A mainstream media which supports the United Kingdom remaining in the European Union is biased against the newly formed, poll-topping Brexit Party, one of their European Union Parliament election candidates has said.
Falklands veteran Rear Admiral Roger Lane-Nott was responding on Saturday evening to the newly announced guest lineup of the BBC’s flagship weekly political programme due to air the following morning when he made the comments, with a party colleague saying the broadcaster was guilty of “lazy journalism”.
All five politicians — including four party leaders — to be featured on the last edition of the programme to air before the vote on Thursday the 23rd of May represent anti-Brexit views.
Brexit Party candidate Lane-Nott, who as well as standing for the Brexit Party in the South-West of England has vowed to stand against theoretically neutral Parliament speaker John Bercow in the next set of Westminster elections, said the BBC was demonstrating their bias with the lineup.
He told the audience at a party rally in Taunton, Somerset on Saturday: “let’s be clear, we all know that most of the mainstream media is [in favour of] Remain, most of the mainstream media is left-wing. Look at the Marr programme, appalling journalism, and it is appalling for the BBC to allow it to go on.
“In some cases, they are in denial, they don’t think it will happen. The same way they didn’t think we would vote to leave.”
Referring to BBC political editor Andrew Marr’s attempt at a ‘gotcha’ interview with Brexit leader Nigel Farage the previous week, Lane-Nott remarked: “you saw what Marr did. It’s disgraceful.”
The retired senior officer, who commanded HMS SPLENDID during the Falklands War, also revealed that while many Brexit party candidates had been interviewed by Breitbart London, they had also offered themselves to the BBC — a state broadcaster theoretically bound to be politically neutral — but were not being invited to speak. He said: “…that’s the bias of the mainstream media. We’ve not been invited — we’ve offered ourselves both regionally and nationally.”
Despite the apparent reluctance of the mainstream media to engage with Brexit candidates in a way that reflects their anticipated performance in Thursday’s vote, the Brexit Party has still managed to come from nowhere to poll first place in just five weeks since its founding.
This is down in part to ordinary people being able to see past news bias and make their own mind up, said fellow Brexit Party candidate Christina Jordan.
The former NHS nurse said new media online allowed politically engaged people to bypass the legacy media, telling the rally: “…they actually do a good job for us, because every time there’s a panel with five Remainers and one Brexiteer, or all Remainers and no Brexiteers on social media — where the Brexit Party is very successful — people are talking about it in their hundreds and thousands.
“Sometimes it actually works in our favour when the media tried to just promote one view. People aren’t stupid — we aren’t stupid! We can see what’s going on.”
Former Royal Marine and Brexit candidate James Glancy also joked at the expense of media bias, making reference to the highly controversial comments by Channel 4’s Jon Snow about there being “so many white people” at a Brexit event in London.
Explaining he’d been to the Devon County Show earlier in the day — an annual agricultural fair which draws crowds of 100,000 — Glancy said: “I think Channel 4’s Jon Snow would have self-combusted had he seen the ethnicity of everyone there. He seems to have a problem.”
The latest polling for the Brexit Party places the new movement on 35 per cent, while the governing Conservative Party languishes on an unprecedented nine per cent. If the polling is replicated in Thursday’s election, it would be the worst national result for the Tories in the party’s near-200 year history.
The Brexit Party is campaigning on a platform of a No Deal Brexit, meaning that the United Kingdom would leave the European Union fully on World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules. While the Government and Parliament have insisted they would not allow Britain to leave the EU without a deal — meaning without remaining inside the rules and bodies of the European Union — Brexit leader Nigel Farage has said a victory on Thursday would mean a No Deal Brexit would be back on the table at the request of the British people.
Oliver JJ Lane is the editor of Breitbart London — Follow him on Twitter and Facebook
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.