I usually post before elections. This time I didn’t get round to it.

The results of the European parliament elections were horrendous, of course. But one slightly good thing may come out of it all.

IMHO the single biggest contribution to UKIP’s success is the fact that Nigel Farage was never off the BBC in the last few months. More appearances on Question Time than anyone else, for example. Constantly consulted on the radio about anything even vaguely connected to Europe or immigration (or anything else, it seemed).

In short, it’s the fact that the BBC treated them like a mainstream party that has caused — or at least helped — them to almost become one.

I see a close parallel with the way they give climate-change deniers equal time with climatologists whenever there’s an environment story; the intent being balance, but the effect being to give undue weight to the views of a tiny minority.

Here, though, they went far beyond that point, to where I feel they were guilty of violating their mandated requirement to show balance.

So the potential good outcome: at least people of the right can no longer say that the BBC has a left-wing, pro-Europe bias.1

  1. Not that that was ever a very fair point; you just have to look at the BBC’s political editor, Nick Robinson, for a counterexample. ↩︎