Complaints closed at stage 1b and complainants subject to the Expedited Complaints Procedure

That's the title of a recently produced document now available for download on the BBC Trust website. It appears from the BBC's lack of publicity they are ashamed of the document's contents - and with very good reason, as you can see in this extract from the opening paragraph:

".. new procedures put in place the right for the BBC to end correspondence on trivial, misconceived, hypothetical, repetitious or otherwise vexatious complaints .."

What exactly is a "misconceived" complaint? Apparently that is something decided by the BBC. So what, in effect, has happened here is that the BBC has set itself up as a arbiter of what is right and what is wrong - and the public just have to accept their ruling.

Last year Graham Norton wore a ribbon to raise awareness of World AIDS Day. The BBC's Deputy Director of Television, Mark Linsey, ordered Graham not to wear the ribbon again, and the BBC subsequently received thousands of complaints about the ban. Nevertheless, the BBC presumably decided that those complaints fell into one of the above categories, and the Trust has not looked into the issue. Nor, it seems are they happy to discuss it further.

The BBC Trust's document ends with a list of "expedited" complainants. Correspondence from "expedited" complainants must, according to the BBC, be read but not acknowledged.