Signal
Can the BBC save itself? Should we care?
Culture secretary Nadine Dorries, the most ardent of Boris Johnson stans, obligingly threw the deadest of cats on to the table at the weekend to distract from the woes of her beleaguered boss. She announced a two-year freeze on the BBC licence fee and dangled the prospect of scrapping it entirely.
The BBC is often valued, and often trumpets itself, as a thing that brings the nation together. I think it has transmogrified into doing the opposite, with a superior sneer that treats Britain like something it’s found on its shoe.
gareth Roberts. Spiked-online.
Dorries must be well aware that any threat to the BBC always results in a Furies’ chorus of anger, horror and prophecies of woe, coming from precisely those people the Tory grassroots are likely to detest. And up they obligingly popped – Polly Toynbee, Nish Kumar, Gary Lineker, all present and correct. This wasn’t so much political theatre as a pantomime with stock phrases and responses. She’s behind you!
Over the years, everybody became posher, and 10 times madder. Raise a polite objection, even in the most agreeable way, to any of the beliefs in the suite, and people stare at you as if you’d defecated in their handbags. You can see them file you away mentally as a nasty person.