BBC chaos: Britain's elite establishment is rapidly sinking

Should the commanding officer of one of Britain’s four Trident nuclear submarines lose contact with their superiors during a future conflict, they know what to do. At exactly 6am GMT they must tune into BBC Radio 4’s Today program. If there’s no broadcast they should assume the UK no longer exists, unseal a pre-written letter from the prime minister and take action against the enemy accordingly.

It’s a so far thankfully hypothetical vignette that demonstrates the centrality both literally and symbolically of the British Broadcasting Corporation to the country it serves.

So bound up is the BBC in the nation’s life that it’s come to be much more than mere broadcaster. In the 103 years since it took to the airwaves, it’s effectively become another arm of the state. So with the Beeb in trouble, after the Sunday resignation of its director general Tim Davie and head of news Deborah Turness over bias claims, Brits have yet more cause for unease.

This isn’t about where we all sit on the left-right axis of the “woke wars” — of which the BBC scandal is the latest manifestation. It’s more the unsettling accumulation of national institutions that have fallen into chaos and disrepute in the last few years.

Continuity of government and other state or state-adjacent bodies was a hallmark of previous decades, particularly during the long administrations of Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair and David Cameron. But in the last 10 years, the UK has burned through six prime ministers, seven chancellors of the exchequer, a huge cast of cabinet ministers and five heads of the civil service.

The established Church of England, meanwhile, has been plagued by allegations of child abuse and cover-ups leading to the departure of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby. The royal family is tainted by its own pedophile scandal, with King Charles III stripping his brother Andrew of his princedom because of his closeness to the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.

Trust in our biggest banks was shattered by the 2008 crash, and has never fully recovered. Brexit was a revolt to “take back control” from remote Brussels eurocrats, but the economic dishonesty that drove it has poisoned the public well even more deeply. The curtailment of liberties during Covid did the same.

The impact of all this upheaval is unmooring. Like the submarine captain, we search for the BBC to confirm that Britain still exists and find it missing.

It’s equally true of all the institutions we might have looked to at times of national strife. Into their place have stepped the multi-billionaire trolls of Silicon Valley, only too happy to exploit the divisions between those who think immigration is diluting UK culture, and others who see the backlash as profoundly un-British. More generally, social media’s ubiquity and the explosion of streaming services undermines any sense of commonality.

The root causes of the institutional failures are different, though not unconnected. While some blame a liberal bias for the BBC’s current travails, I can’t look past a decline in journalistic standards caused by a lack of funding, bad management and the hunt for clickbait in an era when success is only ever measured by audience.

It’s not all the politicians’ fault. Like the civil service, there’s a bloated, blob-like aspect to BBC bureaucracy that seems impervious to efforts to inject the smarter allocation of resources and cash more common in the private sector. Plus there’s the stubborn unwillingness to learn from its mistakes.

As the postwar consensus about Britain’s politics has broken down, so the BBC has become a political football. The previous BBC chairman resigned after it emerged he’d offered to facilitate a substantial loan for then-prime minister, Boris Johnson. That didn’t stop Johnson — a man not known for his sense of remorse or embarrassment — from leading the right-wing media crusade to get Davie to stand down. Figures like the ex-PM have done more than most to chip away at trust in the UK establishment.

That’s why it’s so important that institutions like the BBC, or the royals or the church, can fill the gap vacated by shifty politicos. On Monday, the BBC’s Chair Samir Shah admitted some, but not all, the criticism was warranted. He apologized for the appalling editorial standards that allowed a Panorama documentary to edit Donald Trump’s speech on Jan. 6 2021 to give a misleading impression of how far he’d incited supporters to storm the Capitol. Trump has threatened to sue.

Complaints that the BBC has displayed bias in its reporting of the Gaza war and over trans rights also have some merit. While mistakes happen in any news room, this organization was founded to “inform, educate and entertain.” Those first two are a critical part of Britain’s soft power around the world. It has failed that mission at times.

The lapses are doubly calamitous because they hand ammunition to Trump and his British fellow travelers who’d like to see an end to the BBC altogether. They’re particularly keen to see off its unique, near universal subscription model, the license fee, which is due for review.

When the BBC delivers event television, as it did last week with the culmination of the Celebrity Traitors, a reality show in which famous people connive to metaphorically bump each other off, it is a rare moment that the nation does still come together (11 million of the UK’s 69 million population tuned in, delivering an audience share of 81% of the viewing public.)

US TV viewers have only glimmers of this: the Super Bowl mainly. News there is broadcast in silos, to each his or her version of the truth. The BBC tries, usually succeeds, but in too many cases is failing to pursue objectivity. At a time when so many other institutions are enfeebled, it needs to get back to those core values.