BBC and Public Service Broadcasting

Baroness Kennedy of Shaws Excerpts

Thursday 5th March 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab)]

My Lords, as others have said, media freedom is a foundational value in a democracy. It is rather interesting that this Government, through the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, are at this very time promoting media freedom around the world in a great project which I am involved in. This includes an expert legal panel of lawyers from around the world, and Britain—with Canada and other nations under the umbrella of UNESCO—is promoting media freedom. Yet it causes me some disquiet to say that, at the very same moment, the Government are not engaging with the BBC, trying to limit senior politicians taking part in BBC television debates and limiting their attendance at press conferences. That does not seem to fit with the idea of media freedom that we want to champion.

The BBC is recognised around the world as one of the jewels in the UK’s crown. Here, I disagree with my noble friend who has just spoken, who said, “It’s the one institution that’s admired.”. It is not: our senior judiciary is also admired, but that too is under attack. Our Civil Service is greatly admired, and it is also under attack. We should be worried that these institutions, which are greatly respected around the world, are somehow at the receiving end of the attentions of Mr Cummings and the hard right. It also amuses me that the hard left is a source of great anxiety to many in your Lordships’ House; the hard right should be just as alarming, if not more so.

All Governments get irritated by the BBC, as my noble friend Lady Liddell has said. Of course, the coverage, at times will be an unhappy criticism of those in government, but the current assault on the BBC has a more sinister and calculated provenance than anything that has gone before. Dominic Cummings has been mentioned a number of times and I am sure it will be a great source of delight to him, because we hear in the press that he rather likes being seen as the sinister author of so much that is going on. He is our Steve Bannon, and we should be clear about that. He is an ideologue and has great influence currently, and we can see from his writings what his ideology is. He is someone very much from the fringes politically, but unfortunately, he and others like him of the extreme right wing have captured the castle. Many on the Opposition Benches should be alarmed about that, because of the consequences that may come to pass.

Dominic Cummings and his friend James Frayne, and Frayne’s wife Rachel Wolf, were all part of the think tank New Frontiers Foundation, which has already been mentioned. It has always been opaque regarding the source of its income, as indeed are some of the other organisations around them. Frayne and his wife Rachel Wolf had both worked for extreme right-wing lobbying companies in the United States before they worked with Cummings. They had learned, before any of us even knew about any of this, how to install fake monitors and protesters on social media and how to create online smear apparatus. We should be very clear about what is going on: when he talks about going after the mortal enemy that is the BBC, he really is thinking about the Americanisation of our media ecology —a phrase others have already used.

I call for noble Lords to be alarmed about what is happening. Our institutions are under assault because the Conservative Party, with its long tradition, has been captured by sections of the hard right who want to deconstruct many of the good things about our society that hold us together. It is a scorched earth policy —beware.