BY PAUL T HORGAN
By late April 1945, there was no hope for the relief of Berlin by German forces. The irony was that the Nazi capital held little strategic significance in the war, with one obvious exception. The fall of Berlin would not alter Germany’s fortunes, apart from the fact that this fall would eliminate Germany’s current leadership, a leadership that refused to bring the war to an end despite there being no point in continuing.
Germany’s strategic situation had been dire for just under two years. By August 1943, Germany could no longer win the war. By October 1944, Germany had lost. In similar circumstances in 1918, Germany had sued for peace rather than face her own lands becoming a battleground. It is just one of many indictments against the quality of German governance that it was impossible for the country and its people to arrive at a political solution based on the reality of the situation before the country was thoroughly wrecked and hundreds of thousands of civilians killed.
The staff of the Führerbunker knew that the end was near and there was no further room for hope. So they took matters into their own hands. They held a sustained, alcohol-fuelled, orgy. They literally acted like there was no tomorrow, because for some of them, or most of them, there wasn’t.
This approach to inevitable doom seems to be conceptually similar to what is happening at the BBC at present. The corporation is doomed. The charter comes up for renewal in 2027, or in just two years’ time. By that time, an agreement has to be reached as to how the BBC will be funded. The current funding model, a household licence for the right to view live broadcast content, mostly irrespective of source, plus the right to access the BBC’s own streaming services, is unsustainable, mainly because, despite the number of households increasing in the UK in proportion to the rise in population, the number of households paying for the TV Licence is falling. It is not due to a dramatic increase in households breaking the law by watching broadcast content illegally. It’s because there is increasingly no need to pay a TV Licence to watch TV any more.
Competition to the BBC abounds. There are numerous commercial streaming services. All the live broadcasters provide free catch-up streaming services. It is possible to watch content from these services on a TV without breaking the law.
The TV Licence as a means of revenue for the BBC is unsustainable and has been so even before the BBC’s charter was renewed in 2017. Had it not been for the destabilising effects of Brexit, this anachronistic means of financing the BBC would have been addressed over a decade ago. But the can cannot be kicked down the road any longer.
The BBC will have to be financed by alternative means. If the Labour government imposed some kind of tax on the revenue of Internet Service providers such as BT, this cost would be passed on to users, possibly disproportionately; it would be seen as a kind of Poll Tax.
BT, who also provides live broadcast services, may object to having to pay for a competitor and could lobby against it effectively. Extending the licence fee’s ambit to cover all streaming services would be unenforceable unless the BBC had access to details about everyone’s internet use, and this would be a gross intrusion on personal privacy. If the tax was targeted at individuals’ use of mobile phones or Internet access, this would also be seen as a Poll Tax. The political damage for Labour would increase the already-high prospect of Sir Keir Starmer being yet another single-term Labour Prime Minister. Labour’s dismal record of limited-duration governments, a trend broken by only one of its leaders, would continue. Any such taxation would be repealed by the first incoming non-Labour government lest they meet the fate of their defeated predecessors. So the ‘BBC Tax’ would have been a pointless delaying action.
There would also be the issue that if the BBC were to be funded by direct taxation, its people would become civil servants, and their actions would have to be more accountable to the taxpayer. Ministers would start having to take responsibility for the BBC’s content.
The BBC could not be run at an arm’s length. The Post Office was run as an ‘arm’s length business’, and this has ended in an epic multi-billion-pound disaster that has irrevocably damaged the lived of thousands of innocent people, including children.
There could not be a risk of the BBC becoming yet another epic state business disaster, and the risk of this would be very high if revenue inspectors for any ‘BBC Tax’ targeted and thus victimised members of the public by the thousand.
The only realistic alternative is for the BBC to be only available by subscription. If the licence fee is to continue, then it would have to be reduced, and the shortfall made up by commercialisation and a cut of the BBC’s services. In the multimedia age, the BBC does far too much, and actually stifles competition by undercutting any potential rivals.
But whatever happens, the current BBC is doomed, as its revenue cannot help but decrease dramatically, and soon. There is no way every household in Britain will be willing to subscribe to the BBC in preference to Sky, Netflix, or Disney+. The up-to-now guaranteed flow of money into the BBC will quickly dry up. A large chunk of the 21,000 people directly employed by the BBC will lose their jobs. Those people may not find there is another job in broadcasting for them.
And this may explain what is currently going on at the BBC. There you will find the organisational and ideological version of an orgy. As the BBC, as well as its current staff, seem to have no visible future after 2027, the people there are acting like there is no tomorrow and letting their extreme beliefs shamelessly hang out for everyone to see.
I dumped my TV Licence in disgust at the BBC’s content back in Summer 2020, so it is not possible for me to have a detailed view of the corporation’s output. However, there are reports of drag queens held up as role models on the infant’s channel CBeebies, how Dr Who seems now obliged to tick all the viewer-alienating woke boxes, and the piece de resistance, a documentary that seems little more than a puff-piece for anti-Semitic genocidalists Hamas being broadcast on BBC2.
This last item seems a prime example of the end-times orgy at the BBC. Not only was there a major failure, if not complete absence, of due diligence to ensure that a film shot in Hamas-controlled territory did not include Hamas propaganda, but the main participant was the son of a senior Hamas official, and it seems that Hamas directly or indirectly received money from the documentary’s production crew. The English subtitles used did not match the words spoken, which were openly anti-Semitic. The cameraman is on record as applauding Hamas’ attack on Israel. This was less a documentary and more a propaganda film.
And these are the reports on the BBC’s conduct just this month.
At the time of writing, no-one from any senior post connected with the Hamas documentary has been fired, but internal and external investigations continue. There has definitely been misconduct by BBC staff, but no-one has been suspended, perhaps because the misconduct is currently being explained away as incompetence. So that’s all right then. Apparently. That’s the BBC for you.
But what the British public are being faced with is at least two more years of orgiastic behaviour from the BBC. The tanks are getting closer to the bunker. There is no hope any more. So broadcast standards are falling like a rock in a well at the BBC, just as personal morality rapidly disappeared beneath the pavements of Wilhelmstrasse 77 when Soviet shells started hitting the bunker’s above-ground gardens. Rather than ‘inform, educate, entertain’, the BBC’s new mantra seems to be to ‘deceive, indoctrinate, titillate’, and the staff that remain at the Broadcasting House bunker, will enjoy every last self-gratifying moment of it, right up to the BBC’s inevitable end.
Paul T Horgan worked in the IT Sector. He lives in Berkshire.