The BBC

Myth of a Public Service

Tom Mills

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781784784829
• eBook ISBN:
  9781784784843
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The BBC is one of the most important institutions in Britain; it is also one of the most misunderstood. Despite its claim to be independent and impartial, and the constant accusations of a liberal bias, from its Reithian origins to its coverage of the 2019 General Election: the BBC has always sided with the elite. As Tom Mills demonstrates, we are only getting the news that the Establishment wants aired in public. And yet in the current age of multi-platform news, this bias is increasingly exposed. Mills asks if the institution is fit for purpose? And can it even be reformed?

The BBC is an important and timely examination of a crucial public institution that may threaten the very thing it was meant to uphold: democracy.

CHAPTER 1

Under the Shadow of Power

On 12 May 1926, the BBC’s founding father John Reith was reading the lunchtime radio news bulletin when an important note was passed to him by a member of staff. For over a week, the British Broadcasting Company, as it was then called, had been on what Reith referred to as ‘a wartime sort of footing’.¹ The UK’s first and only General Strike had been called by the Trades Union Congress (TUC) in support of the mine workers, bringing everything – including the newspaper industry – to a halt. As a result, the young broadcasting company had become both a vital source of news for the public and a vital instrument of propaganda for a government determined to break the strike.

The note handed to Reith stated, unexpectedly, that the TUC had called off the strike after nine days. He asked his staff to get confirmation of the news, but not from the TUC; continuing with his broadcast, he scribbled on the note: ‘Ask No 10 for confirmation’. Shortly afterwards, the prime minister’s secretary confirmed that the news was indeed true. Unbeknown to striking workers, the members of the TUC General Council had earlier that day visited 10 Downing Street to inform the government that they were calling off the strike despite not having won a single concession for the miners. This was a resounding victory not only for the mine owners, but also for the government and the City of London, which were determined to drive down wages in an effort to restore the value of the pound and maintain the British Empire’s international standing.

In the 7 p.m. news bulletin, Reith read ‘a verbatim account, from No 10, of what had happened’.² Two hours later, he relayed on-air messages from the king and the prime minister, followed by what Reith described in his diary as ‘a little thing of our own’.³ ‘Our first feeling on hearing of the termination of the General Strike’, he announced, ‘must be one of profound thankfulness to Almighty God, Who has led us through this supreme trial with national health unimpaired.’ He continued:

You have heard the messages from the King and the Prime Minister. It remains only to add the conviction that the nation’s happy escape has been in large measure due to a personal trust in the Prime Minister. As for the BBC we hope your confidence in and goodwill to us have not suffered.⁴

Reith finished his ‘little thing’ by reading William Blake’s poem ‘And Did Those Feet in Ancient Time’. Blake, ironically enough, had been a supporter of the French Revolution, but his poem had become popular during the Great War as Hubert Parry’s patriotic hymn ‘Jerusalem’. As Reith read out the words, an orchestra played Parry’s score in the background. Once Reith was finished, the BBC choir sung the hymn’s final verse, a rousing call to arms for the Christian peoples of England.

Recalling these events three decades later, Reith wrote that ‘if there had been broadcasting at the time of the French Revolution, there would have been no French Revolution’. Revolutions, he reasoned, are based on falsehoods and misinformation, and during the General Strike, the role of the British Broadcasting Company had been to ‘announce truth’. It was, he thought, quite proper that it had been ‘on the side of the government’ and had supported ‘law and order’.⁵

At the time of the General Strike, the BBC was still involved in negotiations over its reconstitution as a public corporation, which had been recommended by a committee only months earlier. The postmaster general, the minister to whom the BBC was directly accountable, was William Mitchell-Thomson, who as chief civil commissioner also directed the government’s semi-secret strike-breaking operations, coordinated by the innocuous-sounding Supply and Transport Committee. As postmaster general, Mitchell-Thomson could oblige the BBC to broadcast any messages the government decreed. And under the BBC’s Licence – the legal basis of its operations – the government had the power to commandeer the BBC ‘if and whenever in the opinion of the Postmaster-General an emergency shall have arisen’. This formal power was never exercised during the General Strike, but it did not need to be. The threat itself was a powerful inducement for compliance.

