BBC bosses draw up plans to win over Reform UK voters
BBC bosses have drawn up plans to win over Reform UK voters, according to editorial meeting minutes.
Minutes from a meeting of the broadcaster's editorial guidelines and standards committee from March show that BBC News CEO Deborah Turness gave a presentation in which she discussed plans to alter "story selection" and "other types of output, such as drama" to win the trust of Reform voters.
The minutes, which were reported by The Byline Times, also show the committee identified "the importance of local BBC teams" to their plan to win over supporters of Nigel Farage.
There is reportedly a belief that the corporation's news and drama output is creating "low trust issues" with Farage backers.
The minutes states: "The CEO, News and Current Affairs provided the Committee with a presentation on plans to address low trust issues with Reform voters.
READ MORE:
"The committee discussed the presentation. Committee members recognised the importance of local BBC teams in the plan, given their closeness to audiences.
"Directors discussed how story selection and other types of output, such as drama, also had a role to play. An update on progress would return to a future meeting."
The committee includes former GB News executive Robbie Gibb, who is also a former director of communications at Number 10 and an outspoken Brexiteer.
Gibb was appointed to the board by former Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson in 2021.
He was identified by former BBC Newsnight presenter Emily Maitlis in 2022 as an 'active agent of the Conservative party'.
Farage has repeatedly used his own GB News platform to attack the BBC, calling it a 'political actor' and threatening to boycott the corporation.
In language also used by the BBC Editorial Committee, the Reform leader suggested that BBC editors were using 'story selection' in order to target his party.
In an incident last year, Farage refused to appear on the BBC until the broadcaster apologised for allowing members of the public to ask him questions during a special episode of Question Time.
READ MORE:
Byline Times said BBC staffers it spoke to are concerned about the plan to win over Reform voters, due to the risk of increasing allegations of bias.
The BBC has previously been criticised by some viewers for heavily featuring Reform UK politicians on its programmes, despite the party only having a handful of MPs.
In July last year, sociology professor Tom Mills – author of The BBC: The Myth of a Public Service – claimed the BBC were giving such a platform to Farage because they are such a big part of a 'political establishment which has drifted to the right'.
'I think the simple answer to why they [the BBC] like Nigel Farage is they are much more comfortable with an anti-establishment figure on the right than the left. It's as simple as that," he said.
'He's on their political spectrum and the political spectrum for the BBC runs from the centrists out to Nigel Farage.
'They still see those guys [like Farage] as being rogue figures of the establishment, but they are just given legitimacy by the fact that there's lots of voices they [the BBC] see to be legitimate in these media organisations which speak from a similar sort of perspective.'
The BBC has been approached for comment.
Hashtags

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
MAGA Melts Down Over Trump ‘Deep State' Deportation Deal
The tech billionaire who bankrolled J.D. Vance's political rise is at the centre of a new MAGA war over fresh plans to use Big Brother surveillance to deport illegal immigrants. As protests rage in Los Angeles over Donald Trump 's immigration crackdown, some of the president's most loyal supporters are outraged over a 'deep state' contract awarded to Palantir Technologies, the controversial data mining company co-founded by venture capitalist and Vance campaign donor Peter Thiel. Government documents seen by the Daily Beast show the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) awarded Palantir the $30 million contract to develop a new surveillance platform known as 'ImmigrationOS' to help the agency identify and arrest illegal immigrants, make it easier to deport people, and track and report self-deportations with 'near real-time visibility'. Trump acolyte Laura Loomer embraced the idea, posting on X this week: 'Time to deploy @PalantirTech to Los Angeles to deal with the illegals. You know you'd love to see it.' But the right-wing provocateur faced a fierce backlash online from people ideologically opposed to government surveillance. Some viewed Palantir, which is named after the 'seeing stones' in The Lord of the Rings, as a tool of the Deep State; others warned Palantir 'won't stop there.' 'Laura, I don't care what the excuse is. One CANNOT in any way, shape or form claim to be a Conservative or Patriot and support this,' replied John Sabal, founder of Texas-based conservative event group 'The Patriot Voice', whose outraged response was one of thousands. 'It is literally antithetical to the notion of 'smaller government' and IN FAVOR of a big government totalitarian system.' Palantir has until September to develop a prototype of the ImmigrationOS software. Not having it, ICE warned, 'severely limits' its ability to expedite Trump's deportation plans and target the gangs MS-13 and Tren de Aragua. But the plan is particularly contentious because it comes after reports that the administration may also be using Palantir to build a database of personal information on American citizens. The New York Times reported earlier this month that the Trump administration had expanded Palantir's work across the federal government, giving it more than $113 million since Trump took office, as well as new contracts with the Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon.
