The BBC is backing Boris Johnson. Tactical voting is the only way to beat them & beat them we must

For a man who plotted to rough up a journalist, Boris Johnson has got an awful lot of mates in the media.

In 2007, when I was pregnant, I got an anonymous phone call. “Boris Johnson will be in Thame tomorrow as part of his Mayoral campaign. You should stay away”.  He referenced articles I had written about Johnson’s refusal to insist a local Tory councillor, in his Oxford constituency, remove golliwogs from his upholstery shop window, despite complaints that they were causing offence. A racism row was brewing. An embarrassing backdrop for a London Mayoral campaign.

The caller wouldn’t be drawn on whether he was acting on Johnson’s instructions and I have no evidence that he was. There is no shortage of evidence elsewhere/everywhere, that Johnson is unfit for public office, let alone, the highest office in the land. If he is still prime minister on Friday, it won’t be a feat of Johnson’s merit, but an indictment of the British media’s abject failure to scrutinise him.

There was obvious media bias against Labour throughout the 2017 General Election, but I advised against challenging it, during the campaign. It would have been a huge energy and resource drain. The scale of the bias we’ve seen this time, though, is on an unprecedented scale, and needs calling out. Especially, as we enter the final hours before polling. If 2017 is anything to go by, an orchestrated campaign of character assassination against Jeremy Corbyn, will be unleashed and electoral rules will be broken, with impunity.

What’s different about this election is, it’s not just the usual Tory backing media barons that Labour is up against. If Johnson wins, forensic historians will scour the rubble of a broken Britain, robbed of its NHS, welfare state, humanity and dignity. As well as finding Tory DNA, the BBC’s finger prints will be all over it.

On Tuesday, a global organisation that tackles disinformation online, reported findings that 88% of all adverts by the Conservatives during this election campaign have been misleading, while not a single advert produced by Labour (a big fat 0%) has caused concern. Most news outlets' headlines ran with that shocking statistic. Not the BBC. It went with, General Election 2019: Ads are "indecent, dishonest and untruthful". Implying that all parties are as bad as each other. The truth buried beneath blatant BBC bias.

On Monday night, a fake news story, wrongly accusing a Labour activist of punching a Tory aide was reported by four political journalists, including ITV’s Robert Peston and the BBC's, Laura Kuenssberg. Kuenssberg’s coverage has been singled out, rightly in my view, for the following reasons; a) as licence fee payers, we hold the BBC to the highest standard, b) she has 1.1million followers all over the world who take, on trust, what she says as truth and c) the language in Kuenssberg’s reporting dispensed with the usual journalistic safeguards when reporting a story that hasn’t been verified. Two of the other three reporters prefaced their claims with “alleged”. Kuenssberg just reported the Tory fake news as fact, despite strict impartiality rules governing General Election coverage.

Ms Kuenssberg has form. Earlier in this election, she sought to discredit the father of a sick child when he dismissed Boris Johnson's hospital visit as a PR stunt and, in 2017, the BBC Trust found that she breached BBC guidelines of impartiality in a report about Jeremy Corbyn which was deemed inaccurate.

It was only when footage from the ground emerged, clearly showing that there was no punch, just the Tory aide walking into a protesters hand, that Kuenssberg and Peston apologised and corrected the record. 

What if the mobile phone footage to rebut the Tory lie, didn’t exist? The fake news story would have been seen by millions of people and, coming from the BBC, had the potential to influence the outcome of the most important election of our life time.

A senior BBC political journalist allowed the Tories to manipulate her into burying one of the most shameful moments in this campaign. The ITV interview (which went viral), where Boris Johnson, refusing to look at a picture of toddler Jack, suspected of having pneumonia, lying on a bed of coats on the concrete floor in A&E, grabbed the journalists phone and pocketed it. 

The same night, Tory trolls and bots spread fake claims that the photo of the sick child on the floor was staged, even though the hospital had already confirmed it was true. It spread quickly across social media and messaging services, potentially reaching millions of people after being amplified, again, by mainstream journalists, including The Telegraph’s Allison Pearson and Enoch Powell fan, Julia Hartley-Brewer. At least five Conservative candidates are also known to have spread the fake story.

The billionaire Tory elite send their sons (mostly) to exclusive boarding schools, like Eton, which Boris Johnson attended, in order to indoctrinate them into Tory ideology. Social interaction with working class people poses a risk of contagion and, God forbid, empathy. It is only by dehumanising vulnerable people that Johnson could come to perceive  "the poor 20%" as “chavs, losers, burglars" and "drug addicts". And, it is only when this narrative has been hardwired, that the Tories can inflict, what a UN report in March, described as causing “great misery” on people in the country with, “punitive, mean-spirited, and often callous” austerity policies.

Boris Johnson knows that if you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it. The well-being of democracy depends on the media pursuing truth with the same determination as those in power seek to obscure and distort it. 

With just hours to go before polling, it’s worth reminding voters of the truth about Johnson’s insults to just about every group in society (except his rich, white, Bullingdon boy mates). His greatest hits include: Referring to Africans as “piccannines with watermelon smiles”, gay men as “tank top bum boys”, comparing Muslim women to “letterboxes” (which led to a spike in hate crimes) and depicting Jews as “controlling the media and being able to “fiddle” elections” in his book, 72 Virgins (I'm not kidding). There’s more. So much more, but such little time.

Our NHS, our planet and our communities cannot survive 5 more years of Boris Johnson. The sick child on the floor of A&E could be your child. The only way to stop the Tories is to unite against them. Splitting the progressive/Remain vote will gift Boris Johnson victory. I’m a Labour supporter and I’ve never voted tactically in my life. But this general election is different. The stakes have never been higher. It’s time to put country before party and vote the Tories out.

The greatest gift that you can give your loved ones this Christmas, is your vote. 

Post election update: Another 5 years of Tory rule. The right united to win while the Remain/second referendum vote was split 3 ways. 52% of the vote went to Remain parties proving what some of us warned for months, i.e. an election won't resolve Brexit. The country is just as divided now as ever. Labour & Lib Dems should not have agreed to a general election without getting a second referendum first. And to do it without agreeing a pact to stand candidates down in marginals was utterly reckless.

The SNP did well & has the mandate to press ahead for a Scottish independence & Northern Ireland returned a majority of nationalist MPs for the first time ever. That bodes well for getting the Stormont assembly up & running again. Don't be surprised if a united Ireland referendum is on the agenda.