The BBC’s point of contact with the Cabinet during the strike was J. C. C. Davidson, who was responsible for the government’s public relations and was Mitchell-Thomson’s deputy at the Supply and Transport Committee. A reactionary and a propagandist, Davidson was anxious about what he called the ‘politically uneducated electorate’ and the threat it posed to ‘our strength in the country’.⁶ Throughout the strike, he exerted what he referred to in a private letter as ‘unofficial control’.⁷ What this meant was that the BBC was afforded a large degree of operational autonomy, remaining formally independent, but on the tacit understanding that it would broadly serve the political purposes of the government.

There were those in government who favoured a more robust approach. A minority of zealous reactionaries in the Cabinet, led by Chancellor Winston Churchill, ‘regarded the strikers as an enemy to be destroyed’,⁸ and they pushed for the use of all means at the government’s disposal to achieve that end. In discussing the status of the BBC, Churchill said ‘it was monstrous not to use such an instrument’.⁹ Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, however, took a different view. He thought Churchill a liability and confided to Davidson that he had been ‘terrified of what Winston is going to be like’.¹⁰ Baldwin and Davidson favoured a more subtle and, they believed, effective approach, as did the notoriously authoritarian home secretary William Joynson-Hicks, known as ‘Jix’, who chaired the Supply and Transport Committee. Davidson described the rationale behind their preferred strategy in a letter written shortly after the strike:

Winston was very strong in his insistence that the Government ought to assume complete possession [of the BBC]. I was equally strong and Jix shared my view, that it would be fatal to do so for the very simple reason that the people that you want to influence are those who would have at once ceased to listen had we announced that all news was dope, while on the other hand the diehard element who criticised us for our impartiality are on our side in any case.¹¹

The ‘moderates’ in the Cabinet used the threat posed by these ‘diehard element[s]’ to coerce the BBC. Baldwin, Davidson wrote, ‘played a very skilful game in postponing a decision by the Cabinet on the question repeatedly raised by Winston and F. E. [Smith] of taking over the BBC’. Indeed, it was not until 11 May 1926, a week into the strike, that the Cabinet finally decided that the BBC would not be brought under direct government control.¹²

The fact that the BBC escaped being commandeered has sometimes been seen as a victory for independent broadcasting. But the historical record suggests, fairly unambiguously, that the BBC was allowed as much independence as was thought strategically expedient from the perspective of the government. As Andrew Marr has put it, the BBC escaped ‘a straightforward takeover by panicky or gungo-ho politicians’.¹³ But the alternative position which it found itself in was not one of independence. As Reith himself later noted, during the strike it was ‘neither commandeered nor free’.¹⁴

In the meantime, the BBC leadership were in any case not mindful to report impartially on the dispute. Reith maintained close contact with the Cabinet at all times and was flattered that the BBC had been trusted to responsibly represent the ‘national interest’. He famously remarked that the government ‘know that they can trust us not to be really impartial’. Indeed, so ‘partial’ was Reith that at one stage he assisted the prime minister by inserting lines into a key speech he was about to broadcast from a desk in Reith’s home study. The BBC’s first director general later wrote that he and his wife, ‘thought we would get a little brass plate put on the desk as the speech was such an important one, and was really instrumental in breaking the strike’.¹⁵

In the aftermath of the strike, Reith wrote a ‘highly confidential’ letter to senior BBC staff in which he referred with pride to the prime minister’s ‘gratifying trust in the Company’s loyalty and judgment’.¹⁶ BBC staff replied with a memorandum commending Reith’s ‘magnificent leadership’, which they said had ‘carried the BBC through the crisis with its prestige not only maintained but greatly increased’.¹⁷

In his efforts to avoid the BBC being commandeered, Reith had made arguments which were strikingly similar to those advanced by the Cabinet ‘moderates’. He wrote to Baldwin urging him that if the BBC were ‘commandeered or unduly hampered or manipulated now, the immediate purpose of such action is not only unserved but prejudiced’. ‘This is not a time for dope,’ he argued, ‘even if the people could be doped. The hostile would be made more hostile from resentment.’¹⁸ Whether Reith persuaded Baldwin and Davidson of this position, or vice versa, or they arrived at it more or less independently, is less important than the fact that their interests were closely aligned. Both the government and the BBC wished the latter to be perceived as independent. But while the BBC naturally favoured total freedom, from the perspective of the government the question was how much pressure was expedient for its purposes.

