The BBC's focus on immigration was a whole day of anti-Brexit propaganda 

A man walks among railway tracks at a makeshift refugee camp of the northern Greek border point of Idomeni, Greece
A man walks among railway tracks at a makeshift refugee camp of the northern Greek border point of Idomeni, Greece Credit: Petros Giannakouris/AP Photo

As a Vote Leave campaigner, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how even-handedly the BBC has covered the Brexit debate. It’s a big improvement on the corporation’s reporting on the European Union in previous years.

Sadly, my newfound respect for the BBC was dealt a blow yesterday when the broadcaster devoted an entire day of live programming to migration. With the hashtag #WorldOnTheMove, the BBC covered the subject from a variety of angles, including a report from Vietnam by Sarah Montague on the Today programme, an extended interview on the World at One with Filippo Grandi, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, and a radio drama by the award-winning playwright James Graham entitled Where Shall I Go, What Shall I Do?

If you were looking for impartiality, you’d come to the wrong place. The entire day was like a 24-hour political broadcast for the Remain campaign.

The thrust of Montague’s report, in which she talked to a number of Vietnamese boat people returning home after years overseas, was that not all refugees stay in their host countries in perpetuity. Unfortunately, she neglected to point out that they constitute a small minority of the total.

Grandi meanwhile stressed over and over again that the only reason people left their own countries was out of dire necessity, to escape war or famine.

“Many believe that refugees are people that come to rich countries to take advantage of a better way of living,” he told Martha Kearney, unable to contain his amusement at such a laughably inadequate hypothesis. “Refugees mostly flee because they are compelled to flee by terrible, unimaginable violence. If they had a choice, they wouldn’t leave, but they have no choice. That’s why we have such a strong not only legal, but also a moral obligation to give them asylum.”

That isn’t true. The number of displaced people in the world currently stands at 60 million, higher than it’s ever been, but both war and poverty have declined dramatically since World War II, a phenomenon painstakingly documented by the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker.

The subtext of Grandi’s “terrible, unimaginable violence” remarks couldn’t have been clearer. Anyone in the UK who wants to restrict the flow of migrants into our country – that is, anyone thinking of voting Leave – is a knuckle-dragging barbarian.

I turned to the radio play hoping for some light relief – I’m a fan of This House, James Graham’s drama set in the House of Commons during the 1974-79 Labour government – but he just added a Corbynite twist to the pro-immigration propaganda.

 Migrants from Pakistan walk on their way Idomeni camp after trying to cross the Greek-Macedonian border Credit: Petros Giannakouris/AP

His take on the subject was to write about internal economic migration within the UK, presumably in the hope of persuading narrow-minded Brexiteers that pulling up the drawbridge won’t protect them from the global crisis of capitalism.

The two central characters, a couple called Alfie and Leah, were secondary schoolteachers and, because teachers at comprehensives are so scandalously underpaid – at least, according to Graham – they’d been forced to move in with Alfie’s mother. “Everyone’s back with their parents,” said the downtrodden public sector worker. “Doctors, teachers, nurses … economic outcasts in their own city.”

Leah explained to the listeners that, like Syrian refugees, they’d decided to uproot themselves from their community to escape poverty.

“A reverse industrial revolution,” she said. “I done that with my Year 9s. The first great movement of people. internal migration, a British invention. From the land into the cities, now turning full circle. Back out we go, to find a new hope in the wilderness.”

The “wilderness” turned out to be Scotland – apparently a place of refuge from heartless Tory England now that it’s run by the saintly Nicola Sturgeon.

But the centrepiece of Monday's blanket coverage was a speech by Angelina Jolie, the Hollywood actress and UNHCR special envoy. She’d been asked by the Beeb to speak at Broadcasting House.

Sounding as if she was reading a script by Nick Clegg, the star denounced “the politics of fear and separation” and claimed that those seeking to impose tougher border controls, (i.e. Brexit campaigners), were guilty of “protecting themselves whatever the cost or challenge to their neighbours and despite their international responsibilities”.

“If your neighbour’s house is on fire, you are not safe if you lock your doors,” she said. “Isolationism is not strength. Fragmentation is not the answer.” I half-expected her to conclude by warning us not to take a “leap into the unknown” and stressing we were “stronger together”.

As I say, I’m not a swivel-eyed Eurosceptic loon when it comes to the BBC. But a whole day devoted to making those of us who would like to control migration feel like mean-spirited Little Englanders was too much. Would the BBC dare broadcast this agitprop after the EU referendum purdah kicks in on May 27th? I doubt it. We can only hope they decide to show Brexit: The Movie in prime time on BBC One to provide some semblance of balance.