It knows that, if Reform wins power in 2029, Nigel Farage will end the license fee and, with it, the whole BBC gravy train, the broadcasting veteran explains
You can’t hate the BBC enough. It is a common refrain heard within the angrier corridors of the internet.
I don’t hate the BBC. The Corporation, which this week announced 1,800 job cuts, has made me too happy over the years to feel that way. From comedies like Porridge and Yes Minister, to Test Match Special and Letter From America, its TV and radio output has been part of my life. Perhaps yours too.
But if hate is too strong, then disgruntlement is too kind. I approach the question of the BBC’s future with a kind of grim resignation. And like many license-fee payers, I have reached the point of no return. The BBC must be defunded.
For too long, the BBC has been inoculated from market forces. Let it now sink or swim. Let it compete against commercial rivals it has for so long been able to ignore, such is the size of the war-chest provided - on pain of prosecution for non-payment - by license-fee payers.
In fact, let me correct myself. The BBC hasn’t just ignored its competitors in the private sector. It has used its market dominance to squeeze the life out of them.
Take local newspapers. They were once a vibrant part of the warp and weft of local communities. As a side benefit, they also provided a first rung on the media ladder. Jeremy Clarkson, whose cancer diagnosis came as such a shock and sadness to many millions this week, cut his teeth on the local paper. In his case, the Rotherham Advertiser.
Dozens of these newspapers have gone out of business in recent years. Local news websites, run by the BBC, are not the only reason. But they are certainly one. Why was the BBC allowed to use its financial might to dominate a shrinking market for local news? You equally might ask why the BBC was permitted to diversify into magazine publishing.
The Corporation justified this mission creep by arguing that profits would be ploughed back into programmes and there’d be less need to increase the license fee. Balderdash. This was empire building, pure and simple.
The impact was felt by businesses that might have thrived - had they not faced the suffocating competition of the BBC. But by - effectively - becoming a publisher as well as a broadcaster, the BBC was expanding its grip on public opinion.
It’s easy to think the BBC’s too-often-malign influence is waning. Not just the job cuts this week. But high-profile cutbacks meant, for instance, that the BBC would not be broadcasting from its own World Cup studio in America (a decision criticised, hilariously, by Gary Lineker, whose tweets and eye-watering salary did so much to dent the BBC’s reputation). But don’t be fooled. BBC News viewing and listening figures may well be in free-fall. Yet the Corporation has other ways of making its woke worldview felt.
Two years ago, the BBC News app overtook Apple News to become Britain’s most-visited app. Several times a day, staff at the BBC send out push notifications. They make the app buzz its users' 14 million phones with news that prioritises Left-wing concerns while ignoring issues which matter to those on the Right.
On Monday, for instance, 710 illegal migrants crossed the English Channel - the highest number to cross in one day this year. Did the app bombard subscribers with push notifications? Migration may regularly top polls as the thing voters care about the most, but last year, when 1,000 people crossed the Channel in a single day, there was not a single BBC alert. But they were told that “Strictly makes sparkling return as new series kicks off”.
I have long felt that the BBC will stop at nothing to marginalise issues which matter to Reform voters. Because it knows that, if Reform wins power in 2029, Nigel Farage will end the license fee and, with it, the whole BBC gravy train, which allows people who all think the same to be paid to tell the rest of us how to think.
This remains the BBC’s foundational flaw. A mandatory license fee. By contrast, streaming services are optional. As someone who farms sheep and pigs and drives a tractor, I like Clarkson’s Farm very much. But if Jeremy or Kaleb or Cheerful Charlie Ireland said something I found unforgivable, I am at liberty to express my disapproval by not ordering another series from Amazon Prime. The BBC cannot be cancelled in anything like the same way.
And there have never been more reasons to suspect the BBC of bias. This week, the Daily Telegraph reported that a BBC children’s show had been “influenced by pro-migrant campaigners”, with producers meeting with a charity that seeks to “change attitudes towards asylum seekers”.
Last year, the same newspaper confirmed what many of us had been saying for years. That for all the BBC liked to boast of its superior journalistic prowess (BBC Verify is the BBC at its most pompous and priggish), it was - in fact - endemically partial. On Gaza and trans issues, the BBC newsroom is in hock to ideological thought-police.
And then there was Trump, currently seeking $10million in damages for defamation from the BBC after it edited a speech given by the President to make it sound like he was inciting insurrection when, in fact, he was urging peaceful protest. This is about as devious an act of journalistic sophistry as it’s possible to imagine. And the target wasn’t just anyone. The BBC, our state broadcaster, had set out to traduce the leader of Britain’s most powerful ally. A breath-taking act of national self-harm.
People who like to consider themselves reasonable think it’s unreasonable to call for the BBC to lose the licence fee. They acknowledge that the Corporation gets things wrong. But then they regurgitate a list of things which - supposedly - only an organisation protected from market forces can deliver. The Last Night of the Proms, natural history programmes, Teletubbies. Whatever.
Increasingly, however, even these ‘reasonable’ folks find that their roll call of national treasures grows shorter. Match of the Day? Axed this season. Doctor Who? It’s one long sixth-form sociology lecture. Costume drama like Wolf Hall? Only the BBC would cast an actress who looked like Shamima Begum as an actual character from medieval English history (Cardinal Wolsey’s daughter, no less). Output, which used to act as a benchmark for commercial rivals, has been downgraded to agitprop pulp.
It’s not just scandals over disgraced on-screen personnel like Huw Edwards or Martin Bashir, who forged his way into getting an interview with Princess Diana. Rogue operators can be hard to spot. But even principled journalists have come-a-cropper. Last year, for instance, Corporation bosses rebuked newsreader Martine Croxall for having the temerity to roll her eyes when forced to read a reality-defying script referencing “pregnant people”, rather than “women”.
The sort of bias the BBC revealed when it came to other nation-defining moments of history, the Brexit vote and the migration crisis, will be as nothing compared to the stealthy exertions the Corporation will expend to ensure Nigel Farage never enters No10.
There will be many ‘reasonable’ people who will insist that Reform would be mad to risk a fight to the death with the BBC. Better to promise to leave the licence fee in place, and avoid the Corporation’s firepower being brought to bear on Reform in the run-up to 2029.
But this is a counsel of despair. The BBC is irredeemably - almost genetically - biased against the Right (or ‘far right’ as it prefers). We are long beyond the point where reasonable people can insist it does more good than harm. No, the BBC has shown by its actions that it has no place left in our public square as a state-subsidised broadcaster. Even reasonable people, I think, can now see the truth of that.