This article is taken from the December/January 2023 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

It is not hard to make the case against the BBC. The revelations that Tom Mangold, a BBC lifer, makes against its handling of the Martin Bashir saga in our cover story this month are devastating. The principal moral engine in this country — and one which has long since supplanted the reach and power of the church — is shown to lack morals itself. But is the case for the BBC better than the one it makes for itself?

Its worldview is risibly transparent

Arguing against the BBC is mostly only a matter of deciding where to start. There’s the fundamental question of why would we need a government supermarket? Which is to say, why do we need the state to provide something the market amply provides? Services even more vital than BBC Radio 1 Relax in Love with Emma-Louise Amanshia, such as food, or energy, are left to the private sector, so why do we need the state-chartered broadcaster to do for the media what it doesn’t need to do for groceries?

When the BBC enters any market it, inevitably, strangles the competition. Under the guise of presenting a comprehensive service — thereby justifying the archaic and regressive poll tax that funds it — the BBC chokes the life out of the voluntary and private sectors, in favour of this national, top-down behemoth. 

Scandal after scandal, from rape and paedophilia downwards, cling mephitically to Auntie. All the while as the taxpayer-guaranteed public entity pays salaries with which the private sector cannot compete. Even then the BBC cloaks its actions in secrecy about how much it pays people out of the public purse. You can discover what we pay entry-level spies sooner than you can work out what you’re stumping up for Ms Amanshia

Its worldview is risibly transparent. Here, in passing, is how a BBC news report describes the Resolution Foundation (in effect the parent organisation of Prospect magazine):

an independent think tank focusing on improving the living standards of low and middle-income families.

The BBC is more than willing to deceive in its own interest

“Independent” of whom? independent of what? This is not to make a cheap shot at the generosity of Sir Clive Cowdery — all magazines deserve good friends — but there’s laziness, and there’s ignorance, and there are unconscious assumptions. The BBC is a riot of all three and they all trend Left. Good things, with the right opinions, are “independent”: other things, with the wrong views, are parsed rather more carefully.

Pick a progressive subject and the BBC itself has the correct opinions. Their coverage of trans hysteria was not improved by the Corporation choosing to jump through hoops held up for it by the thoroughly unpleasant, and innately political, campaign group Stonewall. 

Inevitably, once this disgraceful abuse became indefensible, the BBC casually lied about why it had done this and ignored any claims that the staff responsible should be accountable for sharing their wearisome private opinions at public expense. 

The BBC is more than willing to deceive in its own interest. It’s also by far the dominant source of news in this country. Hence, as Tom Mangold shows, if the BBC decides its own professional failings aren’t newsworthy, it has extraordinary power to kill or misrepresent a story.

To defend the BBC is to find oneself in one of the “heritage” period dramas one might suspect they still make, but when you think about it, aren’t sure they actually have made over the last decade. A witless terror of youth audiences abandoning linear platforms has seen the BBC trash its own brand, neutering its best innovation of the last 20 years, BBC Four, by reducing it to a repeats channel whilst reviving the moronic youth dreck of BBC Three. It is offensively trite even before it is consistently parti pris. 

Yet, there it still stands. And it does so for good reasons. Where there are standards in broadcasting, or ambition for any sort of seriousness, they, invariably, are the BBC’s. If BBC documentaries are no longer what they once were, their general standard remains far above that of the commercial competition.

Indeed, the BBC’s entitlement and ample funding have left it with some residual noblesse oblige. Even hardened conservative voices can no longer be so self-deluding as to think that the market will cater to their cultural objectives, the private sector being as wrapped in the rainbow flag as anything the BBC can offer. 

This sense of responsibility extends to the BBC’s legacy gifts: they rise to state occasions. They did their bit to bury the Queen properly and well. Indeed, in terms of things the public see as representing Britain and its unity of purpose, the Corporation joins the Crown, the armed forces and the NHS. The BBC’s size makes it the national champion we lack in so many other industries. 

The case then for the BBC is for it to do what it does well, and what others won’t. The case against the BBC is for it to stop doing the politicised journalism others already will and can. 

By far the best and most Reithian thing the Corporation could do would be to know its place when it comes to the news. We would be spared its staff’s barely hidden views if the BBC’s remit was excluded from news and current affairs. Doing so would free the rest of the press from this dead weight too. Let BBC news go, and let the BBC live.