Broadcasting: Recent Developments

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Thursday 8th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, has done this House a major favour by sponsoring today’s debate. I will concentrate my own remarks on the aspects of broadcasting which are closest to my professional experience as a working diplomat for more than 40 years: the BBC’s World Service and its foreign language programmes.

I confess that when I first heard of the BBC’s major editorial blunder in its “Panorama” programme about the 6 January attack on Congress following the 2020 presidential elections, I was not totally surprised. How could a broadcaster with the scope of the BBC’s coverage not make errors from time to time? What saddened me was the way in which the cacophony of denunciation which followed overlooked the benefits in soft power and global influence which the BBC’s work brought to the UK and to its western allies in the 100 years since it was founded.

No thought was given to the BBC’s work during World War II to keep hope alive in the countries of continental Europe and worldwide which were under foreign occupation. No thought was given either to the similar work it did during the Cold War in the countries of central and eastern Europe under communist domination. There was nothing about my own direct experience as the UK’s UN ambassador of the benign influence when the BBC was first to report the coup against President Gorbachev in 1991, which then rapidly collapsed. The UK’s soft power influence had never stood higher than that moment. Did none of these other considerations merit weighing in the balance when it made a mistake?

Very relevant to the current charter review was the decision by George Osborne, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, to load the cost of the World Service and foreign language programmes on to the BBC and its licence fee payers when previously those costs were borne by the taxpayer—a clever, opportunistic move, perhaps, from a narrow Treasury viewpoint, but in retrospect a massive and long-lastingly damaging one. Does it really make sense to impose on the director-general the choice between financing the BBC’s domestic programmes and its overseas ones? Does it really make sense to finance the World Service and foreign language programmes, a clear foreign policy decision, on a regressive tax base when it was previously financed by progressive general taxation? Did that earlier method of financing damage the BBC’s reputation for broad impartiality?

The answer to all three of those questions is, I suggest, negative. I hope the Minister replying to this debate will confirm that the regime for financing the World Service and the foreign language programmes of the BBC is on the table for consideration in the charter review.

In conclusion, I shall just say a few words about the litigation recently unleashed by the President of the United States against the BBC. I will not comment on the legal arguments of the case or on the possible outcomes of such litigation—I am not a lawyer—but what I will say about the decision to launch this litigation is that it represents a substantial error of political judgment all too likely to damage seriously all those concerned, apart from those earning legal fees. Would any other President of the United States since we became close allies in 1941 have been expected to take such a course of action? I think not.