Yes, the BBC’s flawed. But abolishing the licence fee will only make Britain more divided

IN OCTOBER 1982 a Conservative politician called John Nott stormed out of a BBC interview with a journalist called Robin Day. Nott was at the time Defence Secretary, while Day was a thencelebrated BBC interrogator.

The cause of the upset was the combative Day demanding of the unworldly Nott: ‘ why should the public . . . believe you, a transient, here-today and, if I may say so, gonetomorrow politician . . .’

He didn’t get much further with the question before a furious Nott tore off his microphone and stomped out of the studio.

Nearly 40 years later, few people under the age of 60 will remember much about Nott. He called his 2002 autobiography Here Today, Gone Tomorrow in dry acknowledgement of his ‘five minutes of fame before . . . my descent into obscurity’.

Day, who presented question Time for ten years, will be more widely remembered. But he, too, will one day fade from our collective memories.

But the BBC itself sailed magnificently on: bigger than both its own stars and the — yes, transient — politicians on whom it reported.

At the time, the walk-out made huge headlines — the latest in a series of bust-ups between the then Conservative government and the Corporation. But grown-up politicians and BBC chiefs knew the score.

A later chair of the BBC, Marmaduke Hussey, shrugged away such squalls: ‘ The BBC will always have an antagonistic relationship with the government of the day — that is in the nature of its independence.’

But all that has changed. within weeks of being told that the Johnson Government intends to decriminalise non-payment of the licence fee — thereby (in the worst fears of BBC supporters) making it a voluntary payment — we were told that the licence fee itself would be abolished.

‘we will whack it,’ was the mob-style threat attributed to a senior Government source. I think we can all guess who. There was some rowing back on that incendiary revelation this week when it was suggested that Boris Johnson and his consigliere Dominic Cummings are at odds on the issue but, if such a bold step were to be taken, it would spell the end of the BBC as we know it.

Until recently, the BBC’s affable director-general, Tony Hall, imagined that he would retire in 2022 after celebrating 100 years of Auntie broadcasting to the nation and the wider world.

BUT

in the space of barely a month all that has changed. Not only will Hall be gone long before 2022, it’s not clear that there will be much to celebrate by then — or even if the BBC itself will survive.

How did it come to this? Boris Johnson is — sorry, Boris — just one more transient politician. Cummings will one day be an expanded footnote in British history.

So how come these two heretoday-gone-tomorrow figures are in with a good chance of wrecking an institution which, like the Royal Family and the NHS, is loved and admired around the world?

we should concede that lots of people are currently very cross with the BBC. Given three polarised years of Brexitfulled anger it’s hardly surprising that both sides ended up blaming the messenger.

Remainers will go to their graves cursing the Brexit Broadcasting Corporation. Leavers will forever believe the BBC is run by out- of-touch metropolitan elite pinkoes.

This is not the place to arbitrate between these two camps. But the bitterness on both sides will — let’s hope — soon pass and we will tune in to a much more urgent problem which society is belatedly waking up to: no one knows what to believe any more.

That’s a slight exaggeration. Two-thirds of us, according to a recent poll, can no longer distinguish between a good source of information and a dodgy one.

The crisis over fake news is one of the biggest threats to democratic societies — bigger, on some views, than terrorism. If citizens can no longer distinguish between fact and fiction, they become easy meat for populist politicians who can play on their ignorance.

Donald Trump is a genius at speaking directly to the 72 million who follow him on Twitter. A team at the washington Post calculates that, since becoming President, he has made more than 16,000 false or misleading statements.

But who cares what real journalists find? Trump has made it his business to discredit and delegitimise the work of decent reporters. His brand of politics — like Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan — depends on creating a fog of uncertainty in which his facts are as good as anyone else’s.

America has no BBC, or anything like it. Its citizens make do, for their information, with dying newspapers, opinionated talk radio, a swamp of social media and the shrill partisanship of channels such as Fox News. Into that cacophony steps the master manipulator of truth.

whatever the current failings of BBC journalism, it is at least some kind of universally available tent peg in the ground. It does not always succeed in being impartial or fair to all sides.

Indeed, it makes its fair share of clumsy mistakes.

THERE

was that overenthusiastic tweet from its political editor Laura Kuenssberg claiming that one of Health Secretary Matt Hancock’s advisers had been punched in the face by a Labour activist, something that turned out to be untrue. And newsreader Huw Edwards liked a tweeted video that said ‘Vote Labour for the National Health Service’, a lapse he excused on the basis that he hadn’t watched the clip right to the end.

Matters were not helped by the fact that both incidents occurred during a highly charged General Election campaign. But the BBC behaves — by and large — extremely ethically and responsibly. It is to my eyes — as someone who edited a national newspaper for more than 20 years — as good a news organisation as any on the planet.

It is out there reporting on the world, as well as spread out across our nation in a way that no other news organisation could even dream of.

It is accountable and transparent in the way that few newspapers are: see the furore and multi- million pound inquiries that can follow on from mistakes that would pass unnoticed in Fleet Street.

It funds 150 reporters to sit in courts and councils to be watchdogs on our behalf.

That doesn’t make it perfect. we all have our gripes. I wish for it to be braver in its investigative journalism. I, too, shout at the Today programme and cringe at question Time.

But the appropriate response to under- performance is reform. The NHS has badly performing hospitals, the strain of severe winters and crises over rogue consultants. The answer is constant improvement, not abolition.

Some say the BBC is doomed long term because millennials are not only switching to streaming services, such as Netflix and HBO, but also increasingly failing to pay the licence fee. There is some truth