One may feel slightly cynical about Nadine Dorries’s timing of her announcement about the future of the BBC licence fee. The freeze for two years was already known. Her talk of a new funding model by 2028 is vaguer than her rhetoric implies. She is choosing this moment because of the BBC’s coverage of the revelations about Downing Street parties during Covid. This is more politics than policy.
The problem is that the BBC has made it easy for her. I actually do believe that Tim Davie, the director-general, is serious about impartiality, but the corporation’s implementation of his Action Plan is slow in that special way that only great bureaucracies can manage.
The story about Boris and parties is a classic case where the national broadcaster needs to show super-impartiality; but the coverage has showed no recognition whatever of what Mr Davie seeks.
On the contrary, from the news that starts the day to Newsnight, with presenters like Lewis Goodall, which ends it, the BBC has tried to prove that this is the worst scandal in living memory and will be fatal to Boris Johnson’s premiership. It has dragged out the sort of disgruntled Tory backbenchers it normally despises and given them endless airtime to attack the Prime Minister. It is not far off being a Fox News of the Left, taking a line and incessantly promoting it.
Newspapers, too, have made a great meal of the scandal, and a good read it has often been. But this is exactly the sort of occasion where a compulsorily funded broadcaster should not try to ape Fleet Street. If you had relied solely on BBC coverage last week, you would have concluded that Boris was about to be kicked out. There was almost no presentation of the contrary view – which precedent suggests is likelier to be right – that he probably wasn’t.
As a result, the BBC under-served its audiences, who crave news that is calm, balanced and correctly prioritised. The biggest story in the world last week (and this) is the possibility of Russia invading Ukraine. The BBC virtually forgot this.
The news that a Chinese agent had donated nearly half a million pounds to the office of the Labour MP Barry Gardiner was also strong – a much more significant example of apparent political corruption than the standard “Tory sleaze” tales which the BBC relishes, yet it was downplayed.
Some BBC presenters, including Dan Walker, tweeted against Ms Dorries’s plans. Every time they behave like this, they help her, and hinder Mr Davie.
‘Fuel poverty’ is now an all too real concern
When the phrase “fuel poverty” first entered public debate a few years ago, I criticised it as a cant concept invented by subsidy pressure groups. Why single out fuel? If you are poor, you find it hard to pay for all essentials. The poor needed help in the round, I argued, not through price controls and special government interventions.
Nowadays, however, the phrase “fuel poverty” is wholly justified. The stupefying energy price rises coming our way are caused only in part by the surge in global energy demand after Covid. These intense market pressures will right themselves over time. The grave added problem is the decisions by governments of both parties to rig the energy market for other ends.
Because these governments have decided there is a climate “emergency” and that net zero carbon dioxide emissions by 2050 is the remedy, they have deliberately forced up household energy bills by adding green levies to them. For the same reason, they have taken measures to reduce British production of the fossil fuels – particularly gas – which our country can plentifully supply and will need for years to cover for the “intermittency” of wind and solar energy.
Theresa May’s energy price cap was a clumsy statist measure to mitigate this self-created problem. It does nothing to solve it, and it has already driven many small energy suppliers out of business.
So yes, we are indeed fuel-poor, and getting poorer. And therefore, many are cold, and will get colder.
A similar approach increasingly governs this Government’s attitude to food production. How long before we find ourselves facing policy-induced “food poverty”? I have just invented the phrase, but there is already a word for the consequence – hunger.
A blessed marriage
Here is this column’s final word about the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s connection with Surrey. Having served there as a curate, benefitting from the kindness of the Lambert family in Bletchingly (see this Notebook two weeks ago), he returned many years later in archiepiscopal splendour to marry Uvedale Lambert’s grand-daughter, the jeweller Cassandra Goad, in the family chapel.
All went well with the ceremony until Tutu addressed the couple before the congregation. As Cassandra remembers, “Desmond had the ring [designed by her] on his prayer book and as he waxed eloquent about the love of God we watched the book slope downwards in his hands until the ring slipped off and fell into the heating grating. My father, in the front row, was mercifully able to lift the grating and rescue the ring from where it nestled amid the bed of dust on the heating pipes.
“The Archbishop then proclaimed, to cheers and laughter, ‘I think we can safely assume that the Good Lord has decided to bless this particular union today’ before handing it back to the groom for a second go.” Many years later, the couple are still married, so he would appear to have been right.
