The degree to which the far Right in both the US and Britain hate public services is difficult to overstate. Currently its ire is being directed against the BBC, occasioned by a 2024 Panorama report which spliced together two sections of a Trump speech in order to give the impression that he was directly inciting – rather than just hinting at his support for – the riotous attack on the Capitol of 6 January 2021. That was appalling journalism, as the BBC has admitted; and which as I understand has caused it to set up new editorial procedures to safeguard against a repetition. But it was surely not serious enough to justify the resignation of the BBC’s Director General, and of the head of its News service; or to justify Trump’s threat, just announced, to take legal action against the BBC (how? Can he prosecute the corporation’s people in the USA?); especially, you might say, when set against the plethora of lies put out by Trump and his favoured American media outlets virtually every day.

But of course it’s not only that Panorama clip that the Right is gunning for, but the BBC as a whole; as a public service body that it would like to be ‘privatised’, like most of America’s broadcast media are. When I’ve lived in the US I’ve been quite impressed by PBS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PBS); but I imagine – American friends will correct me – that it isn’t as much viewed or influential as are the better-financed commercial TV and radio stations; and in any case Trump has it in his sights to ‘defund’ – defund, not defend – it currently (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_14290). British Rightists – papers like the Daily Mail – have for years been pressing for the abolition of the license fee there, the public tax which mainly finances the BBC; and for the organisation to depend on capitalist providers and sponsors for its existence. Nigel Farage thinks this, and came a step closer to it today by expressing the hope that, as a first stage, the new DG be recruited from the private sector (https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/2131767/nigel-farage-bbc-tim-davies-resignation). ‘Public bad, private good’ – the mantra of the Right for decades.

If the BBC goes, the NHS will probably follow; and the victory of the ‘last stage’ of capitalism – see my last post – will be complete.