This article originally appeared at The Guardian.
It must be galling for true believers in Margaret Thatcher’s privatising mission that 35 years after she launched it two of the country’s most popular institutions, theNHS and the BBC, are still publicly owned. It doesn’t quite fit the tale of the triumph of the market. Both organisations still deliver prized universal public services, anathema to the neoliberal mindset. But both also bear the scars of the Thatcherite onslaught, continued under New Labour and Tory governments, including in the form of outsourcing and internal markets.
In the case of the BBC, its political independence has repeatedly been attacked and its journalism cowed. One of the most bizarre myths about the corporation, recycled ceaselessly in the conservative press, is that the BBC has a leftwing bias. As one academic study after another has demonstrated, the opposite is the case. From the coverage of wars to economics, it has a pro-government, elite and corporate anchor. The BBC is full of Conservatives and former New Labour apparatchiks with almost identical views about politics, business and the world. Executives have stuffed their pockets with public money. And far from programme outsourcing increasing independent creativity, it has simply turned some former employees into wealthy “entrepreneurs”, while enforcing a safety-first editorial regime.
The key to how the BBC got where it is today can be found in the years of confrontation in the 1970s and 1980s that are the focus of Jean Seaton’s official history. As she spells out in evocative detail, it was a period of brilliant BBC programme-making, from David Attenborough’s Life on Earth toEastEnders; innovative and radical drama, from Alan Bleasdale’s Boys from the Blackstuff to Troy Kennedy Martin’s Edge of Darkness; uncompromising political documentaries and triumphantly popular soaps. That all depended on independent public funding and a deeply embedded public-service mission – which was precisely the problem from the point of view of a government determined to rip up the postwar political settlement. Egged on by predatory media proprietors, led by Rupert Murdoch, who was determined to take profitable chunks out of the BBC’s growing public realm, the Thatcher government launched a sustained assault on the corporation.
I can’t pretend to be neutral about any of this. My father, Alasdair Milne, was the BBC director general whose orchestrated ousting in January 1987 is the climax of Seaton’s book and a watershed in Britain’s broadcasting history. I knew many of the characters who appear in Pinkoes and Traitors and heard plenty of the stories she recounts from those involved at the time – as well as others she doesn’t. But setting the record straight matters less because of the battlefield casualties than because of what it paved the way for thereafter.
There is no point in romanticising a BBC golden age. The corporation was always an establishment institution, deeply embedded in the security state and subject to direct government control in an emergency. The sexism at the BBC, as Seaton recounts, was appalling, as in many other workplaces, and ethnic diversity non-existent. Around 40% of the staff were vetted by MI5: those who failed the “political reliability” test, often for the mildest of radical connections, were blacklisted – their personnel files marked with the symbol of a Christmas tree. To give a flavour of the relationship, one broadcaster still well-known today had to be brought home from a foreign posting in the 1980s after BBC management became alarmed that his relationship with MI6 was becoming too overt.
But in the 1960s and 70s, a new generation of programme-makers had begun to carve out a more independent and less deferential BBC. That was the institution Thatcher and her political hatchet-men were determined to bring to heel. Their campaign kicked off with the heavily-censored Falklands war. When the BBC referred to “British forces” rather than “our troops”, it was denounced as treasonous by Tory MPs and the Murdoch press. Before long, the government had dispensed with constitutional niceties and started systematically to pack the BBC board of governors with placemen and ciphers as it ramped up pressure on the public broadcaster to take advertising.
A string of manufactured crises followed. Ministers and their media cheerleaders turned one broadcast after another into a political crisis. First there was Maggie’s Militant Tendency, a Panorama expose of far-right influence in the Tory party. That triggered a long-running libel action, brought among others by the MP Neil Hamilton, later discredited in the cash-for-questions scandal. Then there wasReal Lives, a programme which included an interview with Irish republican leader Martin McGuinness, who now takes tea with the Queen. When the governors stopped transmission, BBC staff went on strike. Reporting of Ronald Reagan’s bombing of Libya from British bases was the focus for another government onslaught, led by Norman Tebbit. By the time the BBC’s offices in Glasgow were raided by Special Branch over a film that was never broadcast about a secret British intelligence satellite that was never launched, preparations to sack the director general were far advanced.
