The Tory party chairman Grant Shapps is in the news again, this time for an interview in the Sunday Telegraph in which he says, in terms, that if the BBC wants the licence fee renewing it had better get its act together. The BBC, says Shapps, suffers from a culture of secrecy, doesn't look after our pennies well enough, and has a left-of-centre bias.
It is no longer controversial to say that the BBC was biased. Successive internal reports, by John Bridcut amongst others, suggest the Corporation has had an institutionally liberal outlook on matters such as immigration, although the reports are always careful to stress that this is how things used to be.
The reports also use the word "liberal", not "left wing". I think this is because to admit it had ever been left-of-centre would be an utter disaster for the BBC; anyway, "liberal" has a nice cuddly feel, doesn't it? Who could feel threatened by liberalism?
Actually if you consider what the obverse of a "liberal" bias would be, the answer is, as I've observed here before, a "conservative" one. As so often with officialdom, words are chosen to obscure meaning rather than to communicate it.
The thought that the BBC might have had a bias that was the opposite of "conservative" is not quite so comforting for people that value its place in British society.
Not surprisingly the Guardian wades into the debate this morning, accusing Shapps of being a bully and comparing him unfavourably with Norman Tebbit. Coming from the Graun that's abuse indeed. And you can see their point. The idea of a political party trying to get the state broadcaster to run a more sympathetic agenda sounds uncomfortably like Eastern Europe pre-1990. The paper's leader finishes, " . . a fair and informed national broadcaster matters far more to Britain than a here-today, gone tomorrow partisan politician".
A fine declaration, but one which does rather beg the question, is the BBC's coverage actually fair? I'm not going to address this now because I don't think it sheds much light on the Shapps controversy. You might find it striking that whilst there is no shortage of ex-BBC staff willing to say that the Corporation is on the whole a left of centre organisation, there have been none, and I mean none, who have come forward with the opposite view. You might also have noticed that it's a while since any Labour politician complained about the BBC being a Rightist organisation. But for the moment that's all beside the point.
What might legitimise Shapps' complaint is a consideration of who decides what constitutes "fairness". The BBC mandarins would probably say it's for them to decide, and I wish them luck with that difficult job. But the BBC relies on public consent for its continued existence, and it matters a great deal to the Corporation if a significant proportion of the public think it is biased.
Shapps is worth taking seriously not because he is an MP or Government minister (he is neither), but because he represents a much broader constituency up and down the country which thinks that over decades the BBC has got things wrong and is still getting them wrong now. Failure to heed this constituency undermines the case for the licence fee and jeopardises the BBC's continued existence.
