Whoever succeeds Tony Hall as BBC director general will have to save it from destruction
Whoever succeeds Lord (Tony) Hall as director general of the BBC will have to save it from destruction.
Alarmist? No. The emerging commercial and political threats are lethal. Those of us who rely on it for high quality entertainment and as a trusted news source need to be clear headed about the emerging dangers to its existence in an era of new corporate giants, of populism and fake news.
For the first time in its long history, it is no longer unthinkable that a government could cancel the BBC’s Royal Charter – and scrap it. The Charter is what grants the BBC its freedom to broadcast, its independent status and guaranteed advert-free funding via the licence fee. It is in jeopardy.
We are, after all, taking about Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings. They believe one victory in one general election gives them the right to do as they wish in the name of the “will of the people” – just as with the narrow 2016 referendum result. This pair have dictatorial instincts.
The prime minister – as we see with his recent bonkers idea about moving the House of Lords to York – likes to run the country as if he were still a gobshite columnist on the Daily Telegraph or the Spectator – knocking out bizarre notions to excite debate and demonstrate the sheer breadth of his creativity. Except now he has the power to at least turn them into a dystopian reality.
Johnson has already floated the idea of making BBC licence fee evasion no longer a criminal offence, undermining its finances still further; he has publicly attacked its honesty by calling it the “Brexit Bashing Corporation”; and he has acquiesced in a ban on ministers going on the Radio 4 Today programme to be interviewed as part of a campaign that combines spite and cowardice.
Johnson himself, remember, felt no compunction about dodging his own scheduled interview with Andrew Neil during the election campaign, and evidently sees no reason why his minsters shouldn’t also duck the tricky questions.
For all his occasional charm, it is becoming apparent that what Eddie Mair put to Johnson on Newsnight a while back is true – he is a pretty nasty piece of work. He is vindictive, and you get the impression that Johnson would be perfectly happy if the BBC just curled up in a corner and died, allegedly killed off by the likes of Netflix. It would be very convenient.
Johnson is abetted by Dominic Cummings, a chief adviser whose pit bull terrier instincts mean that he cannot see some venerable national institution without wanting to sink his teeth into its neck and drink its blood. Johnson, as we see, is unwilling to muzzle his murderous attack dog. Cummings will be tireless in his mission to cut the BBC down to size, maybe to be some sort of American-style rump public broadcasting service. I spent some of the most enjoyable years of my working life working at the BBC, and if I were there now I would be very afraid for its future.
Even if Johnson and Cummings don’t actually scrap the BBC’s Royal Charter, they can threaten to do so. The more lurid the threats, through briefings or openly acknowledged, about privatisation, the more they are likely to exert a chilling effect on the BBC’s journalism.
The people who work at the BBC, after all, are decent and honourable, brilliant and imaginative and brave, but they are also only human. There comes a point where defiant defence of journalistic ethics runs slap bang into keeping up the mortgage.
The timing is bad for the BBC. The Cameron-May administration negotiated and granted a Charter and licence fee settlement from 2017 to the end of 2027. A mid-life review is due in two years – which coincides with the centenary celebrations of the original, 1922, British Broadcasting Company Limited. The knees-up may be a bit more subdued than it might otherwise be, with Cummings lurking around the party, snarling at all the “elite” establishment guests.
With an election due in 2024, the working assumption is of a second Johnson term. The crucial passage in the Tory manifesto on the BBC’s future is yet to be written, and you can see how intense the political pressure on the BBC is going to be for the next few years.
The BBC is unusually isolated. It expects to be hated by the Tories: Margaret Thatcher thought it was run by Marxists. It has also been bullied by Labour – in the 1980s Tony Benn thought it should be placed under workers’ control. Tony Blair’s bitter conflicts with the BBC over the Iraq war and the “dodgy dossier” saw the departure of the DG and the chairman, Greg Dyke and Gavyn Davies, in 2004. Johnson’s gibes are now mirrored by Jeremy Corbyn demanding an inquiry into BBC bias in the election. The hard left and hard right share a distrust of the “mainstream media”.
Today, the BBC is also attacked by the Liberal Democrats crying bias, while the SNP regard it as some sort of occupying power’s propaganda unit. The gender pay gap scandal is exacting a heavy cost on reputation and finances. The universal abuse is eroding public support: the BBC is friendless when it needs allies most.
Through its brilliant website the BBC also more directly threatens the old press giants. They always found the BBC’s objective reportage irksome, because it showed up the shoddiness of their own reporting; but the authority and breath of the BBC News website poses a direct challenge to their own digital ambitions.
Yes, the BBC’s rivals do have point (and The Independent obviously needs to declare an interest here). The BBC News website is a direct competitor on a global scale, mainly funded by a licence fee only levied on UK residents. This is not fair; but the challenge is to place BBC News Online on an equal playing field, not to abolish it.
The BBC is much more than news: there are entertainment franchises such as Doctor Who, Our Planet, Top Gear, Sherlock, Strictly. They are powerful, yet there is now the immense challenge of streaming services and other new media. Netflix, Amazon and YouTube, are attracting ever larger audiences, especially younger ones. The BBC cannot keep up with the budgets blown on series such as the Crown or Game of Thrones. The BritBox venture with ITV has the potential to generate a new revenue stream, but it is early days indeed.
The BBC is one of the vanishingly few internationally recognised brands that “Global Britain” can boast. Post-Brexit, its commercial, cultural “soft power” value is more precious than ever; so its role as a unifying force helping bind up the wounds in Britain is more crucial than ever; and its democratic function to supply quality news and facts is more vital (including its support for ever-shrinking local media).
A woman or man of a quite exceptional blend of gifts – political, commercial, diplomatic, adversarial – will be needed to stand up to Number 10, and to set the BBC on course for another century of progress and excellence. We should wish them luck.
