BBC boss Tim Davie faced mounting calls to quit last night as it emerged he was at Glastonbury on the day death chants against Jews were broadcast from the festival.
In a Commons debate, Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy said there was clearly ‘a problem’ with the BBC’s leadership because it has had ‘several’ editorial failures in recent months.
She threatened to hit it with sanctions if the corporation drags its feet over admitting what went wrong after it expressed ‘regret’ at not pulling the live feed.
She said she was still waiting for answers over another fiasco in February, when the BBC aired a Gaza documentary featuring the son of a Hamas official without telling viewers who the boy was.
Mr Davie was present at the festival on Saturday at the time of the livestream of the punk duo Bob Vylan, who launched the rant that Ms Nandy described as ‘the equivalent to calling for the death of every single Israeli Jew’ due to conscription laws.
The band’s frontman, who goes by Bobby Vylan, repeatedly chanted ‘death, death to the IDF’ during a performance – referring to Israel’s military, the Israel Defense Forces.
The Daily Telegraph reported that Mr Davie visited staff at the festival and was informed of the chant shortly after it was made.
He is reported to have decided the performance should not be made available to watch back later, but decided against pulling the livestream from iPlayer, which was available to view for another five hours.
A BBC source told the newspaper: ‘Tim was there for a few hours to see the team. He was made aware during the time he was there of what had been said on stage.
He intervened to make sure the performance was not made available on demand and he was very clear about that.
‘Pulling the livestream brings certain technological challenges. With hindsight, we would have taken it down.’
Last night, the BBC confirmed Mr Davie attended the festival on Saturday but did not give further details on who decided not to make the broadcast available on demand.
The corporation also said the timings of Mr Davie’s visit did not align with the Bob Vylan performance.
Avon and Somerset Police have now launched a criminal probe into the chants, which have been recorded as a public order incident and potential hate crime. Footage shows some of the crowd joining in with the chants.
The force said it was also probing footage and audio of a performance by Irish-language rap trio Kneecap, one of whom is already facing a terror charge for allegedly brandishing a flag in support of the proscribed group Hezbollah at a gig in London in November.
Ms Nandy raised questions about why Glastonbury’s organisers gave the artists a stage amid wider concerns about Left-wing extremist hate at the festival, saying the death chant ‘raises very, very serious questions at the highest levels of the BBC’.
Richard Tice, Reform UK’s deputy leader, said many will have concluded that the BBC was ‘institutionally anti-Semitic’, while Sir Michael Ellis, a former attorney general, joined calls for Mr Davie to resign.
Regulator Ofcom said ‘the BBC clearly has questions to answer’ and that it was seeking more infomation ‘as a matter of urgency’.
