set of institutions and governing arrangements which profoundly influenced the Corporation’s culture and editorial practices. An internal BBC report drafted in the years after the General Strike noted that there was no censorship in its early news service, but since the BBC maintained ‘close touch with the appropriate departments … the bulletins fell in line with Government policy’.30
Given the close embrace between the BBC, the government and the Establishment, should the BBC be understood as a ‘state broadcaster’? Champions of public service broadcasting in politics, journalism and academia have sought to distinguish the approach pioneered by the BBC from more overtly politicised models elsewhere, more readily referred to as state broadcasters. Seaton, for example, claims that the BBC ‘never has been a “state” broadcaster’, since it has ‘income separate from a state grant’, and elsewhere she has noted that its senior personnel work independently of government direction and do not change with changes of government.31 But the BBC’s income has been readily wielded as an instrument of political influence throughout its history, while the other features Seaton points to are shared by a good number of non-partisan state bodies. Indeed, the British Civil Service shares with the BBC its core values of political impartiality and objectivity, as set out in the Civil Service Code. Reith, for his part, considered that the BBC had been established as a body constitutionally committed to public service, and ‘certainly not as a department of state’,32 and while this much is true, it hardly provides a definitive answer to this question.
As Ralph Miliband notes, the state ‘is not a thing’ but a diverse set of interacting institutions, which in his account comprises ‘the government, the administration, the military and the police, the judicial branch, sub-central government and parliamentary assemblies’. The administrative institutions of the state, Miliband notes, ‘extend far beyond the traditional bureaucracy’ and include ‘a large variety of bodies, often related to particular ministerial departments, or enjoying a greater or lesser degree of autonomy – public corporations, central banks, regulatory commissions, etc.’ Though Miliband did not consider the BBC to be part of the state system, the fact remains that it could quite comfortably fit within his definition.33 Thus, the sociologist Tom Burns concluded from his detailed study that the BBC should be understood as a ‘Quango’, that is, a quasi-independent body created to act independently but expected to act ‘in conformity with Government purposes’ and kept under ‘essential instrument[s] of control’.34
Indeed, the BBC is arguably comparable with the classically repressive organs of the modern state such as the police, the domestic monopolists of Max Weber’s ‘legitimate use of physical force’. The Metropolitan Police was formed out of more organic and disparate ‘policing’ practices and rationalised and brought under the authority of the Home Office, a history which bears obvious comparisons to the early formation of the BBC. Despite the incorporation of policing functions under the authority of a secretary of state, a constitutional arrangement emerged according to which the home secretary would not interfere with the ‘impartiality’ and ‘operational independence’ of the police.
While the Metropolitan Police was created by statute, the BBC was formed by Royal Charter. In this sense, it is not even formally accountable to Parliament, but to the Crown. The subsequent renewals of the Royal Charter, as well as the appointment of BBC governors and trustees, have formally been made by an Order of the Privy Council – an arcane and rather mysterious body which exists to advise the monarch on the exercise of the Royal Prerogative, that is, on the exercise of the residential powers of the absolutist state which have never been subject to democratic controls. These powers include, for example, the declaration of war, the granting of honours and the appointment of civil servants. Orders in Council, such as those which appoint BBC trustees as well as senior civil servants, are, in essence, absolutist decrees of the central government, signed-off by the monarch of the day. They are the constitutional basis not only for the BBC, but for hundreds of ‘chartered bodies’, including Oxford and Cambridge and other historic universities, colleges and public schools, hospitals, professional associations, the numerous trade associations and guilds of the City of London, banks and colonial enterprises. Some of these chartered bodies, while thoroughly Establishment organisations, are best understood as part of ‘civil society’. But a good number occupy central places in the cluster of state, quasi-state and non-state institutions which together constitute the central power structures of British society, notably the City of London itself (chartered in 1327) and the Bank of England (chartered in 1694). Where the BBC should be positioned on this spectrum will always remain somewhat indeterminate, precisely because the BBC’s ‘independence’ is so inherently ambiguous.
For the anthropologist Georgina Born, a ‘critical factor in the political character of the BBC is its constitutional status’.35 Somewhat curiously, this status has been seen by both the BBC and the broader British Establishment not as a threat to the Corporation’s impartiality, but as the very basis of its celebrated independence. In 1964, the then director general Hugh Greene wrote that the BBC’s independence, which he considered to be a major reason for its national and international prestige, derived precisely from its ‘constitutional position’.36
The BBC’s claim, which was common in that period, to be both ‘within the constitution’ and yet somehow ‘independent’, or apolitical, may seem contradictory.37 But from the perspective of the British elite, it is an accurate reflection of what is meant by the constitution: those set of institutions and practices that exist above, or perhaps beneath, the realm of official public contestation. To say that the BBC achieved ‘constitutional status’, then, is to say that it attained a position above politics in much the same way as the monarchy or the City of London or the Bank of England. What is remarkable is how quickly the BBC attained this position. Speaking at a time when the Establishment had come under criticism, John Reith recalled this achievement with some pride:
Perhaps if I had thought more or known more I would have tried to avoid the BBC becoming part of the establishment, but perhaps not. Establishment has a good deal to say for itself. And indeed such a charge was surely a considerable tribute to the BBC – that anything of such recent appearance should have attained to such entitliture.38
Of course, this does not answer the question of whether the BBC is part of the state. But this is a question that inevitably descends into semantics. Certainly, the BBC needs to be understood in the broader context of the historical development of the British state, particularly the emergence of a professional and ostensibly impartial civil service and the development of extensive capillary functions, some undertaken by institutions with a considerable independence from ministers of the Crown.
The 1936 Ullswater Committee, one of the many official committees of inquiry on broadcasting, reported that: ‘The position of the Corporation is one of independence in the day-to-day management of its business, and of ultimate control by His Majesty’s Government.’39 This situation has not changed nearly as much since the interwar period as liberal commentators would have us believe. Certainly, the degree of freedom the BBC has enjoyed has been politically significant, and at times it has even served as a site of opposition to powerful interests. But it has always remained, as the future director general John Birt once noted, ‘under the shadow of the state and the other main repositories of power’.40
The former Panorama producer Meirion Jones has written that ‘the fundamental corporate bias is pro-government, regardless of party’:
The only periods when I saw the BBC’s loyalty to the government wavering was under John Major after Black Wednesday, and during the Gordon Brown administration. In each case a cynic might say the corporation could see the PMs were dead on their feet, and the other side was about to be elected and control the BBC purse strings.41
This kind of candour is rare. The journalist and academic John Naughton has described the ‘notion that the BBC is independent of the government of the day’ as ‘one of those quaint constitutional
