Digital Technology (Democracy and Digital Technologies Committee Report)

Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts

Friday 11th March 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I thank the committee for this report. While I do not agree with lots of its recommendations, it is packed full of fascinating research.

One criticism is that it puts too much faith in the forthcoming online harms legislation to restore democratic trust. If anything is likely to undermine trust, it is a lack of candour about what laws will achieve. The public are told that the Bill will mainly tackle protecting children and the vulnerable from all those nasties online: violent porn, grim suicide sites and hateful, bullying trolls. If only the Bill focused its attention on targeted, creative solutions to those issues, I would be less concerned.

On that, I record my support for the determined efforts of the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, to fast-track statutory age assurance. I hope the Minister will confirm the Government’s backing for this robust, quality child-protection model that, crucially, protects the right to privacy.

In reality, this report and the Bill are much broader and will affect adults. I fear that in the name of protecting adults from what is called legal but harmful online content, freedom of speech will be curtailed and democratic debate undermined.

Today I will explore the chilling effect of identifying misinformation as a chief culprit in damaging trust. We may all think that we agree on what constitutes misinformation—cranky 5G conspiracy theories or Russian war propaganda—but recently the term has become politically loaded: less a neutral, objective description of misleading statements and more used by those officially sanctioned as informed to suppress valid scepticism or silence dissidents who challenge official orthodoxies. The removal of what is dubbed misinformation narrows the plurality of information available in the public square.

It should at least give us pause that Putin has declared fake news illegal and is locking up Russian citizens for posting so-called misinformation about Ukraine. We must avoid emulating this propagandist approach of allowing only official versions of the truth. In the free West, we need to query the wisdom of creating new power brokers that get to arbitrate the truth, whether they are unelected regulators, big tech platforms or newly fashionable fact-checkers. I like the quote in the report from the Kofi Annan commission, which shows that it is more complicated. It said that

“there has never been a time when citizens in democracies all shared the same facts or agreed on what constitutes a fact. Democratic citizens often disagree on fundamental facts and certainly do not vote on the basis of shared truths. Democracy is needed precisely because citizens do not agree on … facts.”

Covid brought a lot of these tensions to the fore. The report notes that the pandemic means that

“online misinformation poses not only a real and present danger to our democracy but also to our lives.”

When misinformation is so darkly posed as a life-or-death danger, it gives a green light, as it did, to active censorship by big tech of a range of interviews, articles and YouTube films, and to the cancelling and reputational destruction of many individuals. But how reliable was this online public health war on misinformation? For example, the report congratulates government statisticians on their high-quality statistics, which helped the public to scrutinise policy. However, since the report was written, many of those statistics have been exposed as misleading or revealed as inaccurate conflations with projections—or, even worse, as using worst-case scenarios as a form of behaviour-change policy—yet anyone who raised queries about the data at the time was dubbed a dangerous spreader of misinformation.

Then there is the Wuhan lab leak theory. For many months, the likes of Ofcom, social media platforms and the scientific establishment called that dangerous misinformation. But now we know better—in part thanks to Viral by Viscount Ridley. We know about the WHO’s whitewashed 2021 report on Covid’s origins. We have read the emails between the Wellcome Trust’s Sir Jeremy Farrar and Dr Ron Fouchier, admitting that the leak theory was plausible but, if known publicly, might harm science so should be suppressed. Yet, even now, none of this is dubbed misinformation.

These double standards, and the censorship of material branded as misinformation, contribute to a climate of mistrust. People say, “Why was it removed? What have they got to hide?” There is growing cynicism about the motives of those in power to decide what is the truth and what the public are allowed to see, hear and say. I turn all this on its head. If there is a trust deficit, perhaps it is a top-down loss of trust in the public, and a default assumption that the public are hapless and hopeless citizens, easily duped by malevolent agendas, passively imbibing what they see and read uncritically and incapable of evaluating information.

I urge the committee and the Government to rediscover earlier optimism and focus on technology as a democratising force. As the report notes, anyone with a mobile phone has a printing press, a broadcast station and a library in their pocket. That allows the previously marginalised to challenge traditional gatekeepers. Let us be careful that a moral panic about misinformation does not create a new cast of censorious gatekeepers, at the expense of trust in the public and at the expense of free speech.

