“What kind of tricks are they playing on us, and where are they dragging us?”
The BBC is biased. It has a left of centre, progressive prism through which it forces us to view the world.
It is in many respects unaccountable. Yes it may lose the odd Director General but it carries on in the same old way after what are really superficial, surface changes for public consumption, just enough to satisfy the politicians that some form of rethinking is on hand, enough to suggest the BBC recognises that things were going wrong and that action is needed, and is indeed being taken to remedy the situation.
But that’s not the case. This time next year, this time five years from now, the BBC will still be attacking government policies that seek to reel in welfare spending , reform the NHS or in any way conflict with the BBC’s own values.
How to make it accountable?
Perhaps some form of subscription is the only way ahead.
Is the license fee justifiable any longer?
Is there a workable alternative?
Is there the political will to force through such a change in the face of undoubted resistance?
At the moment you have no choice as to whether to pay for the BBC…if you don’t like its political stance you have no avenue of complaint…it carries on regardless. Subscription might force the BBC to concentrate its mind on being impartial and presenting news that is far more balanced and representative of the population.
Why is the current method of funding attractive? It certainly works as a means of raking in money…it is fairly easy and efficient to operate.
More importantly perhaps, depending where you sit on the political spectrum, it makes the BBC unaccountable to a great extent to the people who actually use the service…or rather those who watch, listen and read what the BBC provides.
There may be other ‘users’ who go under the radar. The BBC is supposedly independent of government, it proudly reiterates this and boasts of its fierce defence of that independence against political interference.
But how much of that is true? Just how independent is the BBC?
First of all it has its own innate bias…a group think that naturally gravitates towards left wing issues and policies…and therefore towards the Labour and or LibDem position.
Then there is a remarkable revolving door between it and the Labour Party resulting in a frequent exchange of personnel…far more than for many other organisation…though many arrive via the Guardian as well. Politicians from ‘opposing’ mindsets are of the ‘wet’ kind and are graciously allowed employment at the BBC because essentially they are ‘of the Left’….such as Portillo or Patten…no doubt Ken Clarke will have his hush puppies under a BBC desk soon enough.
It is almost certain that the BBC collaborates or liases with Government both national and local, police and other organisations such as from academia, when dealing with particular issues and deciding how to communicate a particular message, a line to take. The need to present a united front, a universal, overarching view of events so that any dissenting voices are discredited and isolated is critical to that message being successfully transmitted…in the interests of ‘social cohesion’ for example….or rather trying not to allow blame to be apportioned where it is due.
An obvious example is the intense and orchestrated response to any Islamic terrorism in the UK.
A bomb goes off or a similarly serious outbreak of violence ‘in the name of Islam’ and instantly across the whole spectrum of the ‘Establishment’ there is the same message….any violence by Muslims, done allegedly in the name of Islam, is denounced as criminal, probably done by someone insane…someone who is perverting the true nature of Islam….Islam is a tolerant and peaceful religion.
Most importantly this should not reflect upon all Muslims nor the religion of Islam…the perpetrators are Islamists, political actors who use Islam to further their political ends. There is a vast difference between Islam and Islamism….or so the politicians et al tell us.
Seymour Martin Lipset writes in ‘Political Man’:
‘Inherent in all democratic systems is the constant threat that the group conflicts which are democracy’s life-blood may solidify to the point where they threaten to disintegrate the society. Hence conditions which serve to moderate the intensity of partisan battle are among the key requisites of democratic Government.’
The BBC is used to spread a particular message, to ‘moderate partisan battles’…in this case about Islam…it is a religion of peace, the bombers or whoever are criminals and not Muslim, they certainly do not represent the majority of Muslims in the country.
So the BBC is far from ‘’independent’ of government in many respects. The government needs the BBC to push its message both at home and abroad and uses a compliant BBC to do so.
All that means of course that the license fee is a convenient firewall between the BBC and the Public, enforced by government statute and the threat of court action against non-payers….and that the government will want to maintain that status quo for its own purposes.
It leaves the BBC unaccountable and unresponsive to concerns of bias and complaints about its output. Whilst the BBC has you by the short and curlies you have no way of effectively reining it in.
The government is unlikely to want to change that….the BBC may be pro-Labour and anti-Tory but they are still a useful and powerful tool in government hands to control the ‘masses’.
