BBC and Public Service Broadcasting

Baroness Bakewell Excerpts

Thursday 5th March 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bakewell (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Young for initiating this debate, which is clearly extremely timely. I agree with the many things said from these Benches about the importance of the BBC. However, limited by time I wish to address a single subject, one hinted at by my noble friend Lord Puttnam: the influence of Dominic Cummings on government policy towards the BBC.

In January 2004, with the Tory party languishing in opposition, as director of the think tank the New Frontiers Foundation, Cummings wrote that until the Conservative Party

“realises that … the BBC is a mortal enemy … then it will continue on its current course.”

Six months later, he wrote:

“It is a mistake in general for a Conservative leader to appear on the Today programme unless he is announcing a major new positive proposal … Effort should be diverted from Today to programmes that affect the public … more. Today itself needs to be audited by a proper media monitoring”


enterprise. The following month, he wrote:

“The privileged closed world of the BBC needs to be turned upside down and its very existence should be the subject of a very intense and well-funded campaign that involves bringing out whistleblowers armed with internal memos and taped conversations of meetings.”


Subsequently, after a programme referring to a complaint about the “Today” programme’s coverage of Iraq, he wrote:

“Another reason why the Right should be aiming for the end of the BBC in its current form and the legalisation of TV political advertising.”


In the autumn of that year, again:

“There are three structural things that the Right needs to happen in terms of communications ... the undermining of the BBC’s credibility … the creation of a Fox News equivalent”


and talk shows

“to shift the centre of gravity”

and

“the end of the ban on TV political advertising”.

Later that year—this is still 2004—he wrote that,

“one thing that can be done between now and the election is fire missile after missile at the BBC every time it engages in this sort of reporting”,

and that the right,

“can only prosper in the long-term by undermining the BBC’s reputation for impartiality … and by changing the law on political advertising.”

Since then, a number of anonymously sourced and funded anti-BBC websites and YouTube channels have been set up over the past decade.

Dominic Cummings went on to run the Vote Leave campaign in the 2016 referendum. Since the 2019 election, he has been chief adviser to Prime Minister Boris Johnson in No. 10 Downing Street. Given that the Government have already implemented his recommended policy of refusing to engage with the BBC’s “Today” programme, will the Minister please confirm whether his ongoing agenda for undermining the BBC is now government policy?