“What I do find annoying, Mishal, is that you put these lines that are directly taken from the propaganda from the other side,” said Mick Lynch, the head of the RMT union, in an interview with the journalist Mishal Husain on Radio 4’s Today programme this morning. He continued: “You never show any admiration for the fight that working people are putting up for our country … you never seem to take an impartial view on the way that this society is balanced at the moment.” It was an extremely uncomfortable listen, particularly if you, like I, admire Husain.
Lynch has won widespread popularity across a genuinely broad political spectrum. I also write a column called Dining Across the Divide, in which people with opposing viewpoints meet, and it is incredible how many of them find their one point of unity is that they like Lynch. In part, this is because of his combative, confident stance with interviewers, the way he can run rings around everyone from Piers Morgan to Kay Burley. Husain, though, is a very thoughtful interviewer, and his words to her sounded personalised.
But the interview was uncomfortable because his answers are objectively true: the BBC has not covered the rail strikes with the impartiality for which it is vaunted, and as we go into protracted industrial action across a large number of sectors, the broadcaster has to address its handling of that if it wants to live up to the label “public service”.
This is not just the Today programme, but the corporation as a whole. There are constant errors of omission, in which reporting fails to describe in any detail what the strikes are actually about – story after story in which only the pay offer is mentioned, never the corrosion of job security and working conditions, or the proposal to reduce overtime pay.
Opponents to strike action have their voices amplified to the point of absurdity – memorably, one man was given a long interview to express disappointment that he wouldn’t be able to see his son at Christmas because of the strikes, whereupon people were quick to point out there was a bus he could use, and he was removed from the story with a correction that his travel plans were, in fact, “unlikely to be affected by the strikes”.
Specific to Husain’s interview, though, there was a failure of neutrality: her first question was, why hasn’t the RMT accepted the latest pay offer, when Unite members have? Impartial would have been, “Why haven’t your members accepted this pay offer?” She then went on to ask how much of a financial hit RMT members were taking, as a result of these actions, having shown no such curiosity about what a real-terms pay cut – which is what the employers have offered – might do to their finances. “I find this a shocking stance that the BBC will take,” said Lynch. “You’re parroting the most rightwing stuff that you can get hold of, on behalf of the establishment. And it’s about time you showed some partiality towards your listeners and to working people in this country, who are being screwed to the floor by policies in this government.”
You can critique this, of course. I would say that of all the big-name political interviewers, Husain is one of the least bad for being driven by right-leaning bubble think. You could argue, too, that “partiality towards working people” still wouldn’t be impartial. But you cannot look at this interview and miss that its narrative frame has been entirely created by the Daily Mail and Telegraph: the strikers are being unreasonable, other unions have managed to negotiate, and it’s the unions that are damaging people’s wages and living standards, rather than employers.
Of course, it’s always an interviewer’s job to challenge a political case: but it has to be by thinking critically and independently. If it sounds like a quote lifted straight from the government or a Daily Mail editorial, it lands in the most uncomfortable way, bias dressed up as disinterest. If an interview is going to have an agenda of its own, you’d almost rather Piers Morgan did it; at least then we would all know where we stand.
I support the right of the railway workers to withdraw their labour. I more than support it: it is their only power, and if they don’t use it they are on an inexorable slide to lower wages and poorer conditions. This isn’t a hypothesis, it’s the manifest story of the past 40 years.
Moreover, I suspect a large part of the BBC audience is in about the same place; certainly, polling last week showed public support for strikes increasing, with 46% blaming the government for the industrial action by nurses and ambulance workers, and only 17% blaming unions. It’s not the BBC’s job to reflect the views of its audience, necessarily, but it cannot carry on as though those views don’t exist.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
