still pro-EU, still anti-Brexit, and still unwilling to admit it.”

A BBC spokesman told The Telegraph: "This series was made in line with the BBC’s editorial guidelines, which require the highest standards of impartiality.

"It explores how various policy areas and aspects of public and political life have changed since Brexit, with expert contributors putting facts and figures into context and highlighting the positive and negative impacts of Brexit."

The BBC has come under fire for a series of controversies, including the editing of a Panorama special about President Donald Trump on January 6.

In its annual report, the BBC said: “Reputationally, a series of high-profile incidents have adversely impacted public perceptions of the BBC’s impartiality.”

New BBC director-general Matt Brittin stressed the need for the broadcaster to reinvent itself.

The former Google executive told the House of Lords Communications and Digital Committee: "I think the onus on us is to reinvent the BBC for the world we’re now in, and that requires us to focus on the audience value, the public service value, of the BBC, what does that mean today?

"The economic impact, and I think last week we published a sort of an updated report that shows the scale of that impact. In this moment of geopolitical and international disruption by the scale of technology and innovation to come, the sovereignty impact, British values and how they’re portrayed in the world and how the world sees us.

"I think on that third one, we also published last week a report that shows that the BBC is reaching over half a billion people around the world, something we should be really proud of.

"So the opportunity for us is to reinterpret the BBC’s mission with today’s technology and today’s setting, that will imply quite a lot of change, and as we discussed last week, also a rethink of the funding mechanism, if we’re to have a BBC that has sufficient universality, scale and sustainability."

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