In 2018, while I was placing Brexit in the context of rising new nationalisms in Europe and beyond, I commented en passant on the fragility of two very British icons, the BBC and the NHS:
“ There is no accident that the NHS shares with the BBC, that other icon of Britishness, the intention to provide universal and equal access across the huge diversity of a nation. Here is Tony Ageh… on Auntie’s early promise, “ to Inform, Educate and Entertain EVERYONE, equally and without systemic privilege or favour. No matter who you were, or where you lived, or how rich you were.” Now, both institutions are in crisis. In the case of the BBC, universal relevance has become an etiolated impartiality that is gradually foundering on the rocks of Us and Them. For the NHS, a fundamental economic solidarity is being hived off by privatisation.”
I was reminded of this sense of something unravelling on September 30, when BBC Director Tony Hall reversed the decision to discipline Breakfast host Naga Munchetty, singled out for criticising the US president’s racist rhetoric. The outcry greeting the Corporation’s initial decision was surely a key foundering moment. Even without Simon Albury’s indefatigable commentary on the gathering crisis, it became glaringly obvious overnight, as Anjum Peerbacos pointed out, that BBC rules of impartiality and balance turn out to be “made by white men who do not apply them even-handedly”; just like the Booker judges’ decision to flout the organisers’ instructions and award the 2019 prize jointly to Margaret Atwood and Bernadine Evaristo, suddenly seemed long overdue.
