Mollie Nixon, Carlisle Socialist Party
Tasked by austerity governments with saving £500 million by 2029, the BBC has announced its biggest cuts in 15 years – planning to make one in ten workers redundant! New director-general Matt Brittin, who takes home a salary of £565,000, has made the ‘tough choice’ to cut the jobs of skilled and experienced workers to make these savings. The broadcaster plans to limit spending in all departments, including on travel and commissioning freelancers, a move that will deplete the quality of already biased journalism offered to the public in an age of disinformation. Viewers have already seen the effects of this: with BBC pundits reporting on this year’s men’s football World Cup, held in North America, from sunny Salford.
Philippa Childs, head of Bectu (now part of Prospect), the biggest union at the BBC, highlighted that the news of these cuts “brings the importance of a sustainable funding model into sharp focus,” referring to TV licence fees – the regressive tax which provides the BBC with most of its funding. Over the past decade, licence fee revenue has dropped by £1.3 billion. At £15 a month now, it will continue to struggle to compete in a market dominated by cheaper streaming services with bigger shows and billionaire backers.
Campaigners, including often union leaders, have tended to back demands to increase the licence fee in line with inflation. This will not fix the current problems with the BBC. After this round of cuts, we would be paying an increased rate for a diminished service! The problem is the funding model itself. As well as fighting for their members, including organising serious industrial action to stop the cuts, unions should be calling for the BBC to be fully nationalised, fully funded and free for all at the point of use.
Democratise the media
We deserve good-quality, well-funded journalism and programming, with a say in what is produced. The BBC, even under public ownership, will ultimately always be the capitalist state’s mouthpiece unless we also take it and the wider economy into democratic workers’ control. We need the working class to have its own independent mass media to counter the bosses’ propaganda. In a socialist society, this would form the foundation of a media system owned publicly and democratically controlled by workers – opening up access to the media to the millions not the billionaires. This would achieve genuine freedom of the press and, at last, fully reflect the interests of the working class.
