Helen Grant
Main Page: Helen Grant (Conservative - Maidstone and Malling)
Mrs Helen Grant (Maidstone and The Weald) (Con)
In December 2014 the Royal Television Society produced a video called, “Behind the Scenes at Newsnight”. It was an information film for young people about the TV industry and ran for 11 minutes, yet not a single person from a BME background was included—by BME I am referring to people from black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds.
Seven months ago in September 2015, the controller of Radio 5 Live gave a 16-minute presentation about his ambitions for the station. In it he made no reference to the BME audience and included no BME voices. The video that went with the presentation showed no BME staff or any other BME people on screen. The embarrassment continues anecdotally, with many public figures commenting on the lack of diversity at the BBC. When he was BBC director general, Greg Dyke described his organisation as “hideously white”, and the current director general, Tony Hall, has said that it needs “to do better”.
I expect that colleagues will cite other shortcomings in the BBC’s diversity record, and yes, there is much more to be done and it needs to do better. However, I have also seen it show leadership and create positive change in several areas in recent years. For example, as a result of Barbara Slater’s vision as head of sport at the BBC, and her close work with the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, a step-change was achieved in the media coverage of women’s sport in the UK. Sky and BT Sport played their part, but the BBC was an essential part of the mix, and that should not be taken away from it. To my mind, if the BBC can tackle gender diversity in sport—not easy—then why not racial diversity within its own organisation?
Perhaps we are starting to see some encouraging signs. In 2014, the BBC launched a plan, with targets and a budget, to address some of the issues I have raised. Eighteen months later, some progress has been made in the recruitment and commissioning of BME writers. Sky and Channel 4 have their plans, too, with even more ambitious targets and budgets. A word of caution to all, however. The metrics are important for measuring and monitoring, but they can sometimes be driven by short-term thinking and quick wins. That will not achieve sustainable change. For real change, the dinosaurs really do have to go, with the body corporate rewired and an organisation created with diversity running through its veins; an organisation where people can be recruited and promoted, can feel comfortable and part of the place, and are able to succeed at every single level not for the sake of tokenism and targets, but because they have the right skills and reflect the world in which we live.
Mr Gareth Thomas
Does the hon. Lady share my view that there will not be real change on a whole series of accountability questions until ordinary licence fee payers have the opportunity to have a direct say in who runs the BBC at the very top? BME licence fee payers are not really going to be able to hold the BBC to account on diversity at the BBC until they have the opportunity to directly elect at least one or two BBC directors.
Mrs Grant
I hear what the hon. Gentleman says and I note the radical ideas expressed by the right hon. Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy). To get this right, we need to have unusual ideas put into the mix, and they need to be discussed. In some ways, people talk with their purse. At the end of the day, if the British people are not happy with representation in BBC programming they will not pay the licence fee. In a way they do have a direct say, because they will not spend their money. However, I take on board what the hon. Gentleman says. I think it is interesting.
A nation’s diversity is something to be celebrated and broadcast far and wide, especially in places where racism and discrimination abound. The BBC could and should be leading the way on this, with 23 million viewers every week worldwide in 33 different languages. Just before Armistice Day last year, the BBC ran some programmes about soldiers and spies who made a big difference during the war. One featured a Sikh man and another featured a Muslim man, both of whom fought very bravely to defend our country and made incredible sacrifices. This coverage at a time of great national pride illustrated the very positive link between Britishness and multi-culture. I am in no doubt that the stories will have changed some perceptions and some behaviour, but we need the BBC to make more programmes like this: programmes that attract a diverse audience while still entertaining the wider population. If such programmes were commonplace, then so too would be the demand for production teams, writers and actors from a BME background. The Lenny Henry plan for ring-fenced budgets could greatly assist this much-needed step-change.
It would seem that younger graduates tend to have difficulty in finding work at the BBC. Yvonne Thompson, from the European Federation of Black Women Business Owners, remarked rather sarcastically that perhaps applicants should use English-sounding names such as Camilla Winterbottom or Jonty and see if they get a call-back then. A similar point was made by our Prime Minister at party conference last year, not specifically in relation to the BBC but in relation to discrimination in recruitment generally. Since then, the Government have announced that companies and organisations that together employ more than 1.8 million people will recruit on a name-blind basis. To its credit, the BBC is a participant, but it could go even further. It could disclose, on a voluntary basis, detailed BME data on recruitment, retention, promotion and pay. This type of transparency not only helps to focus the mind, but sets a great example for others to follow. Some BME data were published in one of the annexes to the BBC’s 2015 diversity report, but the tables were not user-friendly. They were very hard to read—I spent several hours on them. There was no real narrative that drew conclusions and no real analysis, so we remain pretty blind to the facts in an area where greater transparency is desperately needed, and where lessons could and should be learned.
