Charlie Stayt and Naga Munchetty’s mocking of Robert Jenrick’s flag was unintentionally revealing of the BBC’s problems. It also made it clear that Tim Davie’s decision to shift hundreds of jobs outside London won’t solve the corporation’s quest for diversity.
What instantly came to mind watching this interchange was another telling incident nearly seven years ago now, during the Rochester and Strood by-election. Ed Miliband had sent the Islington battlecruiser Emily Thornberry out on manoeuvres on the touchingly misplaced assumption that she would ‘bring out the vote’. She did, but not in the way intended.
While touring the constituency, Thornberry snapped a picture of a modest house, festooned with large Cross of St George flags and with a white Transit van parked prominently outside. She tweeted this shot with a mere three word caption ‘Image from Rochester’ – another example of dog-whistle politics, for clearly her supporters were intended to understand that what she was really saying was: ‘See what I’m up against?’.
No wonder there is alarm in the New Broadcasting House boardroom
The upshot was that Thornberry’s subliminal snobbery was rumbled, a huge row ensued, her opponents piled in and she had to resign from her role as shadow attorney-general. Oh, and in the event Labour’s vote slumped by 12 per cent and Ukip took the seat. What is it about some of those on the left and patriotism? Why the Pavlovian response to the flag?
A lot has changed, of course, in the intervening years and the caravan has moved on. Today it is the BBC which is struggling with the same problem. For there is a striking similarity between the Corporation’s difficulties and Labour’s soul-searching. Both organisations find themselves desperately trying to ‘re-connect’ with their core audience.
In Labour’s case, under the stodgy captaincy of Sir Keir, the penny does seem finally to have dropped: it’s common enough now to hear Labour types admitting that the party’s Achilles heel has been its apparent loathing of the country it aspires to govern. They’ve finally accepted, through gritted teeth, that appearing patriotic is necessary if they are to win back voters’ trust. The question is whether the BBC has learnt the same lesson?
Who can forget the ludicrous self-inflicted row that erupted back in the autumn when the Corporation decided that Rule, Britannia! And Land of Hope and Glory should be omitted from the traditional Last Night of The Proms programme? The reasoning apparently was that both songs had associations with colonialism and slavery and thus were not seemly in our newly woke age. Another PR calamity as it turned out. I doubt there are many people who hanker for the time when half the globe was coloured pink, but that doesn’t mean they will take kindly to having familiar and much-loved signifiers of national identity scrubbed out at the stroke of some high-minded BBC panjandrum’s blue pencil. And so it was that the BBC had to volte face and reinstate the songs.
The Proms episode, like Jenrick’s flag, is intrinsically a trivial affair. Yet it is also a graphic example of the BBC’s tone deafness when it has to contend with the nation’s pride in itself. In recent years they have consistently got this wrong; throughout the torturous Brexit psychodrama, the BBC’s journalists seemed only ever to empathise with Brussels; if Brexit was, as many believe, a struggle to preserve our democratic soul, then the BBC firmly aligned itself with the other camp. And this has shown up in audience surveys. Alarmingly for an organisation which claims to speak for the whole nation, only half the population now thinks the BBC understands their concerns and reflects their values. No wonder there is alarm in the New Broadcasting House boardroom.
Which is why Tim Davie has promised sweeping reforms to reconnect with British people. This made it doubly unfortunate that Stayt and Munchetty’s display of metropolitan condescension came last Thursday – the very day that the BBC announced a big step in Davie’s reform agenda.
Under this scheme a tranche of BBC staff and programming will be shunted out of London into the provinces; Radio Three management is being despatched to Manchester and important news programmes like Today and Newsnight will be expected to broadcast about one in three editions from outside London. According to BBC sources, changing the physical location where programmes are made will ‘change the Corporation’s relationship with the nation’. We are being promised something revolutionary.
However this has been tried before. It was back in 2010 that the Corporation announced that some programmes would be leaving London and would in future be produced and broadcast from its new hub in Salford Quays, Manchester. At the time the official BBC statement said that this was ‘part of measures aimed at building a new relationship with audiences across the UK’. And – guess what – the main programme to be shifted was: BBC Breakfast.
Eleven years on and BBC Breakfast is now firmly rooted in the northwest of England but it seems the change of scene hasn’t much affected the on-air talent. Stayt and Munchetty might no longer be exposed to the supposedly elitist and progressive humours of London but, naturally, they’ve taken their biases with them. Clearly moving people away from the metropolis is no magic bullet to cure the Corporation of the progressive bias which is what alienates it from much of its audience.
Changing that will be a long and difficult process. The BBC as it is now is the result of decades of selective hirings; like all organisations the BBC takes on new people who it thinks will fit in. The internal culture of the Corporation is firmly entrenched, so normalised that it is hardly visible to those who inhabit it. The only remedy for this is to seek real diversity among the workforce; this means achieving a proper balance of political beliefs and personal values. Davie’s ambition should be a BBC that not only ‘looks like Britain’ but more importantly ‘thinks like Britain’; if he fails, the threat to the BBC’s licence-fee privilege will only grow.
Comments