Something unique happened at the end of last month: the BBC broadcast for the last time via its own transmission system. The sell-off of BBC Broadcast to a bunch of Australian bankers, which went through on the stroke of midnight on July 31, continues the process of selling off the family silver that began with the sale of the Corporation's transmitter network in 1997 – by a curious coincidence, the year the current government came to power.
The present government has made several mistakes in my view, of which the most obvious is our ill-chosen support of Bush's Holy War on Iraq – the impact of this weasel-worded decision having become more evident over the past four weeks. But creeping privatisation in our society in general and the BBC in particular, the continuation of Thatcherism by undercover means, is perhaps the most insidious. You don't need to be an economist to know, surely, that if you put the network chain into private hands with any kind of profit motive, it's going to be less efficient, and cost more. If it costs £X to do something, how can it cost £X to do the same thing and make a profit? The only way is by increasing real efficiency (I don't mean simply cutting corners, sacking staff so the remaining workers have to do too much, which is the technique being applied elsewhere in the BBC), but efficiency is not the sole province of private industry. Any kind of ownership, public or private, can be efficient or inefficient, and provide good service or bad: it's all about management. But apart from the obvious dangers of public services in private hands, it simply can't be cheaper.
At least in this case the unions were able to agree guarantees for the BBC Broadcast workforce. But that doesn't change what’s happening: today's ‘Soft Thatcherism’, where the same things go on as before, but under the counter instead of under Thatcher, means that the paradigm governing British society has not returned to the post-war consensus that worked so well under both parties for so many years: instead, the politics of greed established at the end of the 70s remain to haunt us on the quiet. We should be concerned about this.
