The vandals break the Channel
The government's plan to sell off Channel 4 is a caustic cocktail of spite, revenge and ideology.
God, how he loathed this government. Little England, plc. Directed by a team of lying tenth-raters not fit to run an amusement arcade in Clacton-on-Sea. Conservatives who would strip the country of its last lightbulb to conserve their power.
Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries’ announcement that the government will privatise Channel 4, sent that quote from John le Carré’s The Tailor of Panama pinballing around Twitter again. But as is so often the case with quotes pulled from fiction, it lacks the full context.
The voice in the quote is not the author’s but that of a civil servant character called Stormont whose full complaint is that the government — the Major government in this case — was bringing outside managers into the Civil Service. It’s a small ‘c’ conservative complaining about his capital ‘c’ political masters.
In 1996, the year The Tailor of Panama was first published, the cabinet considered privatising Channel 4, but its then chairman persuaded John Major to shelve the idea. Margaret Thatcher, whose administration created the broadcaster, also dismissed the idea of taking it private in 1989. A cabinet committee chaired by Thatcher that year concluded: “It was extremely doubtful whether the Channel’s distinctive remit would be sustained by a profit-driven organisation in a highly competitive climate.”
Nadine Dorries doesn’t know why Channel 4 exists or how it exists. In an appearance before the DCMS select committee in November 2021, Dorries confidently asserted that the channel was not providing good value for taxpayers’ money. Informed by her fellow Tory MP Damian Green that Channel 4 does not and has never received public funding — it relies on advertising — her response was:
And... so... although it’s... yeah... and... the... and the.
Yesterday’s Twitter thread declaring she had decided to privatise Channel 4 — the plan has been mooted by every Culture Secretary since David Cameron took office in 2010 — was more coherent on a surface level but equally empty of understanding:
Channel 4 rightly holds a cherished place in British life and I want that to remain the case. I have come to the conclusion that government ownership is holding Channel 4 back from competing against streaming giants like Netflix and Amazon.
A change of ownership will give Channel 4 the tools and freedom to flourish and thrive as a public service broadcaster long into the future. I will set out the future plan for Channel 4 in a White Paper in due course.
I will seek to reinvest the proceeds of the sale into levelling up the creative sector, putting money into independent production and creative skills in priority parts of the country - delivering a creative dividend for all.
It’s like arguing that a tram can’t compete with a jumbo jet; one is designed to serve a local audience while the other is an international concern.
Channel 4 doesn’t make its own programmes — even Channel 4 News is an ITN production — because its purpose is to commission and broadcast programmes made by independent UK producers. Netflix and Amazon don’t produce shows in the UK because they’re obligated to but because there’s a strong creative industry here to make them. Channel 4 is a catalyst for that.
Dorries’s promise to “reinvest the proceeds of the sale into levelling up the creative sector” is as meaningless as every other “levelling up” promise. Channel 4 as an asset is valued at about £1 billion. It spends around £700 million a year on programmes.
Effectively the government is (vaguely) promising that it will put a year and a half’s worth of Channel 4’s current programme budget into “the creative sector” while getting rid of a publicly owned asset for good. It’s highly likely that a private sector owner will quickly start to complain that spending on news and other public service content isn’t viable, especially if that buyer is based overseas.
As Dorothy Byrne, former head of news and current affairs for Channel 4, writes:
Channel 4 does, indeed, need to develop new models to sustain its future. The success of All 4, the biggest free streaming service in the UK, is one good example. But it is not an organisation in critical trouble: its programme budget this year is more than £700m for the first time…
Currently two-thirds of Channel 4’s main channel content is commissioned from companies in the nations and regions, and 55% of its spend on new content comes from the nations and regions. Are we to believe the new owners will want to share their profits round the country like that?
There isn’t a rational explanation for privatisation but revenge isn’t rational. While the government’s push to abolish the licence fee and ultimately privatise the BBC is a tougher, more time-consuming fight, selling off Channel 4 is an easier culture war win. It’s red meat for the part of the Tory base that’s forever chomping its jaws. Julian Knight, the Tory chair of the Commons culture select committee, put it frankly:
Undoubtedly across much of the party, there is a feeling of payback time and the word privatisation tickles the ivories of many.
If I wasn’t already feeling queasy the thought of various grotesque Tory backbenchers having their ivories tickled would do the trick.
In the Lords, the perpetually, proudly, piggishly wrong Lord Daniel Hannan — the least credible collection of words in this edition after Culture Secretary Nadine Dorrie — tried to prove Channel 4 is pointless by sniffily reading out programmes from its daytime schedule, while on Twitter he pretended public ownership and government control are one and the same:
When other governments own TV stations, we sniffily call them ‘state broadcasters’. Yet here, we clint to the bizarre belief that working for the government makes people natural.
I’m not here to pretend that Channel 4 generally or Channel 4 News, in particular, are maverick voices. Countless editions of this newsletter have been dedicated to how limited the range of permissible viewpoints in the British media is, but if the plan to privatise Channel 4 succeeds, that range will only narrow further.
If the government didn’t have a desire to fulfil its revenge fantasies, it might present Channel 4 as a Thatcherite success story: A creation of the Thatcher government that does not cost the taxpayer a penny. But it doesn’t because it can present the sale of a public asset as a ‘win’ against the phalanx of imaginary communists that its most spittle-flecked supporters are convinced still run everything.
As Channel 4 New’s Krishnan Guru-Murthy pointed out today, the channel’s “editorial independence and funding of news can be ring-fenced in a sale if the government wants (as is the case with Sky News)”. But those three words “if the government wants” are key. Government commitments are worthless. Selling off Channel 4 — most likely to a foreign company — will likely result in less money going to independent producers and the UK creative sector being damaged permanently.
It’s no coincidence that the latest privatisation proposals picked up speed after the 2019 general election campaign when Channel 4 ‘empty chaired’ Boris Johnson with a block of ice during a debate on climate change. And the fact Dorothy Byrne’s MacTaggart lecture from earlier that year in which she called Boris Johnson “a known liar” — a statement of fact — has been mentioned frequently bolsters Julian Knight’s revenge theory.
Channel 4 isn’t broken. But the government intends to fix that. It’s not taking away the lightbulbs to conserve its power but to demonstrate it.