How the BBC was captured

My speech for Genspect's 'Bigger Picture'

(I didn’t do a ‘pomposity pass’ over this speech but it turned out ok, I think. Thanks to the BBC insiders who helped me with the nitty gritty.)

To begin, I would like you to picture a sunny day in a park in San Francisco.

Spring has sprung and a group of children are collecting flowers. Their teacher instructs them to pick a few that they can take home to their parents and they flutter towards the nearby constellations of bright red blossoms. It’s all very wholesome.

Sadly, the children have the misfortune to be in the 1978 remake of the film "Invasion of the Body Snatchers”. The flowers they’re bringing home to their parents will be placed in vases, on windowsills, next to beds. As night falls and the family sleeps, the flowers bloom, releasing minute spores into the air. These spores, fine as dust, settle on each family member, sinking into pores, entering through slightly parted lips.

As the night wears on, tendrils emerge from the flowers, extending across rooms, under doors, and attaching to each family member, by now lost in a profound sleep. As dawn breaks, near where each person slept, there's now a pod-like form growing rapidly. Inside, a perfect copy of each family member takes shape, while the originals turn to dust. The new beings awaken, identical in every way to those they've replaced, except now they’re driven by one purpose only—to further the spread of these pretty, scarlet flowers.

Now here’s the really frightening thing about this scene. It takes place at the start of the film. So when you see it a second time, you realise that Donald Sutherland, Brooke Adams and the rest of the cast never had a chance. Their fate was sealed before the film began, and the two hours spent running, fighting and hiding was all just an exercise in futility.

I thought again of this scene on a recent visit to Ireland, where I found myself in Dáil Éireann with a group of conservative politicians and intellectuals. Just a few years earlier, we were at each other's throats during the lead-up to the abortion referendum. Now, we found ourselves on the same side, fighting the grotesque form of American cultural imperialism known as the trans rights movement.

During this visit to the Irish Parliament, I heard something that made me shiver. Apparently, the monstrosity that is the Progress Pride flag had been engraved onto a door in the building. A conquering army had planted their flag at the heart of Ireland's legislative power. But this didn’t come at the end of a war of words like the referendum on abortion—where at least each side was able to make its case. Rather, this was the result of a silent coup, a war fought in whispers and behind heavy closed doors. A war to which the enemy was not invited.

The progress pride symbol, highly contentious, hated both by feminists and many gay people, now stands as a victory banner in the halls where Irish laws are made. It

represents an ideology suddenly beyond questioning or debate. The battle, it seems, is over - and the Irish public didn't even know it was being fought.

Of course, this situation isn't unique to Ireland. Like the flowers undergoing the same predatory life cycle in ‘Body Snatchers’, the trans movement has followed its programming in the same way throughout institutions across the Western world. Much like in the film, the process was subtle, silent, and followed an identical template wherever it unfolded. There are still many in Ireland who simply don’t know that self-id is the law of the land. In fact, Irish trans activists were praised in the infamous Denton’s Document for successfully pulling the wool over the eyes of the Irish public.

But I haven’t lived in Ireland for nearly thirty years, so for a case study in how institutional capture works, let’s talk about the BBC who once employed me to write television comedy, and never will again, which is convenient, because I wouldn’t work for them. In the last decade, the BBC has undergone a transformation as profound and as devastating as that experienced by the unfortunate characters in 'Body Snatchers'. Its outward appearance may remain unchanged, but its core purpose and duties have been hollowed out.

Auntie, as the BBC was once fondly known, now walks in lockstep with ABC in Australia, RTE in Ireland, and PBS in the United States. In New Zealand, the coverage of Posie Parker’s Let Women Speak event, was so hostile and deranged, so dishonest, that it may go some way to explaining why viewing figures across the media landscape there are in freefall.

But back to the UK. In 2013, a group called All About Trans gained unprecedented access to the BBC. They didn't storm the building or stage protests. Rather, they used meetings, workshops, and fun social outings. They met with children's programming, and had afternoon tea in the Langham hotel with Steve Hermann, one of the people in charge of the BBC’s online style guide.

In the same year, the BBC’s drama commissioning team spent a delightful day with trans activists at the London Aquarium. Why the London Aquarium? Who knows. But I suspect they lingered at the Clown Fish. These weren't formal meetings with minutes and agendas. They were casual, friendly interactions designed to build relationships, influence thinking and most importantly, leave no trace.

And it all worked spectacularly well. Only three months after the meeting in the Langham Hotel, in November 2013, the BBC’s style guide was rewritten. It now included the language of self-ID, effectively enshrining the concept into BBC policy. While we were distracted by the Great British Bake Off, trans activists managed to change the very language the BBC uses to describe reality. The result? A decade of misinformation, misogyny and bias. When historians try to piece together the progress of the trans delusion, they will find in BBC archives a decade-wide black hole.

Where there should have been robust journalism, analysing the progress of a ideology that brought permanent harm to generations of gay, autistic and gender nonconforming youth, there is instead so much coverage on the activities of drag queens that you would think them diplomats from a nation controlling global energy reserves. Programs like "I Am Leo" led to a spike in referrals to gender clinics. Victoria Derbyshire’s show became a platform for unchallenged trans activism. Children's programming began promoting gender ideology to still-forming young minds.