“Violence can conceal itself with nothing except lies, and the lies can be maintained only by violence. And violence lays its ponderous paw not every day and not on every shoulder. It demands from us only obedience to lies and daily participation in lies – all loyalty lies in that.” Alexander Solzhenitsyn on violence and lies
If you can’t stop the lies at least stop buying into them.
A subscription method of funding the BBC would free us of the obligation to pay for something we either do not use or do not agree with politically.
It wouldn’t perhaps change the BBC’s output but would at least give the satisfaction that they do not take our money as well as our freedoms of speech and thought.
Subscription or not, something needs to change and the BBC’s stranglehold on the democratic process broken….remember the Tory Party turned itself inside out to appease the BBC.
The otherwise good output from the BBC needs to be maintained…the national coverage, the freedom from commercial adverts, its place in the ‘national conversation and consciousness’. ..not to mention the wide variety of high quality programmes (if only free of political messages)…and the news website.
But if it continues to pump out a left wing agenda then it should no longer be in the privileged position of picking our pockets to pay for its political propaganda that works against the interests of what is probably the majority of this country whose voices on immigration, Europe, Islam and climate change are all too often suppressed and go unheard.
A thoughtful post on the BBC as part of the establishment. Perhaps the corporation’s social democratic bias, which seems to date from the 80s, reflects the growing power of the European establishment too.
Who will be the first MP or cabinet member of any reasonable clout to poke their head above the parapet and demand change at the “National Treasure” (don’t hold your breath) I HATE funding this outfit!
“HATE funding this outfit!” – you do have a choice. You hold a small piece of the solution in your own hands.
If people are that concerned they should launch an e-petition suggesting that the public no longer has faith in the BBC’s style of news broadcasting or current affairs reporting, then just wait for 100,000 e-signatures to pile up and Bob’s your fathers brother.
I no longer fund this outfit (directly) and have not done so for the last 6 years. I have found better things to spend my
£154 on. Folk are amazed when I tell them I don’t have a T.V., they think there is something wrong with me! And they all say the same thing, *what do you do in the evening?* I don’t tell them I sit at my computer reading the narrative on this site most nights! (Maybe I should)
I agree with much of the post but I don’t think that Tory governments find the BBC useful and so tolerate its unceasing attacks on their policies. The reason that they do nothing about the BBC is that they are scared of it power to sway the electorate and so don’t want to upset it.
But their view is wrong.
Firstly , the BBC will always attack any policy that doesn’t conform to its liberal left world view no matter how much the Tories have sucked up to it on other matters. So in effect the Tories are acting as though they can only run the country with the approval of the BBC.
Secondly, I think that the Tories place far too much weight on the views of the London based Hampstead and Islington set regarding the way in which the BBC thought of in the country as a whole. Provided that suitable ‘entertainment’ programmes were provided most of the population wouldn’t mind how their entertainment was provided, and certainly wouldn’t shed tears or be up in arms at the loss of Today ,PM and Newsnight and the rest of the biased rubbish that passes for News and Current Affairs on the BBC.
However, if people had to pay more than the current License Fee for their entertainment they would probably oppose any change. Equally they would welcome a reduction in the amount that they had to pay.
So a service where you can opt in to the ‘New BBC’
and pay £145 pa or less seems the best bet. If that doesn’t generate enough income for a ‘good’ service then they will have to cut costs like the private sector does, resort to advertisting , or look for donations from their chums in the public sector unions!
I think I believe a similar line to Doublethinker. Whilst Labour were in power I could believe that decisions on the ‘line to take’ would either be agreed or that the government and the BBC were working on the same lines. Wasn’t it Harriet Harman who wanted a newsreader in a Hijab? We didn’t get that but we did get Mishal Hussein who cannot always disguise her bias when interviewing Israelis.
However I believe that the BBC affects what can be done by the present government. There are things they should have done but dare not for fear of the BBC leading witch hunt. Even a very Left leaning friend of mine (and Labour activist) says of the BBC ‘they won’t let the government do anything’.
Mrs Thatcher would not have let the government be swayed by shrill cries on the BBC and the country is the poorer for the fear that the present government have.
On The Daily Politics show today , which is one of few BBC shows that is usually impartial, they had one of their vox pop items where they go and test public opinion by asking the public to place coloured balls in one of two boxes which either agrees or disagrees with the question they are asking.
