The BBC seems to be upsetting everybody – the left, the right, sports fans and nature lovers. But if we give up on the BBC, the only winners will be think tanks who have been campaigning for decades to defund the corporation.
BBC past: ground-breaking and brave
Since 1922, the BBC has been entertaining the nation and reporting news to the people who fund it through the license fee, with a charter supposedly granting it freedom from government interference in its editorial policy.
Engraved on the exterior wall of Broadcasting House are the words “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they don’t want to hear”.
This unique level of independence has led it to displease politicians from Stanley Baldwin and Winston Churchill through to Harold Wilson and James Callaghan, Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair. In short, it was doing its job.
In previous years, the corporation made ground-breaking and extraordinarily brave news programmes which challenged the government of the day’s positions on major topics such as the IRA, Northern Ireland, the Falklands War, far-right infiltration of the Conservative Party, Nelson Mandela and the existence, or otherwise, of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
The government and the BBC had regular spats, sometimes ending in compromise, as in the case of Panorama’s ‘Maggie’s Militant Tendency’, when the corporation was sued by Neil Hamilton for alleging that he, amongst others, may have had links with the far-right. Despite its lawyers believing they could win the case, the BBC agreed to settle before witnesses were called to the stand. Hamilton went on to lead UKIP.
In other cases, the BBC did not bow to pressure.
In 1985 the BBC’s Real Lives series broadcast ‘At the Edge of the Union’, which discussed extremism in Northern Ireland. The then home secretary, Leon Brittan, instructed the BBC not to air it in the interests of ‘national security’, which was seen as censorship and led to a National Union of Journalists’ strike at the BBC, largely supported by the management. At tense meetings, the head of the World Service, Austen Kark, said that there would be “grave international consequences for the BBC of any decisions not to show the documentary”. Governors eventually took the decision to air it after minor amendments.
BBC present: everyone’s enemy
Those days and such bravery seem long ago. Standing up to the government is one thing, but being constantly portrayed as standing against the population is something else. What better way to neutralise such a powerful force than to make it yet another enemy of the people?
The right demonise the BBC for political bias, citing shows such as the popular satirical show The Mash Report, axed in 2021, the employment of presenters such as Gary Lineker, who is vocal about his political preferences on platforms outside of the BBC, and a perceived general liberal culture within the corporation as described by Andrew Marr.
In 2009 Jeremy Hunt, at that time the shadow secretary of state for culture, media and sport, said:
“I wish they would go and actively look for some Conservatives to be part of their news-gathering team, because they have acknowledged that one of their problems is that people who want to work at the Corporation tend to be from the centre-left.”
In the same year, however, Mehdi Hasan wrote in the New Statesman that the BBC was biased “towards power and privilege, tradition and orthodoxy” and that the idea that the BBC was biased to the left, “is a calculated and cynical move by the right to cow the corporation into submission”. Giving as examples Andrew Neil, Nick Robinson, Robbie Gibb and Guto Harri, he wrote that the right-wing backgrounds of “various prominent BBC employees have been curiously unexamined in the row over ‘bias’”.
The flagship Thursday night political panel show Question Time is a case in point. In an open letter to the BBC published in Yorkshire Bylines last month, which went viral on Twitter, Dr Russell Jackson asked the programme to address the growing concerns of viewers concerning the perceived partiality of the chair, the lack of transparency in audience demographics, and the panel selection.
BBC future: death by think tank
The importance of the BBC in our national psyche is indisputable. It’s as much a national institution as the NHS. The calm voice of its presenters comforted the nation during the war; since 1932 the World Service has broadcast British soft power the world over in 40 different languages; and we all grew up watching Blue Peter, Doctor Who, Top of the Pops, Dad’s Army, Fawlty Towers, Top Gear and Match of the Day.
But it is this very popularity and extraordinary reach which makes it a target for right-wing politicians and think tanks ideologically opposed to the idea of a national broadcaster.
In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher, a neoliberal, could not fathom the notion of a public service with no market imperatives and she found it hard to tolerate being questioned and held to account by the hard-hitting news programmes of the day. In 1985, the right-wing think tank the Adam Smith Institute produced its Omega Report on communications policy, recommending the abolition of the license fee – music to the ears of Thatcher, who launched the Peacock committee on the back of this report in a failed attempt to commercialise the BBC.
When Hamilton sued the BBC, as mentioned above, it was the chairman of another think tank, the Institute of Economic Affairs, who funded his legal case to enable him to “go after the BBC”.
The appointment of the current chairman of the BBC, Richard Sharp, was always controversial in the eyes of many because of his background as a Conservative Party donor. But has become increasingly so since it emerged that he had facilitated an £800,000 loan to former prime minister Boris Johnson.
He is also a think tank graduate. Recommended for the position of chair by Johnson, he came to the BBC fresh from the Centre for Policy Studies for which he was a director, with his correspondence address listed in Tufton Street.
The Centre for Policy Studies is ranked as highly opaque by Transparify and cited as one of the four least transparent think tanks in the UK in relation to funding. It routinely refuses to reveal its financial donors.
During Sharp’s time with them, the Centre for Policy Studies published several reports critical of the BBC recommending root and branch change of the financial and cultural structure of the BBC including ‘License to Kill: Funding the BBC’ and ‘Bias at the Beeb?’
It certainly seems to have been a strange appointment decision to an organisation apparently so concerned with impartiality.
Protect Auntie from Tufton Street
These think tanks who coordinate challenges to the BBC follow the Thatcherite doctrine of the current government’s neoliberal wing that there is no such thing as society, and that individualism is to be encouraged over notions of the greater good. Unifying national institutions which offer emotional connections reinforcing the bonds on which our national identity is secured are perceived as a threat and have no place in a market-driven environment.
The two major institutions of this sort in the UK are the NHS, the status of which is often compared to a religion in the UK, and the BBC. The current state of the NHS is clear for all to see, and the BBC is seemingly suffering a similar fate.
The more universal the dissatisfaction with the BBC the better for those to who seek to undermine this unique institution.
Twitter is currently full of calls from all sides to refuse to pay the licence fee. Right-wing think tanks have been campaigning for that for 30 years.
Corks must be popping in Tufton Street.
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