Freedom of Speech

Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts

Friday 10th December 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Singh of Wimbledon, has, through using some very challenging and hard-hitting ideas, just illustrated the value of free speech, because we learned something. I was a bit offended, I agreed with some of it—but it had my attention, and that is what it is all about.

Like other noble Lords, I commend the most reverend Primate for holding this debate, because many of us who raise concerns about attacks on free speech have sometimes been accused, including recently, of confecting the problem in order to stir up culture wars or even to cover up our own bigotry. In a bestselling book in the United States, the author Gavan Titley states that freedom of speech

“has been adopted as a primary mechanism for validating and re-animating racist ideas.”

In other words, even arguing for free speech has been turned into a toxic idea.

This hints at one contemporary challenge. Although everyone says they believe in free speech, it is often caveated. How often do I hear, “I believe in free speech, but …”? Often, after the “but” people will say “not for hate speech”, or “not for bigotry”. I appeal to noble Lords: when you hear the “but” after “free speech”, watch out for censorship. I also appeal that we do not take the demonising labels of hate and bigot at face value. Hate is a nebulous concept that even in hate-crime legislation is based on perception rather than objective criteria.

In this way, the subjective label of “hate” can be used to delegitimise a wide range of opinions and can be used cynically to discredit political opponents. For example, LGB Alliance, the fastest-growing campaigning charity for the rights of lesbians, bisexual people and gay men, has been maliciously and erroneously dubbed a hate group on a par with far-right extremists. Or what about the police arresting a number of street preachers for allegedly homophobic hate speech, when what they were actually doing was—wait for it—quoting the Bible? They would have a field day in here. We should note that religious freedom, the bedrock of a secular society, is very much at risk under the auspices of hate speech. Nottingham University recently initially blocked the appointment of a Catholic chaplain for explaining his—well—Catholic views on social media, which were depicted as hate-fuelled. Hate speech, I would say, is often the free speech of those views that we hate.

More generally, we have seen the ratcheting up of sensationalised labels to the level of hate in order to silence opinions which are deemed beyond the pale. For example, everyday sexism, however boorish, is now routinely exaggerated and described as misogyny or hatred of women, and we promiscuously stigmatise ever-growing numbers of people as fascists, Nazis, extremists or fundamentalists. I did a study post 2016 of the various variations of “Brexity, knuckle-dragging gammon”—I was often included in them—and there were thousands of versions of that.

While some noble Lords here suggest that we need to curtail free speech, perhaps to protect marginalised groups, in the name of social justice—although I worry that is a little condescending—many of the least powerful in society are excluded from debate by being labelled as beyond the pale by new powerbrokers, especially around identity politics, who basically describe people as not being worth debating with by using stigmatising labels such as “knuckle-dragging gammon”.

I am also worried when sceptics who wish to query political or scientific orthodoxies are similarly marginalised. In 2019, the Guardian updated its style guide, instructing that climate sceptics should be referred to as “climate change deniers”. The same rhetorical strategy was applied to those sceptical of some lockdown restrictions or who asked questions about the science, who have been labelled “Covid deniers”. This gross exploitation of the legacy of the Holocaust as a way of demeaning individuals and views as so morally reprehensible that they can be banned without qualm is dangerous.

Of course, some people do have repellent and bigoted ideas, and some, even if only a few, are indeed Holocaust deniers. I do not want to duck out of the hard argument. One of the most tricky issues if, like me, you adhere to the principle of free speech is having to defend the indefensible. This is made more difficult by the fashion for falsely conflating the defence of the free speech rights of bigots with endorsing those views. Indeed, this form of guilt by association is used to get people cancelled. For me, it is important not to concede the principle of free speech, which is so foundational to democracy that we should not become squeamish about defending the right of a racist to spout garbage. I think we should answer it with more speech and—yes—sunshine. Also, as Thomas Paine explained centuries ago:

“He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.”


Another contemporary challenge is that we live in a period in which we have institutionalised the idea that safety trumps liberty, brought so viscerally alive when we consider the ease with which civil liberties were suspended and online censorship officially endorsed under the heading of “misinformation” to keep us safe during the Covid virus. On this, I disagree with the most reverend Primate because I think that free speech is increasingly seen as too dangerous to go unchecked by endless regulations. JS Mill’s harm principle has now expanded in our therapeutic times.

