I spoke to a long-time BBC journalist this week and one thing she said has stuck with me. It helps explain how woke culture came to be, why it felt so impregnable at the time, and why, in the end, it was toppled so fast.
Her name is Cath Leng. She was in the Times last weekend (headline: “I was forced out of BBC News over gender-critical views”). I wanted to understand her story better. Any journalist who worked inside a British magazine or paper during the peak woke era (2020-2021) experienced at least some of what she described in the piece.
Reporters where being told by colleagues not to interview certain people who were sure to end up on the “wrong side of history”. This was not, thankfully, the prevailing mood at the top of the magazine I worked for. But it was, somehow, atop the BBC.
The narrow beliefs of a few correspondents on the corporation’s “Identity” team became dominant. Here’s Leng:
“There’s been a move over the last week or so for the defenders of the BBC to say ‘Don’t be silly, there is no way that a very small number of correspondents could hold the entire BBC to a ransom about this. They could not censor the story.’ And that’s true if everybody else hadn’t gone along with it. But because all the other hubs kind of went along with it – it happened.”
There were good reasons for people to go along with an idea they didn’t believe in once it became the prevailing orthodoxy:
“Not many people get fired from the BBC… [but there were] little opportunities that you wouldn’t get… you wouldn’t get picked for an Outside Broadcast or you wouldn’t be put on election coverage… or you would get put on really terrible shifts. Nothing had to be said really. You could just tell that you were disfavoured.”
Going along with the system, meanwhile, was a route to preferment. People who were “compliant” would be “touched on the shoulder”.
“I can’t blame people,” Leng told me. “People have got mortgages, they’ve got lives, they can’t just throw everything in the trash. Journalism is a very fragile profession.”
The point here isn’t to relitigate the trans debate. It’s to note that all of this will recur.
This is what is being missed by the various journalists dismissing criticisms of how the BBC covered sex and gender. The issue itself is only one aspect of the story.
The bigger point is the bias against understanding that it revealed: that major institutions are constantly at risk of folding to the ideas of a new sect and sacrificing their avowed principles.
The life cycle of a deeply contested idea can go something like this: vocal acolytes come along and cow the majority into agreeing with them. That holds until an opposing minority rises up and produces a rival gang of thought, offering the majority a way out.
That rival gang often then becomes its own terrorising force as it wins the argument, as is now happening with the anti-woke crowd, who want to overturn the advances my generation took for granted growing up – that race should be irrelevant and anyone should be able to marry who they like.
A few people hold the line, but most are born and bred to harness, bending with the weather before blithely bending back. There are a lot of people out there who enforced woke culture yet now present as part of the solution to that illiberal era.
Some of them work at the BBC. There is a raft of senior news executives who failed to remain impartial on this issue, despite that being the corporation’s fundamental reason for being. These executives, who have now conceded their coverage was wrong, are all still in post. This is a problem with so big an institution: much of the power is wielded below the line of responsibility when it falls.
Leng, as an adherent believer in the binary of sex, feels largely vindicated by her years-long campaign within the BBC to stop describing, say, male rapists as women (here). She left in 2023 after seven years of objecting to the BBC’s coverage internally. (“One person joked about having a drag and drop folder for my emails.”) She was awakened to the issue after being told to describe Chelsea Manning as a woman in 2016.
The new climate set in fast, as we all remember. Before long, as Leng describes, a “wall of silence” fell upon the BBC: “I have heard really hard, hard people, who’ve done tough, physically dangerous stories, whispering about this in the newsroom.”
Another new idea is going to come along and we are going to once again be reliant on a few people inside the BBC choosing between their stated mission of balanced impartiality, or rowing in alongside a social phenomenon and going with the tide.
The incentives are not aligned with the outcome most people would want. When cultural change hits, people tend to be hit by it. It takes a sinecure, some assurance of continued status, or an almost self-destructive sense of principle to stand athwart what feels like history.
There is little reason to think the people in operational control of BBC News will have that security or those qualities. As Leng saw, you rise to the top by enforcing orthodoxy, not by opposing it.
Postscript
I am planning to speak to more guests this way through the week and upload full episodes and transcripts of those conversations over time.
I’ve been reading Anthony Sampson’s Anatomy of Britain, the first one. It’s good fun. Jazz age cover. Like something out of Monitor.
Links
This was so good by Alison Killing on Neom.
Tanjil Rashid interviews Charles Moore.
George Monaghan on Cameron Crowe and the passing of youth.
Tina Brown in the NYT.
Ed Lucas on the distant echo of the BBC he knew.
