A BBC worker Make no mistake, the cuts at the BBC are not just about jobs.
Nor are they mainly, as Llal Vi inside the BBC believe, the result of Mark Thompson's undoubted incompetence in managing the 2006 licence fee bid, with its resulting "£2 billion hole" in the corporation's budget.
For behind the Director General's superficial blather about "riding the digital wave", lies the sharpest attack yet by neo-liberalism on the already battered edifice of public service broadcasting. The aim set by Margaret Thatcher more than twenty years ago - of destroying not just another public service, but a basic democratic right - could be about to be achieved.
It's an aim that New Labour, in its covert alliance with Rupert Murdoch, has pursued with diligence for its last ten years in office. And the chief inheritor of Thatcher's mantle, Gordon Brown, has his fingerprints all over this latest attempt to fit the BBC into a marketdriven media landscape.
Of course the industrial issues are reason enough for the labour and progressive movement to take up arms in defence of the BBC.
Management plans to shed 2,500 jobs, allegedly over five years. But the vast majority are due to go in the first two years and management plans to get rid of as many as possible in the first tew months. Management plans to shed 2,500 jobs, allegedly over five years. But the vast majority are due to go in the first two years, and management plans to get rid of as many as possible in the first few months.
This is less than the 3,800 lost in Mark Thompson's first round of slash and burn that began in 2005.
But this time news and programme-making, rather unan administranon, are to bear the brunt.
490 jobs are targeted to go in the central news division in London, which includes 20% of the jobs in what will become an integrated 'multimedia' newsroom, bring1ng together TV, radio, online and a variety of "new platforms" (such as mobile phones) for Icws demand.
Local radio and TV news will be hit even harder, with particularly savage cuts in DON'T CROSS
UR BBC - л? Scotland and Wales. Factual programming will be cut more or less in half. So not only will there be even fewer documentaries, but more of those there are will be contracted out to commercial producers.
All the BBC's talk of 700 new jobs, and the possibilities for redeployment, is just that, talk.
Many of these jobs, if they come at all, will come later in the five-year plan, and the BBC has in subsequent discussions with the unions refused to commit itself to offering more than 10% of these new posts to those facing redundancy. In what looked like deliberate provocation, the BBC management slipped into their announcement on 18 October two unrelated proposals - the elimination of the existing 'unprenew start equivalent o a dictability allowance' pay cut of about 15%) from January 2008, and later on a reduction in pension benefits for those made redundant.
Union reps from across the corporation met on that first day and took a firm stance. They threatened an immediate ballot on industrial action unless management agreed to step back and follow its own agreements, and indeed British employment law, by entering into 'meaningful negotiations' on the redundancy plan.
This produced a small, initial victory. Management reversed aecIsIon to begin immediately seeking volunteers for redundancy. This was put off until 5 November, while a framework for negotiations was put in place.
After a two-week trawl for volunteers, and depending on the outcome of this first phase, the unions were then set decide on November whether to ballot for a strike.
The strategy of the joint unions, NUJ, BECTU and Unite, is take a firm stand against compulsory redundancies, and negotiate as much as possible of the rest of the package through redeployments, natural wastage and voluntary redundancies.
This is the limited objective that was achieved during the last round of BBC job cuts, after a wellsupported strike in July 2005. It is vitally important that this fight succeeds again, both to reduce the pain for those who leave and defend the conditions of those who stay, but also to retain the strength of union organisation in what 1s stlll Its strongest base in the broadcasting industry.
The way BBC management has tried to steamroller through these latest job cuts suggests that taking on and smashing the unions is precisely one of its objectives.
Such a 'success' may be the best that can be hoped for at present. But it barely addresses the underlying issues - of how to defend public service broadcasting,
DONT TGHT C SUPPORT THE STRIKE and even more fundamentally, what kind of public service broadcasting we wall. The current plan will, in the words of BBC management's PR material, mean "less but better". In their own briefings to staff they are more explicit. In News, all the talk is of "single editors", "shared production", "combined teams". They say, "we will cover fewer stories overall", "there is likely to be less bespoke feature material" or "one or two producers will deliver the headlines for all TV outlets".
These are not purely technical issues. They point towards the growing homogenisation of output. Such a reduction in scope and variety will mean a closing down of what little plurality and diversity exists in BBC coverage. There will be ever more concentration on "the best", which for today's BBC management is likely to mean "the safest and most conservative".
After the BBC hierarchy's abject collapse in the face of Alastair Campbell and the bogus Hutton Inquiry, the always somewhat mythical 'independence' of the BBC has been fast evaporating.
BBC Service's acceptance of demands from the Foreign Office to close several language services and launch new TV services in Arabic and Farsi (ie. Iraq and Iran) makes the submission to British foreign policy priorities embarrassingly obvious. per se as the enemy.
It was the voice of the establishment. But it was a peculiar part of the establishment that never quite fitted the neo-liberal, Thatcherite bill. This had its own, paradoxical vision of public broadcasting - on the one hand it should be increasingly governed by the market, but on the other, it should be more strictly aligned to the immediate ideological dictates of the state.
Most of the thinking behind the current cuts, and New Labour's wider plans for broadcasting, can be traced straight back to the 1986 Peacock Report on the Financing of the BBC, commissioned by Margaret Thatcher.
In the face of this onslaught, the left has found itself in the awkward position of having to defend not only jobs - that goes without saying but a model of public service broadcasting which is far from progressive, but which at least seems to enshrine some basic democratic rights to broad, varied and more or less reliable information.
Within this, it is now more urgent than ever that socialISts move beyond Inis defence of actually-existing public service broadcasting, and begin develop vision of the kind we actually want.
Mark Thompson and the current BBC management are right about one thing. Technological changes do point towards a new kind of broadcasting world in the near future
We need a vision of how these technologies can be harnessed towards a rootand-branch democratisation of broadcasting, opening it up 100% to public participation and control, and radically extending the range of stories that are told and voices that are heard.
In other words we need a socialist vision of broadcasting for the 2lst century -but that is something that goes a little beyond the scope of this article.