Auntie’s identity crisis

The BBC won’t change just by moving its studios to the regions

What is the point of uprooting some 400 BBC employees from London, 200 of whom work for news, and scattering them in the provinces?

The answer seems to be that Tim Davie, the Corporation’s relatively new Director-general, is sensitive to accusations that the Beeb is dominated by a metropolitan elite who are out of touch with many ordinary Britons and failed to understand the feelings of the large number of people who voted for Brexit. The Government is strongly of this view.

So Radio 3 and Radio 6 Music will be ‘rooted’ in Salford, where the BBC already has a large operation. BBC2’S Newsnight will be presented from different ‘bases’, such as Belfast, Cardiff, Glasgow and Manchester. So will Radio 4’s PM and Today programmes, the latter for at least a hundred episodes a year.

A new, long-running drama series will also be launched from the North. Perhaps there could be heart-rending storylines about journalists forced to move ‘up North’, where they struggle to understand the lingo or appreciate the food. There are constant misunderstandings, and occasional clashes with the ‘natives’. The dream of these unhappy exiles is to return to the capital, from whose sophisticated joys they have been so cruelly torn.

The BBC’S decision to expel hundreds of its employees is of course nonsensical. No one suggests that newspapers – most of whose staff live and work in London – are excessively metropolitan, or out of touch with their readers.

Critics do not say that the Sun appears to be edited from an ivory tower, or that the Daily Mail has no sense of people’s ordinary lives outside the M25. Although such newspapers are produced in the capital, they do not seem in any way disconnected from Middle Britain.

The truth is that the BBC’S detachment from part of its audience has nothing to do with geography. Finding themselves banished to Bristol or Belfast, whether for a few days or for much longer, its journalists won’t suddenly disown their left-leaning, fashionable views. They will seek out like-minded people, of whom there are many. Metropolitanism is not confined to London. I live in north Oxford, which possibly surpasses any part of the capital in terms of ‘wokeness’.

I will therefore be astonished if this show of bringing the BBC closer to the people has the slightest effect. I also wonder whether Mr Davie, and the BBC’S new Chairman, Richard Sharp, really believe that relocating staff will make any difference.

It seems to me that they are mostly window-dressing to keep the Government and, in particular, the Culture Secretary, Oliver Dowden, happy. Mr Dowden’s own conviction of the value of the exercise may also be doubted. But he can claim that Auntie is showing willing and is ready to change her ways.

It’s not really true. The BBC’S culture will stay the same for as long as the Corporation exists. All that will change is that there will be more unhappy employees forced to move from their London homes.

One of the great con tricks of history has been pulled off by the Guardian. It has persuaded its readers that it is poor, and many of them now make regular donations. At the end of last year, there were 548,000 recurring contributors. How much they give is not wholly clear but it runs to many millions of pounds.

In fact, although perennially lossmaking, the Guardian Media Group is far from poor. Thanks to previous lucrative investments, largely in the motor advertiser Autotrader, it has over a billion pounds in an endowment fund, and £134.1 million in cash reserves. Few, if any, other newspapers are in such an advantageous financial position.

Nonetheless, the Guardian still behaves as though strapped for cash. The paper has claimed about £100,000 under the Government’s furlough scheme during the pandemic. This did not prevent it from recently running an irate front-page story about ‘billionaire tax exiles, the British National Party and Gulf states [that] have claimed millions of pounds in taxpayer-funded furlough money’.

There was one billionaire the Guardian forgot to include in this list of shame. Itself.

In my last column, I attempted an audit of Rupert Murdoch’s achievements and failings, to mark his 90th birthday. Idiotically, I omitted what was probably his greatest success.

This was the moving of his printing operations to Wapping in January 1986. It led to the humbling of the rapacious print unions, which had blindly resisted new technology, and to the enrichment of press barons such as Conrad Black, who followed Murdoch’s example once he had made a success of his revolution.

For nearly 25 years, until the internet began to undermine print, Fleet Street was more profitable than it had ever been. Newspapers were fatter, offered more supplements and introduced high-quality colour photographs and far superior printing. Many journalists were better paid than their predecessors.

Love him or hate him, it wouldn’t have happened without Murdoch.

Critics do not say that the Sun appears to be edited from an ivory tower