It is one of my more idiosyncratic theories that all truth, political or otherwise, is to be found in comedy. Right now, I cannot stop thinking of a classic bit by Richard Pryor in Live on the Sunset Strip (1982).
In this particular routine, Pryor is describing his addiction to freebasing cocaine, and a visit by his close friend Jim Brown, the legendary NFL player and civil rights activist.
Confronted by the pathetic sight of the strung-out comedian and his pipe, Brown initially invites him to go roller-skating or “for a ride”. Pryor isn’t interested. So Brown ups the ante.
“You ain’t no movie star to me,” he says. “I ain’t scared of you, motherfucker. I’m your friend. What you gonna do? You gonna get well, or you gonna end our friendship? What you gonna do?”
This maddening refrain – “What you gonna do?” – doesn’t quite get Pryor into a rehab facility; but it sticks with him. In the past fortnight, it has struck me as the question that all progressives should be asking themselves, too.
In an escalation as alarming as it is preposterous, the BBC crisis has now been elbowed into the arena of geopolitics. There is a diabolical symmetry in Donald Trump’s threat last Friday to sue the corporation for up to $5bn – which is equivalent to the £3.8bn that the BBC raises every year from the licence fee.
Though its chair, Samir Shah, has personally apologised to the White House for the editing error in the now-notorious Panorama episode, Trump: A Second Chance?, the US president is, at the time of writing, seeking to trouser the entire annual public revenues of the UK’s national broadcaster. As relationships go, this one does not feel very “special”.
The daunting question posed by the whole furore is: how do we defend liberal institutions from these unprecedented attacks? How do we immunise the liberal order against the relentless onslaught of viral right wing populism, and bolster its resilience in hostile times?
Look at the whole board and brace yourself. In the US, in spite of MAGA’s internal conflicts, an emerging autocracy is bombarding the rule of law, free and fair elections, the media, the legal profession, the non-partisanship of the military, academic liberty and birthright citizenship.
In this country, a Labour government that should be busily shoring up the institutions that protect us from authoritarianism has mysteriously started an unofficial leadership contest, in which two of the prime contenders, Wes Streeting, the health secretary, and Shabana Mahmood, the home secretary, would almost certainly lose their seats in a general election.
Reform UK, which is, at the very least, autocracy-adjacent, has led in the last 150 opinion polls. In life, it’s good to see the glass as half-full – but not when it’s nearly empty.
What you gonna do?
Liberal institutions do not exist to propagate liberal ideology. They exist to protect our right to express those or any other views, within legal boundaries, which is quite different. They protect pluralism, the rule of law, the core freedoms of a decent society. They provide checks and balances to power in all its forms. They obstruct individuals, groups and movements who insist that might is right.
They provide the hidden wiring of a properly functioning democracy. And, sad to say, they presently inspire less public trust than at any time in the modern era. Only family doctors, scientists, teachers and judges (usually) escape the disdain of the electorate.
In this context, the BBC crisis has disclosed many uncomfortable truths: including the fact that the progressive playbook has not changed much in the past dismal decade. In 2016, the die was cast: Leave, it was said, had won because of a monstrous collaboration between the right wing press, dark money and the manipulators of social media, possibly aided by Russia.
From this it followed that Brexit was a historic case of “false consciousness” – the hapless embrace by the electorate of an ideological position hostile to their true interests – and that, in due course, the 15,188,406 voters who backed Leave (minus those who had died) would head reverently towards Westminster to issue a formal apology to the liberal elite.
When the Sun disclosed in July 2023 that news anchor Huw Edwards had had an inappropriate relationship with a 17-year-old, this playbook was immediately deployed on the airwaves by a series of prominent centrist public figures. Axiomatically, Edwards must be the real victim because the Sun is owned by Rupert Murdoch, who wants to bring down the BBC. Let’s just say that this claim did not age well.
The corporation’s current predicament has triggered a similar narrative: the BBC may make mistakes, it is argued, but the real problem is a “cabal”, or “plot”, or even “coup” led by nefarious right wingers acting in concert with sections of the press to destroy it.
There is, of course, some truth to this. Sir Robbie Gibb, the BBC board member for England appointed by Boris Johnson, is indeed a ferocious Thatcherite who believes that the corporation is structurally inclined to favour left, liberal or woke positions. One of the most consequential stories in the whole crisis was last week’s tremendous scoop by TNW’s own James Ball, which showed that the original internal report revealing serious errors in Panorama’s editing of Trump’s speech on January 6 had itself doctored the president’s words to sustain its claims.
To be clear: I am a passionate supporter of the BBC and have, in the past, acted as an adviser to its senior executives during crises and peacetime alike. It is unquestionably true that the right has long had it in for Auntie – at least as far back as 1986, when Norman Tebbit attacked Kate Adie’s reports from Tripoli of the US bombing of Libya.
More recently, Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s chief adviser, was determined to destroy the BBC by cutting off its funding. He was thwarted by a vigorous fightback by the then director-general Tony Hall – and by the speed with which the BBC stepped up to its public service role during the pandemic, as a force of national solidarity that responded imaginatively to a pressing social need.
That was more than five years ago. I have no doubt that the right will do all it can to thwart the forthcoming BBC charter renewal negotiations and, in particular, the quest to answer the complex question of what new compulsory levy should replace the licence fee (which is regarded as unfair by more than 60% of Britons). And it is obviously important that bad actors are called out when they intervene maliciously.