The online safety Bill, which I think is a frightening legislative threat to free speech—but I will wait for Second Reading—proposes censoring lawful but harmful speech if it is deemed to cause harm, even psychological harm. When University of Sussex activists targeted Professor Kathleen Stock, the posters read “Kathleen Stock makes trans students unsafe”—as though a fine, reasoned, philosophical exploration of the material reality of biological sex was the equivalent of a gun or a knife. At the University of Exeter, 100,000 people have signed a petition opposing the very existence of the Students for Life society because it is argued that the pro-life group

“threatens the safety and well-being of women”.

Instead of challenging the society to a debate that they then win, my side, the feminists who are pro-choice, have the instinct to retreat, act as victims and call for a ban.

Another contemporary challenge is cancel culture, and this goes way beyond no-platforming, as noble Lords have noted today. It is a tactic of public shaming and humiliation, often targeting individual employers and demanding that people are disciplined. On the advice, one of the problems is that too many in power are cowardly in the face of cancel culture. I call for courage in facing down the cancelers.

BBC: Government Support

Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts

Thursday 2nd December 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, the BBC’s value as a beacon of excellence has always rested on the impartiality of its news output, but internationally and certainly domestically, that impartiality is under strain. Ofcom tells us that audiences consistently rate the BBC less favourably than other channels for impartiality, and complaints have trebled over four years. Even the BBC itself has now initiated new impartiality training, as it is worried that its staff do not understand it, which is worrying. Indeed, the BBC head of news, Fran Unsworth, recently had to explain to one staff team that they would have to hear and see ideas and people that they did not personally like. That such “journalism 101” lessons were needed should concern us all.

I will make some remarks as a critical friend—much as the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, commented—and as a contributor, particularly to Radio 4, and a listener for decades. As an educator, I regularly introduced teenagers to the archive of the “In Our Time” programme of the noble Lord, Lord Bragg—that is why I am rather nervous speaking in front of him. By the way, I introduced those programmes against advice from other people at the BBC, who told me that their discussions with academics were a bit too highbrow for teenagers and would alienate urban youth—that was a kind of soft bigotry of low expectations that assumes that only Stormzy and “RuPaul’s Drag Race” will capture young hearts and minds.

But, at the risk of being slightly at odds with the noble Lord, Lord Bragg, I think that criticising the BBC is actually a duty. I appreciate that any criticism of the BBC in 2021 can easily be dismissed as, variously, a Daily Mail plot, a Tory coup against the licence fee and a Rupert Murdoch-driven attempt at stirring up the culture wars—

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

It is.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

The noble Lord agrees with me; how brilliant. But, if the BBC is to be of value in the UK, we—its supporters—need to stop being defensive and accept that all grievances are not whipped up by devious political ideologues but arise from perfectly legitimate concerns from the public about impartiality.

Traditionally, a way of judging impartiality was the pride with which impartial broadcasters could boast that no one would know how they voted—their opinions were kept under wraps. But, today, the sense of compromised impartiality is the perception of groupthink at the BBC—not from party politics but from the embrace of values assumed to be incontestable but actually politically partisan and ideologically contentious, such as the BBC’s internalisation of identity politics.

Recently, the BBC’s director of creative diversity, earning a cool £250,000 a year, introduced an allyship training scheme and stated on the BBC website:

“build back better to ensure diversity and inclusion is baked into the ‘new normal’ once the crisis has passed.”

I emphasise the phrases “baked in” and “new normal”. Imagine, then, trying to be staff member in that BBC department who wanted to challenge its decision to spend £100 million on a drive for diversity and inclusion in response to the Black Lives Matter protest. Such an approach does not include but excludes those who disagree—diversity is never diversity of opinion. Try also being a gender-critical feminist working at the BBC—there are many, but they know to keep schtum. I even know people who work at the BBC who voted to leave the European Union, but they could not come out and remain secret Brexiteers to this day. That is how groupthink works: not everyone agrees, but everyone knows the narrative that you are expected to follow.