Today the question was about welfare and roughly 75% of the folks asked thought welfare was a soft touch. Of course we don’t know how many of the respondents were in receipt of benefits themselves which would have distorted the result ,so perhaps the % ‘against’ welfare is even higher, but then this is just a rough measure.
However the presenter summed up by saying that just too many people thought that welfare was a soft touch. Why too many? Was this a Freudian slip? Did he secretly wish that the balance of opinion had been that welfare wasn’t a soft touch?
Apart from this minor criticism I do think that the Daily Politics is worth watching , a rare example of what the BBC is supposed to do ALL THE TIME.
First of all Alan I am so pleased that the “subscription” option is beginning to be discussed. Unless there is a sensible, reasonable and viable option for a government to support there will be no change. Closure of the BBC is not an option but allowing free choice through some arrangement of subscription is the only way.
Secondly, I simply do not believe that the government, particularly a Conservative one, finds the BBC compliant in any way and holds on to it in order to “communicate a particular message” or “to present a united front”. It is simply fear. There are too many examples every day and have been over the years, even in times of national crisis, when the BBC has taken on the government with an Anti-British point of view. Not an anti-government point of view, an anti-British one. The only time they comply is when they are told so or else, as in the Falkland’s war and even then they let out secret intelligence which allegedly got our service men killed.
That the current government is afraid of the BBC is in no doubt. The Minister Mark Hoban MP interviewed by a tenacious, if not aggressive, Suzanna Reid this morning was asked over and over why families on benefits are to be restricted to £500 per month. She would not listen to his explanation and all he could do was to repeat his answer many times. That he kept his cool so well is not an accident or an indication of his calm personality. Ministers are very clearly trained to show no impatience in the face of stupidity. Why? For my part I think the training should be to not only just repeat the message but to show a little metal. How can we respect a government with no fight in it.
The public at large is beginning to see through the BBC but is frightened to want to see it closed for fear of the alternatives. Once again if the government is sitting on the fence so we , along with the many other blogs detailing the bias, as well as national newspapers, must keep up the pressure. The BBC via UKTV is already commercial so the push to go all the way and make it independent and reliant upon subscription and not a compulsory tax must be unrelenting. Once that is accomplished we can rightfully say we live in a free country.
Perhaps we don’t say this often enough but for my part thanks for the blog and the opportunity to put an opinion out into the world.
On the topic of ministers being grilled well past the point of becoming charred and the listener/viewing being bored to death with hearing only side of any debate.
I wonder of the government would be wise to ignore the BBC altogether and to appear only on non BBC outlets. They should insist that whenever the BBC said that they asked for a government spokesperson but none was available, they must make the statement’ that the minister involved was busy being interviewed on channel xyz as the government felt that the people had a right to know the whole truth and not just the view of the BBC’.
If they kept this for long enough it would encourage people to diversify where they got their news and current affairs from.
The possibility of the BBC moving to subscription revenue was more theoretical than immediately practical at the time of the last BBC Charter review – but people like David Elstein put up strong arguments for moving to it.
But now TV has gone digital, subscription for encrypted services from the BBC would be fairly straightforward.
As compromise transitional arrangement – how about cutting the licence fee to £40 so everyone gets BBC 1 free. Everything else would need a subscription. AND – the website should be supported by advertising or a paywall, just like the newspapers are having to do
‘how about cutting the licence fee to £40 so everyone gets BBC 1 free’
Forgive me, but would this not mean one is still compelled to fund BBC 1, and its often narrative-enhanced, events-intepreted ‘news’ and ‘entertainment’, ‘free’ to the tune of £40, no matter what the calibre of its content?
On the matter of the licence fee the whole system is based on a lie, the Wireless Telegraphy Acts originally designed to control the airwaves and use of ‘receiving apparatus’ that, in the early days, may have interfered with broadcasts.
As a tax, which it has become, it is a very strange one and one which the BBC/Guardian would be the first to denounce if it were to be introduced today by ‘Nasty Tories’. The millionaire in his mansion with the tens of bedrooms can get away with paying nothing because he is new-British and his aged grandmother shares his house. Meanwhile the hard done by ‘single mother’, hero of the new left revolution, surviving on benefits, is persecuted for operating a second-hand portable to keep her little sprogs occupied, it being unusually a criminal offence not to pay this tax. Late payment of council tax or income tax invariably results in a drawn out process in which the authorities will offer payment plans or even help in finding unclaimed benefits; no licence however and it’s a summons and potential £1000 fine. I’m sure Owen Jones approves.
