The future of the BBC will now come down to the clarity and quality of thinking inside the organisation. Labour wants to be supportive, but, as in the days of Gordon Brown as Chancellor, funding will be constrained in line with some general decisions, rather than made a special case.
Is there a top quality, oven ready plan inside the BBC ? One which perhaps delivers a rationale for a new, progressive form of predicated taxation, balanced against a defined-if-flexible envelope of programme services ?
I'm not sure. The BBC has been in defensive mode for so long. It's been obsessed with platform prominence and moving people out of London. It eschews advertising, almost, in the UK, yet 'advertises' iPlayer and Sounds almost non-stop. Some non-ad breaks between the football and the news have been longer than the old Pearl & Dean slots at the cinema. It tells us, inelegantly, that it is "pursuing the truth with no agenda", whilst putting major investment into pursuing clicks with departments of "growth" and SEO specialists. It tells us it wants to be the global voice of soft power, but the biggest investment of the past year has been in a US-facing newsroom in Washington and a US-facing marketing team in New York. It tells us of its commitment to "British storytelling" yet pumps licence-feed purchased US pap into iPlayer. It says BBC1 is "a strong mainstream channel that is committed to taking creative risks", such as not dropping Homes Under The Hammer, Escape to The Country, The Antiques Roadshow, and a wide range of other bed-blockers.
Let's hope once we get past the Annual Report, a strategy begins to emerge that gives us confidence that big brains are at work inside the BBC.
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