On Monday, US president Donald Trump filed a $10 billion (£7.4bn) lawsuit against the BBC over the Panorama documentary programme broadcast a week before the 2024 US election.
Trump is claiming defamation over the broadcast, which included an edited version of the hour-long speech he made in January 2021, when he addressed a mob of his supporters just before the insurrectionary attack on the US Capitol.
Speaking to reporters earlier on Monday, Trump accused the BBC of ‘putting terrible words in my mouth that I didn’t say’ before suggesting that the BBC ‘may have used AI’.
A spokesman for Trump’s legal team told the Telegraph newspaper: ‘The BBC has a long pattern of deceiving its audience in coverage of President Trump, all in the service of its own leftist political agenda.’
Painting the BBC as a ‘leftist’ conspiracy by Trump’s administration is being used to browbeat, not just the broadcaster, but the entire Labour government into submitting to the dictatorship of US capitalism.
In fact, Trump has used lawsuits against multiple US broadcasters.
In 2024, ABC News paid out $15 million to settle a defamation case while CBS News paid $16 million to settle a suit brought by Trump over an edition of a pre-election interview with his Democratic opponent Kamala Harris, which Trump claimed made her sound more coherent.
His attack on the BBC is part of a wider attack on the UK, and the entire continent of Europe, being waged by Trump and his administration that is in the grip of a massive political and economic crisis.
Politically, Trump is facing the breakdown of his support as a result of his tariff wars which have started to hit through to the pockets of US workers and the middle class, while his fervent MAGA supporters are splitting apart, not least because of his involvement with the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Yesterday, Trump racked up the pressure on Starmer’s Labour government when the New York Times revealed that the US had ‘paused’ its promised multi-billion-pound investment into the UK.
The £31 billion ‘tech prosperity deal’ was hailed prematurely by Starmer as ‘a generational stepchange in our relationship with the US’ after it was announced during Trump’s state visit to the UK.
This ‘pause’ was due to the US government demanding further concessions over tax on US tech companies and the demand for food safety rules to be scrapped.
All Starmer’s attempts to win over Trump through the most outrageous toadying has come nothing, and now the president is determined to twist the knife through attacking the BBC.
Trump will not be content until US capitalism has total control over Britain and Europe, turning them into nothing more than puppet states of American capitalism to be mercilessly exploited for the profit of the US bosses and bankers.
The BBC has vowed to defend itself against Trump’s lawsuit, while Ed Davey, leader of the Liberal Democrats, urged Starmer to ‘stand up for the BBC against Trump’s outrageous legal threat’.
The chances of Starmer standing up to Trump are non-existent.
The working class alone has the power to stand up to Trump and US capitalism, and to put an end to the drive by US imperialism to rescue itself from its economic crisis through further attempts to enslave the world.
The burning issue today is for the working class to force the TUC to get organised by uniting with trade unions in the US and calling joint action against both the Trump regime and Starmer’s Labour government. The TUC must be forced to call a general strike to bring down Starmer’s government. This revolutionary development will encourage and win the support of America workers to take similar action to bring down Trump.
The working class must unite to put an end to bankrupt US imperialism and its British puppet and take power by bringing down their governments and going forward to Workers Governments and socialism. Now is the time to build up the WRP and Young Socialists and sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International in the US and across the world to organise and lead the victory of the world socialist revolution, putting an end to capitalism for ever!
