22.08.1996

BBC chickens come home to roost

All is not well within the hallowed portals of the BBC World Service. Certainly this is the case if you are a Guardian reader. This newspaper has been running a ‘Save the World Service’ campaign for some time. Its letters column has been publishing any number of letters from all over the world spelling out the World Service’s priceless aid to democracy, freedom and the British way.

All this is not purely bullshit. The World Service is indeed under threat. The head of the BBC, John Birt, has proposed a restructuring that puts many World Service functions under the BBC’s domestic service.

And there are of course swingeing cuts, with about 50 redundancies at BBC Monitoring in Caversham, Reading, approximately 10% of staff there. BBC Monitoring is subordinate to the World Service, though its functions are exactly the opposite - it watches the rest of the world’s media, as opposed to broadcasting to the rest of the world.

Early in July, I went to a rally at Westminster addressed by various worthies like John Tusa and opposition MPs. They described John Birt as a kind of ‘revolutionary’ bent on smashing up the tried and tested World Service. I was surprised that people who went to the rally were not served with cucumber sandwiches and cream teas, so stifling was the appeal to a kind of never-never Britishness that these islands supposedly represent.

To go from fantasy to fact: the World Service is one of the finest examples of the bourgeois media. Its output, certainly on the English service, is far superior to the BBC’s domestic fare. A listener can indeed get a better sense of the world’s diversity and breadth of current affairs than would be possible from any other source. The World Service has little in common with the domestic side of the BBC, so pushing the two closer together is madness.

However, there is another side to the story. The World Service is intimately linked to the British government. At the end of the day, however subtle and skilful it may be, it was and is a propaganda station - like Radio Moscow or the Voice of America, and it played its part in the agitprop side of the Cold War. The BBC Monitoring station is especially close to both the British and US governments and essentially exists to serve them. The redundancies there arise from a £1,200,000 cut in funding from the Foreign Office.

The principal role of the World Service was actually to help fight the Cold War. Its very prestige and reputation was in fact its sharpest weapon, but its ties to the British state were concealed as much as possible, even if not always very convincingly. Now that the Cold War is over, it is increasingly surplus to requirements in an atmosphere of financial retrenchment in government. This is the truth that The Guardian will not tell you, which assiduously builds up the myth that the World Service was the voice of calm objectivity in a world ‘marred’ by ideological discord.

Andrew MacKay