The Christmas Tree Files

Back in the day, the BBC used cancel culture against the left

A vetting file reproduced by the BBC in 2018

Some of you have asked: why do you care so much about what happens to that loudmouth racist Nigel Farage? So what if he was frozen out by posh Coutt's bank. What about the problems faced by asylum seekers? Farage is a right wing grifter insist newspaper columnists and deserves everything he gets. Freedom of speech is a “right wing trope”.

Well, the news that the BBC has finally had to deliver a belated apology to Nigel Farage must surely make clear to even the most blinkered sectarian why this issue is important. The BBC very rarely apologises. That it has had to apologise to the populist former leader of the Brexit Party, of all people, has dismayed BBC journalists. The admission that the corporation perpetrated a falsehood about Farage’s “de banking” - saying it was purely a commercial matter and had nothing to do with his political beliefs - is a serious blow to the BBC’s journalistic integrity. It’s also a kind of morality play about cancel culture.

So I make no apologies for having written about this issue. People of my generation perhaps care about freedom of speech because we know, that the day before yesterday, cancel culture was used to destroy people on the left. Let me tell you about the infamous Christmas Tree scandal in the BBC that broke shortly after I joined the corporation as a researcher.