Does Jeremy Hunt watch BBC1? The shadow culture secretary believes the corporation should recruit more Tories to its news division in order to counter an “innate liberal bias”. He says:
I wish they would go and actively look for some Conservatives to be part of their news-gathering team, because they have acknowledged that one of their problems is that people who want to work at the BBC tend to be from the centre left. That’s why they have this issue with what Andrew Marr called an innate liberal bias.
Should a man who expects to be the minister in charge of the BBC in mere months be meddling in its recruitment policies? And should the BBC, especially the news (!) division, be hiring producers, reporters and presenters on the basis of their political views or membership of particular political parties? Will the application form for a job at the Beeb’s political unit in Millbank now carry the question: “Are you, or have you ever been, a member of what John Stuart Mill once called ‘the stupid party’?”
My views on the BBC, and its right-wing (not left-wing or liberal) bias are clear and can be read here and here. I don’t mind if you disagree with me — as, for example, Peter Hitchens has — but at least those who don’t agree with me should acknowledge that I have provided some evidence for my argument. For example, if BBC News hates the Tories so much, why is that former chair of the Young Conservatives, Nick Robinson, its political editor? As the Mirror’s Kevin Maguire observes in his New Statesman column this week:
Brown’s never forgotten — or forgiven — Robbo for chairing the Young Conservatives in the Thatcherite 1980s. Yet it’s the appointment of affable James Landale as Robbo’s deputy that’s turned up the volume. Landale was a contemporary at Eton of David Cameron and Boris Johnson. The charge in No 10 is that a Biased Broadcasting Corporation is preparing for the Conservatives eight months before an election.
So, does Hunt actually watch any BBC output? The Tories have a habit of using contemporary cultural examples without doing their homework — the shadow home secretary, Chris Grayling, recently suggested that parts of Britain resemble scenes from The Wire — but then admitted that he had hardly watched the HBO series himself. Did his shadow cabinet colleague Hunt, for example, watch BBC1’s Question Time last night, I wonder?
I am a big fan of QT and I agree with its editor, Ed Havard, that it is a unique and vibrant institution. But if Hunt had tuned in last night, as I did, he would have noted that its five-member panel consisted of the former CBI boss (admittedly a one-time “Labour” trade minister), Digby Jones; the new editor of the Spectator, Fraser Nelson; the Tory grandee Michael Heseltine; the Lib Dem education spokesman and outrider for the party’s Orange Book free-marketeers, David Laws MP; and the Leader of the Commons, Harriet Harman MP. That makes four right-wingers versus one lefty (Harman). Now, before we get into an interminable row about how one defines left and right, blah, blah, blah, let’s do it by issue. On the QT panel last night, we had four people (Jones, Nelson, Heseltine and Laws) ideologically committed to the neoliberal, free-market consensus that failed so spectacularly last September and one person (Harman) who isn’t. We had three people (Harman, Jones, Nelson) who supported the invasion of Iraq and only two (Heseltine and Laws) who didn’t. We had all five panellists in support of Britain’s military presence in Afghanistan — even though a majority of the British public is opposed to the war.
So where were the lefties? Where were the critics of neoliberal, deregulated, free-market capitalism? Where were the opponents of the invasion of Iraq or the war in Afghanistan? Where were the defenders of the government, Harman aside? Why were three of the five panellists potential Tory voters (Nelson, Jones, Heseltine)?
As I noted in my piece on BBC bias in the magazine back in August, “the accusation that the BBC is left-wing and liberal is a calculated and cynical move by the right to cow the corporation into submission”. Hunt’s comments are simply the latest, fact-free manifestation of this calculated strategy.
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