It’s been a pretty sensational week for the Liberal Democrats. You know, the party that was devastated in last year’s general election and written off for good. Sarah Olney’s win in the Richmond Park by-election showed that there is plenty life in us yet.
Now, there seems to be some weird, perverse rule at the BBC which means that the more newsworthy and relevant the Liberal Democrats are at any moment in time, the less likely they are to be invited on the main political programmes.
On the day we won the Richmond Park by-election, you would have expected us to be represented on Any Questions, wouldn’t you?
Similarly, the sensational result should have merited an interview on Andrew Marr at least. But, no, the by-election was a footnote of the newspaper review.
There is another party, which has just one MP, which is ukipquitous on the BBC. I swear that one day Farage is going to appear in the Queen Vic. Paul Nuttall has had no shortage of media bookings.
I wonder if we need to become a bit more awkward in demanding our fair share of coverage. How many of us actually complain when Liberal Democrats are not represented when they should be? Not very many, I suspect. The likes of UKIP and the SNP seem to have ensured that the BBC is extremely reluctant to miss them off a panel.
I have complained about both Any Questions and Marr. The presence of Nick Clegg giving one of the best interviews of his life on the Sunday Politics does not excuse the earlier omissions.
While you’re at it, you might like to complain about the Peston programme on ITV, which, similarly, was devoid of Liberal Democrats. Go here to find out how.
All the information you need about how to complain is here. I have to admit, I’ve never actually tried the phoning them up and speaking to a human option, but others have. The number is 03700 100 222 or 03700 100 212 for textphone.
The under-representation of our party and predecessor parties has always been a thing. We are an insurgent, reforming voice in politics and we have to behave like one. That doesn’t mean that we have to turn into cybernats and UKIP trolls. You can do these things politely and with grace and humour. But we really must make sure our voices are heard.
* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings
37 Comments
To be fair……. Marr gave Nuttall a very challenging interview about NHS privatisation, claims about a non-existent Ph.D. and about playing professional football.
Overall impression ? As they once said about Richard Nixon, “I wouldn’t buy a second hand car from that man”.
No harm in complaining though – and while you’re at it, how about to Bercow the Speaker about calling Tim at PMQ’s ?
I didn’t see Andrew Marr this morning, but I note he interviewed Boris. When he interviewed him in the run up to the EU referendum, I did see the interview and thought he gave Boris an incredibly easy ride. Is Andrew Marr easily intimidated? Or is it just a question of him becoming too cosy with the (real) political establishment?
To be fair to the BBC, if you stuck with Clegg as he turned the party into a total irrelevance and destroyed 60 years of progress, it’s a bit much to complain when others don’t suddenly act as if everything is different after one by-election.
Oh yes, and weren’t we the party that said others should be excluded from the leaders debates at the General election – suggesting criteria that we as a party no longer meet.
There is another by-election next week, and it is possible the BBC are afraid they might be accused of bias if they suggest to voters that tactical voting as seen at Richmond could lead to a lib win at sleaford.
Which it could. UKIP have hopes of boosting their total which would likely be at the expense of stealing Tory votes. Remain tories might go with their last MP and vote lib. The question is would the remain vote be split between labour and lib, or would labour be routed again?
I have blogged about the systemic BBC bias (and in some cases open contempt of presenters affiliated to Labour or Tories against the LibDems and to a lesser extent the Greens). Thanks to the BBC’s new political editor, Laura K. there have been some real improvements. The LibDems are of essential importance to defend the rule of law, ancient civil liberty and provide alternative (in my view much better, common sense policy options).
Both bbcqt and bbcAQ have been pretty dire. Any answers did have a decent go at being fair.
I no longer expect mush from Marr. As for the Sunday UKIP…
And greatly disappointed that Peston does not branch out. He is an interesting interviewer but sticks to two party coverage mostly.
Best rounded coverage of Richmond on Friday was a fair assessment on Skynews.
BBC should think about its international reputation.
Labour are claiming to be pro-Brexit in Sleaford. You can’t expect the so-called Opposition to have a consistent policy. It is all of three day since they were pro-Remain in Richmond.
In the Sunday Politics in the southeast they focussed on a council election in Tonbridge where we are not standing a candidate. They also interviewed a Lib Dem who had co-written a book with Caroline Lucas
Chris Bowers http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/politics/constituencies/E14000598
“We are an insurgent, reforming voice in politics and we have to behave like one. ”
If only that were true. You need to look at what Clegg is actually saying on Brexit – which is all about the type of Brexit and effectively saying there is a “good Brexit”. It’s a classic bit of triangulation.
