Beeb websites are a recipe for leftie domination
Closures fail to tackle the bloated BBC’s real problem
THE BBC is to keep its vault of food recipes online despite closing the food section of its website.
Yesterday it announced the end of the internet travel and cookery sections due to budget cuts.
But as thousands signed a petition against the threatened loss of the recipes, Beeb bosses admitted the closure was far less dramatic.
The 11,000 recipes will not be deleted or archived but moved to the Good Food site owned by the BBC’s commercial arm.
Here, one writer argues the closures fail to tackle the real problem – the BBC website’s dominance over commercial rivals
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HOW upset should we be by news that the BBC has been forced to change its online food recipe service as part of a £15million cost-cutting programme?
Fortunately, the left-wing activist Billy Bragg has been offering his views on social media.
It is a disaster, he tells us — yet another devilish plot by the sinister forces of the free market.
Jack Monroe agrees. And Jack Monroe, as you surely know, is probably Britain’s leading transgender anti-poverty food campaigner, famed for her kale pesto recipe and brief, unlikely stint as the face of Sainsbury’s.
So that settles it. If Billy and Jack are against it, it must be a good thing.
Not because they are nasty or evil but because they are classic examples of nanny-state Britain, well-meaning fools who sincerely believe the only way to create a better society is with yet more handouts from the public sector.
Propaganda arm for the trendy PC elite To listen to campaigners, you would think the only place on Earth you can find a decent recipe is the BBC Food website. And they are right, up to a point.
Most of us have tried some of these 11,000 BBC recipes at some point.
Delicious cake from Mary Berry, yummy curries from Jamie Oliver, decadent creamy dishes from Nigella Lawson. They are tried and tested. They work.
But so they ruddy well ought to. We have paid for it all, millions of pounds a year, via our licence fee.
The idea the BBC is providing some incredible free social service is a nonsense.
If the BBC didn’t exist, it wouldn’t mean a sudden end to handy online tips on how to bake a lemon drizzle cake or dress a crab.
All it would mean is the internet traffic would go to cookery sites run by private enterprise rather than to a leftover from 1920s “Big Brother” Britain.
This is what Chancellor George Osborne was talking about last summer when he described the BBC as having become “imperial in its ambitions”.
He meant the organisation — devised by its founder Lord Reith to “inform, educate and entertain” — has become too big for its boots.
From Teletubbies to Radio 1, Today and Woman’s Hour to Any Questions, from the Last Night Of The Proms to its wall-to-wall Glastonbury coverage, the BBC doesn’t just reflect but seeks to dominate British life — social, artistic, economic, political, sporting and, yes, even culinary.
We are often told — by the BBC, mostly — that the service it offers is the “envy of the world”.
That the licence fee — a not insignificant £145.50 from every home with a telly — offers huge value for money.
And that the BBC’s Charter obligations make it strictly impartial.
But in truth the BBC is — and has been for years — the propaganda arm of the metropolitan, politically correct elite whose trendy leftist obsessions are often of little interest to people in the country at large.
This bias — pro-EU, anti-business, captured by the money-grabbing voluntary sector — matters because the BBC represents around 60 per cent of Britain’s total news output.
That is not far off the kind of domination you would expect of a totalitarian state.
It is not healthy for the economy, either.
Business thrives best when there is competition.
But what the BBC’s protected, heavily subsidised — to the tune of £4.8billion last year — near-monopoly does is shut free enterprise out of the marketplace.
How are commercial news- papers expected to compete when the BBC, with its eye-watering online budget of £201million — up from £174million in 2014, by the way — can afford to employ on its free website a full-time football correspondent, Phil McNulty, just to compose written match reports?
Or with the BBC’s vast battery of political experts, from Laura Kuenssberg to Nick Robinson, all of whom also provide written contributions to its website.
Even one of its own, former head of TV news Roger Mosey, once suggested the Beeb was so dominant in news “even long-term loyalists find (it) uncomfortable”.
Since when was it the BBC’s job to have a website, anyway?
It is supposed to be a broadcaster, not a publisher.
To his credit, the Culture Secretary John Whittingdale was trying to rein in some of this BBC excess with a new White Paper.
Unfortunately, he was overruled by his party leadership, who — because the Government has such a small majority — are terrified of upsetting the BBC and its attendant luvvie fanclub.
The very last thing they want is to give Benedict Cumberbatch and Judi Dench the excuse to march on 10 Downing Street, wailing about savage cuts to the nation’s beloved broadcaster. So they caved in to most of the Beeb’s demands.
Yes, the BBC Food website will go, though not the actual recipes.
That’s just a lie.
But most of the bloated, overmighty behemoth will stay intact.
— James Delingpole writes for The Spectator.