Why we still need the BBC

My first posting as a BBC foreign correspondent was Belgrade in the mid-1990s. Serbia was led by Slobodan Milosevic, practically the only Communist ruler in eastern Europe not to have been overthrown. He survived by reinventing himself as a nationalist, though he kept the Communists’ secret police. Our secretary was accosted one day by a couple of them, nasty-looking thugs in black leather jackets. ‘State Security,’ said one, pushing her into a doorway. They wanted her to inform on me. If she didn’t, they would see to it that her elderly father stopped getting his pension. She told them to get lost, a brave thing to do.

To Serbian State Security, I had to be a spy, or at least on the UK government payroll. The Serbian information minister asked me, puzzled, how British officials managed to send me the line to take each morning. (Unspoken was the fact that my phone was being tapped.) I replied that if a government official was stupid enough to make such a call, that would itself be a story. He snorted. Wasn’t the BBC chairman appointed by the British government? Didn’t the government decide how much money we got? It was impossible to convince him.

The Culture Secretary, Nadine Dorries, would like to get rid of that peculiarly British arrangement for funding our national broadcaster: the licence fee. Contrary to the Belgrade secret police, she believes ‘You cannot hope to bribe or twist/ thank God! the BBC journalist./ But seeing what they’ll do/ unbribed, there’s no occasion to.’ (With apologies to Humbert Wolfe.) Dorries has the support of many licence-fee payers when she says the BBC must address issues of ‘impartiality and groupthink’. Having once been a member of BBC staff, I know that the instinctive reaction from my former colleagues will be to deny there’s a problem.