Clive Lewis (Norwich South) (Lab)
Does the hon. Lady agree that there would be some benefit in redacting not just the names of people on applications but the school and university they went to as well, taking into account the impact Oxbridge and what schools people attend, in particular independent schools, have on people gaining employment? Recent research by the Sutton Trust shows that in the fields of law and journalism and so on, the school and university that people have gone to have a massive impact on applications.
Mrs Grant
That is a very interesting idea. We have to do everything we can to make sure we attract the most diverse talent, especially in the BBC and on other stations. The more diverse the talent, the better the programmes and the higher the ratings. The business case is made. I think this is a moving target. Let us see how the name-blind goes, but we have to look at everything.
The Government have a significant role to play, too. I want to take this opportunity to mention the Minister for Culture and the Digital Economy, my hon. Friend the Member for Wantage (Mr Vaizey). His personal commitment and personal determination to shine a light on the need for diversity in the creative arts and media is absolutely commendable. I know it is very close to his heart. I hope all Ministers across all Government Departments take a note of his fine example as they strive, over the next four years, to achieve the Prime Minister’s 2020 vision for equality and diversity.
Charter renewal is an ideal opportunity for the Government. During the process, they could really help to drive change and position the BBC as a world leader in delivering diversity. I would like to see the remit of the public person strengthened, too. Diversity commitments should be secured and diversity targets set to run over the lifetime of the next charter. Governance must be tightened, too, to truly represent the UK—its nations, regions and communities. The BBC’s governing body, the Trust, must itself better reflect diversity in the UK. In the 2015 BBC diversity report, of 23 senior people employed by the Trust, none was from a BME background. Currently, only one of the 12 trustees is non-white.
Culture change is never an easy process, but it is the only way to achieve real change. Channel 4 is managing it and is doing it really well. It has done it because of three key factors: commitment, leadership and money. The BBC needs to embrace this issue honestly and from the very top. It has done the surveys, set the targets, and has its plans and its budget. It knows exactly what the problems are. It just needs to get on now and do it.
Several hon. Members rose—
Dr Huq
That is a hazard for people with a name like mine or the hon. Gentleman’s. The sooner we take steps to acknowledge and address this situation, as we are doing today, the better. He is right that this is a sector-wide issue across the media.
It goes without saying that the nation’s front rooms should be illuminated by more than just white people, and clichéd representatives of white people at that. The late sociologist Stuart Hall used to talk about representations and reality. There is a circuit between them and they feed off each other.
Sadly, “The Black and White Minstrel Show” was not a complete one-off. As my viewing habits progressed, there was ITV’s “Love Thy Neighbour”, which ran from 1972 to 1976—a situation comedy in which the situation was having a black family next door. It seems absurd now. Astonishingly, the TV Times trailed the programme with the line:
“You can choose your friends but you can’t choose your neighbours”.
Also on ITV, there was “Mixed Blessings”, which the British Film Institute describes thus:
“Christopher and Muriel are in love. But since he is white and she is black, their marriage raises tensions among their respective families.”
The BFI—this programme is now a BFI classic—says that it
“understandably reflects the confused racial attitudes of the time”.
Confused.com! The racist ranter Alf Garnett in “Till Death Do Us Part” was on the BBC. We can excuse the other two because they were on a commercial broadcaster. All of these things are now excused. It is like Jimmy Savile’s crimes. These things were acceptable in the ’70s, which was a pre-politically correct time.
We can cite examples of where we have not really moved forward. Sorry, I missed another programme—“It Ain’t Half Hot Mum”. There is a bit of a pattern in these things, because they all demonstrate an inferiority. In that show, it was with Asians. There are academic theories that show that things like slavery are based on the inferiority of another race. These programmes, to some extent, had that sort of attitude at their core.
