Open Road

Wednesday Jun 17th 2009

Never bet against the BBC

No-one ever lost their job buying IBM they (used to) say.  Plenty of lobbyists have blunted their swords on the armoured leviathan that is the BBC, and Salieri would bet that Lord Carter and his Digital Britain report might be the latest wannabe St Georges to fail.
Let’s remember that the ideas in the report are actually pretty modest, whatever the BBC Trust might say.  3.5%of the BBC annual £3.6bn licence fee income might go to worthy causes such as regional news and programming for older children.  Given the size of the pot, hardly the fall of White City.  But because of that dreaded concept ‘precedent’ (BBC managers, like all good bureaucrats, are obsessed with that) the corporation will fight to the last ditch to avoid any scintilla of its money ending up with other people, however great the need.
Why might it win the battle?  The easy answer is that everyone loves the BBC.  That is not actually true, say the polls, although it is true that a large number of vocal SE intellectuals do.
The other lazy answer is that the BBC spends a fortune on lobbying.  Again, true, but hardly a clincher.
No, the real reason is that the corporation’s enemies are so divided.  There are those who like the idea of a contestable licence fee for public service content, although they can’t agree on whether that would replace the licence fee completely, ot leave a smaller BBC with a guaranteed income.  Then there are those, like Salieri himself, who fear that what would happen under contestability would be a dreadful half-way house - a big BBC hanging on to as much direct funding as it could, with another byzantine bureaucracy doling out even more public money to ‘provide choice’.  Result:  the market would be crowded out even more.
While the proponents of radical change bicker, the BBC sails on.  If any of those classicists who used to run the BBC are left, they probably mutter divide et impera over their skinny lattes in the canteen.