British Broadcasting Coercion

Alex Belfield with his 100,000 YouTube subscribers plaque.

2,768 words

It is no secret to those of us from the UK who have not been vaccinated against reality that the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is politically biased. Despite an apparent failsafe in its charter requiring it to stay neutral, it is about as non-partisan as a rabid sports fan bellowing in support of his team. Everything from its news output to its dramas, its comedies to its chat shows, reeks of the far Left, “woke,” and “the narrative,” which is what the Left has in place of truth, that old white man’s construct.

Now, with the persecution of a British journalist who has been an informed and outspoken critic of the organization, the collusion of Britain’s national police forces in order to harass and intimidate him, and the expected silence of the lambs in the UK press, the BBC is entering the next phase of their political bias: direct action.

Alex Belfield is an English journalist with many years of professional experience, 15 of them at the BBC. After making — among many others — an expenses allegation that the BBC never denied, he has been the subject of a sustained attack by the corporation designed precisely to mete out the punishment set aside for the new heretics, which is to lose him his job.

Since then, the BBC has utilized British police to enact its vengeance. In ten months, Belfield has been arrested five times and had his bail extended without due process twice. The police have raided his home on three occasions without a statutory search warrant and removed his computers, again without legally sanctioned permission, and failed to return the equipment when they claimed they would. They have found nothing and there have been no charges, but bail conditions remain in place, and the Detective Constable heading Belfield’s “case,” DC Percival of Nottinghamshire Police Force, has made it plain that her vendetta against Belfield is far from over. 

This is the type of journalistic persecution usually associated with Iran or Turkey. Perhaps, with the inexorable Islamisation of Britain proceeding smoothly, the BBC feels that professional best practice ought to change in line with the coming caliphate.

Belfield has taken the sensible precaution of making the Home Office aware of events and the government has acknowledged him. However, the BBC have not confined their attempts to bring Belfield down to regular legal channels. They have tried some pretty irregular ones as well.

Its lawyers put in 17 requests to YouTube for video takedowns knowing that three is usually sufficient to remove a dissident channel. This is the equivalent of the Denial of Service ruse used by the Left to muffle dissident websites. Belfield claims that the BBC “falsified evidence” by sending altered FOI statements. This refers to requests under the British Freedom of Information Act. This legislative instrument — hated by the British deep state — allows British citizens to ask the government questions, and it is much used by honest journalists. DC Percival told Belfield that if he talked about his arrests on social media, he would be arrested again. A duty sergeant had to correct her misunderstanding — wilful or otherwise — of British criminal law.

The BBC hired a private investigator, although perhaps not the brightest button on the blazer. He confirmed that he was a PI when direct-messaged by Belfield, who has also been sent non-disclosure agreements to try to silence him. Belfield refuses to sign them. He is going the whole way. To court.

To defend himself, Belfield has partly been crowd-funded — although not by his own request — and he has financial backers attracted by his libertarian stance. If he were on Legal Aid — the British safety net which theoretically allows those on low income to have legal representation — he would receive no assistance, as Legal Aid does not allow an individual to challenge illegal bail. Belfield rightly asks how many people are sitting in jail under illegally-imposed bail conditions with no avenue of appeal.

Belfield is so confident that he will be able to sue the police — and the BBC — when this is over that he simply replaces expensive IT equipment and phones which the police fail to return with brand-new ones. 

To compound this tale of corruption and tyranny, there are complementary stories Belfield tells that reflect appallingly on both the BBC and the police. A lawyer for the BBC who pursued Belfield for years left and joined another company, from which she was fired for corruption. When Belfield was arrested, he sat in a police station and watched eight officers insult and bully what Belfield describes as “a gentleman of color” at Mansfield Police Station. Remarking on this in disbelief to his lawyer, she replied, “that’s nothing.” The officers are now under investigation.

Britain is now a country in which the publicly-funded state broadcaster can use the police as a sort of paramilitary wing to harass a professional individual for the crime of blowing the whistle on its shocking financial profligacy. The BBC is notorious for wasting money, and that money is famously not its own.

