BBC under siege as government threatens to scrap licence fee

Before she was eliminated from the Labour leadership contest last month, shadow foreign secretary Emily Thornberry said it was a measure of her devotion to the party that she was seeking "the worst job in the world". Applications close next Wednesday for another contender for that distinction: the post of director-general of the BBC.

Venerated abroad as a byword for quality in broadcasting and impartiality in news, the corporation is under attack from all sides at home. Accused of political bias by both the Conservatives and Labour, the BBC faces a major loss of funding if the government decriminalises non-payment of the licence fee.

BBC News has already announced 450 job losses as it attempts to save £80 billion by 2022, the latest blow to morale amongst staff who complain of a loss of strategic ambition in recent years.

Boris Johnson’s government is boycotting some of the BBC’s main news programmes – although ministers have appeared on Radio 4’s Today programme to talk about the coronavirus. An anonymous briefing from Downing Street last month threatened to scrap the licence fee and replace it with a subscription service and to force the corporation to sell off most of its radio stations.

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In his first speech as culture secretary, Oliver Dowden on Thursday said the government was about to take "a proper look" at the public service broadcasting system and the BBC's role within it.

"If we're all honest, some of our biggest institutions missed, or were slow to pick up, key political and social trends in recent years. The BBC needs to be closer to, and understand the perspectives of, the whole of the United Kingdom and avoid providing a narrow urban outlook," he said.

He questioned whether the BBC was “guarding” its impartiality and said the corporation would have to think “boldly” to respond to changes in the way people watch news and entertainment.

Dad’s Army

Dowden wrapped his message in a coating of platitudes about how Dad's Army and Blue Peter had brought generations together. But film producer David Puttnam was in no doubt about the government's real purpose.

"There is no lack of vision in this government's policy towards the BBC. The vision is there; it was laid out with paint-by-numbers clarity by the prime minister's principal adviser, Dominic Cummings, in 2004. Writing that year, he called for a campaign to undermine the corporation's credibility, suggesting that 'the BBC is a determined propagandist with a coherent ideology'. To combat this, he argued for the creation of a British version of Fox News. He believed this could be achieved through a 'campaign to end the licence fee'," he said.

Puttnam was speaking in a House of Lords debate on the BBC which also heard contributions from broadcasters Melvyn Bragg and Joan Bakewell. Bragg said the government appeared to be bent on sending a wrecking ball through an organisation that had taken 100 years to evolve and was more important than ever after Brexit.

“What sort of country do we want to be? That is the question. The BBC is key to a transformation that will be sorely needed, not only in itself but in what it feeds and drives. Above all, it stands for and tells us who we are. That cohesive self-knowledge is increasingly necessary and energising in what is a fractured time,” he said.

Coronavirus

A number of speakers noted the irony in the fact that the government was targeting the BBC at a time when the corporation was at its most useful in providing reliable information about the coronavirus. Historian Peter Hennessy noted that the commanders of Britain's nuclear submarines are told to open the "letter of last resort" instructing them on whether to fire their missiles only if the Today programme has not been broadcast for several days – solid evidence that Britain had been reduced to a smoking and irradiated ruin.

“It is a very British distortion: we tend to turn on those institutions that are regarded as world-class by the rest of the globe. The BBC has created a bounteous multiplier effect across the length and breadth of British culture,” he said.

“In a decade that will see at least a serious stress-testing of the very UK that has nurtured and shaped us, with the real risk of a Scottish separation, this is not the time to weaken a crucial ingredient in our national glue or to diminish the best instrument we have for furthering a serious national conversation as we seek a new equipoise within our home islands and a refreshed post-Brexit place in the world.”