The Rulebook That Bends Rightward
How Labour and the BBC Mistake Proceduralism for Principle
There is a familiar belief in British public life that rules can save the country from itself. Institutions speak in soft tones, clutch rulebooks as if they were protective charms and reassure the public that fairness can be engineered through careful procedural discipline. This mindset runs through the Labour leadership, the BBC board and the centrist commentators who admire caution as if it were a moral virtue. It is the belief that process equals integrity, that neutrality equals bravery and that strict policing of small infractions among the powerless somehow compensates for studied silence around the powerful.
The BBC’s response to a missing visual cue in a Donald Trump documentary shows how this belief operates. A minor editing oversight triggered formal investigations, reputational panic and the removal of senior staff. The corporation treated a fleeting absent flash as a grave threat to democratic trust. Yet this is the same organisation that reacts with remarkable calm when confronted with far more meaningful conflicts of interest.
The political world offers a parallel in the contrast between Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves. Rayner sought legal advice, corrected an administrative matter transparently and was treated as if she had committed a constitutional offence. Reeves failed to obtain a legally required landlord licence and was forgiven within hours. Both matters were minor. Only one required a resignation. This was not about standards. It was about power and proximity to it.
This instinctive tilt sets the stage for a deeper pattern. Reactionary centrism is the term that captures it. At first glance it appears contradictory, as if caution had been fused with hostility, but in practice it is simple. It is a reflex that tells politicians and media figures to absorb the assumptions of the right and blame leftists for the excesses of the right. Keir Starmer embodies this reflex. He likes to think of himself as pragmatic and serious, a leader who avoids gestures and focuses on what works. Yet on the most ethically consequential issues he absorbs right wing premises long before any debate has taken place.
Immigration reveals this more starkly than any other policy area. Labour under Starmer has embraced a harsh and deterrence based approach to asylum that mirrors the strategies of Reform and the Conservatives. Temporary protection that barely gives refugees time to breathe. Restrictive pathways to settlement. Barriers to family reunification. Property confiscated. Deportations. Enforcement that treats human beings as examples to deter others. All of it wrapped in the language of responsibility and professionalism.
Shabana Mahmood speaks of deterrence as necessary kindness, of resentment simmering in the country and of unnamed forces waiting to weaponise the issue. This is not moral clarity. It is political fear translated into policy. Listen to the language that Labour now uses. Stop the boats. Smash the gangs. Restore control. Protect Britain from becoming an island of strangers. These phrases originate from the rhetoric of the far right yet now pass as the vocabulary of the centre left.
Power Rewards Compliance and Punishes Dissent
The same gravitational pull shapes the BBC. The corporation’s public commitment to impartiality rests on the idea that neutrality can be maintained by strict adherence to procedures. Yet these procedures are applied unevenly. They fall hardest on those who challenge power and barely at all on those who affirm it. Gary Lineker criticised the asylum rhetoric of a Conservative government and was suspended. Alan Sugar praised the Conservatives during election periods and encountered no resistance. This is not neutrality. It is institutional fear.
The cultural sphere provides its own evidence. At Glastonbury, Bob Vylan delivered a chant that said Death to the IDF. It was provocative. Many people found it offensive. Yet it targeted a military force, not a protected group. That distinction matters. But the BBC declared it antisemitism immediately, without nuance or legal assessment, even though if it were a genuine hate crime the courts rather than a broadcaster would be the ones to determine that.
Now place that reaction beside its treatment of Gaza. A vast body of expert evidence, including from Jewish and Israeli scholars, humanitarian organisations, genocide researchers and medical charities, describes the destruction in Gaza as genocide or as an event that clearly meets the threshold for it. International courts have ruled that the situation presents a plausible case of genocide and requires preventative action. Yet the BBC and other media organs refuse to use the word. They claim that only a final judicial ruling can authorise the term. This is proceduralism invoked only where the powerful might take offence and abandoned entirely when a musician with limited influence is the target.
