The State the BBC's In

Peter York on the Lineker storm and the war against the BBC

When Orwell wrote 1984, he wanted to be wrong. You do when you send an Awful Warning. You want to avert the bad outcome. Professor Patrick Barwise (of London Business School) and I warned in our book The War Against The BBC, how “an unprecedented combination of hostile forces is destroying Britain’s greatest cultural institution”. We described these forces, we named the guilty men and women. We wanted to help save the BBC for the nation. When we first trailed the title with the publisher and friends, some suggested it was overly dramatic.

No one says that now.

The Lineker incident seems to have brought many of those hostile anti-BBC forces to a rolling boil, with the world and his wife out there describing how either the BBC had been taken over by “cultural Marxists” (whoever they were) advancing fashionable “leftie” opinions – according to popular national newspapers – or, conversely, how a group of right-wing Tory moles really run the BBC now.

As a general rule it’s best to avoid comparing people you disagree with to the Nazis. But Lineker made a significant mistake in letting it even be thought he’d made that direct comparison. He hadn’t, exactly – he’d talked about the language, the Home Secretary’s rhetoric behind the new legislation. And precisely that language had provoked a Home Office spad (special advisor), Nimco Ali, to resign in December 2022. And the point that it was 1930s language Lineker was talking about, not the Final Solution of the Wannsee Conference of Jan 1942, is valid, but will be lost as pedantry in all the shouting.

If you use the Nazi comparison, people can take you down for over-dramatising or distorting the argument. As it happened UK discussion of the proposed legislation – roundly condemned by heavyweights from the UNHCR to big-name Tories like Theresa May and George Osborne – seemed to stop for a week. Lineker became the story. If he’d said just a little less he’d have made a useful contribution by pointing out the comparative numbers arriving in England as against our European peers.

As it was, it was a gift to the BBC’s enemies, with lots of editorials in the usual places about Lineker’s million-pound-plus salary and what they described as his habitual “virtue signalling” (a term invented by the Spectator’s James Bartholomew in April 2015). There’s going to be lots more where that’s coming from in the 2024 election. According to former Tory adviser, now defector to Labour, Ian Anderson, the Tory plans are for “culture wars” all the way.

I don’t envy Tim Davie, the BBC Director-General, who clearly felt he had to make a stand because he’d practically bet the BBC shop on the high-minded, but somewhat confusing idea of “impartiality” (what exactly is it and how is it regulated?). But why now – and why this? Critics responded with an uncomfortable list of BBC inconsistencies – over Lord Sugar and Andrew Neil, who’d apparently got away with equally problematic tweets because they weren’t anti-Tory ones. They implied that the hapless DG was more responsive to right-wing Tory backbenchers’ complaints than to, say, Labour supporters.

The BBC’s Chairman is usually expected to wade in at these moments, supporting the BBC with a dose of calming Establishment common sense. But the incumbent, Richard Sharp, has been missing in action.

Sharp had been shown in a Sunday Times scoop as facilitating a massive loan to Boris Johnson, then Prime Minister, just as he was pursuing his application to be Chairman. And Byline Times came up later with evidence of Sharp’s major donations to right-wing organisations like Newswatch and The Taxpayers’ Alliance, which were hyper-hostile to the BBC (had they been disclosed either?).

Whatever he is, Lineker clearly isn’t a politician; he doesn’t know how the partisan propaganda circuit works – just how concerted and “professional” it is. And Tim Davie, looking to preserve the public trust in the BBC’s impartiality by acting decisively, has provoked precisely the debate the BBC’s been avoiding about its difficult relationship with “Westminster”, and particularly to the Government of the day – whatever day that is.

The BBC’s Achilles’ heel is that it isn’t politician-proof. The Government should obviously not appoint its Chairman nor – if the accusations flying around now are true – be placing its “trustees” in gatekeeper roles.

Our research showed that the BBC lives in wholly justified fear of politicians throttling its finances on a vendetta basis. George Osborne did, and Nadine Dorries scored another financial hit with her licence fee freeze last year.

There needs to be a proper public debate about the BBC’s funding model – and an independent process to set the funding level, without the BBC’s entrenched ideological/commercial enemies setting the agenda. Some hope.

Paddy Barwise and I recently described in Prospect the difference between the BBC’s enemies’ most constant criticism of it – namely that it’s biased to “the left” in political matters and that bias is shriekingly obvious to all sentient beings – and what the British public say about it in constant iterations of very mainstream research. The majority of respondents, annoyingly for the BBC’s critics, persist in saying either that the BBC is impartial, or they don’t know, while similar minorities – 18% and 22% respectively – say it is biased to the right or the left.

In the short term, the Lineker storm won’t have helped anyone. But over the longer haul, if it’s helped put everything on the table about the BBC and Westminster as part of a proper debate about the future of our public – absolutely not “state” – broadcaster, then the BBC’s critical friends might just think they were in with a chance.

Peter York is a capitalist tool – a market researcher and strategist – a book writer and an occasional televisionist. He has written 12 books, of which the best known is The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook (co-written with the late Ann Barr). His most recent book is The War Against the BBC (Penguin) co-written with Professor Patrick Barwise. He is also President of the Media Society.