The BBC’s Strategic Review is a masterpiece of self-interest

Raymond Snoddy on the BBC’s “beautifully crafted” Strategic Review, designed “to give critics as few grapple holds as possible”.

There’s something about the BBC’s new strategy document that inevitably conjures up images of Gordon Brown’s Labour Government.

Now when faced with his first general election as Prime Minister, Brown is drawing up policies to create a fairer society and treat the elderly with respect. Brilliant. Fantastic. But what have you been doing for the past 13 years when the gap between rich and poor has yawned ever wider?

So it is with the BBC. While it would be churlish to do anything other than applaud its new found commitment to ending expansion, cutting the cost of overheads and infrastructure, and even culling some services, it is just as reasonable to ask why such things were not done before.

How many years has Mark Thompson been director-general of the BBC? And before him such obvious thoughts obviously failed to occur to the expansionist Greg Dyke who has been extraordinarily voluble of late on how the BBC should be run.

Could it be that the same thing that is motivating Gordon Brown to sharpen his pencil might just be encouraging a little more creative thinking at the BBC – the possible arrival of a Cameron government.

There is another similarity between the two institutions recycling old news as if it were sparkling and new. The document talks about giving the public access to the BBC archive. Wasn’t that announced at Edinburgh six years ago?

Rather like the civil service – in fact often very much like the civil service – governments may come and go but the BBC goes on for ever. Throughout its long history, much of it spent under attack from one set of politicians or another, priority number one has always been institutional survival.

If it takes a fundamental review that questions everything the Corporation does, even if that includes throwing a few sacrificial victims to the wolves, then so be it.

As you would expect, yesterday’s (Tues) document is a masterpiece of self-interest beautifully crafted to give critics as few grapple holds as possible.

Who can complain about more money going into high quality original British content and even better quality local news? Who can be against bringing down the cost of running the BBC from 12p in the licence fee pound to a mere 9p, except to wonder ‘if it’s that easy why not down to 8p?’ And note the cleverness piled on cleverness: use pennies as the yardsticks rather than the real number, the vulgar millions.

But the true genius of the BBC is to partially invent – or at least bring to the fore – a new virtual land: Public Space. Just when the Corporation is semi-voluntarily having to draw in its horns in real life so the BBC will have a new reinvigorated purpose and role in the digital age in its new found land: Public Space.

The BBC will help guarantee and underpin Public Space and be its catalyst and connector. That has surely got to be worth a new licence fee settlement at the very least.

Politicians would be very brave to come out against concepts such as the independence of Public Space, a place where there are no paywalls.

As Luke Johnson, the former chairman of Channel 4 and no slouch at understanding Machiavellian manoeuvres, admitted recently one of the big mistakes he had made as chairman was to greatly underestimate the lobbying power of the BBC.

The cognoscenti might even murmur with admiration at the way that the news of the BBC executive strategy slid its way effortlessly into the public domain. Those who are perfectly content with superficial explanations will accept that someone in the middle ranks of the BBC, or politician who had been briefed off the record, leaked the findings to a political journalist on the Times.

Naturally, the BBC press office described the splash in Friday’s Times as “speculation” just as government press officers do. As soon as you see the word “speculation” you know, as if it were a law of nature, that the story is true. Then after some initial obfuscation from the BBC Trust the whole thing was brought out a mere four days later. There has even been time for an article in the Guardian by Thompson teeing up all the best points.

There is no shortage of freelance leakers in the BBC. The place is full of journalists for goodness sake. But a suspicious mind might wonder at the accuracy, comprehensiveness and timing of it all and how seamless the move to publication was.

But here’s the really clever bit. To pacify the BBC Trust, which has been accused somewhat unfairly of being toothless and partial, the BBC executive would have to offer up some victims. Cuts online, closing down the national Asian Network which some Asians have denounced as mediocre, Switch and Blast, and 6Music.

Shame to lose 6Music. An early leak could galvanise its supporters, double its audience thanks to the publicity, and get a 6Music campaign under way.

Then the BBC Trust could become the protector of the listeners and reject the proposal as too extreme – and everybody ends up happy.

Luke Johnson is probably smiling to himself today. “I told you they were good,” he might well be saying.