UK culture secretary Lisa Nandy has launched a stinging attack on the BBC, accusing the broadcaster of having a “problem of leadership” after its latest editorial debacle over the Gaza conflict.
On Monday afternoon, the government minister made a statement to the House of Commons about the BBC’s decision to live stream Bob Vylan‘s Glastonbury set, during which the punk group chanted “death to the IDF.”
Nandy said she spoke with BBC director general Tim Davie soon after the Bob Vylan performance on Saturday afternoon. Officials remained in contact with the corporation over the weekend.
Nandy said she was not satisfied with the answers she had received from the BBC about why producers overseeing the Glastonbury output failed to pull the plug on Vylan’s set.
BBC Studios, the BBC’s commercial arm, produced the corporation’s Glastonbury Festival output. The BBC did flash a message on screen late in the Bob Vylan set, warning viewers that the performance contained “discriminatory language.” By this point, however, the damage had been done.
Striking a somewhat exasperated tone, Nandy noted that she was still waiting for answers relating to the last BBC editorial scandal in February: the documentary Gaza: How To Survive A Warzone, which was narrated by the child of a Hamas minister. A review is expected to report imminently.
“When you have one editorial failure, it’s something that must be gripped. When you have several, it becomes a problem of leadership,” she told lawmakers. The remark will likely be seen as a direct broadside against Davie, who has been the BBC’s editor-in-chief since he took office in 2020.
Nandy said she expected answers from the BBC “immediately, without delay,” adding that she did not want the corporation to carry out a lengthy review, potentially costing licence fee payers’ money.
“I’m not sure that you need an inquiry to establish that it should have been foreseeable that there would be problems with broadcast this weekend, that the decision to broadcast live, without any delay, should have been reviewed, and that a live feed should have been pulled immediately when the chants, ‘Death, death to the IDF,’ began,” Nandy continued. “It is essential that the BBC explains how these scenes came to be broadcast.”
In a statement on Monday, the UK broadcaster said it regretted the decision to carry the Glastonbury set live. “The BBC respects freedom of expression but stands firmly against incitement to violence. The antisemitic sentiments expressed by Bob Vylan were utterly unacceptable and have no place on our airwaves,” the BBC said in a statement.
The BBC went on to say that “the team were dealing with a live situation but with hindsight we should have pulled the stream during the performance,” adding: “We regret this did not happen.”
Bob Vylan’s set slipped the net amid the BBC’s laser focus on a different act, Kneecap. The Irish hip-hop trio, which played shortly after Bob Vylan on the same stage, were not shown live over hate speech fears, but it was Bob Vylan that ended up causing the most controversy. Some have even called for BBC bosses to be prosecuted over the Vylan remarks.
