British Expat Forum

The flak arising from publicising Peter Horrocks' e-mail to BBC World Service reporters is understandable, but his action is not surprising when you consider this, quoted from an article in The Independent:



Let me quote from another Independent article on the subject:



I had always assumed that the FCO's goal was to sell the United Kingdom and its values, not to treat the World Service as part of its investment portfolio.

Things appear to have moved on, Ruggie, on numerous counts.

Back in the days when the BBC's international broadcasting consisted simply of radio transmissions - the BBC World Service - it was funded by an FCO grant-in-aid. The split in budgets between various sub-services of the BBC WS was agreed according to FCO priorities, but editorial control was firmly in the BBC's hands. Commercial goals didn't come into it.

Then the BBC started broadcasting internationally on television as well. This didn't fall within the FCO grant-in-aid, or within the remit of the licence fee, so it had to be funded commercially. Likewise the BBC's Web-based initiatives, inasmuch as they're used by people outside the UK. So that in part explains why the BBC has commercial targets for its international services.

I'm a little surprised if the FCO's been setting commercial targets, though. My guess is that the FCO's trying to minimise the amount of taxpayers' money that has to go into the BBC's international operations, not least because the FCO itself has had to cope with substantial budget cuts. Not really the same as trying to maximise dividends for the FCO, so I think "treat the World Service as part of its investment portfolio" is a bit off the mark. The quotation from the BBC statement looks like weasel wording to me, though it's hard to tell without sight of the targets the statement mentions.

On the other hand, I wouldn't dispute that financial targets are increasingly determining FCO policy making these days - the Treasury's required the FCO to set spending-based performance targets since the early 2000s, which was a large part of the reason why project spending suddenly started dealing with much more significant amounts then.

Don't forget, too, that there's been quite a bit of political pressure for making the BBC a more commercial operation (which would make it harder to justify giving the BBC treatment which Murdoch covets for BSkyB).

If the FCO has been exerting pressure on the BBC to become more commercial, I would be mildly surprised if the decision to exert that pressure hadn't come from Ministers.

Thanks, Dave. An awful lot of things in this world have moved on since I last looked at them - and I probably didn't look very closely at most of them back then anyway.