How to make the BBC a fair arena for UK election fight

Good morning. Two consequential things we know about the next election: one of the big battlegrounds will be economic policy, and the most important arena the contest will be fought in will be the BBC. As it happens, a new review into how the corporation covers economic policy has just come out. Some thoughts on that below, and as always, email us at the address below.

One thing we can say with certainty about the next election is that the most important media outlet will be the BBC. Whether it comes at voters via its smartphone app, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, LinkedIn, or on the radio or television, the overwhelming majority of British voters will get some or all of their news from the BBC. According to Ofcom, eight in 10 UK adults use the BBC in some form every week, while 73 per cent use the BBC for news.

So the decisions it makes about how to cover British politics matter more than almost everything else. Some of the most important and difficult decisions will concern tax and spend.

At the next election, the Conservatives will almost certainly run on the promise of tax cuts — they may even have delivered one in the immediate run-up to the next election. They will vow that they will make this all add up by delivering something similar to the large spending cuts promised by chancellor Jeremy Hunt in his autumn statement.

Now, as I’ve said before, there is about as much chance of the Conservatives being able to follow through with those cuts as there is of me running the London Marathon. It’s theoretically possible, but you have to disregard an awful lot of past behaviour to believe it. Since 2015, successive Conservative prime ministers have found it harder and harder to deliver further reductions in the size of the British state.

They will be opposed by a Labour party promising to spend more on public services but pledging to do this without reference to any of the key revenue-raising taxes. The words “income tax”, “value added tax”, or “national insurance” are not going to be anywhere near any Labour spending pledges. The party will promise services for the many, paid for by the few.

Now, as I’ve also said previously, if Labour wins the next election it will end up breaking its promises on tax — in spirit even if it keeps them to the letter — to keep its commitments on public spending.

So how should the BBC cover that? On the one hand, does it take it as read that the Conservatives, if they win, will deliver what would be a pretty big reshaping of the relationship between the state and the individual? Or does it go “look, come on, this is all pure fiction: the most likely outcome of a Conservative government is total paralysis, as the party is too divided to either raise taxes or cut spending in a significant way?” And what about how it analyses the Labour party’s spending plans?

Ultimately there is no “right” answer here: there are only different interpretations of how you abide by the BBC’s impartiality guidelines. One important part of how the corporation will conduct itself in the next election is its response to a new review into its coverage of taxation, public spending, government borrowing and debt, conducted by Andrew Dilnot and Michael Blastland.

(Full disclosure: I am a visiting fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford university, where Dilnot is the Warden, and I gave evidence to the review. That said, I think the full 50-page document is very much worth your time and can be read in full here.)

The headlines: although the BBC has “weaknesses [which] can lead to output that appears to favour particular political positions”, these positions lean “left and right”. As such, the Dilnot-Blastland review concludes that the risks to BBC impartiality are journalistic, not political. What are those weaknesses?

One is a failure to adequately report and to cover trade-offs. The BBC sometimes treats it as an established truth that “tax cuts are good” and “spending cuts are bad” — but without probing how and why you may have to choose between one of those. (And, indeed, that one or both of those might be wrong.)

Another, in a victory of sorts for Rishi Sunak, the review notes that one problem is that many correspondents feel nervous around economic concepts and this stymies their ability to report on these issues in a balanced way.

Then another is: how do you approach covering economic policy when all the relevant parties are making similar arguments — for instance, in Northern Ireland, where, one BBC interviewee says, all the political parties broadly advocate for more spending? Dilnot and Blastland argue that in that case the corporation needs to seek to broaden the debate off its own bat:

So where does due impartiality lie on issues of tax and spending when a community’s politics are dominated by one political frame — for more public spending? Do we say the politics defines the debate by definition, or accept it can miss things and could sometimes be broadened? We think the latter (though we acknowledge the risks).

That might yet be the most important line in the whole report ahead of an election where both major parties are likely to be engaging in a level of magical thinking on tax and spend.

Shameless self-promotion

Last year, the term “nepo baby” sprung up to describe celebrities and artists who rode to stardom because of their successful parents. But, as my column this week unpacks, this obscures a problem in society with how we acknowledge a much wider spectrum of family advantages in our workplaces and policymaking.

Now try this

I saw The Fabelmans. I found it utterly delightful, as did Danny Leigh in his review. It really deserves to be seen on a big screen, so get to the cinema pronto!

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