The BBC’s Reform-adjacent coverage of asylum seekers continues, with UK editor Ed Thomas being dispatched to Warrington to ask locals their views on a pub being used as a HMO (house in multiple occupation) to house asylum seekers, despite beginning by acknowledging that, er, “we don’t know if it is an HMO… but we know there’s rumours about this place”.
Those “rumours” were enough for Thomas to conduct a fact-free voxpop of locals on how much they hated living near to immigrants. “How would you feel if asylum seekers were put into that place?,” he asked one woman, who was worried about “what you hear on social media especially”. “I’ve never really been frightened to live in my own country but I am now,” she said of the pub which nobody has actually established is being used to house anyone.
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“I feel unsafe in my own home,” said another woman, Mary, who, as if to hammer home the point, was only interviewed through her Ring doorbell.
The entire package, which could have served as a party political broadcast for Nigel Farage’s party, comes just days after the corporation’s political editor, Chris Mason, penned a review of its conference on the BBC website that was so fawning it could have come from the party’s press office.
Will such deferential coverage stop Reform selling off the Beeb to the likes of Paul Marshall or just shutting it down entirely upon taking up office following the next general election? No.
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