YOU would have thought the BBC had learned its lesson about editing with political bias.
In 2007, BBC One spliced footage to make Queen Elizabeth II appear to leave a photo shoot in a ‘huff’. After the BBC Trust investigated, the BBC One Controller resigned.
In February 2025, the BBC withdrew a documentary on Gaza after revelations that the boy star is the son of a minister from Hamas, a proscribed terrorist organisation. Ofcom sanctioned the BBC for the failure to disclose.
One of the ‘facts’ that BBC Verify confirmed is that car insurance companies are racist – citing a partisan report that had presented false data, as BBC Verify itself admitted later.
Similarly, the BBC relied on the Trades Union Congress for a loaded claim that jobs held by ethnic minorities are becoming more ‘insecure’ than those held by whites.
Meanwhile, the BBC LGBTQ desk refused and edited stories from its own reporters that might reflect badly on trans-gender ideology. For instance, it removed a paedophile’s history as a drag queen and organiser of a Pride march.
During the US general election campaign of 2024, the BBC amplified a single poll claiming that Kamala Harris would defeat Donald Trump.
In April 2025, BBC Newsnight broadcast a handpicked panel defaming Douglas Murray after he had left the building.
Then there was BBC Panorama’s belated investigation into the protests against asylum hotels during summer 2025, which degenerated into a non-white presenter claiming racism in every interaction with a concerned councillor or protester.
In November 2025, Tim Davie, then the Director General, and Deborah Turness, the head of news, quit over their failure to act on an internal finding that Panorama had (a year earlier) spliced footage to suggest that Donald Trump had encouraged the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
That’s not to mention the BBC covering up the sins and sometimes crimes of its principals: the sex offenders Jimmy Savile and Huw Edwards, for instance; and Gary Lineker, who used his platform as a football commentator to rail against Israel and other woke targets.
And now we get to June 2026. Surely the BBC had an opportunity to present a balanced view of Brexit, ten years after the referendum. At the time, its reporters demonised Brexiteers as racists and ignoramuses, and acted as the mouthpieces of the EU. Even in the years after Brexit, while the elite procrastinated about exiting the EU, and debated a second referendum, BBC Question Time featured twice as many Remainers as Brexiteers.
This week, the BBC released a two-part two-hour documentary entitled Brexit: A Very British Civil War.
To its credit, the BBC interviewed several key figures from both sides. The editors mostly let the interviewees speak for themselves, with little commentary. However, others were notably absent.
Douglas Carswell, the first MP to defect to UKIP, isn’t mentioned at all. Most of the Brexiteers are featured only in relation to Dominic Cummings, on whom the BBC has been fixated for years. Cummings himself refused to participate, says the BBC.
I can understand why. Cummings had co-operated with Channel 4 and Benedict Cumberbatch in Brexit: The Uncivil War (2019).
The BBC’s coverage of Cummings in government was vindictive, and contributed to his resignation, so I can understand why he effectively boycotted the BBC. But his absence from this documentary helps the BBC to give airtime to his critics.
We do not hear the functional reasons why Cummings was chosen as campaign director for Vote Leave. Instead, the BBC jumps to his decision to place disrupters in the audience when David Cameron addressed the CBI.
Cue interviews with Conservative MPs who think he should have campaigned for Brexit without embarrassing the PM.
The BBC doesn’t admit Cummings’s argument that Cameron put himself in the line of fire. Cameron could have administered the referendum as a neutral. The PM chose both to stay PM and to campaign for Remain. How on earth was Vote Leave supposed to argue for leaving without countering the most authoritative remainer in the land (the PM), not to mention the crushing weight of his overwhelmingly remainer government?
Cameron comes out worst in this documentary – although George Osborne (then Chancellor) is a close second. They unguardedly betray their vacuity, their reliance on style over substance, their assumption that anything can be spun to their advantage – that public opinion doesn’t matter: it just needs to be manipulated. They pose as moderates in public while threatening wavering colleagues in private.
