Cover Story

Reform the BBC, don't kill it

20 September 2003

The BBC is biased, and much of its programming is coarse and crude, but, says Peter Hitchens, it would be profoundly unconservative to privatise it

There is a solution. Many of the most successful British institutions from Parliament to the Common Law have been adversarial. They recognise that this is and always will be a divided and quarrelsome nation and that the truth is best discovered by allowing competing ideas to clash in formal, bloodless battle. The BBC, whose programme presenters are the unacknowledged legislators of our times, should abandon the unsustainable pretence that these men and women, almost all of whom read the Guardian as their main source of news and comment, and many of whom used to work for it, are unbiased. It should allow them all, at last, openly to admit their true feelings. And it should match every single one of them with an avowed conservative, so that no politician or man of power is ever again interviewed by a sympathiser, and current-affairs programmes crackle with open and legitimate controversy, the kind that uncovers the truth.

The Corporation should also realise that there is, thanks to the failure of schools and universities, an increasing hunger for radio and television programmes that treat us as intelligent and seek to inform us and uplift us. It should say openly that its licence fee allows and obliges it to ignore ratings and that it will pursue quality without compromise. It should stop cringing to linguistic fashion and be proud of its role in maintaining clear, confident spoken English. It may well find that it gets the ratings anyway, but even if it does not it will have many influential character witnesses and a good case for the defence when New Labour's cultural commissars come seeking revenge for the Gilligan affair and all that has followed.

Peter Hitchens is a columnist with the Mail on Sunday.