It’s not true to say that we have no choice about paying the licence fee. I’ve given up funding the Beeb. You don’t need a licence if you don’t watch television programs ‘as they are being broadcast’. My TV is detuned and not connected to the aerial. I use it to watch DVDs and recieve (non-broadcast) programs over the internet. Broadcast TV is 99.99% rubbish anyway. This is perfectly legal.
Check out:
http://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/check/viewtopiccontent.aspx?id=TOP12&iqdocumentid=TOP12&WT.mc_id=r001
Giving up funding them has changed my whole perspective. Now I can laugh indulgently at Humphrys’ looney pronouncements of a morning secure in the knowledge that I’m not paying for a word of it.
Thank you for that.
As SKY renders themselves as worthless as the BBC on news at least, and I move my family ever closer to pulling the plug, this is helpful.
My kids don’t watch anything on the idiot box any more, and my wife precious little. It’s actually me who would suffer certain withdrawal pangs* mostly.
My wife just doesn’t want to see me ‘made an example of’ even if we go off-grid legally, or see her and the kids hassled by odd bods turning up in jeans and trainers in the evening, which seems the TVL/Capita response even if you have done nothing wrong. That the authorities sanction such casual ‘official’ harassment is another in a long line of uniques I find it hard to credit.
*Looking at the raft of online offerings there do seem few remaining advantages to ‘live’, which these days seems mainly dominated by inaccurate twitter reports from MSM ‘professionals’ whose salaries depend on ‘scoops’, no matter who gets thrown under a bus to get them.
I might add, from my currently limited but growing understanding of the law, this may not, as with much the BBC is party to, be accurate, or at least any clearer than a DG corridor conversation or Chinese airport hall warning on travel threats:
‘In all cases, we may need a couple of minutes of your time
As it is our duty to ensure that everyone in the UK who needs a licence has one, we may visit your address to check that no licence is required. It’s unfortunately necessary to do this, as when we make contact on these visits, almost one in five people are found to need a TV Licence. Please be assured that this is a routine visit, and will take no more than a few minutes. If we find during the visit that you do in fact need a licence, you’ll need to pay the full licence fee, and you could risk prosecution and a fine of up to £1,000.
I am ready to be corrected that while they may ‘visit’, it will not be routine and they actually have no implied right of access to take those ‘few minutes’ within your home. And with no evidence in support they can and often will then engage in an concerted period of harassment, up to and including the involvement of often woefully ill-informed uniformed police officers to ‘support’ their desire to gain entry.
Is this incorrect?
For me evading or avoiding the TV tax is not the point. It is not a question of the money it is a point of principal. The BBC are getting £145 from me and taking £3 billion or so out of the economy and then doing exactly what they want with the cash.
They spend the money on champagne, on over paid celebrities and on building layers of administration that don’t even talk to each other and then continue the insults by building shiny new palaces in Salford. They have knowingly harboured paedophiles for years and this week underhandedly put students’ lives in danger in North Korea without so much as sorry tone of voice let alone a proper apology. Any other organisation would have been hounded out of existence long ago. The fact is they answer to no one and need to enter the cold hard world of commercial reality PDQ.
Yes, they should be starved of tax payers’ money (by means of a subscription charge, which is optional), but let’s do it openly and not encourage honest folk to bend the rules and then be harassed, prosecuted or even jailed.
Wot ‘e sed.
(I might add that I am, I hope, in no way advocating bending any rules in what I plan, rather obeying them to the letter to register my protest and stay law-abiding. The only result beyond the BBC… and SKY… no longer getting my monthly top-up is that my family ceases to get access to live TV. No huge loss, but still bizarre in this day and age, in the UK, the only means to withdraw support from a failed service you don’t even use but have to fund to get others).
He believed in them and that given the chance these people will repay the loans.
Alfred Nobel died in 1896 and set up his foundation. “As always, there are the usual ‘nominees’ and some newcomers, some famous and some unknowns, hailing from the four corners of the world.
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Well, then, how would they do this without causing a
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