---

Mr. David Winnick (Walsall, North): Should not newspaper editors and owners--as well as the BBC--bear in mind another factor, in addition to the issues that my hon. Friend has rightly raised? Without this place, whatever blemishes and faults it has displayed over the centuries, the civil liberties of all our people--including those whom I have mentioned--would not last five minutes.

Mr. MacShane: I think that my hon. Friend speaks for all of us.

Parliament has another important aspect: it reflects the kaleidoscope of what we are as a people. Many Back Benchers, some of whom are present on both sides of the Chamber--I shall not lessen their reputations by naming them--make a significant contribution. They are the ones who

"Dare to be a Daniel,


Dare to stand alone,


Dare to have a purpose firm,


And dare to make it known."

As is well known, I am a team player--[Hon. Members: "Which team?"]--but we need strong, independent Back-Bench voices. [Laughter.]

Mr. Nick Hawkins (Surrey Heath): I hesitate to interrupt the hon. Gentleman's passionate job application, but I want to pick up a serious point that he has made. I have been listening carefully, and I agree with much of what he is saying.

In trying to persuade the BBC to return "Yesterday in Parliament" to its rightful place, should we not bear it in mind that the BBC's charter requires it to cover Parliament properly? That is what makes the BBC, as a public service broadcaster, entirely different from other broadcasting organisations. It is not allowed simply to chase ratings--and in any event, as the hon. Gentleman pointed out, it has failed in its desperate attempt to do so.

Mr. MacShane: The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right.

Parliament means more than just the Chamber, however. As a junior parliamentary private secretary at the Foreign Office, I can reveal a secret: the Select Committee system causes no little interest among Ministers. The Foreign Secretary has appeared more often

14 Apr 1999 : Column 143

before the Select Committee on Foreign Affairs to answer questions than any of his predecessors. There is also the other place, where an interesting debate took place last night--reactionary and wrong, but interesting none the less. That too has been wiped off the airwaves.

Radio is important. There is a parliamentary television channel. I am going out live somewhere; it is possible to, as it were, chop me up, and it is difficult to make such an event come to life on television. This is a place for speaking. We are not really visual objects: we are losing our hair and gaining in girth. We are not pretty enough to appear on television, even those of us who have been treated with hormones or genetically modified. However, on radio we manage to tell a story, because radio is the medium of speech.

Mr. Patrick McLoughlin (West Derbyshire): Does the hon. Gentleman accept that originally "The Week in Westminster" was dedicated to the role of Back-Bench Members of Parliament, but that it has unfortunately changed, and now often carries what Front Benchers say?

Mr. MacShane: As a Back Bencher I find that deplorable, but I would be happy to take an intervention on the subject from the Front Bench.

We boast about having the best broadcasting system in the world. That may have been true once, but I wonder whether it is any longer. I watch political programmes in a number of other countries, and I often see a more mature, richer debate. The shop-worn Punch and Judy style of Messrs Paxman and Humphrys may be a barrier to understanding the new complexities of the modern world.

Unbelievably, we run a significant balance of trade deficit in broadcast programmes. This great nation of broadcasters imports far more than it exports. We do not have enough radio stations in the United Kingdom. We have 251. France has 858, Spain has 1,405, even the tiny Netherlands has 481, and Italy, where people obviously love talking, has more than 2,000. Three times as many people are employed in the radio business in Germany as in the UK, and twice as many in Italy. I want more broadcasting, more discussion of politics and more jobs to be created.

The row about parliamentary broadcasting, which has been rumbling for more than a year, masks a deeper malaise in the direction and management of the BBC. It is losing audiences, and many are asking whether it has lost its way. The licence fee is harder and harder to justify, certainly to many poor pensioners and the poorer members of my constituency.

The BBC was the first great nationalised industry in the long 20th-century British history of the belief that Government and Whitehall knew best what people wanted and what they should be given. As the BBC looks to the 21st century, I wonder whether it needs to reconsider its financing and institutional organisation.