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
The charts that show why Reeves's spending plans are a fantasy
Rachel Reeves claims she is investing in the country's Chancellor was cheered on by her front benches as she announced more money for the NHS, defence and schools in a move she boasted would lead to 'a national renewal'. In some senses, there were few surprises on Wednesday. We already knew how much Reeves had to dole out in her maiden spending review. The NHS gobbled up most of the money, with day-to-day spending on the Department of Health and Social Care growing by an average of 2.8pc a year over the forecast period. Defence spending has also received a significant boost as pressure from Nato mounts. Other departments, notably the Home Office, were squeezed as Reeves sought to make the sums add up. But while the numbers may tally on paper, economists are already questioning whether they will work in reality as pressures build from a more dangerous world and an older population. There are also fears that Reeves's announcement will pave the way for massive increases in council tax to keep Britain's streets safe. Paul Johnson, the director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), says that while health and defence are big winners 'in pounds and pence, even here, one has to wonder whether this will be enough'. There are other pressures elsewhere. The Chancellor once vowed to never make an unfunded spending commitment but this week announced she will restore winter fuel payments to most pensioners with no clues as to how it will be paid for. She has also announced a Fair Pay Agreement for social care, which will set minimum terms across the sector without any clarity on how the proposals will be funded. Welfare spending, which sits outside Whitehall budgets, is poised to keep ballooning over the next five years as the Government prepares another about-turn to planned cuts to disability benefits. And unresolved questions over levies such as fuel duty will also pile more pressure on the Chancellor. While Reeves's statement is meant to set in stone government spending plans for at least the next three years, her £40bn tax raid last year may not be enough to foot the eventual bill. The tax burden is already on course to reach a peacetime high, but JP Morgan and Capital Economics both believe that Reeves will have to raise taxes by more than £20bn in the Budget this autumn to cover her increased spending plans and fend off increasing pressure from Reform. 'The spending review contains few surprises,' says Elliott Jordan-Doak, at Pantheon Macroeconomics. 'The question is only how big tax hikes will be in October.' The Government hinted on Wednesday that council tax would rise sharply to pay for policing after Reeves cut the Home Office budget by 2.2pc. Reeves claimed 'police spending power' would increase by 2.3pc in the coming years, which documents suggest could include more money from council tax. The Liberal Democrats said families in typical Band D households now faced a £395 increase in council tax by the next election. While the NHS is clearly a winner, there are already questions over whether the money will be enough to keep the health service running. Analysis by the IFS shows there have been just two occasions – in 1991 and 2004 – where health spending grew more slowly than envisaged in the spending review. More often, governments have been forced to top up health budgets to boost day-to-day health spending, which is on course to rise from a 26pc share of Whitehall budgets in 1999 to more than 40pc by the end of the decade. Reeves has set out plans to increase the NHS day-to-day budget more slowly than its historical average – by 3pc in real terms compared to 3.6pc – despite growing pressures on the health service. The plan set out by the previous Conservative government assumed real-terms funding increases of around 3.6pc per year. Johnson says: 'Aiming to get back to meeting the NHS 18 week target for hospital waiting times within this parliament is enormously ambitious – an NHS funding settlement below the long-run average might not measure up.' The plans also revealed the front-loaded nature of many of the settlements, with NHS capital spending set to remain flat in real terms for the rest of the decade after this year. The Office for Budget Responsibility, the Government's tax and spending watchdog, believes pressures from an older and sicker population will increase demand for NHS services by 1.1pc per year alone. 'The pressure to spend more on the NHS will still be great even after today's announcement,' says Jordan-Doak. Economists also questioned whether the health department's pledge to find £9bn in efficiency savings by the end of the decade was credible. Labour will unveil a refreshed NHS 10-year plan in the coming months, which is expected to demand more spending on staff and equipment to deal with Britain's demographic challenge. Another winner from Wednesday's spending review was defence, with spending in this area on track to rise to 2.6pc of GDP by 2027. But there was no mention of a 3pc target which Sir Keir Starmer has committed to, let alone the 3.5pc goal Nato is piling pressure on countries to reach. Increasing defence spending from 2.5pc of GDP to 3pc represents an increase of £17bn by the end of the decade. That's the equivalent of an extra 2p on income tax. Johnson says: 'On defence, it's entirely possible that an increase in the Nato spending target will mean that maintaining defence spending at 2.6pc of GDP no longer cuts the mustard.' There are also doubts about whether Reeves will be able to force through the cuts envisioned for the departments that lost out in Wednesday's announcement – including the Home Office, transport, Foreign Office and environment departments, which will suffer cuts in real terms. Even schools will get a real-terms freeze if you strip out the cost of expanding free school meals. In fact, departmental spending to 2028 will on average grow more slowly than under plans Rishi Sunak set out in the Conservatives' last spending review in 2021. 