David
Cameron’s latest battleground: the BBC
Government
reform plans have been described as a right-wing assault on the
broadcaster. But the damage may already be done.
By ALEX SPENCE
5/11/16, 5:33 AM CET
LONDON — As if
fighting junior doctors in the NHS wasn’t damaging enough, David
Cameron could soon be confronted by angry protests about his plans
for another treasured U.K. institution: the BBC.
That’s if you
believe the press coverage ahead of a long-awaited “white paper”
setting out the government’s proposals for reforming the public
broadcaster Thursday.
Billed by some as
paving the way for the biggest shake-up in the BBC’s 93-year
history, the paper will start the next phase of negotiations on the
corporation’s operating charter, which expires at the end of the
year. At stake is the future of a cultural colossus whose radio
shows, TV programs and website are accessed by 97 percent of the
British population at least once a week.
Publication of the
white paper has reignited a passionate political debate inflamed by a
torrent of leaks and briefings to partisan newspapers. Depending on
your point of view, the BBC is either on the brink of being killed
off in a right-wing coup, or is a bloated, arrogant bastion of
liberal privilege raising a stink because it can’t bear the
prospect of even modest changes.
Chief among their
concerns is a mooted plan to scrap the existing governing body, the
BBC Trust.
Among the
supporters, there has been talk of protests at Westminster and of
rebellion among backbench Conservative MPs. Labour’s shadow culture
secretary, Maria Eagle, accused the Conservatives of “mendacious
meddling.” Peter Kosminsky, director of the BBC drama Wolf Hall,
used an acceptance speech at the Baftas on Sunday to warn that the
BBC was on track to become an instrument of state propaganda similar
to TV channels in North Korea and Russia.
Chief among their
concerns is a mooted plan to scrap the existing governing body, the
BBC Trust, and replace it with an enlarged board to which several
directors would be appointed by the government. Ministers could keep
the broadcaster in check by stacking the board with political
cronies, they worry.
Various other
potential changes have been mentioned which could impact the
corporation’s programs and independence: restrictions to its
website, a requirement to disclose the salaries of its highest-paid
performers and journalists, limitations on scheduling popular
programs against those of commercial TV networks.
The left’s villain
of the piece
The agonizing drew
scorn from the BBC’s critics on the right: “Do these luvvies not
realize how bad their hysterical special pleading sounds?” the
Daily Mail shot back in an editorial Tuesday.
As these critics see
it, the BBC’s management and their allies in the TV industry — a
“self-congratulatory bubble” of metropolitan left-wingers, as the
Sun put it this week — have overreacted to the prospect of minor
changes aimed at securing its future in a highly-competitive,
fast-changing media landscape, at a time when public services are
under financial strain.
“They hope that if
they make enough noise, if they suggest that poor [John Whittingdale,
the culture secretary, the minister overseeing the charter review] is
trying to destroy the BBC, there will be such a public rumpus that
the government will have to back down even from the relatively modest
tinkering which it probably has in mind,” Stephen Glover, a veteran
media pundit, said in the Mail.
Whittingdale is not
the villain the BBC’s supporters have portrayed him as, but an
“emollient and cautious man,” Glover said.
Publicly and
privately, Whittingdale has repeatedly insisted that he’s not
ideologically opposed to the BBC and only wants to examine whether
the corporation’s size, scope and purpose are still what they
should be, 10 years after the last charter. The questions the charter
review have been asking are perfectly legitimate, Whittingdale and
his defenders argue.
“The idea that I’m
some sort of Rupert Murdoch puppet who has been sent in or told by
David Cameron to take apart the BBC is just so ridiculous,” he told
the website PoliticsHome in February.
There are plenty of
people in British media circles who believe that’s exactly what
Whittingdale is — a Murdoch-sanctioned assassin.
That impression
wasn’t helped last week when, in an apparently off-the-cuff remark
to Conservative students at Cambridge University, the minister joked
that the BBC ceasing to exist was “occasionally a tempting
prospect.”
“Whittingdale’s
a Tory fanatic, a reckless revolutionary, driven to break what’s
fixed,” the columnist Kevin Maguire said in the Daily Mirror
Monday.
Trust in the Tories?
Hysteria aside, the
BBC’s supporters do have reasons not to trust the government.
Months after
returning to power in 2010, the Conservatives (then in coalition with
the Liberal Democrats) strong-armed the BBC into a hasty financial
deal which capped the annual license fee paid by households to fund
the broadcaster at £145.50 until 2017. As part of the arrangement,
the BBC was forced to pay for initiatives including the rollout of
broadband internet to homes in rural areas, requiring the BBC to
divert more than £500 million a year from other services.
Worse came last
summer, when the Chancellor George Osborne pushed onto the BBC the
£650 million-a-year cost of providing free TV licenses for viewers
aged over 75.
The corporation will
have to find an additional £800 million in annual cost savings by
2021.
Eager to reduce the
government’s welfare bill yet unwilling to antagonize voters by
revoking the policy, Osborne handed it to the BBC. After difficult,
rushed negotiations, Lord Hall of Birkenhead, the BBC’s
director-general, extracted some concessions in return — notably,
that the annual license fee will increase in line with inflation, as
long as nothing fundamentally changes after a new charter is formally
agreed. That allowed the BBC to spin the deal as reasonable under the
circumstances. Yet the corporation will have to find an additional
£800 million in annual cost savings by 2021, amounting to a budget
cut of about 20 percent.
With services
already under financial strain, that amounts to “grievous bodily
harm,” Steve Hewlett, host of the Media Show on BBC Radio 4, said
in an interview with the BBC’s Radio 5 Live this week.
The way the license
fee deal was done — thrashed out behind closed doors with no public
consultation, over a matter of days, then leaked to the Sunday Times
— did little to assuage fears that the BBC has become increasingly
vulnerable to meddling and bullying by politicians in Westminster.
Lord Birt, a former BBC director-general, called it a “deeply
shocking” deal.
In that sense, for
all the bluster about Thursday’s white paper, the worst may be
over.
With the biggest
issue — the amount of money the BBC receives, and the funding
mechanism — already determined separately from the charter process,
all that is left “is quite a lot of political twitching,” as
Hewlett put it.
Hewlett said he
sympathized with the BBC’s worries and said there’s still
potential for mischief in Thursday’s white paper, but saw no
evidence of an ideological assault.
There’s no
question some Conservatives would like to see a radical overhaul: A
vocal minority complain that the BBC is too left-wing, pro-European,
an unfair public intervention in the free market that people
shouldn’t have to pay to for if they don’t want to.
It’s widely
assumed that the prime minister isn’t one of them. Cameron has so
far been largely absent from the public debate about the BBC, but
media insiders say there’s little appetite in Downing Street for a
protracted dispute. Whatever its flaws, the BBC remains one of the
most popular and trusted institutions in the country, let alone the
media — and Cameron may feel he has enough to deal with already.
Authors:
Alex Spence
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