BBC - TIME TO CALL TIME ON A NATIONAL SCANDAL

Grant Shapps is right to call time on the national

scandal that is the BBC. In the past year, some three

thousand people a week have come before the courts

for the non-payment of the TV licence fee. This can

result in a fine of up to £1,000 and possibly

imprisonment. Anyone looking at the TV schedules -

eighteen repeats in one day - may come to the

conclusion that the £3.5bn the BBC receives annually

from the licence fee represents increasingly poor value

for money.

 

The BBC has become a powerful metaphor for arrogance,

incompetence, profligacy and worse. Senior executives

found wanting are never dismissed, but merely moved to

more senior positions with seemingly meaningless titles.

Those who leave appear do so with extraordinarily

generous compensation.

The Corportion appears to have all but abandoned the

role Lord Reith intended an impartial public service

broadcaster, educating and enriching the fabric of our

society. Instead, it has become a number of

disfunctional and unaccountable feifdoms,

contemptuous of any criticism of how it spends

public money in competing with the commercial media.

Savile and other big names with ludicrously expensive

contracts illustrate the folly of needlessly seeking to

boost audience figures in the ratings' war.

The appointment of the former Labour cabinet minister,

James Purnell, as head of digital and strategy on a salary

of £295,000 - the post was never advertised - may add to

the BBC's admitted institutionl left-wing bias. The most

recent example was news coverage giving prominence to

an EU report suggesting that benefit tourism was not a

problem, while completely ignoring another report

indicating that there are 600,000 unemployed EU

citizens living here on benefit.