BBC quietly sneaks out correction admitting it blatantly lied in the run-up to war in Syria

By Patrick George

Nine months after its successful Syria smear campaign, the BBC has been forced to come clean. A story about a peaceful protest outside an MP’s office had been bent into propaganda to promote a war. Now that we have the war the BBC can admit the truth. In a correction snuck onto their website they have admitted that the smear on anti-war activists as violent thugs was untrue.

As the vote on bombing Syria approached there was increasing scepticism about the bombing campaign. An initially supportive public were slowly remembering the lessons of Iraq and Libya and were feeling apprehensive about another sortie. They needed galvanising behind the war to protect MPs from reprisals at the ballot box. Something had to be done.

A peaceful protest outside Stella Creasy’s unoccupied Walthamstow office became a show of intimidation and violence outside her occupied home. Peaceful protestors became a “hard-left hate mob” and perhaps most bizarrely “vicars, imams and net trolls.” Famously violent people, vicars.

MPs were asked to denounce and criticise such behaviour. Tom Watson suggested that any Labour member on the demonstration would be expelled. Diane Abbott said that “protesting outside someone’s home is too far” and she’s right, but that never happened.

The story was a way for the BBC and the rest of the media to delegitimise the anti-war view by tying it inexorably to a group of thugs. Actually, not even a group of thugs but an image of a group of thugs. Regardless of the truth of the story you have Labour’s deputy leader suggesting that members be expelled without anyone knowing the truth.

Until this week, when the BBC quietly slipped out this snippet:

“Two listeners complained that the programme had inaccurately reported that a peaceful vigil in Walthamstow, in protest against the decision to bomb targets in Syria, had targeted the home of the local MP, Stella Creasy, and had been part of a pattern of intimidation towards Labour MPs who had supported the decision. The claim that the demonstration had targeted Ms Creasy’s home, and the implication that it was intimidatory in nature, originated from a single Facebook posting which later proved to be misleading (the demonstration’s destination was Ms Creasy’s constituency office, which was unoccupied at the time, not her home, and it was peaceful).”

This “correction” was not carried on any news bulletins nor was it widely publicised. Instead it was placed on the BBC’s website, in the feedback section. Buried amidst corrections of typos. It didn’t matter. The story was out there. The goal achieved. We had war.

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