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Electronic Communications

I do not want to embark on top-slicing, and neither does the National Union of Journalists or anyone with a real concern for public service broadcasting. Once top-slicing starts, it never stops. If it starts, we shall end up with what happened when I was in New Zealand. There, the licence fee was frozen and never increased, with the result that demand for commercials to be broadcast on the public service broadcasting channel kept on growing. The motion shows that today's Conservative party has very little noblesse and damn all oblige. The spirit of Willie Whitelaw, a man who was generous to the BBC and to public service broadcasting, is frankly dead. The Opposition are clearly obsessed with the cost of everything, but care little for a valued institution such as the BBC. When the Tory Front-Bench spokesman made his speech, he was surrounded by the boot boys of the Tory party, but most of them have left to do their boot work somewhere else. His was an intellectually feeble argument, and I am pleased to see that the Troy grandees are not participating in it. The BBC has its faults, and we could go on about them at length. I wish that I had been paid the sort of salary that Jonathan Ross gets—I used to present a programme called "24 Hours A Day" and I was worth it—but there is no need to go on about the BBC's faults, as all big organisations have them. Freezing or cutting the annual licence fee increase would secure only pathetic savings and, once we embarked on such a process, it would never stop. What would happen next year, or the year after? Another cut would be proposed. The motion shows that the Tory party is reneging on the licence fee, which has been the basis for the financing of public service television over the years. It has been ring-fenced to the BBC to provide quality in public broadcasting through culture programmes, children's programmes and regional services. The latter are very important in Yorkshire, and the BBC provides all the services from which ITV is pulling out. Are the Opposition arguing that, because ITV is cutting its public service obligations, we should force the BBC to do the same? Is that the essence of their argument—that, because ITV has had to make sacrifices, we should impose sacrifices on the BBC? That is totally illogical. The BBC is the bastion and guardian of public service television in this country. Are the Opposition suggesting that the money saved on the licence fee should go to ITV, or are they proposing these savage cuts just to make the BBC show the same sacrifice as ITV? If so, that argument is illogical.