Warning

Yesterday's cuts to the BBC's services outside the UK are, as announced to the public, about as poorly detailed as last Friday's mini-budget, and a horrible warning to UK licence-payers. 

Apparently, the BBC needs to save £28.5m "immediately"; in the normal cycle, one would expect these to be cuts for 2023/24, yet Tim Davie talked about £30m for 2023/24. In the last full year reported, the BBC spent £243m of licence fee income on the World Service; the Government will contribute an additional £94m a year over the next two financial years. 

So this looks like a 12% cut in licence fee spending. And looking from the outside, the big numbers are saved by getting out of radio. It's the end of radio services in Arabic (spoken by at least 315m) Persian, Kyrgyz, Uzbek, Hindi (342m) Bengali (229m) Chinese (1.3bn), Indonesian, Tamil, and Urdu (230m).   It's entirely possible that the BBC may reach its target of 500m global users in this centenary year, but it'll take some clever counting to maintain that figure. 

The two other elements of saving are in based more production outside the UK (this has problems of maintenance of standards, as evidenced by rumblings about some operations in Africa); and cuts in News, who increasingly over the years have ridden piggy-back on additional funding to World Service. 

How soon will we hear of Tim Davie's more digital, less radio strategy for the UK ?