The real travesty was during the Referendum campaign when massive coverage was given to Farage, Johnson, Cameron, Gove & Osborne – who were all running fear-based campaigns – when the more reasoned discussions got minimal coverage
I have posted my complaint. The ridiculous overcoverage the BBC gives to UKIP is really starting to annoy me. They are at a similar level to us in the polls have 8 less MPs and yet they seem to feature on Question time and the BBC political shows nearly twice as often with no justification, its simply bias and the BBC needs to redress the balance.
I don’t think there is a conspiracy in having UKIP on – they just know they can be sure of some sensational quotes and it generates headlines. And of course UKIP keep needing a new leader. The British media were equally guilty of giving Trump way too much coverage compared with those he was standing against.
Meanwhile, all of the sensible politicians in Europe were being ignored, so is there any wonder that the public didn’t feel any connection with them. Oh, except for Marine Le Pen. It seems essential that we know more about her.
Ignoring us does however give us the opportunity for further entertaining ambushes!
>>> Lords and Commons of England! consider what nation it is whereof ye are, and whereof ye are the governors: a nation not slow and dull, but of a quick, ingenious and piercing spirit, acute to invent, subtle and sinewy to discourse, not beneath the reach of any point the highest that human capacity can soar to……….The adversary again applauds, and waits the hour: when they have branched themselves out, saith he, small enough into parties and partitions, then will be our time. Fool! he sees not the firm root, out of which we all grow, though into branches: nor will beware until he see our small divided maniples cutting through at every angle of his ill-united and unwieldy brigade <<<
from Milton 'Areopagitica' 1644
BTW the page you link to to complain about ITV is not an official ITV page as far as I can see. I think complaints about ITV programmes should be directed to [email protected]
Peter Bone MP, husband of Mrs Bone, complained live on Radio 4’s PM programme that the BBC is biased against Brexit. He did not produce any evidence. He made claims about what would happen in the future, by definition speculative.
BBC TV did not do an election night broadcast for Witney. They did one for Richmond Park, allowing Susan Kramer plenty of time, but what is the size of the audience at two o’clock in the morning? How are they measuring quantity?
Professor John Curtice had interesting things to say about Labour, such as being down to 45% of the working class.
Posted at Sunday 7pm? Better late than never, I guess.
I hear that Farage is to make his 33rd appearance on Question Time next week.
Given this man has tried and failed seven times to be elected to Westminster – this seems far out of proportion to his performance.
You can have too much of a bad thing !!!!
The papers on Saturday weren’t much better. I know that these days, an election result announced on Friday morning is old hat by Saturday, but you can bet the usual suspects would have had large pictures of Zac if he’d won. Where the result was covered, it was about Goldsmith, or an excuse to give Labour a kicking. Our role was almost incidental. I think the FT had a picture of Farron on the front.
Hopefully we’ll get some coverage of Sarah’s first day at the new office tomorrow.
Very appropriate from Caron , really good phrase ukipqitous !
The late great Yul Brynner sang it well in the King and I , “is a puzzlement.”
It baffles me how they can keep a straight face on the tv , or in parliament basing it on the so called electoral arithmetic. We can do the maths.
UKIP hang on, have twice our votes , many fewer mps . So we are very equal over all. But we get massive amounts less coverage .
SNP wait a minute , half our votes , many times more mps . So we are equal over all. Yet we get massive amounts less cov…
It means it is so ludicrous basing it on one election. What about one hundred and seventy odd years of history !
@Fiona
I think the Lib Dems see the Richmond Park result as perhaps more significant than the general public. If papers like the Guardian and the Independent didn’t go to town about the result that would seem to suggest it doesn’t have a great deal of Brexit relevance.
Tomorrow I expect the papers won’t be talking about Sarah’s first day.
We are too reasonable to be ‘good’ TV, I fear.
Liberals have been massive supporters of the BBC. . Lib Dems WON the Richmond Park by election yet this last Thursday’s Question Time awaiting the result had no Lib Dem on the panel. After the result the Andrew Marr show featured the new leader of UKIP, Boris Johnson (Tory) and Labour’s Brexit spokesperson. It is outrageous that following the Lib Dem Victory there was no Lib Dem spokesperson. Labour had lost its deposit, UKIP had not fielded a candidate and Mr Johnson’s buddy had been defeated. Please will the BBC explain this treatment of the Liberal Democrats.
The odd thing to me is why so many in our party have such slavish loyalty to institutions, a very statist left or conservative right stance or tendency.
