BBC and Public Service Broadcasting

Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield Excerpts

Thursday 5th March 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield (CB)]

My Lords, I declare a pair of interests. First, since the early 1980s I have made a number of programmes, mainly for BBC Radios 3 and 4, working with as gifted a set of producers as any broadcaster could wish for. Secondly, the BBC has escorted me through my entire conscious memory, broadening the maps in my mind and changing what makes me laugh as a constant enriching presence. It arouses an intense loyalty in me when it is attacked, as it is likely to be throughout the early 2020s, by those who see it as a standing affront, a self-serving liberal confection funded by a form of taxation without representation. In Michael Frayn’s neat distinction, the attackers are the carnivores; I am an out-and-out herbivore.

As a lifelong ruminant, what would I bring to the BBC’s long-term defence? Throughout my life the BBC has fulfilled the mission set for it by the great Huw Wheldon of making

“the good popular and the popular good”.

We have two dazzling exemplars of that in this debate in my noble friends Lady Bakewell and Lord Bragg. As many other noble Lords have said, it has set a gold standard for public service broadcasting—not just here but with the rest of the world, which recognises this even if sometimes we do not. It is a very British distortion: we tend to turn on those institutions that are regarded as world-class by the rest of the globe. The BBC has created a bounteous multiplier effect across the length and breadth of British culture.

Now for the short-term defence. I am deeply worried by the cuts already planned to news and current affairs. In a decade that will see at least a serious stress-testing of the very UK that has nurtured and shaped us, with the real risk of a Scottish separation, this is not the time to weaken a crucial ingredient in our national glue or to diminish the best instrument we have for furthering a serious national conversation as we seek a new equipoise within our home islands and a refreshed post-Brexit place in the world. Nor is this the time to blur the distinctiveness of the bespoke “little platoons”—as Edmund Burke might have described them—of the BBC Radio 4 sequences, as “Today”, “The World at One”, “PM” and “The World Tonight” are known in the trade.

Speaking of the “Today” programme, which seems to enrage certain people in Downing Street beyond all belief, I wonder whether they know the special role it plays in the last line of national defence. My noble friend Lord West knows this very well. Only when researching a book a few years ago on the British secret state in the Cold War did I discover that failing to pick up the “Today” programme for several days in succession—allowing for Sundays, of course, although Paddy O’Connell’s superb “Broadcasting House” should do to fill the gap—is one of the tests the Royal Navy Trident submarine on patrol applies to check whether the UK has been reduced to a smoking and irradiated ruin by a pre-emptive nuclear strike. The argument is that there cannot be a Britain if it does not have a “Today” programme. Only then do the captain and his number two reach into the boat’s inner safe to open the so-called “last resort” letter from the Prime Minister, conveying his instructions from beyond the grave on whether to retaliate or not. Carnivores, tamper with the “Today” programme at your peril.