Care scandal exposes
carelessness of the state
Libby Purves
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general taxation? Subscription is a
tricky model when eight million only
have access to free-to-air television,
and where tens of millions listen to
free-to-air BBC radio. Besides, the
pick-and-choose nature of
subscription would kill off the
breadth of programming that makes
the BBC unique.
The least-worst option is keeping
the licence fee while — quid pro quo
— the BBC curbs its sprawl. Tim
Davie, the director-general, has
already said the organisation will be
producing less content. To retain
public support he would be wise to
go further. Does the BBC need its
own recipes website? Is such an
extensive regional news operation
necessary, or even desirable, when it
harms local newspapers?
But at the end of this reckoning
the BBC must retain its breadth and
brilliance, and not only for our sakes.
Last month the World Service
resurrected two shortwave radio
frequencies to reach Ukraine for four
hours a day. Isn’t there something
thrillingly David-and-Goliath about
Auntie’s analogue technology
outwitting Putin’s forces of
destruction? And isn’t it stirring to
think that in the basements of Kyiv
and Kharkiv, the truth is being
delivered in a British accent?
A story to make us proud, and to
ponder that perhaps we should pause
before writing off that which is
derided as outdated. Indeed, perhaps
the best hope for the BBC is for this
government to reach its use-by date
before the licence fee does.I don’t trust my party with future of the BBC
Scrapping the licence fee is an act of national self harm that will destroy rather than conserve the best of British culture
REX SHUTTERSTOCK
... Mr Blobby and Beethoven are
yokemates of broadcasting destiny.”
Indeed. Yet 14 years on, Johnson has
handed our national broadcaster’s
destiny to a politician who operates
with all the delicacy of Mr Blobby
careering around Crinkley Bottom.
“Will the BBC still be here in ten
years? I don’t know,” mused Nadine
Dorries last year. The culture
secretary wants the corporation to
“thrive alongside Netflix” (whose
subscriber numbers are dropping)
and has stated that the licence fee is
“completely outdated”.
It is fair to admit that a funding
system introduced in the Wireless
Telegraphy Act in 1923 seems
anachronistic, but the status quo
being un-ideal doesn’t mean the
alternatives are better. Who wants
adverts slicing up the News at Ten?
Who wants the BBC funded from
The beauty of the BBC is how it makes
Beethoven and Mr Blobby “yokemates”unfavourably with Netflix, where
basic subscriptions cost £6.99 a
month, but this is apples and pears
stuff. Is Netflix a trusted news
gatherer with 41 overseas bureaux?
Was Netflix educating Britain’s
children during lockdown? Is it in
any sense a public service? The other
critical difference is that we all share
the BBC.
It is a common denominator, and
how rare this is in our attention-
flitting, fragmented age. Social media
draws people on to countless islands
of cultural interest, but the BBC is a
bridge across them all. In times of
national joy, sorrow and celebration
even those who profess to loathe
Auntie find their finger twitching
towards her buttons.
A century in, more than 90 per
cent of UK adults engage with the
BBC every week, the Reithian vision
of a come one, come all broadcaster:
“The genius and the fool, the
wealthy and the poor listen
simultaneously... there is no first
and third class.”
Defenders of the government may
huff that no one is talking about
ditching the Beeb, merely changing
its funding model. But the BBC’s
brilliance, breadth and universality
are bound up in the way it is funded.
Another columnist recognised this
once. Writing in the The Daily
Telegraph in 2008, Boris Johnson
took Noel Edmonds to task for
announcing he would not pay the
licence fee. Rhapsodising about the
BBC Proms, Johnson wrote: “Take
away the licence fee and you take
away the Beeb’s ability to spend £6
million on the world’s greatest
festival of classical music... We can’t
ask the whole nation to pay for
Beethoven, when some licence fee
payers really don’t give a toss about
classical music. That is why the BBC
has to reach out to the whole nation‘T
hat will be England gone.. .” Philip Larkin’s Going,
Going drifted to mind
when I read of the
government’s plans to
ditch the BBC licence fee in 2027 and
replace it with a “fair and appropriate”
alternative. The poem foresees the
gradual loss of our green and pleasant
land to shopping malls and “bleak
high-risers”; the funding review
portends the decline of things less
tangible but no less valuable: culture,
identity, national pride. “Most things
are never meant,” wrote Larkin.
Ministers might not intend to trigger
the demise of the BBC as a world-
class institution, but make no mistake
about the trajectory: the licence fee is
replaced by a subscription service;
the corporation is forced to drop a lot
of the “public interest” stuff; content
becomes narrower and cheaper; the
number of consumers declines; the
BBC moves from the centre of
national life to its margins, from
institution to irrelevance, history-
maker to GCSE history module.
It is an act of national self-harm,
like the French attacking their wine
producers or the US its film industry.
But hey, it might win the Tories 17
more votes in the red wall.
When I became a paid-up member
of the Conservatives almost two
decades ago, a big part of the appeal
was in the name. I wanted to join a
party of conservers not asset
strippers; of Fred Dibnahs not Fred
the Shreds; a party which revered
those sepia-tinted words duty and
moderation. My younger self got
misty-eyed when a veteran Tory MP
told me he was in politics to “defend
all that is gentle and good about
England”. That was my tribe. But
now? The party is a wrecking ball. It
smashes through parliamentary
standards and public trust. It hurtles
through old niceties about the truth
actually mattering. It crashed
through our relationship with
Europe. Now it whistles towards
Broadcasting House, the riches of
our cultural life and a global
reputation earned over a century.
It is so dumb, so self-defeating.
This “patriotic” government ponders
buying a new royal yacht to project
British influence while undermining
the broadcaster that reaches half a
billion people worldwide every year.
This “levelling-up” government
wants to spread opportunity around
the country while attacking the
organisation that employs more staff
outside London than in it. Thegovernment struggling to revive our
economic fortunes is threatening the
engine room of our creative industries,
which contribute around £116 billion
to the economy every year.
Yes, the BBC can be maddening,
not least in its desperate courting of
youth. Cutting free TV licences to
over-75s was unwise. But those who
focus on a few gnarled trees and miss
the majestic wood need shaking. The
big picture: the BBC is a marvel. For
43p a day we get an extraordinary
range of output, from Line of Duty to
Blue Planet; Desert Island Discs to the
world’s most-visited news website.
It is de rigueur to compare the BBCIts brilliance and its
breadth are bound up
in the way it is funded
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