THE BBC has never been “impartial”. It’s an essential organ of the British state. It is the pre-eminent manifestation of the “legitimacy” of state and class power within the UK.

As such it reflects and promotes the class interests of the ruling elite. At the moment Britain’s oligarchs are creating a nasty right-wing anti-refugee climate. The BBC is front and centre in promoting this filth.

The attempt to silence and browbeat Gary Lineker is part of a wider conspiracy by the Tories to silence all opposition. This is what fascists do.

READ MORE: BBC urged to get a ‘grip’ as Match Of The Day 2 to air without hosts

Refugees are being blamed for the current economic crisis. This is to divert attention away from the malfeasance being done by British imperialism. Westminster is seeking to turn public opinion against asylum seekers. This is to distract from the billionaire gangster class that keep all those around the world in peonage.

The Tories are introducing draconian authoritarian legislation against the working population. This week Jeremy Hunt in his Budget will make it virtually impossible to retire on a private pension at 50. Tory fascists want people working until they are 70.

20 more years of toil and drudgery are being propagandised by the Tories as a “gift”.

The Tory plan to imprison refugees en masse without charge or trial is entirely consistent with their proposals to outlaw strikes and protest for people living here.

The British state needs to be smashed into a thousand pieces and scattered into the wind.

Alan Hinnrichs
Dundee

IT is now confirmed, through the words of a sports commentator, that the BBC is in the pocket of the Conservative Party.

Gary Lineker is a highly respected TV football presenter. He is freelance and not a BBC employee and was expressing, off TV, a sincere and personal viewpoint on controversial Tory government policy, as is his democratic right.

Furthermore, the once free and impartial image of the BBC has been shattered, when it is controlled by a chairman who donated £400k to the Tory party and organised a loan for that reprobate Boris Johnson.

READ MORE: UK Government doesn’t need to bother wading in on Gary Lineker

However, this corrupt Conservative government is not concerned about adverse media coverage, since most of the media is Conservative.

It is even more troubling that new UK Government bills are being rushed through parliament, including legislation against strikes, human rights and migration, with the Home Secretary unable to say whether the Illegal Migration Bill is actually legal or not!

With more than three-quarters of Britain’s national newspapers controlled by four wealthy establishment figures and with more right-wing news sites opening up, the British broadcasting media, including the BBC, has certainly moved to the far right.

Grant Frazer
Newtonmore

AS my wife and I drove northwards on Friday from the Central Belt in Scotland, we heard the regular news broadcasts from the BBC in which the extreme weather conditions further south were covered. Hourly bulletin after hourly bulletin described these as affecting the “northern parts of the UK”, before further specifying these areas as Manchester, Yorkshire and Country Durham. The attitude of mind at the BBC is worse than can be imagined.

Gavin Brown
Linlithgow

HOW on earth do the BBC high heid yins have the nerve to punish someone for breaking their impartiality rules, when all their news and debate programmes show that they themselves don’t even have a nodding acquaintance with them?

P Davidson
Falkirk

AT first I thought it must be a satirical spoof when I heard that Foreign Secretary James Cleverly had ordered British diplomats to accompany and keep a watch on SNP government ministers when they travel abroad to meet overseas politicians, in case they try to undermine the UK with talk of independence. But it turned out to be real (UK diplomats will be ordered to keep an eye on Scottish ministers’ overseas trips, thenational.scot, Mar 10).

Those Tory defenders of free speech, those champions of Ukrainian self-determination, those self-proclaimed standard bearers of democracy turn out to be hypocrites/liars/bullies (please add further descriptors as you see fit).

This is remarkably similar to the practices of the Soviet Union, so I suggest we should now refer to any diplomats who go along with this authoritarianism as KGB (Kingdom of Great Britain) minders.

David White
Galashiels

IN reference to the deposit return scheme, I would like to reply to the comment of John Gordon (Website comments, Mar 1).

According to Mr Gordon, he and his 2000 neighbours wash all hard plastic and metal containers and put them in their recycling bins for the council to collect. He says the system works well, meaning out of sight, out of mind, as he does not know where the recycling ends up. Does it go to India to be burnt, thus generating toxic smoke which affects people’s lungs, mainly children? Does it go to Malaysia, to be buried or burnt, or Turkey to be buried?

Just because you put waste into a recycling bin, that is NOT the end of your responsibility. If it is landfilled, whether in Scotland or Malaysia, or Turkey, pregnant women living near a landfill site have higher than average incidence of miscarriage and foetal abnormality.

Get industry to clean up their act, get the general population to stop blaming everybody but themselves for the garbage they generate. And stop fish farms poisoning what should be pristine water.

I write as an environmental activist of more than 40 years.

Margaret Forbes
Blanefield