POLITICS
Tuning in to the Hurd programme
NOEL MALCOLM
Political excitements come thick and fast these days in the House of Commons. No sooner had Mr Lawson sat down after his grilling about pensioners on Monday than Mr Hurd popped up to describe the end of broadcasting as we know it. There are times when one feels that all the Chamber needs is a few French windows (and perhaps the occasional trouserless minister — Sir Geoffrey springs inevitably to mind) to complete the impression of a high-speed turnover of coups de theatre.
The quarrel about pensions and the argument about broadcasting have, at first sight, little in common; and many of the MPs who had filled the opposition benches for the first of these did not stay for the second. There is, however, one significant common factor. They are both examples of the growing tendency of debates on major policy issues to consist of arguments be- tween two opposing versions of Conserva- tive ideology. What is more, when the Labour Party does take up one side of the argument, the faction it sides with is always the one which is most conservative with a small 'c'.
In the universal benefits debate, for example, Labour is against all those buSy, new-broom Conservatives who want to bring in 'targeting'. On child benefit, Labour has already shown that it is the party for duchesses with young children; now, on pensions and Christmas bonuses, it shows that it is the natural party for • dowager duchesses too.
In the case of broadcasting, the debate in the Tory Party is between old-style pater- nalists and new-fangled populists. Here too Labour's instinctive conservatism makes it hold out for the old way of things. During Monday's questioning of Mr Hurd, it was a Labour MP, Mr Austin Mitchell, who invoked what he called the old Conserva- tive maxim: 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it.' And when that doughty class warrior, Mr Eric Hefter, described the sort of program- mes which he feared would disappear from our screens in a flood Of deregulated quizzes and gameshows, the examples he gave were not 'open space' documentaries produced by anti-racist action groups, but Fortunes of War, the Miss Marples dramas and — wait for it — Brideshead Revisited. Mr Hefter is a literary man; but what these examples surely betray is not so much a love of literature as a love of pre-war Bentley convertibles and tires dansants. Perhaps room could be found for a seventh channel, to be known as the Nostalgia channel, which would carry nothing but 1930s costume dramas, interspersed with readings by Mr Heffer from that other great generator of nostalgia, the Labour Party Constitution.
Labour's distrust of deregulation and commercialisation shares, largely, the atti- tudes of the anti-libertarian wing of the Conservative Party. In particular there is a virulent strain of cultural anti- Americanism which lies just below the surface of this argument. But Labour has an extra motive for protecting the old values of the BBC: the Corporation is, with the NHS, almost the last remaining nationalised industry to command wide- spread popular support. One of the few memorable policies towards the media to have come out of the Labour Party in recent years was Mr Tony Bern's demand that the Times should-be nationalised; if the Times were turned, he thought, into a corporation modelled on the BBC, the change would meet with public approval.
One has only to pursue for a moment the comparison between broadcasting com- panies and newspapers to see just how odd the situation of British television is — and just how tame and cautious the free- marketeering measures of the White Paper are. Under the present system, it is as if anyone who wishes to read any newspaper is obliged to pay for a year's subscription to the Times — even if he never actually reads that paper. It is as if two of the other major dailies were subject to an Independent Journalism Authority, which controlled their printing presses, checked the wording of the adverts they carried and appointed committees to discuss the exact balance of features and news items to be carried on every page. Many people applauded when the IBA intervened on behalf of the 'God slot' on Sunday television; would they be quite so happy to see an IJA telling the Sunday papers that a significant proportion of their pages had to be devoted to full-length sermons by Lord Soper and Mr Gerald Priestland?
Under Mr Hurd's proposals, the BBC and God (in that order) seem to be the main losers. The television licence is to be replaced, eventually, by a system of volun- tary subscription to the BBC — though, for technological reasons, the change-over is lost in the mists of futurity. The Indepen-
dent Television Commission will be less involved in detailed scheduling than the IBA (which it replaces): this probably means that it will no longer be able to insist on a Sunday God slot, though I shall not be surprised if the Kinder, Kiiche und Kirche lobby (roughly translated: Dame Jill Knight and Songs of Praise) has its own way in the end, just as it did with the Education Reform Bill.
Otherwise, to return to my comparison, it is as if the 'independent' papers will continue to be told to print a certain amount of news and current affairs repor- tage. in each issue; to carry a certain quantity of 'regional' stories (in the case of ITV); to ensure that at least a quarter of their material is contributed by freelance writers; and to see that a 'proper propor- tion' of it — whatever that means — is of EEC origin. And in addition, Lord Rees- Mogg's watchdog committee will be draw- ing up its own codes and commandments on sex and violence, over and above the provisions of the Obscene Publications Act.
Altogether, this hardly adds up to a picture of rampant commercial libertarian- ism. The sense of continuity with the present system is strong enough to be reassuring to some and stifling to others. The only people to break free from some of these controls will be the satellite hroadters: it is technology, not free market ideology, which enables them to escape not only the earth's gravity but also Mr Hurd's.
Paragraph 6.9 of the White Paper strikes a feeble blow for market principles (and a
strong blow against grammatical ones): When there was only one channel it was natural and right for the BBC to take great care about the balance between different types of programmes on that channel. When there are ten or more programmes within the reach of the average viewer he and she can increasingly sort this out for themselves.
The historical interpretation of the early BBC implied by this remark is, however, an example of wishful hindsight. The old BBC was not trying to give people what they would choose if they could; it was trying to give them what it thought they ought to have. ,That is the old way of thinking which is still alive and well in this White Paper. Some Conservatives, and many conservatives, still have plenty to be grateful for.
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