A FUTURE FOR PUBLIC SERVICE TELEVISION CONTENT AND PLATFORMS IN A DIGITAL WORLD

CONTENT AND PLATFORMS IN A DIGITAL WORLD
of Welsh Affairs, for example, argues that
responsibility for broadcasting “should be
shared between the UK government and
the devolved administrations” 374 while the
academic Robert Beveridge put it to us that
Scotland should have full control over its
media policy. 375 In a high-profile speech at the
Edinburgh International Television Festival
in August 2015, the Scottish first minister,
Nicola Sturgeon, called for a “federal” BBC 376 ,
a demand that was rebuffed in the UK
government’s 2016 white paper but one that
we think is likely to resurface in any future
referendum debate and that merits very
serious discussion. While there is little point
in this Inquiry pre-empting constitutional
change, there is also little point in refusing to
acknowledge significant shifts in the public’s
appetite for increased autonomy.
In the meantime, as Robert Beveridge told
us, “we need to establish new and better
ways of working within which to secure the
Scottish public interest within the evolving
constitutional settlement.” 377 Following
this logic, devolved administrations are
energetically making the case for further
decentralisation. The Scottish government,
for example, has asked for the ability to
spend the £323 million raised by Scottish
licence fee payers on content and services
of its own choosing including, of course,
content produced centrally. 378 This form of
“budgetary control over commissioning”, it
argues, could even be achieved within the
terms of the existing charter and ought to be
seen as a fairly basic democratic principle.
The Welsh assembly is recommending that
commissioners for the nations and regions
should be based in those areas and provided
with greater control of network funding, “as
a means of increasing the range and diversity
of output, both locally and for the network”. 379
There appears, however, to be few spaces
in UK-wide policy circles in which to argue
for these sorts of policies without being
dismissed as either ‘nationalist’ or ‘parochial’.
This is particularly the case in Scotland where,
as we have already noted, the BBC already
receives the lowest performance ratings in
the UK. We ought to recognise the strength
of the Scottish’s government’s mandate to
secure more control over the country’s future
but we also need to disentangle what are
sometimes still seen as ‘partisan’ nationalist
politics from the wider opinions of the
Scottish public – not every demand for more
autonomy is necessarily a full endorsement of
Scottish National Party policy.
The debate over the idea of a Scottish Six,
a dedicated one-hour news programme
produced in and for Scotland, is a case in
point. John Birt, who as we have seen helped
to pioneer the official ‘nations and regions
strategy’ was fiercely opposed to the idea of
such a programme and committed himself to
“a bitter battle to prevent the BBC being split
apart by the fissiparous forces of devolution”.
He was firmly against the idea of giving
any ground to what he saw as nationalist
arguments when in fact, as Guardian
journalist Charlotte Higgins argues, many
proponents were simply BBC loyalists “whose
intention was not to threaten the institution
but to improve its service for its audience.” 380
This is precisely the point: if the BBC, and
other broadcasters, are to keep up with
changing political tastes and consumption
374
IWA Wales Media Audit 2015, p. 5.
375
See, for example, Robert Beveridge’s submission to the Inquiry.
376
Kate Devlin, ‘Nicola Sturgeon calls for new Scots channels in BBC revolution’, the Herald, August 27, 2015.
377
Robert Beveridge, submission to the Inquiry.
378
Scottish Government, Policy Paper on BBC Charter Renewal, February 2016, p. 8.
379
National Assembly for Wales, Inquiry into the BBC Charter Review, March 2016, p. 3.
380
Charlotte Higgins, ‘The BBC: how the voice of an empire became part of an evolving world’, the Guardian, July 2, .
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