We will miss the BBC when it’s gone

For conservatives, things can always get worse

‘The BBC is almost overburdened with a sense of responsibility. One sometimes has the impression that because it is not answerable to one particular body it feels itself to be answerable to everyone for all its actions.’ Those words, written in 1935 by political scientist W.A. Robson, could similarly be said today of the corporation, under fire by a Conservative government floundering and looking for ways to save taxpayers some money [Ian Hislop raises an eyebrow; audience laughs].

Robson’s criticism was that, because of this overburdening sense of responsibility, even the BBC’s ‘controversial’ programmes were too cautious. Like that other great via media, the Church of England, it is a national body that manages to upset all shades of opinion, and in doing so convinces itself that it is doing something right. Also like the national Church, it faces a difficult future, threatened by rivals and by apathy, but also outliving the beliefs that first created it.

The BBC is now almost exactly a century old, having been founded in the year modernity began. This was the era of Yeats’s ‘Second Coming’, with war followed by plague, instability and anarchy, and there was a strong desire for moderation, stability and truth. Its first Director of Programmes, Arthur Burrows, had been horrified by the spread of misinformation during the First World War, while Deputy Cecil Lewis was a fighter pilot in the conflict and wanted to help spread ‘the wisdom and beauty of the world’ .

When the wireless hit America it had led to a sort of market anarchy, with almost 500 functioning stations by 1925, and so Britain’s radio pioneers, fearing the sort of disinformation and political extremism that might follow here, instead formed a monopoly.

That December the British Broadcasting Company, as it was then named, hired John Reith, whose guiding spirit would influence the corporation long after he departed. Reith’s father George was a Presbyterian minister, his church ‘one of the wealthiest, most influential, most liberal in Scotland’, and its congregation included ‘merchant princes, great industrialists, professors’ as well as a ‘considerable element of the humble but equally worthy sort’. The son’s creation would echo the father’s, a liberal church spreading the outward-looking and high-minded values of British Christianity.

Matthew Arnold was a major influence, and Reith, quoting Arnold’s 1869 work, Culture and Anarchy, said the aim of the new service was to make ‘the best that has been thought and known in the world current everywhere’. Radio would speak peace to the nations, and in so doing save civilization. In her history of the BBC, Georgina Born emphasised the importance of Arnold, ‘for whom culture was conceived as way of lessening social divisions and class hostilities. Culture, according to Arnold, “seeks to do away with classes; to make the best that has been thought and known in the world current everywhere.” Reith portrayed his broadcasting ideal as a means of bringing together Britain’s different classes and regional populations. It should reinforce social integration.’

And yet ‘doing away with classes’ in effect meant taking sides when those classes came into conflict, as was shown by the General Strike just four years later. At the time a memorandum to senior staff explained the BBC’s pro-government tone with the directive that ‘nothing calculated to extend the area of the strike should be broadcast’.

Reith justified this with the argument that ‘since the BBC was a national institution, and since the government in this crisis were acting for the people… the BBC was for the government in this crisis too.’ Not everyone saw it that way. Ellen Wilkinson, Labour MP for Middlesbrough at the time, said that ‘The attitude of the BBC during the Strike caused pain and indignation to many subscribers. I travelled by car over two thousand miles during the Strike and addressed very many meetings. Everywhere the complaints were bitter that a national service subscribed to by every class should have given only one side of the dispute.’

The divisions of the 1920s were largely about the proper allocation of resources, but outside of quite small bohemian and literary circles, Britain’s social classes had similar values; the middle class may have been more socially conservative, the working class more culturally conservative, but the differences were relatively thin. The challenge facing the BBC in reinforcing social integration in the 2020s is vastly magnified.

Britain a century ago had a remarkably unified national culture, even taking unto account the different nations within, an achievement hundreds of years in the making but which the BBC helped solidify. Just as the Book of Common Prayer ensured that all Englishmen and women had common knowledge of shared texts, and once a week could be found listening to the same words, so annual events like the FA Cup Final, Grand National or Queen’s Christmas Message, or rarer moments like a Coronation or General Election, became part of the British National Liturgy. Instinctively we mostly head to the BBC in times of crisis, and if an asteroid was approaching and the world faced an extinction event you’d want to tune into BBC1, with perhaps Michael Buerk or Gary Lineker giving some comforting words in humanity’s final moments.

But while the BBC came out of the First World War, it was forged in the Second, which has become Britain’s new origin story. One of its most impassioned defences this week came from historian Dan Snow, who wrote that the BBC was still needed to tell the truth and added ‘I have interviewed Holocaust survivors, who hid as children in Dutch houses. The highlight of their day, the candle in the dark, was the voice of the BBC broadcaster from London who gave them precious information and with it, hope. Hitler feared that voice.’

