The B .B .0 .'s Critics A group of Conservative
M.P.'s appears to have organised a concerted barrage of questions to the Postmaster-General on the subject of the alleged Leftward tendencies of the B.B.C. They have brought forward few specific charges, and in the one or two concrete cases quoted Major Tryon was able to reply that he had himself been listening in and was satisfied with the impartiality of the impugned talk, or that a study of the script revealed complete freedom from bias. The anxiety of the M.P.'s in question is not generally shared. To keep meticulously in the middle of the road politically (and the middle line of national opinion does not, it is worth observing, run through the middle of the Con- servative Party, but through the outside edge of its Left wing) is no easy matter, and the speaker with no opinions of his own is not likely to be worth listening to. But there is no good ground for suggesting that B.B.C. speakers as a whole, or even individual speakers, have been guilty of serious deviation. Lord Ullswater's Committee found nothing to complain of on that score, and while the eternal vigilance of Commander Bower and his colleagues may on occasion have its uses their daily questions are not to be taken as denoting any general lack of confidence in the B.B.C.
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