The BBC. Tom Mills
a comprehensive history of the BBC, nor a full account of its institutional life as a whole. Rather, the central theme is that of the BBC’s place in the history of British democracy and its relationship with the centres of power in British society, principally corporations and the state. Here the basic picture is clear enough, even if it is rarely acknowledged in official discussions. The BBC has never been independent of the state in any meaningful sense, while the relative autonomy it once enjoyed from corporations and the logic of the market has been steadily eroded since the 1980s.
It has already been argued that the laudable values with which the Corporation is associated should not obscure an adequate understanding of the BBC as it really is. Equally though, such values should not be casually dismissed. For such ideals have, to some extent at least, been embedded within the BBC’s organisational DNA and have had some impact on reporting, albeit usually in limited ways and at the margins. This book does not take the values of liberal journalism or public service broadcasting for granted. On the contrary, while offering an historically informed, clearsighted analysis that acknowledges the reality of the BBC’s often lamentable record, this book also recognises in the Corporation, and the public service ideals that have animated it, an unfulfilled promise of independent journalism and a more democratic and accountable news media.
On 12 May 1926, the BBC’s founding father John Reith was reading the lunchtime radio news bulletin when an important note was passed to him by a member of staff. For over a week, the British Broadcasting Company, as it was then called, had been on what Reith referred to as ‘a wartime sort of footing’.1 The UK’s first and only General Strike had been called by the Trades Union Congress (TUC) in support of the mine workers, bringing everything – including the newspaper industry – to a halt. As a result, the young broadcasting company had become both a vital source of news for the public and a vital instrument of propaganda for a government determined to break the strike.
The note handed to Reith stated, unexpectedly, that the TUC had called off the strike after nine days. He asked his staff to get confirmation of the news, but not from the TUC; continuing with his broadcast, he scribbled on the note: ‘Ask No 10 for confirmation’. Shortly afterwards, the prime minister’s secretary confirmed that the news was indeed true. Unbeknown to striking workers, the members of the TUC General Council had earlier that day visited 10 Downing Street to inform the government that they were calling off the strike despite not having won a single concession for the miners. This was a resounding victory not only for the mine owners, but also for the government and the City of London, which were determined to drive down wages in an effort to restore the value of the pound and maintain the British Empire’s international standing.
In the 7 p.m. news bulletin, Reith read ‘a verbatim account, from No 10, of what had happened’.2 Two hours later, he relayed on-air messages from the king and the prime minister, followed by what Reith described in his diary as ‘a little thing of our own’.3 ‘Our first feeling on hearing of the termination of the General Strike’, he announced, ‘must be one of profound thankfulness to Almighty God, Who has led us through this supreme trial with national health unimpaired.’ He continued:
You have heard the messages from the King and the Prime Minister. It remains only to add the conviction that the nation’s happy escape has been in large measure due to a personal trust in the Prime Minister. As for the BBC we hope your confidence in and goodwill to us have not suffered.4
Reith finished his ‘little thing’ by reading William Blake’s poem ‘And Did Those Feet in Ancient Time’. Blake, ironically enough, had been a supporter of the French Revolution, but his poem had become popular during the Great War as Hubert Parry’s patriotic hymn ‘Jerusalem’. As Reith read out the words, an orchestra played Parry’s score in the background. Once Reith was finished, the BBC choir sung the hymn’s final verse, a rousing call to arms for the Christian peoples of England.
Recalling these events three decades later, Reith wrote that ‘if there had been broadcasting at the time of the French Revolution, there would have been no French Revolution’. Revolutions, he reasoned, are based on falsehoods and misinformation, and during the General Strike, the role of the British Broadcasting Company had been to ‘announce truth’. It was, he thought, quite proper that it had been ‘on the side of the government’ and had supported ‘law and order’.5
At the time of the General Strike, the BBC was still involved in negotiations over its reconstitution as a public corporation, which had been recommended by a committee only months earlier. The postmaster general, the minister to whom the BBC was directly accountable, was William Mitchell-Thomson, who as chief civil commissioner also directed the government’s semi-secret strike-breaking operations, coordinated by the innocuous-sounding Supply and Transport Committee. As postmaster general, Mitchell-Thomson could oblige the BBC to broadcast any messages the government decreed. And under the BBC’s Licence – the legal basis of its operations – the government had the power to commandeer the BBC ‘if and whenever in the opinion of the Postmaster-General an emergency shall have arisen’. This formal power was never exercised during the General Strike, but it did not need to be. The threat itself was a powerful inducement for compliance.
The BBC’s point of contact with the Cabinet during the strike was J. C. C. Davidson, who was responsible for the government’s public relations and was Mitchell-Thomson’s deputy at the Supply and Transport Committee. A reactionary and a propagandist, Davidson was anxious about what he called the ‘politically uneducated electorate’ and the threat it posed to ‘our strength in the country’.6 Throughout the strike, he exerted what he referred to in a private letter as ‘unofficial control’.7 What this meant was that the BBC was afforded a large degree of operational autonomy, remaining formally independent, but on the tacit understanding that it would broadly serve the political purposes of the government.
There were those in government who favoured a more robust approach. A minority of zealous reactionaries in the Cabinet, led by Chancellor Winston Churchill, ‘regarded the strikers as an enemy to be destroyed’,8 and they pushed for the use of all means at the government’s disposal to achieve that end. In discussing the status of the BBC, Churchill said ‘it was monstrous not to use such an instrument’.9 Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, however, took a different view. He thought Churchill a liability and confided to Davidson that he had been ‘terrified of what Winston is going to be like’.10 Baldwin and Davidson favoured a more subtle and, they believed, effective approach, as did the notoriously authoritarian home secretary William Joynson-Hicks, known as ‘Jix’, who chaired the Supply and Transport Committee. Davidson described the rationale behind their preferred strategy in a letter written shortly after the strike:
Winston was very strong in his insistence that the Government ought to assume complete possession [of the BBC]. I was equally strong and Jix shared my view, that it would be fatal to do so for the very simple reason that the people that you want to influence are those who would have at once ceased to listen had we announced that all news was dope, while on the other hand the diehard element who criticised us for our impartiality are on our side in any case.11
The ‘moderates’ in the Cabinet used the threat posed by these ‘diehard element[s]’ to coerce the BBC. Baldwin, Davidson wrote, ‘played a very skilful game in postponing a decision by the Cabinet on the question repeatedly raised by Winston and F. E. [Smith] of taking over the BBC’. Indeed, it was not until 11 May 1926, a week into the strike, that the Cabinet finally decided that the BBC would not be brought under direct government control.12
The fact that the BBC escaped being commandeered has sometimes been seen as a victory for independent broadcasting. But the historical record suggests, fairly unambiguously, that the BBC was allowed as much independence as was thought strategically expedient from the perspective of the government. As Andrew Marr has put it, the BBC escaped ‘a straightforward takeover by panicky or gungo-ho