UK liberals are trying to pre-empt Reform UK taking control of the BBC, and find themselves facing a fundamental problem, writes Phillip de Wet.
If you are a UK liberal worried about stopping the bad guys (i.e., anyone who isn’t liberal) from seizing control of the mass media, there is a small window of opportunity open right now.
The bad guys – or, at least, the extremely not liberal – Reform UK is coming. Conservative bigwigs keep defecting to it. Opinion polls keep saying it would win an election if one were called today. Nigel Farage is all but picking out the new drapes for 10 Downing Street.
Right now, though, Britain is under the firm control of a Labour Party that could do pretty much anything it pleases, if it were to stop the internal bickering for 10 minutes.
As it happens, Labour is in that powerful position during a review of the BBC Charter, something that happens only once every decade.
Powerful check
For all that its reputation is a political football, the BBC is a hugely influential force in the UK, with reach and trust that puts it at the centre of the national conversation. It could be a powerful check on a Reform government, or a lapdog for such a government, or a neutral protector of norms, or, well, whatever. That’s the point of its charter, to determine where the BBC should be on a spectrum of public broadcasting that goes all the way from declared government propaganda unit to vicious watchdog.
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The new BBC Charter is expected to be set in stone on 1 January 2028, and that’s where the timing gets interesting. Reform is pencilled in to take over the running of the government during the course of 2029, for what is typically a term of just about four-and-a-half years in modern Britain. So Reform would have to last into a third term before it gets to touch the BBC.
Grab-proof
Hence, the window of opportunity. If you can get ironclad, rock-solid, can’t-fail protections built into the BBC Charter now, and you can make it proof against a Reform grab.
There’s an even better way. Instead of trying to write lawyer-proof rules, you just build so much inertia into the process, such an unwieldy structure for getting any operational changes implemented, that the sun will set on a Reform parliament before it can do anything about the BBC. (If it lasts beyond two terms, the world is ending anyway.)
That’s not a plan I came up with. The idea was proposed, thinly disguised, in a meeting I sat in on recently. The Chatham House Rule forbids me from identifying the participants, but luckily that is not necessary. You can extrapolate everything you need to know about them from how the meeting went.
One smart and well-meaning set of people put the idea to a bunch of other smart and well-meaning people, who nodded vigorously and muttered the modern equivalent of “hear hear” and “what a jolly fine idea”. Nobody was in an armchair, nobody was smoking a pipe, and I was probably the person closest to having a beard, but it works better if you imagine everyone sitting around in armchairs, smoking pipes, and stroking their beards.
Then a constitutional scholar dropped an inconvenient truth bomb. In the UK, parliament is sovereign. There is nothing one parliament can do that irrevocably binds the next. All the clever structures in the world can be swept away in the legislative equivalent of an instant.
The only thing that can stop a Reform government from doing something ugly, such as putting the BBC’s head on a spike outside the Tower of London, is public revulsion. As long as Reform acts in line with the manifesto that gets it elected, as long as it has public support, it has freedom.
‘Do something’
It would be entertaining to watch the rising panic among liberal intellectuals in the UK, the increasing urgency to Do Something Before It Is Too Late, as that truth hits home, were the whole thing not so boring by now.
Viktor Orbán took Hungary there in 2010, and Narendra Modi took India there in 2014. Donald Trump 2.0 is taking America all the way down the road.
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Do they destroy norms and institutions built with painful care over a long period of time? Every time. Are they a danger to those who put them in power? Absolutely. Can you do a single damn thing to stop them? Nope. You might as well fast-forward to the wailing and the gnashing of teeth.
Recent history also shows us that populists don’t necessarily get to burrow so far into the system that liberal democracy is lost forever. Brazil and Poland have both come back to the centre after a serious flirtation with the fringe.
Maybe the US and the UK will find their way again. Maybe they won’t. I can’t see that the odds of that are significantly swayed by anything that can be achieved as the populist storm draws near. Not if you blind yourself to it, as did liberals in the US, nor if you can see it clearly on the horizon, as can liberals in the UK.
Because that’s the problem with democracy: it’s not a problem you can solve. Sometimes it is something you just have to endure.
- Phillip de Wet is a journalist and former foreign editor at News24.
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