The BBC is funded by an annual television license, currently £157.50 (around $218). Even if you never watch a second of any of the BBC channels, you still have to pay the fee if you own a television. The corporation has recently tried — and failed in court — to force computer owners to pay the fee as they can watch BBC programs online.

In passing, online commentators tend to call the license fee a “tax.” It is not. It is elective, and if you don’t want to pay it, don’t have a television in your house or apartment. I haven’t owned a television for 20 years, and when I moved into an apartment in 2011, I received a postal demand for payment of the license fee. I called the number given and spoke to one of the most arrogant people I have ever encountered. She simply did not believe that there might be someone who despised TV and did not own what my father used to call an “idiot box.” She said I could be raided at any time, day or night, and that it was a serious offense. I told her to make it so and that I would “put the fucking kettle on.” 

The BBC was formed in 1922 as a response to public interest in radio after the first live broadcast — of an opera singer — was made in 1920. John Reith, an austere Scot, was its first director and provided its famous mission statement: that the BBC existed to “inform, educate and entertain.” It can’t really be said to have more than a passing interest in any of those laudable aims now, being a huge and ideologically monolithic propaganda machine for the deep state, pushing multiculturalism, all the postmodern fads you would expect, Islam, and, more recently, the anti-white rhetoric we see spewing from elites and their media courtiers across the West.

The BBC was woke before there was woke. In 2001, its then-director Greg Dyke described the corporation as “hideously white,” and its black and brown staff began to multiply accordingly. You would need to be exceptionally talented now to be white and get a job at the BBC, or be a big name. There is regular governmental murmuring about revoking the license fee and forcing the BBC to swim in the shark-infested waters of the free market, but like so much throwing of political scraps, nothing ever happens.

And so the BBC continues to squander money on absurd salaries, unused (though expensive) taxis and hotels, and teams of staff dispatched to events such as Glastonbury in unnecessary numbers on what is essentially a corporate jamboree. And my brother and friends in England fund this via the license fee. My mother does not, being 82, as the fee does not apply to the over-75s. It speaks clearly concerning the BBC when you discover the reason the elderly still enjoy this privilege is that the corporation failed in court to have it rescinded.

You can buy It’s Okay to Be White: The Best of Greg Johnson here.

One of the BBC’s most hated cultural phenomena is the internet. They don’t understand how to utilize it, and are appalled at the idea of uncensored content and opinion not in ideological lockstep with its own hard-Left vision, and not produced by “trained” (aka “indoctrinated”) journalists. Alex Belfield operates — for the time being — on YouTube, his channel having recently hit a quarter of a million subscribers for his short, pithy, low-budget takes on topical news stories. He is personable, funny if deliberately corny, and his professionalism shows through in contrast to some of the over-long rambling commentators who try the same format but are too lacking in focus to provide Belfield’s punch.

Aside from his ten-month-long feud with the BBC and its lawyers, Belfield displays a conservative viewpoint that big tech is notoriously opposed to, itself being a provisional wing of the Western deep state. The story is developing — and I expect it to keep evolving while and after you are reading this — but Belfield wants nothing more than his day in court. He intends to sue Nottinghamshire Police and the BBC.

His latest arrest took place while I was writing this piece, and it is the most sinister of all. The police arrived in numbers. If you look at the short video linked (in which an officer informs a Belfield reluctant to come to his front door that he will “put it in”) you will note the insignia on the bonnet of the van. It reads “TSG.”

Belfield hosts a twice-weekly phone-in and has already assembled a loyal and well-informed following. One caller pointed out that TSG stands not for any unit in the Nottinghamshire Police Force, but rather the London-based Territorial Support Group. The TSG is a specialist unit purportedly to tackle gang crime, assist in borough policing, and give general support to regular officers in a crisis or escalated situation.

However, there is a lot more to the TSG than this noble-sounding mission statement. They are essentially fast-response riot police. One of their briefs is supervising a response to a large-scale terrorist attack or mass evacuation. They give the impression, however, when you delve beneath the veneer of PR, that they would be there not to help people but to hit them. Their predecessor unit, the Special Patrol Group or SPG, had such a bad reputation for violence against the unarmed, as well as genuine racism towards blacks (rather than the processed, freeze-dried “racism” we are used to now) that the brand had to go. These are the type of police officers deemed necessary to arrest a mild-mannered journalist operating a YouTube channel from his living room. The political wind in Britain is getting chilly. And it gets worse.

