Goldstein in HD: The Manufacture of Hate in Modern Britain

Something strange happens when you sit in a room with people who still trust the BBC. You begin to feel like you are watching two different realities. The television hums in the background, the newsreader’s cadence slow and assured, and suddenly the temperature in the room changes. Donald Trump appears on screen, and my parents, who are gentle, intelligent, and by no means political extremists, visibly bristle. It is not a reasoned dislike. It is visceral. Like clockwork, the Two Minutes Hate has begun.

I do not say that flippantly. Orwell understood this dynamic better than anyone, because he had lived through it. In Homage to Catalonia he wrote of his disillusionment when propaganda twisted reality so completely that even the people he had fought alongside no longer recognised the truth. I had a similar moment of awakening years ago, in a very similar way, when I realised how state narratives are built not to inform, but to control the emotional weather of a population. Once you have seen that mechanism, you can never unsee it.

What the BBC has done over the past few weeks, editing political footage and calling it an “error of judgment”, is not just a media scandal. It is a symptom of a society where narrative control has become the last functioning institution. The state can no longer manage the economy, the currency, or the border, but it can still manage perception. When you lose real power, all that is left is the story.

The BBC’s framing of Trump over the years is a masterclass in subtle conditioning. Every headline, every facial expression, every sigh of exasperation from the studio panel works as a signal. The message is not simply “we dislike him.” It is “you should too, if you are a decent person.” It is the politics of belonging disguised as public service broadcasting. The result is emotional automation, see Trump, feel disgust, reaffirm social identity. It is not journalism, it is behavioural programming with subtitles.

You can feel the echo of Orwell’s “Two Minutes Hate” in living rooms across Britain. The faces are calm, the voices polite, but the underlying emotion is identical, orchestrated loathing toward a convenient Goldstein. It is cathartic, it is communal, and it is completely safe. No one gets arrested for shouting at the television. Meanwhile, the real architects of decline, the ones hollowing out the country’s finances, liberties, and dignity, remain untouched, hidden behind the reassuring glow of the BBC logo.

That is the great irony. The British public think they are watching the news, but they are participating in a ritual. The BBC has perfected the art of moral ventriloquism, speaking through the viewer’s conscience and giving them the illusion of independent thought. “Our BBC,” people say proudly, as though it were still a civic institution and not a state-funded perception management agency co-financed by foreign governments, UN agencies, and philanthropic billionaires. The only thing “ours” about it is the bill.

And when the deception is exposed, as with the recent Trump speech edit, the defence is always the same, it was an honest mistake, a one-off error. But the errors always point in the same direction, do they not? If propaganda were random, it would occasionally embarrass the establishment. Instead, it protects it. That is how you know it is systemic.

This is the broader macro pattern we have been tracking for years, institutional legitimacy decay across the Western world. The BBC’s crisis is not isolated, it is part of the same feedback loop that is consuming the central banks, the civil service, and the political class. Economic failure breeds disillusionment, disillusionment breeds tighter narrative control, and tighter narrative control accelerates collapse. The system eats itself in order to preserve the illusion that it still functions.

What fascinates me is the psychological resilience of those still under its spell. My parents trust the BBC because, for much of their lives, it really did represent reliability and national integrity. But that was another Britain, before the Blair era, before “spin” became a profession and politics became theatre.

The BBC has always served as a propaganda arm of the state, it was created to sell national objectives and bury national embarrassments, but there was a time when the propaganda felt civic, even unifying. It wrapped itself in duty, not deceit. That changed under Blair. From that moment, truth became a commodity and narrative an instrument of governance. The institution did not collapse in scandal, it was quietly repurposed.

Trust was not broken, it was harvested, the credibility built over decades now spent on political messaging and cultural engineering. By the time most people realised, the transformation was complete. The BBC still sounded the same, but it was no longer describing reality, it was curating it.

This is why the hatred feels irrational. It is not rational. It is tribal conditioning maintained through repetition and fear of social isolation. To question the narrative is not just to doubt a broadcaster, it is to risk excommunication from the polite world. Far easier to sneer at Trump than to confront the possibility that the system you have trusted all your life might be lying to you.

And so, Britain continues its descent into managed decline, financially, institutionally, and psychologically, while its national broadcaster performs the role of high priest. The rituals remain the same, daily incantations about “far-right populism,” sermons on “threats to democracy,” and emotional communions of righteous outrage. It is no longer journalism, it is liturgy for the Church of the Collapsing State.

Orwell would recognise it instantly. He warned that propaganda was most dangerous not when it was obvious, but when it felt virtuous. When people believed that hatred was a moral duty and obedience a form of enlightenment. We have reached that stage now, the Ministry of Truth phase of British democracy. The screen does not just tell you what happened, it tells you how to feel about it.

And that, perhaps, is the final act of a dying empire, not censorship by force, but persuasion by habit. The steady drip of moral certainty that keeps the population docile, convinced of its own virtue while everything around it burns.

The BBC did not invent the Two Minutes Hate, but it has perfected it.