Public Service Broadcasting (Communications and Digital Committee Report)

Lord Liddle Excerpts

Thursday 27th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

My Lords, I have no direct interest in broadcasting, but I have shared a breakfast table for the last 38 years with Caroline Thomson, who was a senior figure in Channel 4, and went on to be a deputy director-general of the BBC.

There have been many excellent speeches in this debate, and I cannot think of a better defence of public service broadcasting than that which we have just heard from the noble Lord, Lord Holmes of Richmond; it was a fantastic speech. We also had a very good speech from the chairman of the committee, the noble Lord, Lord Gilbert of Panteg, introducing his excellent report.

I share the usual complaints about the usual channels in this House, who delayed the debate on this report for an unacceptable 18 months. That should not be allowed to happen in future. However, in some ways it is fortuitous. Because of the scandal around Bashir, it is fortuitous that, at this moment, the case for public service broadcasting has to be remade—and we have heard excellent speeches today trying to do that.

The only speech that I profoundly disagreed with was that of the noble Lord, Lord Hannan. The question I put to him—fortunately, he cannot reply—is this: does he really want to end up in a world like that of the United States, where two parts of a divided country occupy their separate cultural bubbles, listening to separate media channels and using separate social media outlets? One side watches Fox, and the other side something else. Is that the kind of world we want? Is that what the noble Lord really wants? Under the policy that he advocates, that is where we would end up.

I am also surprised that, from a prominent Brexiteer, we did not hear even a bit of a defence of the BBC, as one of the emblematic parts of the global Britain that the noble Lord is supposed to favour. Surely the BBC is something of which this country can be proud—something that people all over the world admire. I remember once being with Caroline on a broadcasting trip to Los Angeles. We got into a taxi with an Ethiopian driver, who asked, “Well, what do you do?”. Caroline said, “I work for the BBC,” and he said, “Gosh, wonderful! I listened to that every night when I lived in Ethiopia, and I still do now, in Los Angeles.” You cannot get much more global than that.

I would have expected someone who is a member of the Conservative Party to be strongly in favour of something that brings the nation together—and that is what the BBC does—at times of crisis. In my own county of Cumbria, when we had the floods in Carlisle, it was BBC Radio Cumbria that people turned to for reassurance and information. It had a fantastic listenership at that time of crisis.

Similarly, if I were the Prime Minister, what would I think about the BBC? There are a lot of Cummings and goings at the moment around what the Prime Minister did, and when, at the start of the Covid lockdown. None the less, he managed to go on television in this country and address 27 million people, arguing for the policy that he had eventually decided on. I put this to the noble Lord, Lord Hannan: what vehicle other than the BBC would provide that? The noble Lord has got to rethink.

The BBC faces huge challenges. The challenge of appealing to our divided society is very difficult. Another challenge is keeping the interests of the old and young together and appealing more to the young, although in fact the old are the core vote—a lot of it Conservative vote, of course—in support of the BBC. That element gives the BBC its political strength.

I would like to see a stronger broadcasting presence in the regions. The move to Salford by the BBC, which has not been talked about today, was a tremendous thing for the north-west. I remember going there and hearing about the schoolchildren whose aspirations and motives had been transformed by the fact that they now realised that in their locality there was this significant cultural presence for which they could aspire to work.

I think there is a lot in what the report says about having an independent mechanism for determining the future licence fee. There are big issues, but on the fundamentals, as a whole nation, across our parties, we must support public service broadcasting.