The BBC and the dog that didn’t bark

The 1892 book, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, is a collection of short stories. One of the best-known stories is “Silver Blaze,” a mystery about the disappearance of a famous racehorse the night before a race and the murder of the horse’s trainer. Sherlock Holmes solves the mystery by realising that no one had said that they had heard barking from the watchdog during the night. The dog that didn’t bark is one of Conan Doyle’s most enduring images.

What has this to do with the 2025 Local Elections? What stood out from the BBC coverage was the dog that didn’t bark. All the coverage on the Today programme and on the BBC News website, the joys of Chris Mason and Sir John Curtice, of Justin Webb and Amol Rajan, and yet there was something that no one mentioned. And what was just as interesting was the reason why it went unmentioned.

What was missing was not the results or all the coverage of the winners and losers, but why Reform did so well. The answer is obvious. Reform is the only British political party that takes immigration seriously and, more important, takes the widespread concern about immigration seriously and has done so from the time it started. Secondly, it’s the only political party in Britain which takes ordinary people’s concerns about law and order and rising crime rates seriously.

First, the Conservatives under an astonishing number of Prime Ministers and Home Secretaries talked the talk but never walked the walk. Despite their ill-fated plan about Rwanda, which never touched a chord with the electorate, they never looked as if they were going to deal with a problem which really mattered to many of their core voters. Then came Sir Keir Starmer with his constant going on about “smashing the gangs”. The only problem was that he hasn’t and he won’t. So an ever larger number of Labour voters just don’t trust him or Yvette Cooper on this central issue. The more he goes on about smashing the gangs, the more immigration continues to rise, day by day, week by week. Rightly or wrongly, voters who live in the towns and cities most affected by rising immigration only trust one British party to take their concerns seriously: Reform.

Then there is law and order: everyday shoplifting, violence, graffiti, knife crime, rape gangs, hate marches, all of which worry many onetime Labour and Conservative voters. Again, both major parties have failed to deal with the problem. They talk about it but fail to do anything about it. So many of their core voters have turned elsewhere, to Reform. Rightly or wrongly, they believe that Nigel Farage not only understands their concerns but shares them (which is not the same thing at all), and, above all, that Reform will try to do something about it.

The next question is: if this is all so obvious, which it is, why don’t all the legions of BBC News reporters, presenters and analysts mention it? In his piece for the BBC News website, “Sir John Curtice: Reform challenging traditional party dominance”, Sir John is as acute and thoughtful as ever, but he doesn’t mention these two issues at all. Not once. In his report from the Runcorn and Helsby by-election count, the BBC correspondent Damian Grammaticas, a fine reporter, talked about the questions this “earthquake” raises for Labour and the Conservatives, but forgot to mention why people had voted for Reform. The saintly Chris Mason, BBC’s excellent Political Editor, did a good job of telling the basic story: “Right now, it’s the story of Reform UK that rightly dominates… these elections will shape the tone, tenor and focus of the political conversation in the months to come; the Government and the Tories staring, sleep deprived, hard into the mirror and working out how to respond.” Except that he forgot to mention immigration or crime.

None of these people are stupid, nor are their producers and editors. So why don’t they mention the blindingly obvious? Could this be Brexit Mark 2? Just as our mainstream news programmes completely failed to predict the importance of Brexit to so many of their viewers and listeners, so now – apart from GB News – they are failing to properly report on the importance of immigration and rising crime to their audience. And why is that? Because as with Brexit, this isn’t a major concern for people at the kinds of dinner parties these highly paid reporters and presenters go to. They just don’t get it.

Worse still, it smacks of a kind of right-wing politics they disapprove of. They don’t like Farage, they don’t like GB News and they don’t like the people who vote for Farage, who watch GB News and who worry about immigration and crime. They would never say so on air, so they just don’t mention it at all. It’s easier to speak of political earthquakes, what a character Farage is and how Labour and the Conservatives need to do some thinking.

The real issue is that in Britain, as in Trump’s America and large parts of Europe – Le Pen’s France, Meloni’s Italy, Orban’s Hungary, Holland and eastern Germany – these issues are drawing more and more voters to the populist Right. In 1992 James Carville famously said, “It’s the economy, stupid.” That is always so but only up to a point. Today, across the West, “it’s immigration and crime, stupid.” And the complete failure of Labour and the Conservatives to grasp this and to find a language that will address it and then the policies to deal with it, are making them increasingly irrelevant to a large number of their former voters.

Unlike the economy, immigration and crime are nasty issues which bring out unpleasant thoughts about race and the changing nature of Britain. But Britain is changing and whatever nice people think of Nigel Farage, Reform or GB News, it’s no good shooting the messenger. If the BBC don’t want to address these issues they will condemn themselves to increasing irrelevance. Their audience will just move away and is already doing so.

Excellent programmes like Newsnight and the Today programme are losing their audiences. If you don’t speak about the issues that concern many of your viewers and listeners, you will be left running endless items about fathers and sons rowing kayaks so they can see whales close up, something about lynxes or really excellent items about children’s books, and fewer and fewer people will listen. In short, Labour and the Conservatives are not the only people who are losing their audience.

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