spinoff

Ho ho! ‘Tis the season to be jolly, the season of good will, of gifts, generosity and of shafting the BBC over its licence fee. Gather round for the singing, the mulled wine and the below-inflation funding over the next five years. Ho ho ho!

     

Dashed unfortunate for the BBC, I suppose. Poor BBC. We at Spinoff, while recognising the inefficiency of the Beeb – its Byzantine structure, misguided foray into ratings-based, rather than public service-based programming – still love both it and the idea of having a public service broadcaster removed from the commercial exigencies suffered by other channels. We love the fact that we alone in the UK are able to watch TV channels and listen to radio stations that aren’t spoiled by adverts. The BBC stands as an uncommercial oasis in a commoditised world.

        

And now the Govt. are going to curb the BBC’s pocket money. Gordon Brown and Tessa Jowell concocted the rate cut equivalent to a 0.45% drop in funding each year. The Beeb is desperately trying to negotiate something more favourable.

       

There are several reasons why G.Brown has put his name to so sensitive a decision. The first is that he really doesn’t have all that much money at the moment. We hear all sorts of Tory flatulence about how “the public finances are in a mess”, and when one sees the Chancellor scrabbling around for cash – bonking the Beeb on the head and nicking its dinner money like this – well, one is inclined to suspect that something out-of-the-ordinary must be afoot with the village accounts.

        

The second reason is more cynical still and it is this – that the BBC has permanently blotted its copybook with the government over the 45 minutes / illegal war / dead weapons inspector rumpus, and that Gordon has decided to crack down on them as hard as poss. in order to cement the master/servant dynamic in place before his bid for glory next year.

       

And Gordon is, to a certain extent confined to this sort of tactic by dint of his personality. Over these last ten-or-so excruciatingly painful years, he has seen his partner in crime T.Blair win the media over with oodles of charm, warmth and so on, all the while knowing that he himself has no such charm. Let us not beat around the bush here – Gordon has, quite frankly, all the interpersonal skills of the Cairngorms.

       

But just because he is blessed with a demeanour that makes a deep freeze seem as warm and as welcoming as a week in the Bahamas, that doesn’t mean to say that Gordon can’t win over the media. No sir. He will win them over. Absolutely. It’s just that he’ll use a different method to our Tone. It will involve “carrying on the war by other means”.

       

And in this case, those other means are financial. Squeeze the buggers. Cut off their money. Twist their tails. Get them involved in a fight with us that they can’t afford to lose, and which will involve them sucking up to us and not the other way round. The Blairite smarm-machine has been replaced by the Brownite purse strings garrotte and the BBC is the first victim to feel the tightening about its throat. He withholds money now but dangles the carrot of a renegotiable increase of up to 2% in 2012 – is the Beeb therefore more or less likely to be “on side” when Gordon runs for P.M.?

       

And the third reason is the most cynical of them all, and can be summarised in one word. “Murdoch”. (Should be fairly obvious where this one is going, so will make it brief). Before he got into power, Blair assured Murdoch that he would not fiddle with the UK’s media ownership laws, or in any way attempt to trigger a break-up of the News Corp. empire. He stuck to this promise, and in fact loosened media ownership laws, which has recently allowed Murdoch to buy a large chunk of ITV (depressing days indeed).

          

Moral of the story is therefore: “you want be elected P.M., you got make Rupert happy”. This Gordon has recognised, and this Gordon is attempting to do. Murdoch HATES the BBC. It is everything that he hates: it’s leftie, non market-driven, subsidised by the state, not for sale. God he hates it. The sight of Gordon Brown chipping away at this smug, liberal media henge in the middle of the thrusting, ad-driven whirlpool will indicate to R.M in no uncertain terms that indeed, this is a chap who seems to have the right ideas.

        

So this is our prime minister in waiting: taking money from the public broadcaster to plug gaps in the national balance sheet; chipping away at the BBC to scare them into submission; falling head over heels in order to please an un-elected, un-accountable oligarch who controls the majority of the UK’s news flow.

      

  

Merry Christmas everyone.

     

Yours etc.,

      

Spinoff.