A current programme I would cite, which has been going since 2012, is “Citizen Khan”. If I did not know what the year was—I do not know if people know that programme. It is the everyday tale of a Birmingham family of Muslims, but they are really quite backward. Again, it relates to the point about Islamophobia made by my hon. Friend the Member for Streatham (Mr Umunna), who is no longer in his place. There is a beardy-weirdy chap. They are not quite cutting off people’s hands, but I could imagine that being in a future episode.
Mrs Helen Grant
I just want to give a contrast to the terrible programmes the hon. Lady has recalled, which I remember too. I want to mention one positive and diverse story that I saw this morning on “BBC Breakfast”. It was about the 276 girls from Chibok in Nigeria who were abducted by Boko Haram. It was a brilliant story that was well done and well produced. It was the BBC at its best. It has also allowed me to say a little in this Chamber to highlight the fact that today is the second anniversary of the abduction of those girls. It is two years on and the vast majority are still not back. It is important that these girls are remembered. We must not forget them and must do everything we can to campaign for their safe return.
Dr Huq
The hon. Lady’s excellent point anticipates a later part of my speech, which is about the difference between black and Asian people over there, compared with the ones here.
I do not want to bash the BBC. I am a former employee of the corporation. Ealing and Acton are very BBC places—the wage slips we used to get were issued from Villiers House in Ealing Broadway. Ealing Studios is in my seat, as is the wig and prop department in Acton, where there are various warehouses. It is a very BBC area, on the whole. I have had 361 separate communications from people begging me to argue that the charter renewal should go through and that the Reithian principles—to educate, inform and entertain—should be preserved in the new settlement.
I do not want to attack the BBC, and the point has been correctly made that the examples that have been chosen are selective. People see the BBC as a world standard. My cousins in Bangladesh always say that when they want to know the truth they turn on the BBC to hear what is going on, which chimes with the hon. Lady’s point. But with power comes responsibility—it is an old phrase—and the mainstream media have enormous power. They do not have simply to reinforce; they can also challenge. If there is any broadcaster that does not run only on supply-oriented lines, it is the BBC.
As many Members have said, diversity does not just stop at ethnic diversity. There was the case of the “Countryfile” presenter Miriam O’Reilly, a woman in her 50s who was discriminated against just for reaching her half century. We could do a Venn diagram of all these things: gender, ethnicity—I would fit into quite a few of them—sexuality, regional diversity and class representation, because we want to see the people downstairs as well as those upstairs. We also need to know what is going on off screen as well as on; it is all very well having a pretty person who can read the autocue, but we need to know what is happening at board level.
To go back to my couch potato days, Michael Buerk’s reporting on Ethiopia in the 1980s put the issues underlying what became LiveAid and BandAid on the agenda, but there is a worry that sometimes factual broadcasting can resort to clichés, showing gangs, or Muslims who are repressed. My right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham mentioned the character of Benny in “Grange Hill”; at the same time, all the Asian people in the programme were victims of the bully, Gripper. That gave me, as an Asian person, a very negative portrayal.
I did not want to make my speech about statistics, because other Members can do that better than me, but there is progress. For example, I am encouraged that Aaqil Ahmed—I do not know him personally, but that is definitely not a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant name—is the commissioning editor for religious broadcasting at the BBC. John Pienaar got the amazing interview with my hon. Friend the Member for Brent Central (Dawn Butler) when it came out that she had been mistaken in the lift for a cleaner—sadly, many of us have had similar experiences, although not perhaps as extreme as that. I have just heard today that he has been promoted to deputy political editor at the BBC.
That perhaps reflects progress in this House, with the new Serjeant at Arms, who is British-Moroccan, and the chaplain Rose Hudson-Wilkin, who also represents progress. Again, however, we need to look at things like hyphenated identities, because the Serjeant at Arms is British-Moroccan. Old slogans like “Black, white, unite” make it sound as if people can be only one category, but mixed race is predicted to be the biggest demographic segment in global megacities such as ours before long. We need to represent that. We should also think about Chinese people and Jewish people; there are Irish stereotypes on “Mrs Brown’s Boys”—all of those things. [Interruption.] Okay. I need a killer conclusion.
Many people have referred to “hideously white”, the famous slogan of Greg Dyke when he was director-general. Sometimes it feels as though progress is painfully slow.