BBC: EU Coverage

Lord Teverson Excerpts

Wednesday 7th May 2014 Grand Committee

[Lord Teverson (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Pearson, for this debate and for a very good start-off to it, as well as for drawing my attention to this report, which I must admit that I had not read before—and that is clearly something I should have done. But, my goodness, how things have changed since 2005 when the report was written. Since then, being anti-EU has become fashionable; it has strong street cred—it is the urban of today. If anything, the way in which the BBC reports European issues has actually gone in the opposite direction. As the noble Lord, Lord Pearson, said himself, UKIP coverage has been quite extraordinary. I congratulate UKIP and the noble Lord, as a former leader of the party, on what it has achieved with no Members of Parliament but a strong MEP contingent. It is an important political movement in the country which gets huge coverage. Most of it, until two or three months ago, was almost completely uncritical, unlike the coverage of us rather more boring traditional parties, which suffer all the things that are thrown at us for all the things that we try to do in government or, indeed, in opposition.

The report of the noble Lord, Lord Wilson, brings a number of things to our attention. It states that there is no intentional bias, but goes on to say that informal bias has been shown in the past. The important message from that is still true: the BBC and the media more generally tend to report in terms of extremes, in that it is either all in or all out, or that we need somehow to partially opt out rather than stay as we are or go completely. It also talks about over-simplification, giving some examples. One that I remember well is where it looks at the,

“development of a European defence capability being treated simply as a scheme for a ‘European Army’”.

We heard about that mainly in the tabloid and popular press, but the BBC covered it as well, and of course it was far from the truth. There are some other points that the report brings up, such as treating,

“France and Germany as shorthand for the rest of the EU and failing to recognise the increased diversity of opinion following enlargement”.

That is an important one; it may not be so bad, but it is an area where we are still at risk.

One of the biggest areas since 2005, where the bias has been completely anti-European, is with regard to the euro crisis. Not only the Financial Times but the tabloid press and the BBC predicted constantly for about 12 months the break-up of the euro, although for me it was one of the most unlikely things that was going to happen. What has happened? Has the euro broken up? How many member states have left the euro? Two actually joined during that period. Did we hear a lot about that from the BBC? I do not remember hearing much about it. During the euro crisis, did the euro stop being the world’s second reserve currency? I do not believe so. Is it still? It absolutely is. Did the exchange rate actually plummet so that it was worthless? No, in fact, I think—my noble friend Lord Dykes will know better than I—it actually went up in value by comparison, certainly with pound sterling at the time, although that has probably slightly adjusted to our benefit over the past few months. Did we hear much about Hungary, a non-euro member that had equal economic and financial difficulties and needed a European and IMF bailout? I do not remember a great deal of reporting about that either. Clearly, there was a euro crisis and there were a lot of problems in terms of the way that Europe made its decisions at the time. However, in terms of its reporting, the BBC was absolutely and totally biased in a negative way and caused much of the feeling about the rest of Europe that reflected on that.

There is another area of concern. I remember writing to the BBC programme “Feedback” some years ago, before I became a Member of this House, to complain that although I liked listening to the “Today in Parliament” programme, there was no European Parliament coverage. Of course, I realise that I could be criticised here because the European Parliament accounts for only 9% of our legislation—or 7%, I think my party leader would say—but there is very little reporting at all of the European Parliament, which is an important institution in terms of the laws that are made in this country, as I am sure the noble Lord, Lord Pearson, would agree.

I would also ask whether we expect to have a sceptical or “anti” view of the international institutions of which we are a member. Is that something we should demand from the BBC? Have I heard a lot of criticism of NATO or a lot of bias against NATO? Have I heard anything on the BBC about removing ourselves from NATO? Should we actually come out of the UN? Should we have suitable “balance” from the BBC in terms of withdrawal from the IMF? The most important issue, of course, which we confront not in England but in Scotland, is whether we should have had, over the past five to 10 years, equal balance from the BBC about Scotland’s withdrawal from the United Kingdom. I absolutely think we should not have done, but that, although it is not the same, is a parallel and similar issue to the UK’s membership of the European Union.

I will conclude there. However, I was interested to see that John Humphrys of the “Today” programme added more fuel to the fire on this. He was slightly critical of the BBC but I was delighted that he was reported as saying that BBC staff were more likely to be liberal rather than conservative because they were the “best and the brightest”. I do not mean anything about my coalition colleagues by that—that was a small “l” and a small “c”—but I would like to think that as liberals, which I am sure that many noble Lords in this Committee are in terms of international politics, we are the best and the brightest. The BBC should remain balanced, but I believe that, if anything, the balance over the past five years has been in the opposite direction.