The embrace of such orthodoxies is rarely spotted as a threat to the impartiality of BBC output, but it is a new and very present danger. Why did no one at the BBC notice the danger to editorial independence when the corporation signed up to a partisan lobbying NGO such as Stonewall? This was so well documented and eventually revealed, despite pressure to drop it, by the Stephen Nolan podcast series—an example of BBC investigative journalism at its finest.

Yet, even now, BBC senior management has announced that it is working with another external organisation—Involve—on trans-inclusive policies, although Maya Forstater, co-founder of Sex Matters, has warned that it might be

“Stonewall in all but name”.

Kate Harris from the LGB Alliance has cautioned:

“For the sake of the BBC, its reputation and its audience, it must be open about the exact nature of the relationship and how it will safeguard its editorial independence.”


On another issue, do not alarm bells sound when we see a corporate logo for Albert pasted at the end of current affairs programmes, such as “Newsnight”? I was intrigued and looked it up, and I found out that the BBC has signed up to an initiative in which media organisations pledge to use their content to help audiences tackle climate change and inform sustainable choices. Tim Davie is quoted on Albert’s website, saying:

“At the BBC we will continue to tell the stories that matter ... or help audiences consider greener choices through our best loved shows like EastEnders”.


Is it any wonder that sections of the public will feel patronised, denied choice, lectured and nudged to embrace one true political outlook? That is not impartiality in my book.

To conclude: like the right reverend Prelate, who I welcome here and who gave an excellent, original and thoughtful contribution to today’s debate, I worry about some of the toxic trends in the public square. However, I worry that it is identity politics that is so tearing apart the public square and that it is the groupthink approach to fashionable political causes that threatens diversity of opinion. I hope the BBC will stop succumbing to both.

Ofcom: Appointment of Chair

Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts

Wednesday 24th November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, regardless of his suitability for the job, Paul Dacre’s stinging critique of the blob rang true with many of us, especially as only yesterday Dame Kate Bingham accused the Civil Service of groupthink and risk aversion. Does the Minister agree that, whoever is recruited, they will need to be sufficiently independent of mind to face down the blob? They should break Ofcom out of any sort of groupthink—the sort that led one of the most powerful regulators in the land to so unwisely be captured by the gender ID lobbying group Stonewall, perilously threatening impartiality in the media in the coverage of women’s sex-based rights.

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

On the first part of the noble Baroness’s question, yes, this underlines the importance of having independent people appointed to oversee such important regulators. It also underlines the need for boards with a broad and diverse range of views. All government departments and regulators such as Ofcom benefit from that breadth of experience and views.

Sport: Transgender Inclusion

Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts

Tuesday 9th November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

Yes, increasing everybody’s participation in sport is the main aim of the Government’s strategy, Sporting Future, so I certainly support the message from the sports councils to individual governing bodies to think in innovative and creative ways to ensure that no one is left out. As the noble Baroness says, that might involve novel or modified versions of their sport. Creating the right environment is important so that everybody, whoever they are, can take part and get active.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, it is clear that trans women cannot belong in the female sports category because they have a male performative advantage, however they identify, which is inherently unfair. Obviously, trans women should be able to compete fairly in sport. Will the Minister meet Dr Nicola Williams and colleagues from Fair Play for Women, which has some excellent, detailed proposals for including trans people in sport without disadvantaging women, and is courageous enough to open up the debate, not close it down?

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

My Lords, this varies from sport to sport. I took part in your Lordships’ full-bore rifle shooting match against the other place, which I regret to say that we lost. That is a sport on which men and women already compete on an equal basis. Some sports are games of skill, some of stamina and some of strength. That is why it is right that there is a case-by-case approach for each sport. I will take forward the meeting suggestion, as I did for the noble Lord, Lord Triesman.

Ofcom: Appointment of Chair

Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts

Tuesday 26th October 2021 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Speaker (Lord McFall of Alcluith)]

Now that I have my glasses on, I offer my sincere apologies to my friend, the noble Lord, Lord McNally. Now I am sure that it is the noble Baroness, Lady Fox of Buckley.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

Will the Minister note that one specific issue that the new Ofcom chair needs to urgently address is an egregious example of compromised media impartiality due to the powerful lobby group Stonewall, as revealed by the superb BBC Sounds 10-part podcast series “Stephen Nolan Investigates” on the influence of Stonewall’s gender identity on the output of the BBC, skewing impartiality? Perhaps the Minister can comment on the content of episode 9 revealing that Ofcom itself was using its judgments on audience complaints as evidence to Stonewall, as though it was judge and jury, to prove its LGBT credentials. That is not comforting from a neutral regulator.

