Broadcasting
A victorious witchhunt
Paul Johnson
The National Union of Journalists have won a notable victory in their witch- hunt against David Dimbleby. I have written about this odious campaign before, but it is worth recapitulating the facts. Dimbleby has served the BBC as a com- Mentator, presenter and interviewer most of his working life, and so far as I know no for has ever been made against him tor lack of political objectivity. Indeed, he has sought to carry on the high standards Set by his father, Richard Dimbleby, who fairness. the BBC a world reputation for fairness. David Dimbleby has covered all the party conferences for the BB for the last ten years. The BBC has no criticcism of his work for them. But he also, like his father, helps to run the old family newspaper business which Publishes the Richmond and Twickenham Times. Last October, in an effort to save the business and preserve the jobs of his ebmPloyees, he transferred its printing to T. 'alley Forman in Nottingham. A newspap- er connected with this firm has a dispute With the NUJ. As a result, the theologians of the NUJ decided to black Dimbleby's Paper and the union ordered its 13 mem- rs out on strike. This was an unlawful secondaryaction under the 1980-82 legisla- ttinn, and in due course Dimbleby invoked the 1982 Act against the NUJ. The union's witchhunt against Dimbleby began last October, when the print transfer took Dice and he has in fact been used by the *"'e wily four times since then. But the tillveeation of the 1982 Act has since tr„econle the official reason why the NUJ is fr,'118 to get him banned. As a spokesman t-hr the union put it: 'It was spelled out to w",se BBC], you can't accept that a man "0 uses Tory employment legislation 'Mina his workers is politically unbiased.' This argument, of course, is rubbish, a mere cover for the witchhunt. The 1982 Act is not `Tory legislation', it is the law the uses or and to argue that anyone who "'s or abides by any law shows bias towards whichever party passed that par- ticular statute is preposterous. In any case, the BBC itself has invoked the 1982 Act, notably to prevent the NUJ from 'blacking' Dimbleby. So, according to NUJ theology, the BBC itself is 'biased' as a corporate entity and ought to be blacked in tow. But most members of the NUJ who work for the BBC are not prepared to go along with this — they value their jobs — so the union has decided to concentrate on one victim.
the BBC put up a rather reluctant fight on Dimbleby's behalf earlier this year, to enable him to provide their Budget cover- age. But that was the limit of their courage. Since then, the NUJ witchhunters have gone to the Labour Party and got a ruling from its National Executive that Dimbleby would not be given accreditation to the party conference this year in Brighton. The BBC could easily have defeated this ploy by telling the Labour Party that, if it proposed to censor their team, then they would not cover the conference at all. BBC coverage is far more important to Labour than any nice point of union theology, and the party would unquestionably have yielded and dropped its ban. The BBC fought and won an identical battle on this principle against a much more formidable opponent, the Soviet government, which refused to accept Tim Sebastian as their Moscow correspondent. The BBC insisted that, in that case, they would have no Moscow correspondent at all — and the Soviet authorities gave in. All the BBC had `Pew! What a scorcher!' to do was to display similar, firmness against the Labour Party.
Instead, the Corporation invented a distinction which, for mealy-mouthed pusillanimity and cowardly evasion, must be unique in its annals. It argued that, whereas the Budget, on which it had stood firm — or not actually surrendered, any- way — was a public occasion, the Labour Party conference was a private one, to which the press and TV were invited. Therefore, its casuists proceeded, the party had a right to object to particular indi- viduals and the BBC, in abiding by that objection, was sacrificing no principle. So Dimbleby could not cover the Labour Party conference.
As if this were not enough, the BBC, again under NUJ pressure, decided that since Dimbleby was not attending the Labour conference on its behalf, he could not be asked to cover the other three party conferences either. This, of course, is exactly what the witchhunters were hoping for, since their object is to hunt Dimbleby out of the BBC altogether. The decision, apart from being cowardly, makes non- sense of the BBC's ostensible reasons for repecting the Labour Party's 'privacy', since in effect it gives the Labour Party a veto on whom the BBC should use to attend the Conservative, Liberal and SDP conferences also.
As usual with acts of cowardice, it has been accompanied by lying, since a BBC spokesman was instructed to say that the decision to ban Dimbleby from all four conferences was 'purely an editorial deci- sion'. The fact is it was a supine capitula- tion to union blackmail. The NUJ spokes- man, in his exultant and jeering comment, came much closer to the truth when he remarked: 'It seems they have got the message and have decided to remove him from all their conference plans.' In a feeble attempt to prevent Dimbleby making any fuss about his victimisation, and the Cor- poration's acquiescence in it, the BBC announced that he had been invited to do `a major documentary series' on 'Anglo- American relationships'. We shall have to see whether the NUJ allows this to take place either. They have now got the BBC on the run, and Dimbleby is unlikely to be the only victim to go to the stake. I have a shrewd suspicion that their next target will be Sir Robin Day who, with the censoring of Dimbleby, is virtually the only major figure who still upholds the BBC's old standards of objectivity and fairness.
The decision to submit to threats and ban Dimbleby was, I believe, taken at the highest level in the BBC. Douglas Hurd, the minister responsible for broadcasting, should conduct a full investigation into the murky affair, and backbench Conservative MPs should make sure that its findings are made public. For the collapse of the BBC's professional standards and political inde- pendence which this disgraceful surrender involves has a direct bearing on Parlia- ment's forthcoming decision on the BBC licence fee.
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