We should be for equality of information access and quality of its delivery! And since the advent of a second channel , before I was born, just as likely to come from a channel other than the BBC as from that network.t their best any channel or production company would be great or good sometimes with a monopoly of three billion pounds a year of public forced fee- ding licence!
We have got to stop preaching individuality and at once seem more like deferential citizens circa 196o.
We need to have a slim and once again , if ever , brilliant BBC , of one or two channels, that is a genuine public service broadcaster putting on good only worthwhile programmes that are not pandering to the mass of viewing figures and ratings , and which could be funded by the same Department of Culture Media and Sport that helps bring us a Royal Shakespeare Company , a National Theatre and innumerable centres of excellence.
Instead of bloated salaries and lack of any meaningful accountability ,via the non means tested payments of poor people , some unable to pay them ,in jail, as a result of illiberal ,scary, detector vans, that make Mrs Mays ” snoopers charters ” on digital rights being trampled on, seem par for the course in the modern , “in Blighty the Beeb is Boss culture !”
And some think we are too reasonable ?!
I’ve made my fair share of complaints at the time and after one time receiving a response I felt was unsatisfactory I began to support a cut in the licence fee – they won’t listen to anything else on some issues.
The BBC seems to have gone downhill since one of their directors went on a trip to Apple’s headquarters in California – they seem to prioritise short-term viewing figures over accuracy. It doesn’t help when people come in from privately owned media and maintain their way of thinking in the BBC.
The BBC is a public institution but too often seems to want to feed out of both troughs. Complaints about lack of Lib Dem coverage are probably fair and I think related to other parts of its attitude. I still love the BBC though, but they also make mistakes and sometimes don’t recognise them.
The BBC are still better than most, but we need to realise that every other party whines to and about them, and we can’t afford to be too polite about getting representation.
In some circumstances, our previous lack of women MPs worked against us, as the media attempts some gender balance, but I really don’t think that defence stands up to scrutiny. I would say that a lot of our prominent representatives have spent the last week campaigning in Richmond, so may have been enjoying a well deserved quiet time – even if it was just to do their own case-work.
It’s not just about having presence on tv and in the press, but also controlling the narrative. Over the course of the weekend, the people of Richmond Park have been dismissed as all super-rich, who don’t come into contact with immigrants, and that Sarah replacing a genuinely very rich, old Etonian, is apparently the behaviour of spoilt wealthy residents.
>Meanwhile, all of the sensible politicians in Europe were being ignored
And there you have it.
Our national press are all politically biased, so we’ll never get a fair hearing.
The BBC is so scared of being accused of bias, it seems to have stopped challenging politicians on anything they say. The Leave/Remain claims were reported, but no one questioned if they were true.
I suspect we suffered during the coalition as the thinking was ‘we’re got a Tory on QT, we can’t have two representatives of the government’.
But I say ‘and there you have it,’ because what motivates the media above all else is a A GOOD STORY.
A bungee-jumping politician making people laugh is news.
A sensible politician talking (uncontroversial) sense isn’t.
‘On the day we won the Richmond Park by-election, you would have expected us to be represented on Any Questions, wouldn’t you?’
No. I’m sure Any Questions is set up long ahead, so dumping one panellist to slot for one from a different party looks like a producer’s nightmare. I also wondered how far from Richmond it was, but that wasn’t an issue. (It was in Bedford – a town with a LibDem directly elected Mayor.) The three MP panellists were Lab., SNP, and Tory. The fourth panellist was a UKIP GLA assembly member.
A complaint could help the case for Sarah (or another LibDem) in a few weeks time, though.
I’m old enough to remember the ridiculous 15-day rule in the 1950s, when it was illegal for Any Questions to discuss anything that would come up in Parliament in the next 15 days. It was, rightly, greatly resented by the BBC and the public.
Having once complained I find the BBC to be complacent, condescending and ‘right’.
That won’t stop me but it will take a large number of complaints to change anything at the BBC. I love it dearly and will defend it to the last but it is not responsive enough or careful enough in this area.
Labour MP Diane Abbott has said that Andrew Neil is “an Alpha Male” and got away with it. What she means is that he is a bully, but found a witty way of saying it. He often tries to demonstrate that his interviewee has not done enough research or does not understand economics. Nick Clegg was an assistant to Commissioner Leon Brittan, took Leon Brittan’s advice to seek a constituency outside London, was elected as an MEP outside London, was elected as an MP outside London, and knows more about the EU than most people. He is therefore shadowing two Cabinet members on Brexit, Liam Fox and David Davis.
