When I was a young foreign correspondent working for The Times in the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, I would sometimes arrive, sweaty, dirty and dusty, after a long and weary journey to some God-forsaken hellhole in the arse-end of nowhere. Yet, if there was a BBC satellite dish, I’d break into a thankful smile.

That’s because if the story I was there to report on was running on the BBC that my employer, The Times, would probably want a longer article from me, and more words meant more pay. Second, the BBC, even as late as the 1990s, was the global gold standard for news. The US big networks had more money – and more egos for sure – but the BBC stood for something that money alone couldn’t buy; a class, pedigree and integrity built up over half a century.

Thirty years on, the domestic BBC is a dying institution in denial about the depth of the rot.

It gave up balance for bias years ago; on climate, on trans, on ‘diversity’. It obsessed about Black Lives Matter in the US whilst being blind to Pakistani-heritage Muslim grooming gangs raping thousands of white children here. The misrepresentation of Israel is deep.

It’s news values skews debate. The BBC has arguably become the major obstacle to diversity of opinion. Like other elements of the Left, it polices language as a way of policing debate. The BBC regularly omits (suppresses?) the link between criminality, terrorism and immigration – legal and illegal. This is perhaps why our collective trust in it has collapsed faster than any organisation apart from Government itself. Like that other former monopoly, the Church of England, it stumbles from self-induced crisis to self-induced crisis, blind to its faults and resistant to change, like the French Bourbons kings, “they have learned nothing, and forgotten nothing.”

If in doubt, remember what the BBC’s former director of News, Fran Unsworth, said about “” gripping the BBC. “There was lots and lots of bullying going on about all sorts of things: people didn’t want to hear from certain points of view: they’d ‘no platform’ them: all that safe-spaces s—.” My own favourite is the BBC press release that described the world’s most popular living author, JK Rowling, as a ‘one of Britain’s most polarising public figures’ due to the obsessive hatred of a tiny number of trans activists: £600 million in books sales v a clique of obsessive and in some cases, dangerous, men. Where do you even start?

I was never one of those Tories who wanted the BBC privatised, but I’ve grown to see it as the equivalent of a friend whom once you admired, only now to despise because of their delusional dishonesties, the pretence that they learn when you know they won’t or can’t, and their belief that they can always pull the wool over your eyes. The domestic BBC is too far gone to be credible.

However, there is one part of it worth saving; the BBC World Service.

Western democracies are in a global battle against authoritarianism. Our adversaries: Russia, China and Iran, root their strategic culture in revolutionary propaganda, whether religious or secular. Their conflict against others begins with language: their words. They put great store in information and influence campaigns aimed at us. The thing that helps inoculates both us and others is an objective, and ultimately conservative, sense of truth.

We have few tools at our disposal. Potentially the most powerful is the BBC World Service, certainly what it used to stand for: accurate, unbiased, fact-led journalism. It’s ridiculously cheap compared to its rivals. The current annual running cost is £358 million for it, and this includes TV too. China and Russian rivals by contrast spend between £6 and £8 billion.

The World Service’s platforms annually reach 131 million on digital, 127 million on radio – critical for developing parts of the World – and 100 million on television. The rough figure for cost is a little above £1.10 per listeners/viewer per week.

Shamefully, its real terms funding has fallen in the past five years by about 20 percent. Cost cutting is affecting ratings, down to 313 million from 365 million in 2021–22. A 2026 Parliamentary report warned that it was “at risk of losing the trust of its World Service audiences, undermining its crucial role in countering misinformation globally.”

The BBC World Service isn’t perfect. There is something wrong with the BBC Arabic Service, and the BBC World Service seems to suffer the same poor management as the rest of the BBC, but it remains one of the most remarkable achievements of humanity in the 20th Century. Sadly it is being slowly salami-sliced to death by the BBC’s bean counters and a chronic lack of foreign policy ambition. Ironically, despite being told that conflict is imminent, we continue to not spend on defence and not to spend on the BBC World Service.

What makes this so painful is that there is money to blow on Labour’s priorities. Last year Labour spent £2.3bn (from the overseas aid budget) on supporting refugees/asylum seekers inside the UK. It’s spending billions more on net zero. It’s spending billions more on welfare.

It has money to spaff on illegal migrants, but no money to rebuild the BBC globally. Our leaders want to prepare us for a darker and more dangerous future whilst simultaneously being unwilling to do anything about it. If that’s not the definition of complacency, I don’t know what is.

Personally, I’d be happy to see the domestic BBC go to subscription – I am not even sure it deserves to keep the name – but I’d generously fund the BBC World Service directly from aid funding and grow it. I don’t know if £500 million is the correct amount, or £1 billion, increasingly in line with inflation. But it needs to be funded to do its job; to lead the global defence of objective journalism. We need a restatement of the values that made the BBC great and respected. Who knows, it may actually help the failing domestic BBC regain its direction too.

The World Service’s remit would be tight – no woke politics, either explicit or implicitly in running orders, and no engaging in political causes. Above all there needs to be a core understanding that truth is objective and universal, not driven by neo-Marxist or post-modern, subjective, contested ideologies. This is where the domestic BBC has gone so disastrously wrong.

So in our policy reform, let’s dramatically cut the bloated aid budget, but let’s come up with a plan to make the BBC the world’s dominant and most trusted broadcaster, investing specifically in Russian, Chinese and Persian services, and to do so across regional and global television too.

We are in a conflict of values this century against rising dictatorial powers. The BBC World Service is our unique weapon of soft power (along with the Royals). Regardless of the failing domestic BBC, the World Service should be invested in, with funding, purpose and leadership. It needs to be saved, not only for Britain’s reputation globally, but humanity’s as well.