No to BBC propaganda!

Dermot Hudson with the mike

by New Worker correspondent

London comrades joined other Korean solidarity activists outside Broadcasting House on Saturday to protest at the BBC’s inaccurate and biased coverage of Democratic Korea. Called by the Korean Friendship Association (KFA) and supported by the New Communist Party (NCP), the picketers gave out leaflets and held high the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) flag and the banner of the KFA.

The KFA Chair Dermot Hudson took the mike to ridicule the BBC for the nonsense it’s been spouting over the years, including claims that generals are shot on the whim of the DPRK leader Kim Jong Un; that thousands languish in labour camps and that the rest live on starvation rations. The fact that all these lies originate from the puppet south Korean propaganda centre is never directly acknowledged by the BBC, although they have been forced to retract some of their most outrageous lies.

Rupert Wingfield-Hayes, for instance, claimed that patients at the Okryu Children’s Hospital were not ill at all but child-actors. But in May 2016 he signed a statement admitting that his reporting was biased and inaccurate.

Now the BBC World Service is broadcasting daily propaganda broadcasts to the DPRK in support of south Korea and US imperialism’s psychological warfare campaign against Democratic Korea. It is also an attempt at imperialist and bourgeois ideological and cultural infiltration into the DPRK in order to undermine its socialist system from within. In the past the BBC World Service played a role in undermining the former USSR and the people’s democracies of eastern Europe. It shows that the British ruling class is working behind the scenes, hand in glove with the US imperialists, to overthrow the DPRK and make the northern half of Korea a colony of world imperialism.

A representative of the BBC came out to meet the picket and engaged in discussion with us about our grievances whilst some passers-by supported the KFA demands.

Dermot Hudson made a final address on the mike, saying: "Licence payers are expected to pay for the BBC's appalling propaganda against the DPRK. This is wrong. The BBC has even invited so-called defectors with criminal records to slander the DPRK. We support the DPRK because it is an independent socialist state based on the Juche idea of independence, self-sufficiency and self-reliance. We will come back again and picket the BBC!"