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BBC too?

It’s not every day you hear Joni Mitchell quoted in the House of Lords. But in a debate on the future of the BBC today, Lord Young of Norwood Green (a mere whippersnapper on the red benches, at the age of 77) couldn’t help citing the songwriter’s immortal line: “You don’t know what you’ve got, till it’s gone”.‌

That sentiment was echoed by speaker after speaker as peers let rip at the intimidatory noises coming from No.10 on the licence fee in recent weeks. Given the wealth of former and current BBC staff in the Lords, it’s of course unsurprising that many of them would want to circle the wagons around the Corporation.

Nevertheless, the dark warnings many of them expressed will have unnerved more than a few Conservatives. Melvyn Bragg (whose superb In Our Time series on Radio 4 really is worth the licence fee alone), Joan Bakewell, Margaret Jay and David Puttnam have seen previous attempts to bully the Beeb. But they all said they feared it was now facing the biggest ever political threat to its existence.

And the villain of the piece, cited repeatedly, was Dominic Cummings. Boris Johnson’s chief adviser was director of the New Frontiers Foundation think tank in 2004 when it produced a string of blogs that attacked the BBC. Cummings was one of just two staff at the think tank.

Bakewell quoted a passage calling for “the undermining of the BBC’s credibility and…the creation of a Fox News equivalent / talk radio shows / bloggers etc to shift the centre of gravity”. There was this prescient line too: “Effort should be diverted from Today to programmes that affect the public.” Don’t forget this was written 16 years ago. Today now does indeed suffer a boycott and sources talk of plans to ‘whack’ the BBC by axeing its licence fee income.

Several peers contrasted the BBC’s responsible reporting on the coronavirus outbreak to the way the US media (and its president) have reacted. Of course all British broadcasters, and most newspapers, have been pretty measured in their coverage, but Puttnam rammed home the Ofcom finding that the BBC has emerged as “the digital gold standard” for trusted information in an era of fake news.

What was striking today was the way it was Labour peers who got up to defend the Corporation, despite occasional disputes with this or that bit of coverage. It was a stark contrast to the way many Jeremy Corbyn supporters routinely fire abuse at the BBC as much as, if not more than, its Tory critics. I remember vividly attending a Corbyn rally in Swansea in 2016 and hearing for the first time in my life a string of ostensibly normal people telling me that ‘the BBC is the enemy’.‌

Plenty of the horrific abuse doled out to Laura Kuennsberg on Twitter is from the Left, and shameful heckles were directed at her from Labour members at campaign events in the last election.‌

One singularly low moment came last month when Dawn Butler tried to use a deputy leader hustings to attack the Tories for attacking the BBC. “Now they want to get rid of the BBC. So in a way I thought, ok, that will teach you. But then we do need to ensure that it stays in public ownership. We need to ensure that there is some independence.” Yes, ‘that will teach you’.

Of course the BBC is far from perfect. There is in fact a perfectly credible (and progressive) case for decriminalising the licence fee. HuffPost UK recently spent a day in a magistrates court and found those punished for failing to pay up were among society’s most vulnerable.

Several Tories are slowly beginning to see that dismantling the home of David Attenborough and Antiques Roadshow would be a major vote loser. Today, new culture secretary Oliver Dowden gave his first major speech and devoted much of it to the Beeb. He called for more “genuine diversity of thought and experience” within it, but was careful to add that “the BBC is an institution to be cherished”.

“We would be crazy to throw it away but it must reflect all of our nation, and all perspectives,” Dowden said. That went some way to reassuring the BBC that it was still valued in government. One minister said to me recently that the attacks on the Beeb were “not just nuts, they’re profoundly unconservative”.

In the Lords debate, junior minister Baroness Barran added that the BBC was one of the “success stories of the British economy” and that “it is not for the government to make judgments about any perception of editorial bias”. On Cummings, she said pointedly “it is for advisers to advise and for ministers to decide”.

But perhaps the quote of the day came from Lord Puttnam: “Rage and frenzy will pull down more in half an hour than prudence, deliberation, and foresight can build up in a hundred years.” That wasn’t Joni Mitchell. It was Edmund Burke, the great conservative thinker. With the BBC nearing its own centenary in 2022, the big question is whether that Burkean  thought is shared by the prime minister himself. 

Quote Of The Day

“It is now likely that the virus is going to spread in a significant way.”

The prime minister’s official spokesman

Thursday Cheat Sheet 

The UK recorded its first death due to coronavirus, as new figures showed the number of people with the disease was now 115. No.10 sources say the shift from ‘contain’ to ‘delay’ phases in handling the disease will take place next week ‘at the earliest’.

EU negotiator Michel Barnier said there were ‘grave’ differences between Brussels and the UK over a potential trade deal. The role of the European Court of Justice, level playing field tests and fishing were all sticking points.

Commons leader Jacob Rees-Mogg told MPs there are ‘no plans’ to close parliament down as a result of coronavirus.

MPs’ pay is to go up by 3.3% to £81,932, IPSA (the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority) revealed.

Gordon Brown backed Keir Starmer for the Labour leadership.

New ONS figures showed that while most living standards stagnated in recent years, those of the poorest went into reverse.

What I’m Reading 

Why Babies Can Be More Altruistic Than Adults – Wall St Journal

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