The British commentariat likes to use about our country the phrase “Broken Britain.” I’m not keen on it. Those who employ it tend to imply that the rot started with Brexit, and I’m a keen Brexiteer. Besides, “broken” is a word used by drama queens about the effect on them of everything from the peaceful passing of their centurion granny to Trump winning. I prefer “captured.”

All of our institutions, from the army to the zoos, have been captured. Two of the worst cases are our state health service, the NHS, and our state broadcasting company, the BBC. Both are practically religions in this country; the head of our actual state religion, the Church of England, was the arch-woke archbishop Justin Welby, who presided over the capture of Church of England schools.

Archbishop Welby has just been forced to resign over failing to blow the whistle on a man who sexually abused hundreds of boys at Christian summer camps.The NHS is one of the biggest employers on the planet; some estimates put it at sixth largest, after the Indian Ministry of Defence, the American Department of Defense, the Communist Chinese army, Walmart, and Amazon.

Nevertheless it has become less and less effective, with scenes of Dickensian squalor on many wards, leading the new Labor health minister to call it — yes — “broken.” However, the Prime Minister Keir Starmer, whose mother and wife both worked for the NHS, appears to believe that he can fix it. 

In the case of the NHS, the first step in tackling a problem — admitting that is one — has been taken. Yet no one ever says that the BBC is “broken,” even after a string of examples in which shocking sexual abuse (often of minors) by the “talent” was facilitated by the bosses. Add to this a long list of anti-Semitic scandals and one might conclude that the BBC is every bit as broken — because of being “captured” — as the NHS.

Founded in 1922, the BBC sees itself as far more than a broadcaster. With the high-minded motto “Nation Shall Speak Peace Unto Nation” it has always presented itself as the voice of reason, and in recent decades as the still small voice which can be trusted to tell the truth in the Tower of Babel the modern media has become.

Yet it is a proven liar, especially where Jews in general and Israel in particular are concerned. We the public are financing these lies. The mandatory license fee generates an income of around 4.6 billion spondulix; recent data from the Ministry of Justice have claimed that a third of women in British prisons are there due to non-payment.

Sometimes the BBC simply seems mad; in 2021 it was forced to remove an item from an educational programme resource for children as young as nine which claimed that there are over 100 “gender identities.” Other times it seems bad — very bad indeed. As with all captured institutions, it displays an embarrassingly fan-boy bias towards Islam; when this is the case, anti-Jewish feeling is never far behind.

It started long before the war in Gaza;  in 2021 a group of Jewish students were subjected to an anti-Semitic attack in London while traveling on a private bus after celebrating Hanukkah. The BBC, however, reported that the students has provoked the incident by yelling anti-Muslim slurs, which the media watchdog Ofcom found to be a lie, leading a spokesperson for the Campaign Against Antisemitism to say “Sadly, the BBC’s stonewalling is exactly what British Jews have come to expect from our public broadcaster.”

The war has worsened the situation, with one senior employee, Dawn Queva, sacked — but only after a whole ten years of calling Jews “Ashkenazis” and denying the Holocaust on social media. This summer the BBC was accused of “gaslighting” them by a group of more than 200 of its Jewish workers who presented a letter calling for an investigation into a “serious institutional racism problem” and a 30-page dossier of anonymous complaints from staff about their experiences of antisemitism at the corporation.

The antisemitism was often cloaked in the language of humanitarian concern for the Palestinians and criticism of Israel’s determination to defend itself. This lead the former BBC presenter and Spectator chairman Andrew Neil to write on X that former colleagues had told him it was “frightening” to be Jewish at the BBC right now. “Nation shall speak peace unto nation” indeed — unless that nation is the world’s only Jewish state.