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

I have not heard that episode but the example that the noble Baroness points to underlines the importance of a free and fair media that scrutinises everyone in power, whether that is those in government or in lobby groups. It also reflects the importance of the BBC broadcasting a range of views in fulfilling that important role.

UK Journalism (Communications and Digital Committee Report)

Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts

Wednesday 13th October 2021 Grand Committee

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, this report is packed full of useful insights into the challenges facing contemporary journalism. I am especially pleased to see that at last—if rather belatedly—the problem of lack of diversity has been expanded beyond representation to include the urgent need for diversity of opinion. The problem of groupthink for journalistic impartiality is well described in the report. I agree with Sir Robbie Gibb that too often journalists are stuck in echo chambers and therefore misread the mood of the country, as they did with Brexit, too often mistaking Twitter for public opinion.

I am glad that the report notes the problem of confirmation bias. However, identifying a problem does not solve it. I am not so convinced by the proposed solution of getting Ofcom to collect data on a larger number of demographic characteristics of staff, such as socioeconomic background, because it seems to me that that is just another version of representational identity head counting that misses the point.

I am more persuaded by the report’s focus on the problem of an over-academicised journalistic profession. The tried and tested tradition of school leavers joining local newspapers as apprentices in the heart of communities, learning their trade by covering, for example, court cases and council meetings, would do more than valuably restore journalism’s key role of holding all public bodies to account. It might also drag journalism out of its rarefied ivory tower—and it might save us from the cack-handed reportage of the London media venturing into red wall areas like anthropologists discovering new exotic tribes.

One key area I do have qualms about is the treatment of the public’s mistrust of media institutions. I am squeamish about the seeming assumption that the problem here is one of the public’s ignorance. The disproportionate emphasis in the report on media literacy as a vehicle for restoring trust implies that it is the public who need educating—as though the media were blameless.

This becomes clearer in the discussion on how to train citizens to detect misinformation. Surely it is more complicated than that—especially as the term “misinformation” has increasingly little to do with factual accuracy and is regularly weaponised to delegitimise opinions that journalists and politicians deem dangerous or offensive, or which simply do not fit into a narrow official narrative.

Although the report, and the Government’s response, reassuringly stress the importance of a free press, I would say that media freedom has rarely confronted so many censorious trends. Those often come in the guise of fighting misinformation and fake news, and that is where we see the real threat to free media.

Ofcom’s coronavirus guidance heavy-handedly instructed broadcasters not to feature stories that, first, undermined people’s trust in the advice of mainstream sources, or, secondly, would deter audiences from following official rules. Surely, this veers close to state-endorsed suppression of dissent—as though the science were settled, and that was it. It turns the media into a behaviour-modification scheme.

As MP Steve Baker noted, Ofcom effectively labelled any kind of rational criticism as unscientific misinformation. This may explain a conformity of narrative, throughout the pandemic, from media outlets that differed from one another only in the levels of fear and anxiety they whipped up.

Meanwhile, the Government have encouraged big tech to become a “Truthfinder General” in recent months, in relation to alleged misinformation—at great cost to free speech and transparency. Ultimately, that denied access to a wide range of opinions and evidence, which were not made available to the public—or, indeed, to journalists.

Look at how those who tried to raise the possibility of a Wuhan lab leak had their social media accounts suspended, and how respected experts were lumped together with cranky 5G obsessives as agents of misinformation. Interviews and evidence were removed by Facebook. This in turn stopped journalists investigating what is now considered a crucial line of inquiry—but rather too late; the evidence has gone. Then there was the infamous removal of Talk Radio’s channel by YouTube. When digital giants feel emboldened by government to shut down and censor MSM, there is surely no room for complacency about freedom of the press.