'We think that these real-terms spending cuts will be impossible to deliver given the pressure on public services and voters' demands for increased spending,' says Jordan-Doak. Then there are the Chancellor's investment plans. Capital spending is set to rise by £113bn over this parliament, with money going on everything from transport to green energy, new prisons and housing. Reeves is gambling that this investment blitz can kick-start growth. But as with any gamble, there is a risk it could go wrong. 'If the Government insists on accumulating the extra spending it's planning over the full parliament, it seems only fair to also draw attention to the £140bn of extra borrowing we're forecast to do over the same period,' says Johnson, at the IFS. Extra borrowing will keep Britain's debt pile rising every year until the end of the decade. 'That borrowing incurs a cost in the form of additional debt interest – and one that's bigger than it was a year ago,' says Johnson. The question was always whether the extra investment would bring sufficient benefits to make that worthwhile.' Government borrowing costs rose in the immediate aftermath of Reeves's announcement. Andrew Goodwin, at Oxford Economics, calculates that the Chancellor's already wafer-thin £9.9bn headroom to meet her borrowing rules has already been eroded by £2.5bn as a result of higher gilt yields. And while Reeves boasts about all the extra investment being pumped into the economy, another key question is: will she be able to get all of that money out the door? Previous analysis by the Resolution Foundation shows that successive governments of all stripes have struggled to spend all the money they wanted. Just £1 in every £6 in planned investment spending over the past seven spending reviews since 1998 actually went out the door. Why? Governments are often too optimistic about when projects become shovel-ready. There may be planning hold-ups, and the construction sector may not be able to cope with all that extra demand for engineers, project managers and construction workers to deliver these projects. 'We now know more about what sorts of projects the Government plans to invest in,' Johnson says. 'The focus must now shift to delivery and avoiding the all-too-common project over-runs.' Governments have in the past raided capital budgets in order to make their day-to-day spending budgets add up. New safeguards have been introduced to in theory prevent this from happening again. But this may simply make it harder for Labour to meet spending demands if plans go awry without putting up tax. Ben Ramanauskas, at Policy Exchange, casts doubt on Labour's ability to live within its means. He says: 'While the uplift to the defence and criminal justice budgets are welcome, this is unlikely to go far enough. Instead the Chancellor has chosen to prioritise the NHS by giving it even more money, without insisting on productivity improvements.' All this is expected to keep the size of the state permanently bigger than its pre-lockdown size. Ramanauskas says: 'The Government is yet to set out how it will fund its largesse to the public sector. However, it will almost certainly have to place even greater strain on the public finances by increasing borrowing or adding extra burdens to households and businesses by raising taxes.' Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more. Sign in to access your portfolio
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Fact check: 2025 spending review claims
On Wednesday Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves delivered the Labour Government's first spending review, outlining its spending plans for the next few years. We've taken a look at some of the key claims. How much is spending increasing by? At the start of her speech Ms Reeves announced that 'total departmental budgets will grow by 2.3% a year in real terms'. That headline figure doesn't tell the full story, however. Firstly, 2.3% is the average annual real-terms growth in total departmental budgets between 2023/24 and 2028/29. That means it includes spending changes that have already been implemented, for both the current (2025/26) and previous (2024/25) financial years. The average annual increase between this year and 2028/29 is 1.5%. Therefore, as the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) has said, 'most departments will have larger real-terms budgets at the end of the Parliament than the beginning, but in many cases much of that extra cash will have arrived by April'. Secondly, it's worth noting that the 2.3% figure includes both day-to-day (Resource