Belfield is a canny journalist. He knows what to say and what not to say on his channel. He knows who to name and who not to name. He tells us the arresting officer’s name because it is the right of the public to know. He does not, however, name the individual at the BBC who triggered this whole manhunt because he is undoubtedly well-versed in British libel and defamation law, and there will be a court case. He also knows which way the wind is blowing in the UK, which is why he underplays one particular aspect of his journalistic past.

There are and have always been “great unsayables” in British journalism about aspects of politics and culture. When I worked in magazine publishing 20 years ago, it was considered that the worst-kept secret in journalism was that Prince Harry — currently the Woke Prince of Bel-Air — was not Charles’ son but allegedly the offspring of James Hewitt, a polo-playing cad straight out of a trashy airport novel and one of Diana Spencer’s many favored beaus.

In the 1970s, pedophilia among BBC presenters — often children’s TV presenters — was rife and everyone knew it. My father made films for the Ministry of Defence, and he told me and my mother about disgraced Australian artist and presenter Rolf Harris (who was released from prison in 2017 after serving three years for indecent assault) in about 1975, when all this was going on. One artist was banned from the BBC for trying to expose pedophile disc-jockey Jimmy Saville. That was John Lydon, aka Johnny Rotten of The Sex Pistols. 

Britain remains a surreal place, culturally.

Things have changed, though, and I suspect Alex Belfield may be set up for revenge after transgressing one of the great lines in the current British orthodoxy. In my youth, the media in the UK protected white men in privileged positions from scandal. Now there are new masters to be shielded.

I don’t know how much it means to an American reader when I use the phrase “Rotherham grooming gangs.” The story was so tightly bound and gagged in the UK that I can’t imagine its echoes across the Atlantic were very loud. For all of this century and the tail-end of the last, thousands of white, underage British girls, and also Sikh girls, were systematically stalked, groomed, and raped by organized gangs of Muslim men in many of Britain’s major towns and cities. It was and allegedly still is, as described by a researcher hired by one of the afflicted councils, “the worst child abuse case in British history.”

The whole disgusting story is available in Peter McLoughlin’s Easy Meat, amazingly still available on Amazon. The author has never been sued, and in the UK that means that every word is true. If it were not, then lawyers working either for the deep state by proxy or the Muslim Council of Great Britain — who called the whole thing a “racist myth” — would have frog-marched McLoughlin into court. I won’t go into details of the book, although I recommend you read it. It makes me very angry and I have to approach my heavily annotated copy with caution.

How does this relate to Alex Belfield? Well, as he calmly related in a couple of his recent videos, he interviewed many people about the so-called “Rotherham scandal” (a nickname of convenience, as the abuse and rape, as noted, was spread across many UK towns and cities). This is information in the public domain, and Belfield does not pussyfoot around the subject of Muslim rape gangs and what he thinks of them, an idea that quickens the pulses of most British hacks with fear.

Keying “Alex Belfield arrested” into Google and going to the “news” category gets precisely no hits. Actually, that’s not true. His arrest was mentioned in the Yorkshire Evening Echo, the British equivalent of the Arkansas Gazette. I am sure you could descend the Google rope ladder and find some mention on page eight of one of the UK’s recognized newspapers, but that isn’t the point. The MSM is not interested in criticism of the BBC as they are complicit in its new, politicized remit. Belfield has already explained the details of the case and — like Peter McLoughlin and as noted — if he is not sued, you can be sure he is not lying. A huge, shadowy, and unofficial legal team is now employed by the British deep state on the lookout for Wrongthink. Step out of line and they will pounce.

But the BBC has nowhere to hide. They are persecuting a journalist, harassing and intimidating a professional dedicated to getting at the truth, and using license-fee-payers’ money to do it, pursuing a highly improper ideologically driven vendetta. 

You may not have heard of Alex Belfield, but if the BBC does not retract and settle out of court in the wake of these allegations (should they be proven at law), he may become the journalistic equivalent of the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo.

Alex Belfield’s 20-minute video on his persecution can be found here.

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