Andrew Neil has often expressed his lack of interest in EU matters when the Daily Politics was providing 30 minutes on Fridays. He should therefore stand corrected when Nick Clegg tells him about the Single Market, the Customs Union and what Tory Cabinet Minister Greg Clark, MP for Tunbridge Wells, said. Greg Clark is softly spoken and has been satirised by the Daily Telegraph for being polite, but he has made it clear to the local newspapers that he is for Remain both before and after June 23.
The Observer on 4/12/16/16 had a half page Andrew Rawnsley below a cartoon by Chris Riddell. His style is unique, as evident by unsigned cartoons in The Economist.
He did one in The Independent after the result in the Ribble Valley by-election. It depicted the poll tax as a sacred cow surrounded by flies. The election result was a sharp axe. The Environment Secretary Michael Heseltine, who had been charged by the Prime Minister with reviewing the poll tax, was depicted as working on the maths, but not fast enough.
We invited Chris Riddell to a celebration dinner at the National Liberal Club with Michael Carr MP, where other cartoons were studied.
The BBC and all media seem to have their prejudices. They will always have UKIP on as they are always guaranteed to say something embarassing or damaging, I do not think they are fascists or stupid but misguided. In fact they should have been wound up their objective has been reached. The Breixiteers go on about bemoaners but they would have kept fighting had they lost. As the SNP do in Scotland where the vote decisively in favour of keeping the UK. But UKIP and its bedfellows go on and on. No one would disagree the EU needs reforming. Keep complaining the BBC it might do some good one day.
Dear Caron and other LibDems,
my Dutch party (D66) has had a couple of post-coalition government collapses, so we have some experience with getting attention from (and even more important: on) national broadcast media while we get on our feet again.
Our previous collapses have spawned a saying among D66 cadres: “governing means getting halved” (or worse).
Our experience during post-coalition revivals is a bit like you describe:
not yet invited to the top TV talkshows (although I remember plenty of praise for Tim on BBC Question Time) with others, especially loudmouths, getting preference. But Nuttal isn’t an MP, and that is essential for getting attention from London-based media!
But just wait and see (and the Brexit parliamentary debate dustup will give you an excellent opportunity), once the LibDems keep winning (or in the wavering territory of Sleaford, becoming a creditable second), they will attract attention.
According to the Wikipedia item about the Sleaford 2016 by-election, Labour was the opposition there; and according to its item on the Constituency, Labour became second in 1997, 2001, 2005 and 2015; only in the “I agree with Nick”-2010 election (with Gordon Browns Labour collapsing) did the LibDems come second.
If Labour and if possible the Tories suffer a calamitous collapse this time, that will be a bigger wakeup call to the media than our Richmond victory, where everybody agreed on No Third Runway and on: Remain in EU, where Corbyn went AWOL, and where the Tories were divided.
So just bide your time; our days will come…
On 1/12/16 the Daily Politics had a feature on David Lloyd-George, speaking in “Received English” because his first language was Welsh,
The BBC do seem biased in favour of UKIP compared to us, I will also submit a complaint. I agree with earlier posters (eg Fiona) that said that they probably favour UKIP to get sensational quotes.
As a very recently joined member I wondered why we never see Tom Brake, Greg Mulholland, John Pugh or Mark Williams on programs such as Question Time etc? It’s always Tim, Nick, Sal or Paddy or some of the big names who lost their seats in 2015 such as Vince Cable.
Not all bullies are male. Julia Hartley-Brewer is on the panel of BBC TV Question Time occasionally. As a fast-talking salesperson she builds a house of cards. Each proposition depends upon previous assertions, every one of which is worthy of peer review. it may be that she genuinely believes what she is saying. It may be that she asserts the arguments which are used by others, such as Nigel Farage, to support her overall conclusion, but the effect is a turnoff.
To rebut what she says would require other panellists to be shorthand-writers.
Would David Dimbleby, or his producer, allow a recording to be played back point by point?
https://inews.co.uk/essentials/news/politics/new-lib-dem-mp-sarah-olney-saved-pr-julia-hartley-brewer-questions-brexit-re-run/
experienced and well informed politicians often refuse to be interviewed by Andrew Neil, so he substituted Peppa Pig. Robin Day’s understanding of politics was informed by his experience of standing for parliament. Julia Hartley-Brewer could learn from the career of David Frost who started brilliantly, but learned how to improve.
Sometimes one can feel sorry for Andrew Neil. He recently asked the reasonable question: “What is Labour’s policy?” The Labour MP replied with a stream of consciousness, from which it was certain that she dislikes the Tories and what they have been doing. “But what would Labour do?” If they have not yet decided should say so.