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The fiercest attacks on the BBC come from conservatives. I was reminded of this during a stimulating discussion with Peter Wallis, aka Peter York, last week. Peter’s doing some research on attitudes towards the BBC and seemed to be under the impression that I was someone worth asking. Can’t think which crazy fool gave him that idea.

Among the subjects I failed to enlighten Peter on was the connection between conservatism (which I loosely subscribe to) and support for the BBC (which is only right and proper among civilised people). He ended up writing down “social cohesion”, which I do think is important, but not in the way it’s normally taken to be. I’m with Mark Thompson on this one. He says:

I think there is a lot of evidence that this remains quite a closely-knit culture where people have a lot of things in common …it’s for the British public to decide how far they want to feel part of different cultures and communities. The truth will be some of both.

In other words, national programming will survive because people desire some level of cohesion.

The reason that conservatives should support the BBC is a prudential one. I am not talking here about social conservatives (who oppose the BBC’s cultural liberalism), or free-market conservatives (who find the license fee just as offensive); I am talking about traditional, old-fashioned conservatives - Burkean conservatives. These people should be instinctively against any radical change, especially when the system as a whole is in such a state of flux.

Britain’s broadcasting system has grown up through a patchwork of piecemeal reforms. It is imperfect, unusual, and untidy. Idealists would like to sweep it all away and replace it with something more rational (or replace it with nothing, which is what replacing it with the market would be). But, as Burke observed all those years ago, idealists are to be ignored. He preached reform not revolution. Thankfully, that is where the current consensus sits today.

Burke also said that tough times would bring out the genius of long-standing institutions. John Lloyd, one of the best commentators on this sort of thing, makes the same point in an excellent article in Prospect:

We have inherited a great boon: a large and powerful media organisation that is open to debate … all of its programmes are explicitly part of the public square—open to argument exactly because we are nearly all paying for them, because we all have a stake in the BBC as a national, public institution.

Lloyd calls the BBC an accidentally lucky gift. Conservatives, of all people, should know how precious these gifts are.

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