BBC DG Tim Davie used his Royal Television Society interview with employee Amol Rajan to soften us up for World Service cuts, which may come as early as Thursday.
The Government used to fund the World Service via an FCO grant, until Mark Thompson was stitched up and forced to pay from the licence fee from 2014. Last year £1.30 from every licence fee was spent on English and language service broadcasting outside the UK, to a total of £243m (by comparison, the BBC spent £214m on entertainment and comedy programmes).
Since the 2014 change, the FCO has come back into the frame, supporting targeted services in Africa and Asia; in April this year, it promised additional annual funding of just over £94m a year for three years, plus a one-off £4m to help with Ukraine.
If there are to be cuts, it must mean a rebuff of some sort from the FO under James Cleverly.
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