Watch those hands
Jeremy Hunt, the Tory man at the Ministry of Fun, has been having fun cheerfully hinting to his followers that the BBC will be cut down to size. In Edinburgh over the weekend, he used what seemed like compelling logic, arguing that the BBC “should live on the same planet as everybody else”.
Everybody else, it turns out is the rest of the public sector: “They have to understand the rest of Government, apart from the NHS and international development, is looking at average cuts of 25 per cent”. Or to put it another way – if we’re axing a Scottish regiment, ten thousand police officers and two hundred new secondary schools then…
…right-ho – let’s bin the Edinburgh Tattoo, Sherlock and Waterloo Road on BBC One.
The trouble is that this is a false comparison. The BBC is not part of the public sector. It is funded directly by licence fee payers. while the television levy is set by politicians every five or so years, the Beeb is not paid for out of general taxation (with the exception of the World Service and licence fees for the over 75s). So, in short, any money saved by the BBC does not help ease the public finance deficit.
That's the end of him (the bloke on both the right and the left)
Shutting BBC Two – which would meet the 25 per cent goal – does not give you a new hospital or two, just £23 of the licence fee to be squandered per person on half filling the petrol tank or a night out in the boozer. And there’d be no Top Gear.
So, the true comparison for the BBC is not, then, schoolsanhospitals, but other broadcasters – whose fortunes are, in fact, mixed. ITV and Channel 4 have struggled amid the downturn – but Sky goes from strength to strength, and shows little sign of being disabled by the massive intervention in television that is the BBC. (In fact you can argue that the BBC makes it easy for Sky to dodge spending on drama, comedy and anything else the Beeb does well).
No question, the BBC could be more efficient as anybody who has been rung up by six different producers, including three from various cities outside London, would tell you. But, and here’s the critical point, if you take cash out of the licence fee, at some point it would presumably hit spending on content. And as Mark Thompson observed in his “my enemies are everywhere” weekend lecture, there comes a point where a pound taken out of the Beeb is a pound taken out of Britain’s creative economy.
The hard part, for all concerned, is working out where the inefficiency starts and the creativity stops. But just saying that the BBC needs to be massacred just because the rest of the public sector is bust doesn’t cut it. The BBC, at least, always balanced its books – so the only justification for cutting it back is to make life easier for ITV/Channel 4 and Sky.
Oh, and to give us a few pounds back.