In this context, I am less than reassured by the constant references to the online safety Bill as a protector of media freedom—hardly, when the Bill would mandate, and therefore empower, big tech to remove so-called misinformation, all enforced by Ofcom. This is a recipe for censorship.

Finally, there are new threats to a free press on the horizon. The media itself can be a victim of cancel culture. For example, the strategy of the online Twitter mobs unleashed by the NGO Stop Funding Hunt—sorry, I mean Stop Funding Hate—is to bully a variety of businesses to cancel advertising in certain media outlets, usually tabloids, but more recently GB News. The idea is to punish financially editorial “wrongthink”, and that is chilling. So I hope the committee will look into new threats to media freedom. I regret that, when it does that, one of the greatest threats it will have to consider is the forthcoming online safety Bill—unless some of us can stop it.

European Football Championships: Travel

Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts

Monday 21st June 2021 Lords Chamber

[The Deputy Speaker (Lord Haskel)]

I am so sorry. I call the noble Baroness, Lady Fox.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

I am thrown now, my Lords. Anyway, congratulations to Wales—it is the hope that kills you—and to the Scottish football fans for having a good time. On this cancelled “freedom day”, does the Minister understand that these apparent double standards and exemptions for the few, similar to those we saw at the G7 and Royal Ascot, are creating cynicism about whether policies are really based on evidence, not just among the protesters outside today but among the most lockdown-compliant citizens? Perhaps UEFA and FIFA saw the viral thread of tweets describing the risible conditions in an official quarantine hotel: for example, paltry amounts of food served at 9 pm and children and the elderly incarcerated and actually going hungry. Can the Minister assure the House that, rather than tightening up quarantine, the Government might look at lessening it for the many rather than just for the few?

Public Representatives: Online Abuse

Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts

Wednesday 16th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

The Government aim to make sure that people can operate in the public sphere safely at all levels, as the noble Lord rightly highlights. We expect the Bill to make a great difference to that when it becomes law. It is clear that, when the police use their existing powers, particularly under the Investigatory Powers Act, they are successful in identifying anonymous users online in particular.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as someone whose receipt of online abuse is somewhat off the scale but who feels uncomfortable with public figures playing the victim card on this. I feel even more uncomfortable with the implicit conflation of a brutal murder with a Twitter pile-on. Does the Minister agree that there is a danger in principle of confusing physical harassment, such as was horribly meted out to the BBC journalist Nick Watt, with online trolling, however unpleasant it may be? Does she note free speech activists’ concern that online abuse is being used to justify censoring lawful content? My fears about the online safety Bill outweigh any fear of harassment.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

The noble Baroness is right to raise the unacceptable abuse that Nick Watt received the other day. I highlight that we have just published our National Action Plan for the Safety of Journalists and a call for evidence is live at the moment. I encourage your Lordships to contribute to that as appropriate.

Public Service Broadcasting (Communications and Digital Committee Report)

Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts

Thursday 27th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, one premise of the report that I found very stimulating is that public service broadcasters are

“struggling to achieve their mission to serve all audiences in the face of increased competition”

from streaming services

“and changing viewing habits.”

This could identify the wrong problem, and it ignores the elephant in the room. There is a serious issue of broadcasters failing to serve all audiences, but I do not think it has much to do with video on demand. There is a much more profound identity crisis, and I am glad that the Government’s public service broadcasting advisory panel has tried to dig a bit deeper and ask whether, as has already been mentioned, the concept of public service is needed and, if so, what a modern PSB should look like.

That is a bit more like it, because it seems to me that, especially in the last five to six years, there has been a growing chasm between public service broadcasters and the public. More and more of the public feel alienated from mainstream media and often feel that they are being done a disservice by PSB channels. It seems significant that we are about to see the launch of a new channel, GB News, which has already been maligned and demonised in this place. It is being launched on 13 June. The director of news, John McAndrew, described GB News’s aims as free, fair, impartial and Ofcom-regulated, arguing:

“We can sense a real hunger for something fresh and different in television news and debate.”


He is right.

