News International

It is not Watchkeeper's policy, Gentle Reader, to comment on the actual structure and function of that bloated dinosaur the British Broadcasting Corporation. Rather, these pages focus on the iniquities of the Poll Tax that funds the BBC and the tactics employed in its collection by a public limited company and its gang of salesmen masquerading as "officers", backed up by a raft of PR companies tasked with disseminating misinformation.

Nevertheless, I make an exception today in the wake of the scandal which brought about the demise of the News of the World and brought its parent company, News International, to its knees. I bring to your attention an article authored by Melanie Phillips and published in today's Daily Mail. She says in part (and the emphasis is Watchkeeper's):

... the News of the World did things that were wrong; and when the full extent of this behaviour is established, those responsible should be held to account, however high up the chain of command they happened to be.

But why should it follow that News International should therefore be broken up? After all, it is possible to imagine that everyone involved in this affair — including the entire Murdoch clan — might be replaced by people with totally clean hands to run the company.

The reason, says Miliband, is that Murdoch has ‘too much power over British public life’. But this is transparently disingenuous. For there is a media oligarchy which exercises far more power in Britain than News International. And that is the BBC.

The BBC’s monopoly over the media is indeed a running scandal. After all, just imagine if News International had been given the legal power to levy a tax on everyone who bought a newspaper in order to fund the Murdoch empire.

People wouldn’t stand it for a moment. It would be considered an utter abuse of democracy. Yet that is precisely the privileged position the BBC occupies.

Far be it from Watchkeeper to blow his own trumpet, but that is precisely the parallel which he has already drawn. How much longer will the British public stand for this? Wake up, people! You don't have to break the law to do something about it. Simply do your TV watching on the catch-up services and save yourself £145 per year.

Ah, say its defenders, but the BBC is a public service broadcaster, and therefore of course merits a public subsidy as a great British institution which must be preserved at all costs.

Well, that argument just won’t wash any more. For the BBC wraps itself in the heroic mantle of a public service remit which it has systematically betrayed.

That remit was to educate and elevate public taste, as well as to entertain. But for years now, the BBC has instead been playing to the lowest common denominator, competing in the ratings market as ruthlessly as any commercial broadcaster.

Let's be quite clear about the latter point. The BBC has a guaranteed income of around £3,500,000,000 per annum from its tax on viewing live broadcasts. It does not have to chase financial support in the marketplace. It can put on any programme it likes and whether viewed by millions or tens its income will not suffer. Yet it is obsessed by ratings and adjusts the standard of its output accordingly.

The BBC's privileged position is due to its history. Beginning as the British Broadcasting Company in the early 1920's, when "wireless" was in its infancy, it was the only programme provider. It therefore provided the full range of programme type summarised in its remit - information, education and entertainment. Now, almost a century later, there is a plethora of media sources not just in the UK but across the globe via the World Wide Web. The day of the BBC monopoly is over. The tax on viewing live programmes can no longer be justified. In the words of Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth, "Stand not upon the order of your going, but go at once".