eighty years, the BBC’s legal personality resided in its Board of Governors, only superseded in 2007 by the BBC Trust. The personnel who have made up both these bodies have been independent, but appointed by the Crown on the advice of the prime minister, another quaint constitutional myth. In reality, the Corporation’s governors and trustees have been appointed by the leader and close advisors of the current ruling party. By convention, they have been non-partisan appointments, unable to interfere with programme making. But these appointees, most of all the BBC chair, have often been highly politicised and interventionist. Especially notable in this regard was the Thatcher period. The potential for the powers of the Board of Governors to serve the interests of an authoritarian government was acknowledged with great prescience in 1977 in a speech by the then director general Ian Trethowen:
Governments of both parties have so far been scrupulous in making sure, through the appointments, that the Board [of Governors] reflects a wide spectrum of opinion. In practice, in my experience, the Governors of the BBC have consciously seen themselves as an important part of the defence of our independence, and they have so acted. The fact remains that a Government with more sinister intentions could find in the power of appointment to the Board of Governors an uncomfortably convenient weapon.43
Another convenient weapon in the government’s arsenal has been the control over the BBC’s finances. It is often argued that the licence fee is an important guarantor of the BBC’s independence from government since it affords revenue directly from the viewers and listeners, to whom the BBC is therefore said to be directly accountable. A 2015 parliamentary briefing paper on the renewal of the BBC’s Charter, for example, claims that the BBC has a ‘unique structure’ in that ‘it is largely independent of the state and funded by those who watch television’.44 This is true to a point; if the BBC were dependent on general taxation, this would likely result in even greater government influence. But the relative independence provided by the licence fee mechanism should not be exaggerated. What really matters is not who provides the money, but who controls it, and here the BBC’s audiences have in practice had no choice in the matter. The level of the licence fee is set by government and, like the powers of appointment, it has proved to be a useful means for exerting influence.
During periods of relative affluence, the BBC has tended to enjoy greater autonomy from government. However, during periods of austerity, a government’s financial leverage tends to become much greater. Stuart Hood, a former controller of television programmes, has suggested that the more liberal and independent culture at the BBC that emerged during the 1960s under the director generalship of Hugh Greene is partly attributable to the substantial income the BBC was still receiving from the take-up of television licences:
Because of the rising graph of TV licences [the BBC] enjoyed a parallel rise in its income. This meant that it did not have to go to the government to ask for an increase in the licence fee … The BBC was a beneficiary of the ‘you have never had it so good’ period under Macmillan. At a moment of prosperity and against a background of social changes, the cracks in the monolith could be and were exploited by broadcasters.45
This more favourable financial context changed markedly from the mid-1960s. Before this period, the BBC enjoyed steady increases in its income, but subsequent inflationary pressures meant it had to regularly request licence fee increases from the Labour Government. Naturally, such a situation where the BBC leadership is at the mercy of a government’s financial largesse has political consequence. As Michael Bett, the BBC’s director of personnel in the late 1970s, recalls,
the licence fee became a bigger and bigger political issue. Therefore it mattered very much what the government thought about you and you couldn’t rely on the general reputation. You had to please the government.46
More recently, the current Conservative Government was criticised for drawing the BBC into its politics of austerity when it imposed a sudden and dramatic cut in the BBC’s income following an already harsh licence fee settlement in 2010. Shortly after the Tories’ unexpected electoral victory in 2015, the government announced that it would withdraw funding for free licence fees for the over-75s. Making the announcement, the Chancellor George Osborne reasoned that the BBC is ‘a publicly-funded body, so it is right that it, like other parts of the public sector, should make savings’.47 That policy, agreed at secret meetings with Director General Tony Hall, was later described by the former director general Mark Thompson as ‘totally inappropriate’.48 Sir Christopher Bland, who chaired the BBC Board of Governors from 1996 to 2001, warned that the policy drew the Corporation ‘closer to becoming an arm of government’,49 while the Blairite Labour MP Ben Bradshaw, a former BBC journalist and culture secretary, called it ‘a significant assault on BBC independence’.50
Perhaps the greatest threat that the government holds over the Corporation though is its ultimate discretion over the BBC’s very existence. Originally constituted as a public corporation under a royal charter in 1927, shortly after the General Strike, the BBC was originally granted the right to operate for a ten-year period. Since then, the BBC Charter has been periodically renewed and amended, but has never placed the Corporation on a sure and permanent footing. The official Licence and Agreement, the other major constitutional document, negotiated with the relevant secretary of state, is by convention debated in Parliament, but need not even be subject to that limited degree of democratic oversight.
Whether or not these various mechanisms and processes are considered to undermine the BBC’s independence depends on how the term is understood. The Corporation has enjoyed independence in the more limited sense of operating without direction from government, and the various mechanisms of influence are all at least one step removed from programme making. On the other hand, these mechanisms plainly allow for political influence over the BBC’s output and the management of its affairs, even if only indirectly, by affording influence over the internal distribution of resources and editorial and managerial authority. More obviously, these mechanisms place the BBC in an ultimately subordinate position, which in turn makes the BBC hopelessly vulnerable to more overt political pressure.
Georgina Born considers the BBC a ‘contradictory’ institution, which, although kept ‘on a short lead’, has still exhibited signs of genuine autonomy.51 This is accurate, and also points to a problem with the whole notion of independence as a starting point for examining the BBC; namely, that it implicitly assumes it to be a broadly homogeneous body. In fact, it has been a site of considerable political contestation, including over its own institutional character, the nature of its independence, and its relationship with governments and the state. The picture is made more complex by the fact that these ‘contradictions’ are not merely internal wrangles, but are related to broader struggles over the distribution of power in society. The very idea of the independence of the BBC plays an important part in these political conflicts. It emerged as an idealised expression of the terms on which broadcasting was incorporated into the Establishment, and arguably the state, and over time became a political principle invoked in struggles, as both broadcasters and politicians have sought to renegotiate the terms of this historic but ever-evolving settlement. Independence remains, therefore, a profoundly important ideal that should be upheld whenever powerful interests seek to influence the BBC. But it is nevertheless a poor starting point for an analysis of the Corporation and its place in British society. Not only does it tend to obscure internal contestation, it also unduly focuses attention on instances where the BBC and the government, or other sections of the Establishment, sharply disagree. This obscures collusion and cohesion and overlooks the extent to which the BBC is the product of the same ideological and material forces which have shaped other elite political institutions. A more fruitful approach than asking whether the BBC is authentically independent of government or the state, therefore, is to ask what social forces have shaped its institutional structure and culture and to what extent these arrangements have encouraged or discouraged particular journalistic practices – and whose interests.
In examining a hierarchical organisation like the BBC, it makes sense to take