Mr. John Maxton (Glasgow, Cathcart): My hon. Friend is being slightly unkind to the BBC. The major reason for the BBC's loss of audiences is the rapidly changing technological world, which is changingthe nature of broadcasting. That makes possible a Parliamentary channel, and means that we will get digital

14 Apr 1999 : Column 144

terrestrial television, satellite and cable. In the near future we will get digital radio, which will allow for debates in this place to be broadcast live on a continuous basis.

Mr. MacShane: I accept what my hon. Friend says, but he is arguing for quantity, whereas I am arguing for quality. My point was that the linked narration of "Yesterday in Parliament" makes the programme come to life, instead of its being a Hansard of television or radio that anyone can tune or plug into at any time of the day.

In conclusion, I appeal to the governors. They are responsible for the present position. It is clear that the BBC executives have shifted responsibility for this area to the governors. They do not usually intervene directly in programme making or editorial decisions, which is right. The executive of the BBC has let down the governors. It told the governors, and Sir Christopher came and told us, that removing Parliament from the airwaves on the FM "Today" programme would promote Radio 4, and that no one would notice the difference. They were wrong. Even Polly Toynbee, for example, who supported that decision before it was made, has written that she misses "Yesterday in Parliament." The executives were wrong 3 million times--the 3 million British citizens whom James Boyle, the Radio 4 controller, deprived of access to their own Parliament.

It is immensely hard for the British establishment to admit that it has got things wrong. It is harder still to put back in place what was successful. The BBC should be big enough to admit that it got something wrong, and to restore what worked and what serves the people of this country.

9.54 am

Mr. David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden): I begin by declaring an interest, as the author of the "BBC Guide to Parliament." I should tell the House that any change in its circulation in recent years has nothing to do with what I shall argue today.

As is conventional, I congratulate the hon. Member for Rotherham (Mr. MacShane) on his good fortune in getting the debate. He knows that my congratulations are more heartfelt than usual. I shall try to be as non-partisan in my comments as he was; I agree with 95 per cent. of what he said. I shall pick up the issue of the licence fee, with which he ended.

We all accept the ramifications of the licence fee. It may surprise some of my colleagues that as a relatively right-wing, free-market Tory Member of Parliament, I am entirely in favour of the licence fee, precisely because of its public service implications. It requires the BBC to inform, educate and entertain, in that order of priority--a point rarely made by the BBC.

That requirement has increased, not decreased, in importance with the proliferation of channels. We must remember that when there is greater pressure on the BBC to defend its market share. The hon. Member for Glasgow, Cathcart (Mr. Maxton) alluded to that in his intervention. Audience share reduction is inevitable, whatever the BBC does. It must recognise that fact and understand that that is not an excuse to abandon its core values.

I ask the Minister to pass on my congratulations to the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, who recently, in response to a question from the righthon. Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Mr. Sheldon),

14 Apr 1999 : Column 145

my predecessor as Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, stated his support for Alan Yentob's comment that quality comes before the mindless pursuit of audience. That matters in the present context, as elsewhere.

It is no bad thing that there is a dynamic tension between the wish to hang on to audience share and those core values. It prevents a subsidised monopoly organisation such as the BBC from making the Arts Council error of funding with taxpayers' money or, in this case, public service money, the very obscure--piles of bricks or preserved sheep--and invoking the public interest argument. Sensibly applied, dynamic tension prevents such a loss of common sense.

That dynamic tension also drives the BBC to try to square the circle by making good the popular and making the popular good. Over the years, the BBC has been extremely good at that. I come to my view of the BBC partly because, like the hon. Member for Rotherham, I have lived in another country. I have experienced the American television system and its lack of quality. I have seen the effect of the BBC not being present to drive standards up, as it has done in much of its coverage.

The idea of making the good popular and making the popular good demands from the BBC a creative response, rather than a managerial one, to its circulation problems. The error that we have witnessed over the past year results from a managerial response, rather than a creative response, to the problem of improving audience figures for the BBC.

---