It is worth noting that this new channel is headed up by Andrew Neil. He was one of the best public service news broadcasters at the BBC—but they did not know how to use him and lost him. GB News is a start-up that has attracted presenters and production talent from across the PSB landscape, and a whole swathe of young producers and employees—diverse, passionate and eager to make a difference—recruited by an enthusiasm for the project of covering stories and voices neglected by PSB channels rather than by some special HR-designed diversity charter. I think it is exciting and although, according to one noble Lord we have heard, we should be worried because of its foreign owners—my goodness, xenophobic or what?—what is to say that GB News is not a new kind of public service broadcasting? We should at least allow it to shake up any complacency.

I want to focus especially on the problems of the BBC. The BBC is an institution whose ideals I love and want to defend, but I find it increasingly hard to do so. It feels as though somewhere along the line it lost track of its public service mission. I do not doubt the BBC’s commitment to serve and reflect communities across the country but, sadly, this is conceived in rather a technical way by focusing on regional production sites and programmes commissioned outside the M25. That is all good, but why then in the same month last year did we hear of £25 million cuts to established regional programmes while a pledge of £100 million was made to a new diversity initiative? I worry that obsessing about a particular interpretation of “diversity” does not serve all audiences and does not stress what we have in common but rather plays on differences.

My fear is that there is a balkanising of audiences going on by attempting to tailor programmes to different demographics and identity groups. It is true that this reflects one aspect of modern Britain—the divisive and essentialising identity politics so fashionable in metropolitan echo chambers. It can lead to the crassest form of programme making. Look at how broadcasters do not so much cater for 16 to 34 year-olds as chase after them, flattering and fawning to prove that PSB is relevant. It is excruciating witnessing the resulting soft bigotry of low expectations. Look at the tangle that Radio 3 and the Proms get into. “Add a bit of grime and rap and the audience will love us,” you feel them saying. Too many PSBs seem convinced that the young are an undifferentiated blob with the attention span of a gnat. The irony is that what the young are watching on streaming services are complex, nuanced, challenging long-form documentaries and drama series.

Another problem that I have with the focus on diversity is that too often it neglects diversity of opinion and thought. Even though Tim Davie, the BBC director-general, used the word “impartiality” 11 times in his inaugural speech, the most common complaint that I hear about the BBC is that it is partial by offering a narrow worldview. The problem with the present strategy is that it assumes that a Geordie or Yorkshire accent means diversity—but you can talk metropolitan orthodoxies with a northern voice, believe me. The BBC may have dumped received pronunciation, but its embrace of a suite of received opinions feels even more stifling and condescending.

Often the BBC cannot hear itself. It just does not realise that it is tone deaf about diverse values and worldviews that it does not share. This became apparent to me personally in 2016. I was a panellist on Radio 4’s “Moral Maze” for 20 years. I have done all the current affairs and news programmes that the BBC has to offer—a bit of a “BBC luvvie” if you want. No doubt I was seen as a bit of a maverick, but I was accepted on the scene. However, when I mentioned that I was going to vote leave, it was met with disbelief. “But you’re an intelligent, well-educated person, Claire,” said one senior producer—and from then on, in studios and green rooms, a growing sneer. And that sneering was even more viscerally observed by audiences.

The virtually unanimous view that Brexit was a foolish, backward and inexplicable idea meant that those called public service broadcasters did not have a clue what the public were thinking and were totally shocked at the referendum result. Many news reports before and since that democratic vote have given the impression that PSBs just do not like the public.

It is sometimes suggested—it has already been said here—that anyone who makes such criticisms is whipping up grievances and fuelling a culture war. I often think it is the other way around, and I worry that the BBC is inadvertently behaving like an activist in the culture wars. There are endless examples: the bizarre statement from “Countryfile” about the UK countryside being a “white environment”, and the “Rule Britannia” saga at the BBC Proms.

It was not the Defund the BBC campaign that clipped a section of a BBC Sounds podcast featuring two young women hectoring older white women for being “Karens” who should educate themselves about their white privilege, saying, “get out of the way” and ordering them to “basically leave”. The BBC eventually deleted the clip after a backlash, but what was it thinking? “Educate yourselves, you Karens” makes the old-fashioned, patrician Reithianism sound positively egalitarian.

The BBC is owned and paid for by the public, and it has a moral duty, not just a financial one—

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

My Lords, I am sorry to interrupt the noble Baroness, but this is a time-limited debate.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

Do not be complacent, or public service broadcasting will not survive.