“I think people need to see through Nigel Farage, and see through Donald Trump and realise what they’re trying to do to our great country.”
Lib Dem leader Ed Davey has slammed Nigel Farage for joining in with Donald Trump’s attacks on the BBC.
Trump has threatened the BBC with a $1 billion lawsuit after it resurfaced that a BBC Panorama documentary had spliced together two clips from a Trump speech to make it look like he had encouraged the January 2021 Capitol riot.
On Sunday night, the BBC’s director general Tim Davie and BBC News’ CEO Deborah Turness resigned.
Farage claimed during a Reform press conference yesterday that the BBC had stitched Donald Trump up “on the eve of a national election” by airing the Panorama episode.
In Trump’s speech on January 6 2021, he said: “We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”
This line in Trump’s speech has been repeatedly pointed to as evidence of him having incited the riots.
The Reform leader mentioned having spoken to Trump on Friday, who he said was angry at the BBC.
Farage then went on to attack the BBC: “I mean people talk about election interference, what the BBC did was election interference.”
He also said that if Reform wins power at the next election, he will “defund the BBC from its current model, be in no doubt about that”.
“The licence fee, as currently is, cannot survive, it is wholly unsustainable,” Farage, who has a GB News show, added.
On Sky News, Davey said condemned the Reform leader’s comments.
Davey said: “Nigel Farage is basically teaming up with Trump to criticise the BBC, it’s shocking, it’s unpatriotic, it’s wrong. It shows he wants Trump’s America, with his attacks on free media, coming to the UK.”
Asked if he understood why Farage had said the BBC committed “election interference”, Davey said that comment was “too extreme”. He said: “The interference we have seen in elections has come from Nigel Farage’s friend Vladimir Putin.”
He said that Russia has interfered with UK elections in the most “appalling ways”, yet Farage calls Putin “the world leader he most admires”.
“I think people need to see through Nigel Farage, and see through Donald Trump and realise what they’re trying to do to our great country.”
The Lib Dem leader has written to prime minister Keir Starmer, Tory leader Kemi Badenoch and Farage calling on them to condemn Trump’s attack on the BBC.
He has also called for BBC board member Robbie Gibb, who was appointed by Boris Johnson and is a longstanding Tory supporter, to be removed from the board.
Reports have suggested that Gibb “led the charge” in claims over systemic bias at the BBC.
Olivia Barber is a reporter at Left Foot Forward
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