And now for something completely different
Over the years the future course of the BBC and all that goes with it has snuck up on the inside rail, some might think somewhat against the odds, to become one of our regular “hot topics”.
Rusters will have noticed that it has recently been shooting up the priority list of London-centric “Hampstead set chattering classes”, largely because of their disquiet that the new (80-seat majority) Tory Government has let be known its intention to have a serious review of “Auntie”, along with the Civil Service, HS2 and, of course, the Supreme Court which – depending upon your view – with its decisions that it had the power to judge the Tory government’s prorogation of Parliament and also then that it was unlawful, either upheld convention and the UK’s unwritten constitution or, alternatively, defied them.
I’m no particular fan of the Government, but – not least springing from the pundits’ consensus about the outcome of the December General Election, i.e. that everyone in the intellectual, elite “Westminster Bubble” and its various bag-carrying retainers down in London and the South East have received both their come-uppance and a bit of a bloody nose because (on the issue of Brexit particularly but in a lesser sense on other issues also) routinely over the years they have ignored the mood of, and indeed what was really going on in, the rest of the country – at least, it seems to me, Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings are prepared to ask some pretty basic and searching questions of these bastions of Establishment complacency.
It’s about time.
On the issues facing the BBC, here’s a link to a typical “woe is me” piece by ‘Hampstead setter’ Jonathan Freedland (if I may be permitted to style him as that for present purposes – for all I know he may live in one of the Tory shires!) that I noticed overnight upon the website of – THE GUARDIAN
Let us get to some facts – if that term has any meaning given for this post I’ve just googled them from websites I tend to trust, possibly erroneously.
In 2013/2014 the BBC was provided by the television licence fee with some £3.7 billion, with which – in my submission – it tries to be all things to all men, not only providing valuable public service broadcasting programming but also competing with everyone else in the free market to provide entertainment, sports rights-based and any-other-type-of-output that you’d care to mention, including via the internet.
To do this – when you add in part-time, supposedly freelance and/or flexibly hired contributors – according to Wikipedia it retains a total of 35,402 people, 22,000 of whom are ‘staffers’ and 16,000 are involved in public-service broadcasting.
Even using ‘bucket chemistry’ calculations, this suggests that if the BBC was limited to just public service broadcasting – which I think most of us could at least agree is a “good thing”, especially if it were to come with a guarantee of impartiality (and there’s another whole new argument) – the Beeb could lose approximately 50% of its workers, and therefore also presumably a similar percentage of its funding requirement.
In other words, if the Government (and/or Parliament) were to write in stone that the BBC would (1) be totally ring-fenced from political interference of any kind from any quarter and (2) receive £1.85 billion – okay, well let’s be generous and round that up to £2 billion – per annum, plus a provision for automatic RPI increases, and then just stuck to producing public service broadcasting of the highest possible quality … what would be the problem?
Arguably, by this route, the BBC might return to its original perceived vision/goal (and one-time reputation) of providing the world with “the truth” – exactly what our chattering class moaning-minnies are calling for.
Just saying …
