Is Channel 4 genuinely under threat?
As talk surfaces of selling off the not-for-profit broadcaster, it would be wise for the channel to go on a war footing to protect its status against any possibility of political vandalism. By Raymond Snoddy.
An essential skill for any Prime Minister or senior politician is to be able to swear that black is white and do it with such passion and conviction that at least a doubt lingers in the minds of listeners.
David Cameron is very good at this – and he certainly stirred up a hornet’s nest in the Conservative Party this week by saying that Cabinet ministers would have to resign if they wanted to campaign against a referendum “yes” vote.
One day on and naturally he insisted that such a view was quite mistaken and that journalists had either misinterpreted, or in a neat variant “over-interpreted” his views.
Read the transcript and make up your own mind.
Extreme linguistic vigilance is needed not just on big issues such as UK membership of the EU but in relatively small matters such as the future of Channel 4. Interest in privatising Channel 4 waxes and wanes according to the political mood.
The reason we never quite know the latest state of play at any one moment is that the Treasury keeps a more-or-less permanent list of things that could be privatised.
Channel 4 is always on that list and moves up the list at periods of uncertainty, or right-wing vigour – the sort of period we are entering now.
Conservatives, however, should never forget the channel was created under Mrs Thatcher’s Government in 1982 and given its distinctive structure and remit by one of her most civilised and creative ministers, Willie Whitelaw.
There will almost certainly be broadcasting legislation in the next few years as the future of the BBC and its Royal Charter come to the fore. If there is, how easy it would be to tack on a privatisation of Channel 4 clause, pocket £1 billion or so and attach appropriate safeguards.
It has already been reported that in the last Parliament attempts to privatise the commercial public service broadcaster, emanating from the Treasury, were blocked by Vince Cable and the Lib Dems.
With no Lib Dems in government you don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to start looking for signs of trouble on the horizon.
The government has this week stoked up such fears with a single word, while apparently trying to do the opposite.
In a written Parliamentary answer Lady Neville-Rolfe, a junior minister in the Department for Culture, Media and Sport said the following: “There are no plans currently to remove the public-service conditions imposed on Channel 4 or to privatise it.”
Such an answer should set the alarm bells ringing in the mind of any sentient human.
She said “currently” and currently means right now, not tomorrow or the next day.
It might have been slightly better – but only slightly – if the word had been dropped and the Government had said it has no plans to privatise. But even that would have been far from perfect because, after all, plans can be drawn up in the autumn or after Christmas, or more precisely as Lady Neville-Rolfe put it, after Ofcom’s third review of public service broadcasting.
The Government could have said, but didn’t, that it would not privatise Channel 4 – no ifs no buts. Even then, as David Cameron has eloquently demonstrated this week, what is said one day can mean something quite different the next.
Channel 4 would be wise from here on in to assume that it could be in the firing line and go on a war footing to protect its status against any possibility of political vandalism.
You will rarely go wrong if you assume that there is no limit to the follies that politicians are capable of – if you want a concrete example HS2 will do.
The good news is that Channel 4, because of its public service remit, is not exactly a money-making machine. Last year it made £4 million on total revenues of £938 million.
You could even make more money in an HSBC current account.
And that’s the rub of course. The Channel 4 business as it currently stands, which happily makes programmes that are not commercial and produces the best daily news programme in the UK, could not be privatised.
You could of course raise that billion or maybe more with a bit of flexibility on the remit and anyway, do we need quite so many minority programmes which not many people watch? After all, we have the BBC for all that public service stuff and no-one is suggesting privatising the Corporation.
The only certainty is that a privatised Channel 4, even if it retained the name and outer shell, would no longer be a unique institution in world broadcasting – a public service schedule funded by advertising.
As the Channel 4 chairman Lord Burns, himself a former Treasury panjandrum put it this week: “As a not-for-profit organisation Channel 4 plays a unique role as both a creative greenhouse for the UK and a major contributor to the creative economy.”
Channel 4 also noted that 11.3 million people had registered with its online platform including, remarkably, 50 per cent of all 16-34-year-olds.
The last time there was a serious threat to privatise Channel 4 it was seen off by the then chief executive Michael Grade.
The Conservative peer Lord Grade could play an important role in helping to block any gathering threat to Channel 4 – unless he has changed his mind.
Lord Grade seems to be a very different person to Michael Grade and changes his mind a lot.
Against such an uncertain political background it would be good for Channel 4 to make common cause with the BBC. They come from the same neck of the woods and have more in common than they think.
Previous efforts have foundered mainly because the BBC is often sleekit to use the Ulster Scots vernacular. The word means untrustworthy, verging on the duplicitous, and indeed former Channel 4 chairman Luke Johnson and former BBC chairman Sir Michael Lyons nearly came to blows during the attempt to establish an Entente Cordiale.
Maybe their successors will realise where the real threats are likely to come from and unite to repel them.