Victoria Derbyshire and Steve Hermann

But it wasn't just about what they reported - it was also about what they didn't. And this brings us to Hannah Barnes and her groundbreaking report on the Tavistock clinic, when she became one of the first mainstream BBC journalists to report on the medical scandal behind the term ‘trans kids’. In a normal news cycle, a story uncovering grave issues at a prominent institution such as the Tavistock would only begin on a flagship programme like Newsnight. After that, the news machine would kick into gear. They'd create shorter versions - maybe a 3-4 minute piece for the main bulletins, and a 2-minute version for hourly news updates.

The story would be everywhere. On breakfast TV, you'd have in-depth interviews with the journalist and key figures from the report. The 24-hour news channel would run panel discussions, bringing in experts to debate the implications. Online, you'd see a flurry of articles exploring every angle of the story. But that's not what happened with Hannah Barnes' report.

In the end, the story was largely confined to Newsnight. The broader BBC ecosystem fell eerily silent on the matter. No cut-down versions for the main bulletins. No in-depth interviews on breakfast TV. No panel discussions on the news channel. It was as if the story had hit an invisible wall. This wasn't accident or oversight. It was a deliberate suppression of information that didn't fit the narrative trans activists had dictated to BBC executives while sipping earl grey in the Langham Hotel. The same silent influence which got that ugly flag etched on a door in Dáil Éireann was at work here.

The BBC's impartiality guidelines became a weapon against truth. Gender-critical voices were invited onto panels and then disinvited when their opponents refused to debate, killing entire stories. Jenny Murray, the much-loved presenter of Women’s Hour, was silenced on trans issues during her time on the program and eventually forced out.

Having started in journalism before my comedy career took off, and now returning to it, I’ve seen more than my share of careless writers. Bluffers, whose job consists of taking passages from Wikipedia and placing them on the page in a different order. But this wasn't just bad journalism. This was something else. This was deliberately misleading journalism towards an ideological end. One of the worst examples of this was Jon Ronson’s ‘Things Fall Apart’, in which Ronson told the story of The Michfest Music Festival, which had been a beloved part of the calendar for lesbians and feminists for 15 years. Ronson did not tell the story from the point of view of the attendees. Instead, he zeroed in on the men who had been tormenting the festival-goers for years. Ronson depicted Camp Trans as a model of restrained and measured protest and neglected to mention that its members would drive dirt bikes* around the festival in order to drown out the folk acts playing within.*

Dana Rivers and Jon Ronson: A brutal insult to lesbians.

Even worse, he failed to include an incident that would have cut the legs out from under his premise. Dana Rivers, a member of Camp Trans, invaded the home of two Michfest attendees, Charlotte Reed and her wife Patricia Wright, and killed them and their adopted son, Benny Diambu-Wright, 19. Ronson’s excuse, that he was only interested in the origins of Camp Trans, which conveniently featured no triple murders, holds no water, and in fact his excuse merely confirms that he knew about the murder, and left it out deliberately.

That’s not just bad journalism. It’s a betrayal of journalism, it's a betrayal of the public trust. If a pharmaceutical company was promoting a drug that caused permanent harm to children, while suppressing evidence of its dangers—imagine that!—we'd demand accountability. We'd expect arrests and prosecutions. We wouldn't just shrug and say, "Well, that's Big Pharma for you!" How is this any different?

The BBC, through its reporting and its lack of reporting, has effectively promoted a medical scandal. They've given a platform to those pushing experimental treatments on children. They've silenced experts warning about the dangers. They've created an environment where questioning this ideology is seen as bigotry, effectively gaslighting an entire nation. Again, this isn't just bad journalism, this is fraud. This is complicity in child abuse.

Under the Criminal Law Act of 1977, conspiracy is defined as an agreement between two or more people to commit a criminal act. This includes planning to commit offences against children. I believe that some of the meetings I’ve described today, could fall under that heading. This may sound extreme, but we're dealing with an institutional failure so profound, so damaging, that I feel it demands a legal reckoning, or at the very least some kind of truth and reconciliation process.

We're not talking about a difference of opinion here - we're talking about the deliberate promotion of an ideology that's causing irreversible harm to children, the suppression of evidence that would have reduced the damage, and the ruination of those who tried to stop it. The BBC's reporting has improved somewhat in recent months. But the damage has been done. A generation has been indoctrinated. Lives have been irreparably harmed. And someone needs to be held accountable.

I would suggest at the very least, The Director General of the BBC should be summoned before the Parliamentary Select Committee for Culture Media and Sport, and made to answer for the channel’s behaviour over the last decade, but sadly, that committee includes MP and gender loon John Nicolson, who could take any number of naps near one of the pods in ‘Body Snatchers’, wake up and show no discernible change in his behaviour.

As we move forward, we need to demand more from our media. We need true impartiality, not the false balance that sits on truth while feeding on ideology. We need journalists who are willing to ask difficult questions, and we need executives who will protect them from the inevitable Twitter onslaught of anime profiles with she/her pronouns. We need a media landscape that values truth over trends. But most importantly, we need accountability. Those who have used their positions of power to promote harm must answer for their decisions. Only then can we begin to rebuild trust, not just in our national broadcasters, but in every other institution that helps keep our societies healthy.

Only then can we prevent future spores of toxic ideologies, carried on digital winds, from finding purchase in young minds. Thank you.

* NOTE: A Michfest attendee wrote to me that this would not have been possible at the second site of the festval, but may have been at the first. If there's anyone out there who attended Michfest and remembers how men were trying to gain entry, please get in touch. I would love to do a sort of oral history to correct the record

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