Carol Lapel

There are times when I ask myself whether I’m being a bit too hard on my employer when I accuse it of grotesque breaches of impartiality. And then I hear interviews like this. It’s absolutely staggering that Karen Dalziel, the senior BBC editor responsible for Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, can talk about the very definition of a woman as though it’s some endlessly shifting, contested concept. During an interview with Ros Atkins (who actually does his job properly), marking 80 years of Woman’s Hour, Dalziel is asked about the Supreme Court ruling which established that the words woman and sex in the Equality Act refer to biological sex. Her response is revealing. She talks about the story moving, about how a legal judgment that settles something at one point is, for many people, merely a beginning. She even invokes the history of women getting the vote, as though the biological definition of a woman is another chapter in some great unfolding struggle for equality. Think about the offensive absurdity of this. For most of the 80 years that Woman’s Hour has been broadcasting, the meaning of the word woman was perfectly well understood. Yet here we are, celebrating that anniversary, with the programme’s own editor apparently treating that biological reality as something endlessly open to reinterpretation, rather than a fact that should underpin the programme’s coverage. Giving equal weight to the proposition that any man who declares himself a woman thereby becomes one is not a neutral, impartial position. It’s an ideological one. Dalziel isn’t finished though, and keeps digging. She suggests Woman’s Hour listeners are too old to “understand the terminology”. Presumably, these daft old bats are holding onto the quaint, hopelessly unfashionable idea that a woman isn’t a costume or a feeling but a biological reality. If only their befuddled brains could catch up with the enlightened metropolitan consensus! It absolutely enrages me listening to this. Because this is how the BBC has been hollowed out from within. By people in influential editorial positions so ideologically captured or cowardly that they can no longer distinguish between impartial journalism and progressive orthodoxies. The BBC cannot restore its reputation for impartiality while people who mistake ideological conformity for editorial balance occupy senior positions. Until they’re removed, every last one of them, all the BBC’s grand declarations about impartiality aren’t worth the paper they’re written on.