Government and B .B .0 .
The debate in the House of Commons on Wednesday on the B.B.C. was not based on the decisions of the Cabinet regarding the Ullswater Report, for the Cabinet has as yet taken no decision. The strictures passed on the Director-General may or may not have been justified—that a strong personality like Sir John Reith should be charged with autocracy is not in itself sur- prising—but they cannot be held to be improper on the ground that the official attacked was not free to reply. The Director-General of the B.B.C. is, in fact, not fettered by the restrictions laid on an ordinary civil servant, and every aspect of the great institution of which he is the head is a fit subject for discussion by Parliament. To what was said about a staff association and supervision over the private lives of employees the Government would do well to pay attention. The question of relay services raises different " issues. If in a given centre a company chooses to frame selected programmes, made up of picked items from British and foreign stations, and relay the programme as a whole to its subscribers—who, if they had a good enough receiving-set could select precisely such a programme for themselves—it is hard to see what harm is done to anyone. And if there is money in it that is no good reason wily the Post Office should be given a right to it.
Previous page
