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Nigel Farage outraged that BBC aired Jeremy Corbyn’s Glasto speech

By Chris Cooke | Published on Monday 26 June 2017

Jeremy Corbyn’s guest stint on the Pyramid Stage at this weekend’s Glastonbury Festival grabbed quite a few headlines, didn’t it? And the BBC covering it annoyed Nigel Farage. So well done everybody.

“Why should we pay the BBC licence fee just so they can promote Jeremy Corbyn?” asked the UKIPer on Twitter – actually responding to a Radio 1 tweet about the speech – before adding the exclamation “outrageous”.

Needless to say, the fact that Farage built an entire political movement on the back of regular BBC guest spots, he having successfully worked out that the Beeb always likes a bit of splutter on its airwaves, was much noted by other tweeters responding to Farage’s remarks.

He wasn’t the only one annoyed by Corbyn’s presence within the BBC’s coverage of this weekend’s Glastonbury Festival though. “The BBC will do everything they can to get their hero Jeremy Corbyn into Downing Street”, Tory MP Andrew Bridgen was quoted as saying by the Daily Mail.

“Now with things like this year’s Glastonbury, it’s becoming ever more blatant”, the MP for North West Leicestershire continued. “They are at the stage where, if the BBC give it one more push, we will end up with a Marxist in No 10”.

Meanwhile another Tory MP, Philip Hollobone, piped up with: “The BBC is riddled with left-wing bias from the ‘Today’ programme downwards. They will seize any opportunity to get Theresa May out. Jeremy Corbyn at Glastonbury is a typical example of their behaviour … the BBC is out of control”.

Every political group of every possible persuasion is convinced that the BBC is biased against them, of course. Though to be fair to Farage, if he did deliver an angry intro to not quite Bucks Fizz playing in a field, I suspect the Beeb wouldn’t air that.