My concern is more general: namely that progressives too often settle for what I would call “centrist conspiracism”. Gibb is indeed opposed to the present configuration of the BBC – he was a founder of GB News, after all – and was not nominated by Johnson to his current role by accident.
But are we expected to believe that he single-handedly hypnotised or strong-armed the other 11 board members, including Shah, to engineer the crisis that led to the departure of director-general Tim Davie and news CEO Deborah Turness? Were his colleagues all passive and, if so, why?
My point is that naming, shaming and scolding are not enough. The worst feature of conspiracism – centrist or otherwise – is that it replaces agency; encouraging the belief that we are all prey to dark and terrible forces that explain our plight but are beyond our control. Conspiracism may sometimes look strong, but it always comes from a place of weakness. It glamourises learned helplessness.
What you gonna do?
One of my New Year’s resolutions is to go back to first principles, which is always a good plan. I worry that progressives in general are fighting the last war, if not the one before that. Instead, they should be looking for fresh methods, stories and public offerings. It is not enough to admonish, to denounce, to behave as if sanctimoniousness were a strategy.
In this context, I think in particular of Franklin D Roosevelt’s great speech at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta on May 22, 1932. Acknowledging the terrible impact of the Depression on the young people to whom he spoke, the 32nd president called for an unrestrained burst of imaginative statecraft.
“Do not confuse objectives with methods,” he said. “When the nation becomes substantially united in favour of planning the broad objectives of civilization, then true leadership must unite thought behind definite methods… The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation.”
What might such “experimentation” look like in 2025 and beyond? There are lessons, for starters, in the recently published The Seven Lessons of Trust: Why It is Today’s Essential Superpower by Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia.
To his credit, he acknowledges the scale of the problem. In the digital age, like it or not, a new set of social norms has become entrenched: “They include ‘assume bad faith’, incivility, dogmatism, extremism, incuriosity, nastiness, mockery, and generally behaving in ways we expect toddlers to grow out of.”
“Trust,” Wales continues, “isn’t an immovable mountain, it’s an edifice, built brick by brick. Pull out enough bricks and it will start to wobble.”
The good news, however, is that trust “really is practical” – in respect to which, he cites the ways in which companies like eBay, Uber and Airbnb have handled dips in public confidence. Inspired by the work of Frances Frei, a professor at Harvard Business School, Wales identifies three key elements to the maintenance of trust.
First, authenticity: namely, how you act, what you say, how your behaviour connects. This is why Nigel Farage is outpacing Keir Starmer, and why Zohran Mamdani is the mayor-elect of New York City. Before his assassination, Charlie Kirk – a MAGA Christian nationalist, remember – spotted why Mamdani was succeeding: “This is another distress signal by young people to say – ‘hey, if you’re not going to fix our life economically, we’re going to get very radical politically’.” He was right.
Second, empathy: do you visibly care about those you serve? Are you truly accountable, not just in elections but in your day-to-day conduct? If the BBC acknowledged and acted upon its mistakes more quickly, it would not so often be embroiled in ideological argument. In today’s world of 360-degree, 24-hour scrutiny, the defensive crouch, like centrist conspiracism, is the loser’s option.
Third: what Wales calls “logic”. This is his catch-all word for the ability to deliver, capability and reliability. Democracy is losing support in the free world because it is failing as a delivery system. Its institutions are snarled up, under-resourced, infected by groupthink (reactionary or woke, it makes no difference), and utterly unsuited to a world of digital networks, impatience and widening inequality.
On November 26, this government will unveil a Budget that – we can say with confidence, because so much about it has been disclosed already – will offer incrementalism instead of FDR’s “bold, persistent experimentation”. The slide will continue. Yes, the Mail and the Telegraph will crow; but they are not the root of the problem.
And while I’m at it: another very important book – one of the most exciting non-fiction titles of 2026 – is C Thi Nguyen’s The Score: How To Stop Playing Someone Else’s Game (Allen Lane, January 13). Nguyen, a philosophy professor at the University of Utah, has pioneered the idea of “value capture” – the way in which we outsource our perceptions and judgments to bureaucracies, digital platforms and supposed regulators that reduce everything to statistics and quantifiable indices.
In the online world, this takes the form of clicks, likes, streaming hours and followers. In the institutional world, it manifests itself as the tyranny of metrics: the assessment of medicine only by the number of lives saved, say, or patient satisfaction rates; or of education according only to GCSE grades and tick-box school inspections.
Do Starmer and Rachel Reeves really believe public faith in the institutions they lead is strengthened by their constant references to comparative GDP in the G7? Can’t they feel themselves drifting into the orbit of irrelevance?
Nguyen’s subtle but profound point is that all this leads to “value collapse”, where the humanity, ideals and ethics that originally underpinned institutions (or any organisations) are swamped in a sea of data and anxiety-inducing statistics. Perversely, this has wrecked what he calls our “error metabolism”: the capacity to identify real problems and address them.
My argument is that, if liberal principles and institutions are to survive and prosper, they will require a radical openness to new ideas (and no, neither electoral reform nor citizens’ assemblies is a silver bullet); a degree of humility (which is not self-abasement); and, above all, a recognition that the current progressive software is not working. It may still feel familiar and comfy; but it is obsolete.
Just look out the window. It isn’t 2016 any more, much less 1997. Those menacing clouds you see are real, and only the start of the coming storm.
What you gonna do?
