Media Matters
The Government and the BBC are in a fight to the death
Has anyone noticed that the Tories are in the process of slowly killing off the BBC, and doing so very successfully? And that the BBC is trying its best to make it easy for them?
For as long as I can remember, the Right has been grumbling about the mandatory licence fee. When the issue last came up in 2016, some predicted that the Conservative Government would refuse to renew it or, at any rate, would do so for a shorter period. In the event, the then Culture Secretary, John Whittingdale, although no fan of the Beeb’s, extended the fee for another 11 years.
Many thought the Government feeble. In fact, the axe had already been surreptitiously wielded, the previous year. The Chancellor, George Osborne, forced the Corporation to take on the full financial burden of supplying free licence fees for the over-75s from 2020. By this year, the annual bill was £750 million. The BBC decided to bear a third of the cost in terms of economies but, in order to claw back the remaining £500 million, it recently ended the scheme for all but the very poorest pensioners.
Why Tony Hall, who has just stood down as Director-general, swallowed this poison pill is a mystery. One of his predecessors, Mark Thompson, has claimed that when Osborne tried to impose similar terms on the BBC five years earlier, he began writing a resignation letter. The wily Osborne intended primarily to hack back Auntie’s £5 billion a year income. But he must surely have worked out that if the BBC passed on the costs to pensioners, it would incur widespread unpopularity.
And so it has. In one recent poll, two thirds of respondents said they wanted the annual £157.50 licence fee scrapped. That’s a higher proportion than was commonly disclosed by polls a few years ago. There is also a growing dissatisfaction with the Beeb’s political and cultural values. For example, more than half of those asked said they thought the Corporation too ‘politically correct’.
Cue the Government’s next move to weaken the BBC. As I write, it is reported that it intends to decriminalise nonpayment of the licence fee. The argument is that ten per cent of cases in magistrates’ courts involve non-payment, so decriminalisation would free up valuable court time. It would also blow a further hole in the Beeb’s finances. Most people will go on paying, but a significant minority might not. The Corporation reckons it could lose £200 million a year.
One way and another, the Government (with the Prime Minister’s chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, plotting the course) is slicing back the BBC without formally ending the licence fee. The likely effect will be to encourage the beleaguered Corporation to explore alternative forms of funding. In the meantime, it grows weaker and less self-confident, while the Government escapes being portrayed as a brutal assassin as a result of moving stealthily and deftly under cover.
How they must have celebrated in Number Ten when Auntie primly announced that the allegedly jingoist words of Rule Britannia and Land of
Hope and Glory wouldn’t be sung at this year’s Last Night of the Proms. That decision has been reversed by the incoming Director-general, Tim Davie – but not before the BBC suffered more self-inflicted wounds. In the poll I mentioned, 59 per cent of respondents said they agreed with Boris Johnson over his criticism of the Beeb for ‘cringing with embarrassment over our history’.
Mr Davie, supposedly a closet Tory, which puts him in a minority of about three among senior management at Broadcasting House, must be perfectly aware of what is being done to the BBC. Lord Hall was both more woke and not very astute. The new Director-general has said the Corporation must ‘represent every part of this country’. According to the Daily Telegraph, he wants to rein in Left-leaning comedy and panel shows – which means almost all of them.
Good luck to him, I say. Few of us would like to see the BBC reduced to a husk. My guess, though, is that its metropolitan and leftist character is so ingrained that Mr Davie will have very limited success in changing it. The Government will continue to squeeze air out of an institution it regards as overmighty. The two of them are engaged in what may turn out for the BBC as we know it to be a dance of death.
Philip Collins, whom I have never met, has long been one of my favourite columnists. He’s a Blairite, so our politics are not the same, but, having served as chief speech writer to the former PM, he knows more about the workings of government than most political journalists. He also writes clearly. A well-informed, lucid and balanced columnist. What more could one want?
You can imagine my surprise when I learnt that this paragon of my trade has been sacked by the Times, supposedly for being too left-wing.