Repeatedly, Cameron comes across (even in interviews rigged to make him look like the sensible one) as obsessed with friendship and fear as the keys to winning votes. He still isn’t apparently interested in the good reasons to vote Leave. He does not seem aware of how counter-productively he campaigned, with his stupid claims that Brexit would result in economic collapse, another world war, and American abandonment. If he repudiated anything or admitted any fault, the BBC hasn’t released any evidence.
Also playing their out-of-touch selves are John Major and Gordon Brown. Tony Blair is featured in historical footage – campaigning with John Major, no less, to claim that the Northern Ireland peace process would collapse upon Brexit.
Jeremy Corbyn gets a lot of airtime, just to reveal unwittingly how chaotic his thinking on Brexit was, and ultimately duplicitous. He both pandered to the progressive dogma of international institutionalism and complained about the risks to domestic labour.
Much more interesting is Kate Hoey and the other Labour leavers who joined Farage’s roadshow, and discovered to their surprise that he wasn’t a loathsome fascist after all.
Brexit: A Very British Civil War, like Brexit: The Uncivil War, doesn’t let any Brexiteer except Boris Johnson explain why they chose to campaign to leave. Both programmes present Johnson as a bumbler who fell into the choice opportunistically – ill-informed, contradictory and disenfranchised from Cameron.
Johnson, then Mayor of London, reveals that after saying he was leaning towards leave, Cameron said: ‘Well, if you do that I will f*** you up for ever.’ Cameron says he can’t remember saying those words, but admits to the spirit.
Farage is given solid airtime, but reveals nothing startling. The most interesting episode to benefit from Farage’s narration is when his flotilla of fishing boats is intercepted on the Thames by Bob Geldof and a boatful of luvvies and journos, including Rachel Johnson.
The BBC dwells on the episode in unusual detail. At first, Farage feels triumphant at the head of the procession; then Geldof feels he has stolen the moment; then Geldof invites aboard an irate fisherman who couldn’t be reasoned with, recalls Geldof. Then the BBC cuts to a Brexiteer saying ‘referenda aren’t about facts, they’re all about emotion’. The BBC spliced that remark to suggest the fisherman had the last word on pure emotion. The BBC didn’t show any of the persuasive facts the fisherman said (I was watching him live, I remember how factual he was). And the BBC didn’t show any of the foul emotion that Geldof performed at the time, such as flipping the V-sign at his opponents and calling them stupid.
The BBC again splices footage to suggest an untruth.
The series ends with quick clips of both Farage and Johnson admitting they did not expect to win the vote and had not ‘planned’ for Brexit. The inference is clear. Farage and Johnson were supposedly advancing their personal political careers, and unwittingly condemned Britain to a future for which they were unprepared. But planning for Brexit was the government’s job. Neither Farage nor Johnson was in government. They weren’t even in Parliament.
Cameron resigned, without any intent or plan to make good on his pledge to leave the EU, the day after a vote to leave. Theresa May took over, said Brexit means Brexit, then procrastinated, while busily signing Britain into EU programmes as a non-member.
Years went by, until Prime Minister Johnson got Brexit done, albeit imperfectly. Ten years on, Brexit remains incomplete. For instance, Britain never left the European Convention on Human Rights, and thence never left the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights.
Now, Brexit is in retreat. In May 2025, Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, agreed to ‘reset’ UK-EU relations. The agreement commits the UK to follow EU regulations in certain sectors, which means that British law in those sectors will be subordinate to the European Court of Justice. Exporters face the extra costs and burdens of compliance in return for fewer customs checks.
This year, the Government re-permitted EU fishing in British waters and replaced the Turing programme for Britons to study abroad with the Erasmus programme for more EU citizens to study in Britain than Britons will ever study in the EU, all at British expense, plus an annual fee of £570million.
Where’s the BBC documentary on how Brexit was betrayed?
