BBC: EU Coverage

Lord Borwick Excerpts

Wednesday 7th May 2014 Grand Committee

[Lord Borwick (Con)]

My Lords, it strikes me that everyone thinks the BBC is biased against their own personal viewpoint. Those on the left think it outrageous that business representatives are on the news more frequently than trade union leaders. They have also said that, although there is a general bias to political incumbents, Conservative politicians get far more airtime than anyone from Brown’s Government ever did. Conservatives think that the more obvious partiality of the 1970s and 1980s—admitted by Mark Thompson to be a “massive bias”—is still in existence today. We think that the BBC has pushed issues such as the bedroom tax without any grounding in fact. Indeed, Conservatives would argue that the BBC using the phrase “bedroom tax” is itself indicative of bias, given that it is not a tax at all. Perhaps this highlights part of the BBC’s problem: it has become too big, while still trying to maintain some semblance of balance.

How do we get an insight into the BBC’s world view? It may be reflected in the stories that its planners consider running on radio and television. Where do they get those stories? Last year it was shown that the BBC continues to purchase more copies of the Guardian—68,307 copies—than any other paper. It bought 58,000 Telegraphs and 60,000 copies of the Times. The Guardian has far lower circulation figures than either of those papers, not to mention the tabloids.

Having said that, I actually think that producers and presenters work quite hard to achieve balance in the BBC’s political output. It is very far from perfect, of course, but you cannot say that staff at the BBC do not try. However, the BBC plays an important role in deciding what is part of a reasonable debate on a given issue. If staff decide that a certain expert or group is not suitable to come on its vast number of political programmes to discuss something, that person or group is instantly seen to be outside the terms of reasonable debate—a pariah, an extremist, hard right or hard left. However, I am afraid that Europe is one issue on which the BBC tends to lose any sense of reason. Peter Oborne, in his publication, Guilty Men, for the Centre for Policy Studies, offers more examples than I can offer in this short contribution.

Many of these problems would be addressed if the BBC were to be reformed. The licence fee model is outdated, with the biggest change coming in the past five years or so. It is that watching television is not the only way to watch television programmes. Programmes are watched on phones, tablets, laptops, and they will be watched on devices that have not yet been invented. The BBC has its own iPlayer service, which, like its commercial equivalents, allows viewers to watch programmes wherever and whenever they like. Perhaps the best way to overhaul the BBC is to make it a subscription-based service.

A paper from the Adam Smith Institute outlined some sensible proposals. The BBC could, over a limited period, allow licence payers either to lapse or switch to voluntary subscription. The BBC would maintain a core public service function, funded by a much smaller government grant. “Public service” would be redefined to essentials. The core content would be free and include news, but entertainment and most documentary and factual output would not be free. That would make the BBC a 21st-century organisation, fully adapted to the digital revolution. Subscription models in the US show that people value choice. People will watch BBC material once they have chosen to pay for it themselves. These kinds of reforms would fix a far bigger problem than perceived bias: the monopoly features of the BBC, or at least its dominant market share. It currently has around 70% of the news audience, according to Ofcom.

I once had the privilege of running a monopoly, or at least a company with no competition, in the London taxi industry. I can tell you the truth of the saying, “Monopolies are like babies; nobody likes them till they have one of their own”. The BBC loves its monopoly and thinks that it deserves it. However, I can tell it that in fact competition, though scary to a monopoly, is good for it. You can never quite demonstrate the merits of a dominant business because the customers have no choice. Give them a choice, and wonderful things happen. The BBC can then be proud of its output and of its happy customers, rather than be proud of its monopoly while trying to ignore the thousands of customers criminalised in the magistrates’ court for not paying their licence fee.

There was a programme on BBC2 in March called “The Restaurant Man”, in which people gave up their day jobs to start restaurants. It was nothing at all to do with politics. In that programme, the presenter said, “Opening a restaurant just to make money is wrong”. That, to me, is where the BBC is at its most biased. I am not even sure presenters and producers know it, nor do they think they are doing anything wrong, but the cultural, metropolitan elitism is far more rife than any hard, political bias.

When it comes to the EU, it is clear that the balance of the coverage does not reflect the balance of the paying public’s opinion. Restricting a core grant for public service material will ensure a narrower focus and a much greater ability to ensure balanced output. It will save taxpayers money too.