Moreover, the convergence of interests at the senior levels of the BBC and the government was not just a meeting of minds. During the strike, the BBC was further integrated into the infrastructure of the British imperial state. Reith moved into an office in the Admiralty, where Davidson and his team were based.¹⁹ With him came several other BBC members of staff, including Walter Fuller, who had recently been appointed editor of the Radio Times, and the BBC’s deputy managing director and head of public relations, Gladstone Murray.²⁰ Both men shared an office with Davidson’s liaison officer²¹ where they worked together in ‘close collaboration’, drafting news bulletins from information received from the regional civil commissioners and other government sources.²² News from Reuters, which itself had come under covert government control during the First World War, was passed on from the BBC to the Admiralty before being approved or amended as deemed appropriate and sent back for broadcasting. All bulletins were submitted to Davidson for approval, and Reith recalls that he too personally vetted ‘almost every item’.²³

The BBC’s chief engineer at the time recalls ‘the staggering experience’ of witnessing ‘bias by elimination’, despite having been ‘proselytizing the BBC as the impartial public servant’.²⁴ This crucial evidence has rarely appeared in accounts of the strike,²⁵ which have tended to focus on controversial editorial judgements rather than the fact that BBC news was routinely shaped around a partisan political agenda.

The failure of the BBC to assume anything resembling an impartial position during the General Strike has been readily acknowledged in the many histories of the BBC and British broadcasting, although the extent of these failures and the level of collusion between the BBC and the government has been hugely underplayed. The classic account is offered by the Corporation’s first official historian, Asa Briggs, who writes that the BBC ‘maintained a precarious measure of independence throughout the strike’.²⁶ This is broadly correct. Reith worked hard to ensure that the BBC was not ‘commandeered’, and this meant at times making significant compromises. But the conventional readings, which see the episode as something of a bumpy start on the road to more substantive independence, are misconstrued. They overlook the extent to which the compromises reached during that early period of crisis set in place terms of the BBC’s relationship with governments, its incorporation into the Establishment, and arguably the state itself. A precarious independence has in fact defined the BBC’s institutional existence ever since, and the highly circumscribed notion of impartiality it developed in parallel with state institutions has also proved enduring.

Briggs’s successor as the BBC’s official historian, Jean Seaton, concludes her discussion of the General Strike by noting that the compromises and accommodations reached between the broadcaster and the government during that early period of crisis gave rise to an enduring ‘ethic of political neutrality’ at the BBC, drawing on a tradition of propaganda based not on the dissemination of falsehoods, but a strategic ‘selection and presentation’ of information.²⁷ Indeed, both J. C. C. Davidson and Reith shared this same ‘ethic’. They associated propaganda with explicit falsehoods, or emotive material, and saw themselves as responsible distributors of accurate information, distributed in the national interest. In a confidential report following the strike, Davidson wrote:

When the Deputy Chief Civil Commissioner was appointed it was understood that he would be the member of the Government responsible for publicity and it was agreed that he should not make himself responsible for any propaganda but should confine himself to acting in the capacity of collector and distributor of Government news, censored when necessary but undoctored.²⁸

This was a notion of propaganda that would be operationalised again by the BBC and the British state during the Second World War, and one that would become deeply engrained in the BBC’s institutional culture.

The ‘ethic of political neutrality’ led to some curious contradictions. This is well illustrated by a memo from the BBC chairman during the General Strike, which decreed that the Corporation should ‘maintain an objective news service’ and

try to convey to the minds of the people generally that the prolongation of the general stoppage is the one sure process calculated to reduce wages and the standards of living which it is the avowed endeavour of the Trade Unions to maintain and improve; and to try to make it clear that the sooner the General Strike is satisfactorily terminated the better for wage earners in all parts of the country.²⁹

Seaton characterises the BBC’s stance during and after the General Strike as a ‘denial of politics’. But her account is less suggestive of a naive idealism than an unquestioning acceptance of the authority of the state. Not so much a denial of politics, as a profound identification with, and subordination to, a particular set of institutions and governing arrangements which profoundly influenced the Corporation’s culture and editorial practices. An internal BBC report drafted in the years after the General Strike noted that there was no censorship in its early news service, but since the BBC maintained ‘close touch with the appropriate departments … the bulletins fell in line with Government policy’.³⁰

Given the close embrace between the BBC, the government and the Establishment, should the BBC be understood as a ‘state broadcaster’? Champions of public service broadcastin...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Under the Shadow of Power
• 2. The BBC and the Secret Service
• 3. War and Peace
• 4. Politics, Power and Political Bias
• 5. The Making of a Neoliberal Bureaucracy
• 6. Public Service Broadcasting and Private Power
• Conclusion: Democracy, the State and the Future of Public Media
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index