Mark Andrews: Small boats v private jets, institutional bias at the BBC, and why the PM has copped a wrong 'un on police commissioners

"The people who do the most harm to this country are those who arrive by private jets, not small boats," says Liberal Democrat councillor Andrew Tromans.

A few years ago, I might have been inclined to agree. But this year we don't need to worry. The Cop summit is being held in Brazil.

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If the Panorama scandal defies belief, it is even more incredible that the BBC's cheerleaders are now complaining of a 'coup'. How can anyone defend what has happened? Deliberately splicing together two unrelated sections of a speech, delivered an hour apart, to make it look like Donald Trump was inciting an insurrection is not a mistake, as some apologists are saying. It is not even the uber-fashionable 'unconscious bias'. This was a willful attempt to mislead viewers in a manner that would be more befitting some hare-brained social-media activist than Britain's national broadcaster. What I don't understand is how anybody ever thought they would get away with it, and it also puzzles me how it took so long to come to the public's attention. 

More to the point, it is a spectacular own goal when serious journalism is fighting a rearguard action against conspiracy theorists against the 'mainstream media' and agitators peddling their own misinformation through YouTube channels. After all, if you can't trust the BBC, who are you going to trust?

All that said, I'm not convinced the resignation of yet another director-general is really going to help. I know it's the person at the top who carries the can, but on this occasion I am far more interested in what happens to the person at the bottom - ie whoever thought this was a clever stunt to pull.

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Besides, the Tim Davie always came across as somebody who understood the problem of institutional bias in the BBC, even if he never managed to do anything about it. 

Now I've always found the idea that an organisation should look like the society it represents slightly ridiculous: imagine how the fans would react if the England team was picked, not on the basis of who was best at football, but to reflect all the different communities of England. There would be uproar. Yet when it comes to our public services, we're quietly resigned to the fact DEI is king. Or whatever the DEI-friendly term for king is. 

But if reflecting the diverse communities of Britain is to be the aspiration, the BBC has failed miserably: Its workforce is disproportionately younger than the national average, and is heavily concentrated in big cities, notably London and Greater Manchester. Then you throw in the DEI targets, and is it any great surprise that it has an inherently metropolitan, liberal bias?

If diversity really is the watchword, let's see some older faces from the provinces, with a variety of different accents. After all, who wouldn't love to see News at 10 being read by a grumpy old codger from Bilston, or a retired farmer from Knockin?

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Not a great deal of good came from David Cameron's constitutional meddling in the previous decade. It was he who brought us the dreadful 'combined authorities' which lumped together rival towns and cities with no historic ties to satisfy a passing fad of regional government. The one good idea that he did have, though was elected police and crime commissioners, which for the first time gave police forces meaningful autonomy and proper democratic accountability.

So naturally, Sir Keir Starmer is forcing combined authorities on all our historic shire counties, wiping away centuries of history to create something every bit as hateful as the plastic metropolitan counties dreamt up in the 1970s. And now he is going to do away with the police and crime commissioners as well. Do you ever worry he is holding the plan the wrong way up?