Such a thing had never happened before. It was a transparently political operation, and was intended to be so. In the autumn of 1986, Thatcher installed Marmaduke Hussey as BBC chairman, a man with impeccable Conservative connections and a fiercely anti-union record. She did so, Seaton reveals, only after first seeking the approval of Murdoch, the BBC’s “most committed commercial and political enemy”. Hussey then consulted Victor Rothschild, a security adviser to Thatcher (and one-time associate of the Cambridge spies). According to Hussey’s memoirs, it was Rothschild who proposed firing the director general. That was finalised over lunch with the home secretary, Douglas Hurd. Within three months, it was done. No explanation was given. And Hussey used a threat to my father’s pension to persuade him to resign for “personal reasons” – and prevent him speaking out in public.
This was a No 10 coup by any other name – and one from which the BBC has never fully recovered. Once the government had demonstrated it could not only manipulate the licence fee to ensure BBC compliance, but summarily dispatch its leadership at barely one remove, what BBC director general or chair would do anything but bend the knee or jump ship? That is what happened in 2004, after a report by a tame judge into the death of the weapons expert David Kelly and BBC reporting of government deceit over the Iraq war led not to the fall of ministers or officials – but the resignation of the chairman and director general of the BBC.
For Seaton, however, the BBC’s survival meant the sacrifice had been worth it. The BBC had failed to understand the “shift in ideas” and the mood of “the nation” that Thatcher represented, she reckons, and its management had foolishly resisted accommodating the demands of her governors. There was a political assault, true, but in the end clever and decent mandarins, inside both the BBC and the Conservative party, had saved this very British institution from Thatcherite immolation.
Given the author’s view that the BBC should have been a “trustworthy confidant” in the Falklands war effort, that striking miners were “lemmings” and that MI5 vetting of BBC staff was “defensible and proper”, perhaps it’s not surprising that she thinks it all worked out for the best – and that even relative autonomy for a public broadcaster is at best work in progress.
But in her enthusiasm to show that the collision of the 1980s was as much the fault of BBC obduracy and incompetence as government ideology and menace, she tips over into rewriting history. There is a no man’s land between journalism, subject to libel law and instant challenge, and established history – and it’s in that land of factual licence that Pinkoes and Traitors sits. The book is littered with inaccuracies and demonstrable distortions: from names and dates to the self-serving spin of those who have survived to tell the tale. In the case of the Thatcher-inspired sacking of the director general, Seaton claims he had been “misleading the governors” over the Maggie’s Militant Tendency libel action and that they had “intended” to sack this “zombie DG” for three years.
There is no evidence for either claim. The libel case only started to unravel when Tory pressure led witnesses to withdraw their testimony. And as one surviving governor of the time confirms, dismissal had not been discussed even informally until the last few months. If they had even a half-baked case of professional incompetence to justify decapitation, they would have certainly used it – and they did not.
Tellingly, the source of these claims turns out to be Patricia Hodgson, then the BBC company secretary and a long-time Conservative confidante of Thatcher. Three decades later, she is chair of Ofcom, the government’s neoliberal broadcasting and communications regulator whose central purpose is the promotion of “free market” competition. It naturally suits Hodgson to try to depoliticise a destructive assault on the BBC in which she was intimately involved. But in reality it had nothing to do with competence and everything to do with a demonstration of where power lay against a rearguard defence of broadcasting independence.
The consequences were soon clear enough. The BBC was required to privatise a quarter of its programming. John Birt, the pliant director general of a hobbled BBC, forced through the quintessentially Thatcherite “producer choice” internal market, justified as a way of preventing an outright sell-off. Murdoch and Sky were handed lucrative regulatory favours. Two decades on, in a symbolic mark of its creeping corporate capture, the latest BBC trust chair, Rona Fairhead, has become embroiled in the tax dodging scandal that has engulfed HSBC, of which she is also a non-executive director.
For all that, the BBC still remains a battered obstacle to the complete private takeover of communications and a stubborn outpost of a public service ethos. For all its failings, its existence still allows creative programming and journalism that would otherwise be ditched or utterly marginalised. For that to survive in the digital era, its independence has to be re-established, its governance democratised and the threat of corporate dismemberment turned back. That’s the real lesson of the war of the 1980s, sanitised and misrepresented in Pinkoes and Traitors.