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BBC

18/2/2020

1 Comment

 
This is the slightly edited text of a communication sent to my MP, Vicky Ford, on the status of the BBC.

"I wish to express my extreme concern regarding the government’s apparent attitude to the BBC. News reports say: “Downing Street has told the BBC the licence fee will be scrapped.” I have no idea whether this is Conservative Party policy, I don’t think it is, but it is clear from the anti-BBC rhetoric in the right wing press – particularly the Daily Telegraph – that the BBC is in the firing line, and I wish to lobby you to represent my views on the subject.

I will say that the practice of sending people to prison who have defaulted on their licence payment should end forthwith. We abolished debtors’ prisons in this country in 1869, and it is a scandal that people are still being sent to gaol for debt – and this applies equally to defaulters on council tax. Also, I believe that the possession of a TV set should not be the determining factor in whether a licence is needed. Some sort of login system with a password ought to be perfectly possible to be implemented with the minimum of inconvenience - this could be easily automated as is the login to Netflix.

However to abolish the licence fee for the BBC and replace it with a subscription service would be an act of cultural vandalism.

The benefits that the BBC TV, radio, local radio, world service and website bring to the country – and the world – are incalculable; make it a subscription service, and the BBC’s revenue would nosedive, turning it into the sort of lowest-common-denominator broadcasting familiar to anyone who travels abroad. The BBC is the envy of the world and a lifeline too for many countries with totalitarian regimes. Most people – with the exception of some readers of the above mentioned daily newspaper – know that what is heard on BBC news and current affairs programmes is fair, balanced and unbiased, sometimes almost to a fault. The BBC speaks truth to power.

I suspect that there is a politically motivated move to punish the BBC for its probing, mildly anti-establishment stance during the debate on Europe, spearheaded by the Today programme. Anyone whose memory is capable of winding back 20 years, would know that it was equally probing and questioning towards the Labour Government of Blair before, during and after the Iraq invasion. That position cost the BBC their chairman and managing director. 

​We need a sensible and grownup public debate on the future of the BBC, not policy made on the hoof to garner instant approval from a minor section of the electorate."


1 Comment
Paul Robertson
19/2/2020 10:13:49 am

A good letter, and I sincerely hope that it will not go ignored, but what are the chances? It seems to me that already the rot has set in.

Having been separated from immediate reliance on the BBC now for some 25 years, my view of it tends, or at any rate had tended, to be through the rose-tinted telescope of the passage of time. The cheery snide of a John Humphrys or a Brian Redhead of a morning and something actually funny in the way of comedy in the early evening were its very essence, along with the safe knowledge that Radio 3 was always there, un-listened to, but calm and reassuring, like an ancient librarian tirelessly and meticulously cataloguing the nation’s culture.

But I must assume that I am remembering a BBC very different to the one of today, and even through the rose-tinted telescope, one cannot fail to notice that journalists such as Eddie Mair and James O’Brien left the BBC because they could not call a liar a liar on air. The BBC’s ‘Question Time’ gave a season ticket to Nigel Farage and loaded the QT audience with pro-brexit knuckle-heads, the programme anyway chaired by the pro-‘brexit’ Dimbleby. The board of governors are now unashamedly political appointees. On issues of climate change, the BBC’s idea of balance has often been to “balance” indisputable science with uninformed opinion. I hardly need say that you do not balance science with faith. You balance science with more science.

I am tempted to conclude therefore, that the BBC had already caught wind of what was coming some time ago, and ever since has been bending over backwards in order to pander to the worst and most extreme elements of the Tory Party. If, underneath it all, it is a matter of appealing to the better nature of Dominic Cummings, then as we say in France, “C’est perdu d’avance.”

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  • Home
  • Books
    • Henry's Trials >
      • Extract from Henry's Trials
    • Smethurst's Luck >
      • Extract from Smethurst's Luck
    • Murder in the Red Barn >
      • Extract from Murder in the Red Barn
    • Reverend Duke and the Amesbury Oliver
  • Talks
    • Talk on Henry's Trials
    • Talk on Smethurst's Luck
    • Talk on Isambard Kingdom Brunel
    • Talk on the Murder in the Red Barn
    • BBC
  • Publications
    • The Amesbury Union Workhouse
    • The Separate System
  • Peter Maggs
  • Shop
  • Blog
  • Family History
    • Mirli
    • BM Creeper >
      • The Significance of Stonehenge
      • Educating Ealing I: How Lady Byron Did It
      • Educating Ealing II: Church of England Primary in the 1920s
      • All Because of Crystal Palace
      • Innocent in Ealing - Extract
      • Miss McDonald