What might Whittingdale do next?

The appointment of John Whittingdale as Culture Secretary has been widely reported as an attack on the BBC. Let’s not be so hasty, writes Raymond Snoddy.

The right-wing press had absolutely no doubt about the significance of the appointment of John Whittingdale as Culture Secretary.

War on the BBC has broken out.

The Daily Telegraph even went so far as to splash on the appointment with the line that the future of the licence fee was now in doubt following Whittingdale’s appointment. The move will be seen as “a declaration of war on the BBC.”

The Daily Mail had the Prime Minister “taking aim” at the BBC and suggesting he had been put into office as a sort of hit man to finally “sort out” the Corporation.

The belligerent tone of the coverage overlooked a gentler but perhaps more significant truth about the appointment.

Will wonders never cease – the new Culture Secretary actually knows something about the important portfolio he has now taken on.

Whittingdale has chaired, for almost a decade, the influential House of Commons Media Select Committee and despite right-wing instincts and voting patterns, served with distinction.

This is at least unusual, if not close to unprecedented. Chris Smith, now Lord Smith, had a doctorate on Wordsworth and David Mellor a genuine love of both classical music and Chelsea but Whittingdale knows about culture, media and sport.

To add to the theme the new Sports Minister Tracy Crouch is a qualified football coach.

The new Shadow Culture Secretary, Chris Bryant, is an expert on phone hacking – he is £30,000 richer following the hacking of his phone by the News of the World – and is a former head of European Affairs for the BBC.

It amounts to a small revolution in the way ministers are appointed. Usually a complete lack of knowledge, or even interest in the subject matter of a portfolio, is preferred and as for the Culture department, it can be little more than a staging post for the ambitious on the way to greater things.

How will John Whittingdale, the man who has indeed described the licence fee as “worse than a poll tax”, actually do now that he is sitting around the Cabinet table?

First he would be well advised to be cautious about drawing too much attention to poll taxes.

The young Whittingdale was political secretary to Margaret Thatcher at the very time she was implementing her infamous “community charge” which led to street riots and hundreds of people sent to jail – all helping to undermine her.

There is undoubtedly an element of unfairness, an inequality, about the £145.50 annual charge – though scarcely unique – and it would be good if the new Culture Secretary concentrated on trying to find ways of making the licence fee fairer – without undermining the finances of the BBC.

Whittingdale has also been eloquent in arguing that with changing technology the licence fee is ultimately “unsustainable.”

Well, yes, probably.

But then the Culture Secretary went on to explain that what he meant was that the licence fee would be unsustainable in 20 or 50 years.

Yes indeed, but that’s a long way from saying that it is unsustainable now.

To help Whittingdale, in case he should become over-excited by his initial coverage, one simple sentence has to be repeated over and over again – indeed as many times as necessary.

If you want a national broadcaster providing services in the public interest to the entire community then a universal licence fee is the least bad way of funding such an organisation.

All the alternatives have been looked at countless times over decades and found wanting. A voluntary subscription service would be viable – if you want to reach fewer people and either increase the charge, or dilute the service.

Perhaps such simple verities should be carved on a block of stone and delivered to 100 Parliament Street.

As Sajid Javid said as he moved to become Business Secretary, he was sure John Whittingdale would weigh up the facts following a thorough inquiry before making up his mind.

The new Business Secretary could provide additional help and advice from his new perch. The BBC is at the heart of both training and commissioning for the UK audio-visual sector one of the few industries where Britain can truly be described as world class.

Reduce the scale of the BBC, break it up and you are actually damaging UK enterprise – surely something that would not be in Javid’s current interests.

The Conservatives are supposed to be spitting blood about the allegedly biased BBC coverage of the 2015 Election campaign.

If there is evidence of such a thing let them produce it rather than indulging in anonymous smears.

Politicians’ idea of bias usually covers everything that drops short of warm adulation. Naturally they can cope with the ludicrous, comic-book coverage of national newspapers which happen to agree with them.

What should John Whittingdale’s priorities be now, as part of a full inquiry into the future of the BBC before the award of a new Royal Charter and licence fee settlement?

Look for ways to modernise the licence fee including extending it to all devices used for receiving BBC content?

De-criminalise the licence fee by all means as long as you recognise that £200 million a year might be lost as a result in unpaid licence fees.

Mess about with governance if you must but note that putting the BBC under Ofcom is probably the worst available option.

Insist on better value for money from the BBC but look at ways of rewarding increased BBC efficiency such as providing matching funds.

As a government stop saying vacuous things such as the BBC is too big when it is actually becoming smaller in relative terms on a daily basis compared with the rise of the big international players from Sky to Netflix and Liberty Global.

Whatever John Whittingdale does to the BBC, and it will probably be less blood-thirsty than the headlines imply precisely because he knows something about the subject, there is one big plus in his arrival.

It means the end of influence for Hacked Off.

Both the Conservative manifesto – the one they insist they will implement – and John Whittingdale, believe that independent press regulation under Sir Alan Moses should be given a chance to establish itself.