Despite being legally bound to political impartiality, the BBC nevertheless has a habit of treating Eurosceptics with the same respect which it usually reserves for cheese-rollers, the people who risk life and limb to run downhill after rounds of cheese every year in Gloucestershire: amusing and brave British eccentrics but nevertheless quite, quite mad. by Ofcom rules

“So ingrained is the veneration of the European Union as a force for good at the BBC that they are totally unaware of any bias in their reporting”

Yet our national broadcaster’s biggest problem isn’t simply that, as an institution, it doesn’t like Eurosceptics and is instinctively pro-EU. The real problem is that the BBC doesn’t even realise it has a problem in the first place.

So ingrained is the veneration of the European Union as a force for good at the BBC that they are totally unaware of any bias in their reporting on the question of Britain’s future relationship with the EU.

Gloucestershire cheese: a pearl beyond price  Photo: JUSTIN TALLIS/AFP/Getty Images

They don’t mean it, of course, but the BBC bias against the Leave camp starts long before even the first question is asked on air.

I know from first-hand experience the look of horrified pity that I get from BBC producers when I say that I am a Eurosceptic, which is something akin to the mixture of revulsion and bemusement they would feel if I had just confessed to a secret passion for killing puppies while listening to Barry Manilow’s greatest hits.

I say this more in sorrow than in anger, as a staunch admirer and supporter of the BBC as a world-class British institution, but the truth is that many BBC employees, like those of the Guardian newspaper, move in a world where they rarely come across people with different views from their own.

“Leave guests are sneeringly portrayed as ignorant xenophobes simply for daring to question the economic and social case for mass immigration.”

They have therefore come to regard support for the EU as a mainstream, centrist opinion, because that’s what everyone with whom they work and socialise thinks, while anything else is seen as an extremist, minority view.

There are some honourable exceptions, of course (stand up Nick Robinson and Andrew Neil) but, after years of appearing on the BBC, my guess is that most of the corporation’s staff are completely unaware of having any bias at all and believe themselves to be utterly neutral when they patently are not.

Indeed, the bias starts even before the first question is put to guests on any BBC radio or television show, when producers decide which guest to book in the first place.

Again and again, Remain guests appear from the ranks of the well-briefed front benches and senior business worlds, while Leave guests are foaming-at-the-mouth Ukip local councillors or so-called “ordinary people” who are sneeringly portrayed as ignorant xenophobes simply for daring to question the economic and social case for mass immigration.

Once a guest has been booked, the questions are routinely loaded with unconscious Europhile bias.

“Why do you think Britain will be better off out of Europe?” is a typical BBC starter for 10 for an interviewee supporting the vote to Leave.

This is doubly important because the Remain campaign deliberately uses “Europe” in place of “the EU” as a political tactic.

In the event of a vote to Leave the EU, we are no more going to “leave Europe”than we are going to sail away to join South America or Asia or the Antarctic.

Europe is a physical continent, the EU is a political entity. This is a not a difficult distinction, yet it is one that the great Oxbridge minds of the BBC appear to confuse on a daily basis. That sends out the subtle message that wanting to “leave Europe” is the stuff of madmen.

Then there is all the questioning of Eurosceptic politicians about splits in the Leave camp and who certain politicians will or won’t share a platform alongside –whether it be Nigel Farage, George Galloway or anyone else.

These are of course perfectly reasonable questions. Yet the same questions are rarely asked of those on the Remain side. Is it not equally pertinent to ask if David Cameron is happy to share a platform with his fellow Remain supporter, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, a man whom he recently described as a “risk to national security”?

And is it really the case that those campaigning for Remain see eye-to-eye on every single issue given that they include true blue Tories, far left Labour socialists, Liberal Democrats, the SNP and Green supporters among their tribe?

Meanwhile, pro-EU political grandees likeLord Heseltine and Kenneth Clarke are treated like gurus of wisdom and truth rather than simply voices on one side of a debate – let alone asked why anyone should take their scaremongering claims about the terrible fate awaiting Britain if we leave the EU when they made the very same predications if we failed to join the euro.

Rarely, too, do you hear a chief executive of a FTSE 100 company being asked if he is supporting Remain not from a deeply held love of international cooperation, but simply because his annual bonus is dependent upon company profits which are boosted by a large supply of cheap foreign labour that keeps wages down.

And while the Leave campaign is routinely portrayed as full of right-wing Little Englanders, this ignores the fact that many on the supposedly progressive Left, including the rail unions Aslef and the RMT, take a staunch Eurosceptic stance in the name of protecting wages.

The bias in the BBC’s coverage is all very subtle and much of it is totally unconscious, but it is nevertheless real, and it will have an effect on how the BBC’s many millions of listeners and viewers perceive the two competing camps and their campaigns.

We have another four months until voters get to decide Britain’s future on June 23. Until then, all of us – even the cheese-rollers of Gloucestershire – deserve to hear the full, unbiased facts, not Europhile half-truths, from our national broadcaster.

It is a question you will hear time and again over the coming months, despite the fact that no one in the Leave Camp is suggesting that Britain fills the Channel Tunnel with rubble and ups anchor to float Britain out to the north Atlantic, far away from the teeming hordes of our continental cousins.