The same instinct drove the withdrawal of a Gaza documentary narrated by a child whose father worked in a ministry administered by Hamas, as many civil servants in Gaza do. The narrated script had been written entirely by the documentary writers. The corporation acted as if it had been caught laundering propaganda. Meanwhile the BBC’s Middle East Editor reportedly displays a personal letter from Benjamin Netanyahu in his office, a photograph of a former Israeli ambassador and maintains cordial relationships with Israeli intelligence figures. None of this has ever raised concerns about impartiality. Not even when its coverage was found to substantially favour Israel.
The one case that should have prompted institutional alarm receives none at all. Robbie Gibb, a former Conservative communications strategist, sits on the BBC board. His presence has never prompted anything close to the hysteria triggered by a missing flash cue in the Trump documentary.
This same selective severity shapes Labour’s internal culture. Punishments fall consistently upon one faction while protections are reliably extended to another. The pattern becomes clearest when arranged thematically. The punishments come first. Angela Rayner, despite full transparency, is pursued relentlessly. Diane Abbott apologised immediately for a poorly phrased letter and remained suspended long after the investigation concluded. These are not neutral responses. They are political signals.
The protections form the second pattern. Rachel Reeves breaches a landlord regulation and the matter is considered closed. Luke Akehurst amplifies inflammatory claims about crisis actors in Palestine and about the United Nations being antisemitic. He faces no discipline. Instead he receives a parliamentary candidacy. These are not isolated oversights. They reveal how proceduralism functions within the party. It is not applied evenly. It is invoked to marginalise the left and relaxed to protect insiders.
The mechanisms behind this theatre are straightforward. Accusations of antisemitism are weaponised as factional tools. Selection processes are redesigned to remove left wing candidates. Criticism of the Israeli government is treated as a reputational emergency. Racism directed at minority MPs becomes a quiet internal conversation. Proceduralism becomes a stage performance of fairness disguising a predictable and partisan outcome.
These dynamics are driven by a common fear. Both Labour and the BBC operate in dread of hostile right wing headlines. Legitimacy is imagined as something granted by newspaper editors rather than something earned through principle or public trust. In this climate, every decision is filtered through the same anxious question. What will the front pages say.
How the Commentariat Became a Conduit for the Right
The final piece in this puzzle lies with the commentariat. Analysts and columnists increasingly act as referees of political behaviour, yet their ability to do so is impaired. They treat power as symmetrical. They insist that standards are standards, never acknowledging that enforcement is selective. They describe factional purges as professionalism. They mistake media pressure and Twitter trends for public mood. When right wing newspapers demand punitive action, commentators treat it as the authentic voice of Britain. When civil rights groups call for restraint, the same commentators dismiss them as fringe activists.
They cannot see how the far right shapes the centre through threat rather than persuasion. They mistake Labour’s retreat as strategic maturity and BBC timidity as institutional rigour. In this way centrism becomes the unwitting midwife of far right politics.
The Human Cost of a Politics That Fears Its Own Shadow
The consequences for the public sphere are severe. Dissenting voices are marginalised. Journalists self censor. Activists are recast as terrorists. The boundaries of legitimate speech narrow until the only remaining choices are authoritarianism in two flavours. Policy drifts right without debate. Opposition becomes hollow. Meaningful alternatives disappear. Marginalised groups face the harshest outcomes. Immigrants are subjected to punitive rules designed to meet an appetite for ever harsher treatment that no policy can satisfy. Racism and discriminatory policing become normalised. Advocacy for Palestinians and broader civil rights movements is treated as a reputational hazard. Accusing someone of bigoty is punished more harshly than bigotted behaviour.
A political culture that punishes its dissidents and indulges its powerful has lost sight of democratic principle. Britain cannot proceduralise its way out of a crisis of power. The rulebook that claims to protect fairness has become a tool for disciplining the vulnerable and shielding those with influence. It cannot restrain the far right. It cannot appease a press ecosystem that openly despises the institutions it dominates. It cannot claim neutrality when it polices only those without protection.
Unless Britain confronts the fact that selective proceduralism is not neutrality but complicity, the political centre will continue to bend rightward, one rulebook at a time.