The End of the BBC

A pivotal figure in the assault on the BBC was Marmaduke Hussey. He was a pillar of the Establishment but also a Tory newspaperman: a former Chief Executive and Managing Director at Times Newspapers. As such, the ultimate call to kill the Corporation - and we shouldn't be in any doubt that what we are withessing is the latest stage in a long drawn out assassination - was made by Margaret Thatcher. She was driven by her belief that the BBC's editorial leadership was not made up of people who could be considered "one of us", like Hussey, and this made them tantamount to traitors in her eyes. Though the then Director General, Alasdair Milne, was also a pillar of the establishment, within months of taking up the role of Chairman Hussey had forced him out. Since then, the Director General has always had a target on his back (there have been no women) and appointments to the role have been deeply politicised. They have also alternated between TV "lifers" and those drawn from the newspaper industry.

As the BBC had always loyally reflected the interests of the state, as mediated by the government of the day, what this antagonism between Hussey and Milne reflected was not some leftwing drift at Broadcasting House but the growing gap between the Conservative Party and Establishment sentiment in the early to mid-1980s (the views of those disparagingly referred to at the time as "wets"). That gap closed over the years, not least because of the "commercial" turn of the Corporation during the regimes of Michael Checkland and John Birt, and because of New Labour's appointment of sympathisers, such as Greg Dyke, who it expected to stay "on side", most notoriously over the David Kelly affair. Since then, the BBC has been beset by repeated "scandals" centring on editorial judgement and the accusation of cover-ups, while the licence fee remains a perennial issue for rightwing newspapers, a fact that has less to do with concerns over the Corporation's funding and more to do with its very existence as a public service broadcaster.

There is an irony in the fact that as the Tory party has fallen apart as a political force since 2015 so its grip on the BBC has tightened, notably with the appointment of Robbie Gibb to the BBC board under Boris Johnson. Farage and his various understrappers have always been happy with the Corporation, though they'd never publicly admit it. They get disproportionate, indulgent coverage and little in the way of probing scrutiny. It's the Tories who remain the BBC's implacable foe, as they have been since the launch of commercial television in the 1950s. You could say that this reflects the reality that the Conservative Party has only ever been a front for the rightwing press and associated commercial interests, but then we have to acknowledge that those powers are waning too under the impact of the Internet, social media and streaming, so why is their grip tightening now? Is this merely the ebbing tide of the politicised appointments of the 2010-24 era?

One plausible answer is that any sign the BBC is becoming popular, particularly with the young, must produce a reaction to force it into becoming more conservative and narrow in its appeal. In other words, this is a defensive manoeuvre in the face of growing calls for the BBC to be genuinely impartial, not just over issues such as Gaza but in its coverage of emerging voices on the left, such as Zack Polanski. The bias that the BBC is encouraged to show, from sneering at trans people to kow-towing to Donald Trump, is less about enforcing a conservative worldview and more about minimising its potential audience. The history of the many calls for impartiality levelled at the Corporation makes it clear that what is really being demanded is silence and thus irrelevance. Just as the BBC should leave sport and entertainment to ITV, so it should recuse itself from any political analysis and leave the exposés of the malignant antisemitism and traitorous indulgence of Islam by the far-left to GB News and others.

According to Polly Toynbee, "Its enemies hate the BBC with the same venom they detest the NHS, as publicly owned and popular social endeavours." But the parallel between the two isn't particularly helpful, and not just because nobody on the right is seriously suggesting the NHS can be converted to an ad-driven model. The Tory ideal is for the BBC to withdraw from popular entertainment and focus on higher culture (albeit of a very conservative stripe, e.g. the Last Night of the Proms) and uncontentious public service broadcasting (essentially middle class programmes like Countryfile and Gardeners' World), leaving the bulk of the linear TV field to commercial broadcasters. In the case of the NHS, the ideal is to reduce it to a basic safety net for the poor. Viewed as positional goods, these are at opposite ends of the wealth/status spectrum: a high culture backwater and the return of pauper wards. Inasmuch as the BBC and the NHS have a similarity, it is in the lack of true democractic accountability, something that doesn't seem to bother Toynbee overly much.

A better way of understadning the animus against the BBC is to consider the role of youth. Political engagement among the young, unless channelled via respectable routes in the traditional parties, is habitually derided as naive or the product of brainwashing. Likewise, and despite her venerable age, Auntie is routinely accused of following fashionable nonsense and of being obsessed with "reaching a younger audience". This isn't without foundation - a steadily ageing audience will inevitably lead to the end of the licence fee model - but it is exaggerated as part of the persistent campaign to undermine the Corporation's claims to represent the entire nation. This is why there is such an emphasis on the idea that the BBC is indulging the radical young over issues such as trans rights and Palestine, and also explains why if any leftwing voices are to be allowed on the channel they must ideally be young and excitable, all the better to be dismissed as young and excitable. Owen Jones and Ash Sarkar probably only have a few more years in the limelight before they are considered worringly "grown-up". 

The elevation of Jeremy Corbyn to the Labour leadership presented a major challenge to the BBC precisely because of his age. He couldn't simply be patronised as a young fool. The initial response, beyond dismissing him as a old fool, was to use his supporters as a proxy, focusing on his success in attracting and energising younger voters, hence the prominence given to Momentum. But this ran into the brick wall of the general election in 2017, which proved that Corbyn's attraction went well beyond the young and clearly included many of the older Labour voters that Westminster opinion was convinced had been lost to the anti-EU right. This led to a switch in focus, first to the old standby of traitorous disloyalty (e.g. the attempt by Newsnight to link him to Moscow after the Salisbury poisoning in 2018), and then to the claims of institutional antisemitism (culminating in the infamous John Ware Panorama report in 2019). 

Just as the liberal press routinely occludes 2017, so the BBC will ignore its role in undermining the Labour Party and indulging the Conservative government under Boris Johnson in 2019, and will insist that it is and always has been politically neutral, despite the abundant evidence to the contrary from the 1926 General Strike through the Battle of Orgreave to today. In comparison, its questionable editing  of Donald Trump's 2021 Capitol Hill speech is a triviality. The real significance of the moment is that the UK's national broadcaster is being threatened by the head of a foreign government, and one with a track record of bullying media companies into agreeing sales to his own backers. The fear from the 1980s onwards was that the BBC would be broken up and replaced by components of the Murdoch empire, or at least placed ever more firmly under the thumb of newspapermen, but it's now more likely that it will be arm-twisted into a subservient relationship with the new media conglomerates centring on Silicon Valley. As in so much of her policy, Margaret Thatcher paved the way for the americanisation of British life.