Gerald Warner: Phoney war merely highlights the case for selling off the BBC

Published on Saturday 19 September 2009 19:55

READ all about it: tiff between government and BBC – not many killed. As shooting wars go, the conflict between culture secretary Ben Bradshaw and the mandarins of the BBC does not rate very high on the Richter scale. It represents one of the oldest propaganda devices in politics: when society is ruled by a consensual élite, it is a good idea to engage in some showy in-fighting, to make it look as if an established settlement is being challenged.

Bradshaw's Fort Sumter, from which he fired the opening cannonade, was the Royal Television Society's convention in Cambridge where he made a speech last Wednesday attacking the BBC Trust ("I don't think it's a sustainable model") and uttering heresy against the Corporation's twin totems of expansion ("the BBC probably has reached the limits of reasonable expansion") and its monopoly of public funding ("There may indeed be a case for a smaller licence fee").

These strictures drew immediate fire from Sir Michael Lyons, chairman of the BBC Trust, who told Radio 4's Today programme: "I am not charged with obeying ministers, I am charged with protecting the independence of the BBC and representing the licence fee-payer." He made much of refuting Bradshaw's denunciation of the Trust's plan to return 5.50 of the money saved from unspent digital switchover costs to licence payers rather than "top-slicing" it to aid regional news.

Bradshaw had said: "I would just like to point out that the 5.50 is not the BBC's to give away." Lyons retorted: "No, and my answer to that is it's not his either. It is money for the licence fee-payer." So, the BBC Trust, which presides over the parasite Corporation, realises the need to appease mounting public anger by posing as the champion of the licence fee-payer, making great play of returning a paltry 5.50 out of the 142.50 it extorts annually from owners of colour television sets – regardless of whether they watch its dismal programmes or not.

Mark Thompson, BBC director-general, also waded into the dispute, accusing the government of political interference with the BBC Trust. He made the legitimate point that he found it "puzzling" that the government should now be opposing services launched by the BBC which had been approved and in some cases suggested by the Labour government in which Bradshaw is a minister. Yes, indeed. If the government wishes to address the structures and direction of the BBC, why did it not do so before renewing its Charter in December 2006, or when it approved the new licence fee?

All of this shadow boxing, like "Dave" Cameron's puny proposal to make a small reduction in the licence fee, is no more than a distraction, to evade addressing the real problem: the need to terminate the Corporation and sell it off. The strictures uttered in his MacTaggart Lecture last month by James Murdoch, head of News Corporation in Europe – particularly targeting the unfair competition represented by BBC expansion – were blunted by the perceived self-interest of his thesis and the unpopularity of News Corporation in many quarters.

Yet even Ben Bradshaw conceded that Murdoch had made some valid points. The whole BBC leviathan is an outrageous burden on the public. The licence fee is an iniquitous imposition. By what right does the BBC act as gatekeeper to around 200 other television channels which cannot be viewed without paying Danegeld to the Corporation? This monopolist arrangement is in clear conflict with Article 10 of the Human Rights Act 1998, which defines the right "to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers".

The money extorted from the public provides massive salaries for 744 senior BBC managers: 13 earn over 250,000 a year; 83 earn more than 160,000; 172 are on more than 130,000; and 343 are paid 100,000 or more. Cultural achievements such as EastEnders (public service broadcasting, by the way!) do not come cheap. At the other end of the scale, in 2006 the courts fined 113,874 licence fee defaulters and jailed 24, mostly from the poorest sections of society.

Culturally, the Jonathan Ross/Russell Brand affair showed the depths to which our self-regarding "public service broadcaster" has sunk. The revelation that Ross was on an 18m contract demonstrated how licence payers' money is being squandered. The perfunctory suspension of Ross (during which the BBC nominated him for a Bafta award) illustrated the Corporation's arrogant insouciance towards the public that funds it.

Last week's phoney war at Cambridge illustrated that the politicians are a million light years away from addressing the real solution: to sell off the BBC and leave its "edgy" managers to "push the boundaries" in the free-market gutter alongside the other media trash peddlers.