CSM EDITORIAL
BBC Director General Tim Davie’s squirming in front of a committee of MPs a couple of days ago was embarrassing to watch. Reminiscent of a schoolboy making up ridiculous excuses for not doing his prep rather than just admitting to the truth and acting contritely.
Davie’s excuse for the organisation’s fading impartiality was flimsy to say the least:
“I think the culture wars are raging, I think we’ve got a real battle on our hands. I walk a tightrope every day on this, but we’ve got to fight for it.”
Davie did bring himself to apologise for the behaviour of ex BBC investigative journalist Martin Bashir. So, Davie is clearly capable of an apology. The problem with him and the BBC is that they only ever apologise after the car crash rather than before it. Damage limitation for them is a cleaning up job rather than a preventative task. The BBC is like an oil tanker that needs time and space to ever turn around – it doesn’t need to be and could become effective at ejecting charlatans within.
At this magazine we look forward to when the likes of Davie are forced into an apology over other BBC-built cheats and quacks, notably the quite dreadful BBC wildlife presenter-cum-animal rights fanatic Chris Packham. It is hardly as if Davie is in the dark on these matters.
This magazine has said for a long time that the BBC needs to lose the licence fee and fast. We have referred to the “death spiral” the BBC cannot escape from. As Michael Portillo put it so eloquently, the BBC is ‘like a polar bear on a receding piece of ice and cannot survive’.
Yet the BBC should survive. It is a redeemable global brand. Sure, the licence fee should go – it is an unfair tax better suited for 1971 not 2021. What unquestionably should happen is there should be a complete clear out of the Augean Stables. The organisation is fat and labyrinthine, hiding far too many jobsworths and funding a surplus of fringe and dangerous activists who have buried themselves like ticks in its soft underbelly. Where is Hercules when you need him to perform such a task?
Let the Squires make a prediction here and now:
It will not be a lack of impartiality or another Bashir-style scandal that cuts the BBC off from licence fee money and thus starts the final battle for survival. The starting gun on the BBC’s demise – before it reforms and modernises into something feasible for the 21st Century – will come from revelations about how BBC cabals have been pocketing money over the years from foreign sales of content, abusing the BBC licence fee payers to have programmes made on the BBC dime and then foreign profits failing to return to the organisation, salted away into offshore companies and via foreign paymasters and lawyers’ accounts.
Follow the money.
Watch the greatest scandal to hit the BBC unfold.
This is the bomb that will go off under the licence fee and end that unfair tax. The pilfering of profits over the years by BBC cabals will shock the British public to such a degree that the future of the BBC will for a while be in doubt.
Mark our words. There is no escaping such dynamite.
Further brave whistleblowers most welcome. Contact the Squires in confidence here.