The BBC braces for the fight of its life

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A majority Conservative government was the outcome that Europe’s largest public broadcaster dreaded most. And Prime Minister David Cameron had not even finished announcing his new Cabinet when the British press declared his government at war with the BBC. The appointment of John Whittingdale, a Conservative stalwart and former adviser to Margaret Thatcher, as the minister overseeing broadcasting policy was, to hear the UK media tell it, the opening barrage in what will be a brutal fight about the corporation’s future over the next 18 months. The extent of the new Culture Secretary’s hostility to the BBC was, in some cases, comically overstated. But the stakes for the BBC are higher than ever. The negotiations will be rough. Britain’s public broadcaster may emerge from five years of Tory government looking drastically different. Although the corporation is editorially independent of the British state, it relies on the public purse for £3.7 billion (€5.1 billion) of its £5 billion (€6.9 billion) annual budget. And it now has to wrestle an agreement about its funding and remit for another ten years from a party whose members frequently accuse its journalists of left-wing bias and promised voters that there will be no increase in the £145.50 (€203,30) that they pay annually to fund the BBC.

“Tories go to war on the BBC,” thundered the front page of The Daily Telegraph after Whittingdale’s appointment was announced. “Cameron’s shot across the bows to the BBC,” proclaimed The Times. The BBC, whose programming includes nine TV channels, 16 radio stations and one of the world’s most-trafficked news websites, is fighting to retain a universal, compulsory license fee, which it argues is the fairest and best mechanism for funding its services. It claims that it has already slashed around £1 billion in costs in response to financial constraints imposed by the previous government and warns that, without an increase in its annual public funding, the quality of programs will suffer. At risk, BBC executives say, is nothing short of their ability to provide free, universally accessible journalism and entertainment that is used, in some form or other, by around 96 percent of the UK population every week.


The BBC braces for the fight of its life