THE crisis engulfing the BBC speaks to critical aspects of international politics today which must command the left’s attention.

The first is that US President Donald Trump is daily extending his campaign to remake bourgeois politics in his own image. Not content with a full-on assault on democracy in the US itself, he is seeking to extend his agenda to other countries.

Britain is a particular target, for a mixture of historical, linguistic and strategic reasons. His Vice-President JD Vance spent part of the summer here, meeting right-wing and far-right politicians.

Trump’s administration is also pushing to gut the Online Safety Act in the interests of the right-wing tech barons and their desire to make a profit-spewing filth and hatred unconstrained.

It is taking up the cases of anti-abortion campaigners. Some elements of the administration, and of course Elon Musk, openly back fascist grifter Tommy Robinson too.

Now the US president has the BBC in his sights. Threats to sue have already brought elements of the US media to heel, not because Trump’s legal cases had any merit but because rich owners want to stay the right side of the White House.

The BBC has already largely capitulated to Trump’s pressure, forcing out two top executives in what looks very much like a coup organised by the president’s agents, or at least sympathisers, within.

As this paper has already noted, the BBC is not and never has been a friend of the left. It is an arm of the bourgeois state, its role analogous with that played by the church in the 19th century, of forming mass consensus around ruling-class objectives in a democracy.

It is a plaything of public schoolboys, saturated in elite assumptions.

It has never given a fair hearing to workers in struggle, worked might and main to undermine Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of Labour and has most recently given broad support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

But it is under attack for the same reasons that the neo-Thatcherite populist plutocrats of the nationalist right are demagogically attacking so many established institutions, using culture war rhetoric to advance their cause.

That is the need to shift to a less and less bridled authoritarianism as the only way to guarantee the unimpeded continuation of the neoliberal order, which has lost mass consent since the 2008 crash. Toxic chauvinism and racism are the main weapons.

The residual institutions of the post-war order, independent sources of ideological authority, even parliamentary democracy itself, become encumbrances to be subverted so that the rule of the rich can be insulated from effective popular opposition.

Clearly, the sustained challenge to imperialist policy represented by the Palestine solidarity movement can barely be tolerated. Only a GB News-style framing of the issue is deemed acceptable.

And how else can neoliberalism endure after a generation of slump and stagnation, without blocking the expression of dissent?

A second critical factor is that the Labour government is incapable of offering any serious resistance to this onslaught. Starmer, Cooper, Nandy and the rest are paralysed before Trump like rabbits before a cobra.

They are so in thrall to the diseased ideology of Atlanticism, so terrified of the US president, that they will not offer any defence of the institutions and values they claim to champion.

The maintenance of democracy cannot be left to the decayed remnants of centrist politics. They are incapable of offering the lead required and their misgovernance only empowers the Trumpians in our midst.

It thus falls to the left, inside and outside Labour, to rally the forces to repel the threat to our freedom.