My father, an evacuee during the war, was of that generation, too, partly-raised by the BBC; the Dutch national anthem would always remind him of childhood, when it was broadcast to raise morale in the occupied Netherlands. The babyboomer Peter Hitchens has written beautifully about his early memories of Listen with Mother, showing a fondness for the corporation that will be shared by many.

There is something glorious and beautiful about the BBC’s role in defeating Hitler, but as an argument for maintaining the status quo in the 2020s it feels rather weak, just another way in which British political debate remains so fixated by Our Finest Hour.

It certainly does not seem like much of an argument for those born in 2000, three generations removed from the conflict, many of whose forebears had no connection with Britain, and who barely watch traditional television. Because of Hitler, you must pay £13 a month or go to jail.

It’s not 1945 anymore. The dispersion of values and lifestyles in the post-war period, while giving people more freedom to choose their niche in life, has also made it harder to justify a national broadcaster. This changing pattern was recognised as early as the 1970s by the BBC’s Annan Committee, which argued for greater pluralism in broadcasting. Since then, many of the national cultural events associated with the BBC – the singles chart, for example – have begun to disappear.

We’re expecting the BBC to be a national church in a society in which huge swathes of the population aren’t believers, not middle-of-the-road Anglicans but instead Catholics and Puritans, Anabaptists, Quakers, Buddhists, fire-worshippers and every belief under the sun.

With values diverging, it has also become harder for the BBC to disguise the fact that most of its presenters, producers and wider staff tend to align on one side of that divide. It certainly doesn’t help that certain, very highly-paid stars insist on tweeting it out.

While the Government might be hopeless, incompetent and corrupt, it’s not ‘starting’ a culture war with the BBC. The BBC just represents a culture of which most Tory voters feel no part anymore, its news agenda clearly reflects a certain worldview, and it’s going to get worse when the 12-year-olds who run the Beeb’s Teen Vogue-like website end up in senior management.

Nostalgia plays a big part in people’s reflective defence of an institution they love against a government they (quite reasonably) loathe. Some have been sharing a 40-year-old advert featuring a man from a long-distant age whose comedy would never see the light of day today (and who is no longer a fan of the Beeb). For others, love of the institution runs so deep that they see it as essential as the fire service. Or road building. (I actually agree with Wallace, but unironically, that road pricing is a great idea.)

But a major national broadcaster is not an essential service, its existence depends on some deeper spiritual need, and none of the arguments for the licence fee address the question. Many have argued what great value the BBC is for only 43p a day, which may be true, but that’s a consumer selling point, an argument to subscribe (and I certainly would); it doesn’t at all answer the question as to why other people should be forced to.

If the BBC makes all these programmes well via forced subscription, it could surely do so in the open market; if the argument is for broadcasting high culture – and almost no one is making that – then that could be produced by a much smaller corporation, as with the fact-based news that Snow writes of. I’m sceptical about the BBC’s ability to produce high culture at any rate, partly for the ideological reason that most high culture is the work of men born within the empire of Charlemagne; but partly because the British cultural elite have a sort of reverse-Bolshevik prejudice that high culture is anti-working class.

The case for a national broadcaster rests on the belief that there is something especially important and significant about the nation, that the British people remain distinctive enough that they need something to reflect this ideal, and promote it. The idea that Reith’s contemporaries believed in.

As the question of the BBC’s future has become more of a partisan dividing line, so the Beeb’s defenders are increasingly found among the political tribe who least believe in this idea of the nation as a meaningful idea. Where Britain’s Blue Tribe do subscribe to patriotism, it’s more as a representation of their own liberal values, inclusive to the point of meaninglessness in membership, rigidly exclusive in terms of beliefs, and heavily laden with very British cringe. If you don’t support the idea that your compatriots are worth more to you than foreigners, that’s fine – most educated people today don’t – but without that idea, you cannot expect them to fund a national broadcaster to reflect your values.

So the BBC in its current form may not last, either being scaled down and paid for by income tax, or sold off altogether – but it might not especially help conservatives, or make their lives less stressful.

It could well be that a privatised BBC is even worse. We wouldn’t get a more impartial broadcaster aiming to steer a middle course, we’d get something like CNN, liberal-leaning but with far fewer constraints. The BBC would be far more biased as a private enterprise, and with its huge archives and cultural capital, it would still be a powerful force.

Without a state broadcaster, we’d end up with the American problem of having a “‘neutral’” (heavily ironic double scare-quotes) and a conservative media. Because of Britain’s size and its heavily urban population, the dominant broadcaster would still steer to the Left, but would try to maximise its revenue by flattering the metropolitan prejudices of its audiences. As in the US, conservatives would be the punchline, and now there would be no redress because, unlike the old BBC, it wouldn’t be burdened with the responsibility of caring what you think.

If you think it’s bad now, comedy in a privatised BBC will make the Mash Report feel like Blackadder or Fawlty Towers. It will be hell. You might not be paying for it, but there will be no escaping its talking points. That 43p a day would in retrospect seem like the best money you ever spent.