DEL) and investment (Capital DEL) spending. Capital spending (which funds things like infrastructure projects) is increasing by 3.6% a year on average in real terms between 2023/24 and 2029/30, and by 1.8% between 2025/26 and 2029/30. Day-to-day departmental budgets meanwhile are seeing a smaller average annual real-terms increase – of 1.7% between 2023/24 and 2028/29 and 1.2% between 2025/26 and 2028/29. Which departments are the winners and losers? Ms Reeves touted substantial spending increases in some areas (for example, the 3% rise in day-to-day NHS spending in England), but unsurprisingly her statement did not focus on areas where spending will decrease. Changes to Government spending are not uniform across all departments, and alongside increases in spending on things like the NHS, defence and the justice system, a number of Government departments will see their budgets decrease in real terms. Departments facing real-terms reductions in overall and day-to-day spending include the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (this factors in reductions in aid spending announced earlier this year to offset increased defence spending), the Home Office (although the Government says the Home Office's budget grows in real terms if a planned reduction in asylum spending is excluded) and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Did the Conservatives leave a '£22 billion black hole'? Ms Reeves made a claim we've heard a number of times since it first surfaced in July 2024 – that the previous Conservative government left a '£22 billion black hole in the public finances'. That figure comes from a Treasury audit that forecast a £22 billion overspend in departmental day-to-day spending in 2024/25, but the extent to which it was unexpected or inherited is disputed. The IFS said last year that some of the pressures the Government claimed contributed to this so-called 'black hole' could have been anticipated, but others did 'indeed seem to be greater than could be discerned from the outside'. An Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) review of its March 2024 forecast found an estimated £9.5 billion of additional spending pressures were known to the Treasury at that point in time, but were not known to the OBR as it prepared its forecast. It's true that this review didn't confirm the £22 billion figure, but it also did not necessarily prove that it was incorrect, because Labour's figure included pressures which were identified after the OBR prepared its forecast and so were beyond the scope of the OBR's review. We've written more about how the Government reached the figure of £22 billion in our explainer on this topic. How big is the increase in NHS appointments? Ms Reeves took the opportunity to congratulate Health Secretary Wes Streeting for delivering 'three-and-a-half million extra' hospital appointments in England. The Government has previously celebrated this as a 'massive increase', particularly in light of its manifesto pledge to deliver an extra two million appointments a year. Ms Reeves' claim was broadly accurate – data published last month shows there were 3.6 million additional appointments between July 2024 and February 2025 compared to the previous year. But importantly that increase is actually smaller than the 4.2 million rise that happened in the equivalent period the year before, under the Conservative government – as data obtained by Full Fact under the Freedom of Information Act and published last month revealed. What do announcements on asylum hotels, policing, nurseries and more mean for the Government's pledges? Ms Reeves made a number of announcements that appear to directly impact the delivery of several pre-existing Labour pledges, many of which we're already monitoring in our Government Tracker. (We'll be updating the tracker to reflect these announcements in due course, and reviewing how we rate progress on pledges as necessary). The Chancellor announced an average increase in 'police spending power' of 2.3% a year in real terms over the course of the review period, which she said was the equivalent of an additional £2 billion. However, as police budgets comprise a mix of central Government funding and local council tax receipts, some of this extra spending is expected to be funded by increases in council tax precepts. Ms Reeves said this funding would help the Government achieve its commitment of 'putting 13,000 additional police officers, PCSOs and special constables into neighbourhood policing roles in England and Wales', a pledge we're monitoring here. The spending review also includes funding of 'almost £370 million across the next four years to support the Government's commitment to deliver school-based nurseries across England', which Ms Reeves said would help the Government deliver its pledge to have 'a record number of children being school-ready'. The Chancellor also committed to ending the use of hotels to house asylum seekers by the end of this Parliament, with an additional £200 million announced to 'accelerate the transformation of the asylum system'. When we looked last month at progress on the Government's pledge to 'end asylum hotels' we said it appeared off track, as figures showed the number of asylum seekers housed in hotels was higher at the end of March 2025 than it was when Labour came into Government.