He’s right about the left

This week Gavyn Davies, the former Chairman of the BBC, told a Lords committee on charter renewal that "the culture of the BBC cannot be centre left". The perception that it is, worried him.

To someone like Mr Davies, with his experience of the private sector, it is painfully obvious that the corporation is saturated with left-wing values. It disparages competition and worships consensus. Views prevalent in liberal universities percolate through every aspect of policy. Political correctness and cultural relativism are holy writ. Democracy is usually good, but not in America where it produces the wrong result.

This progressive orthodoxy did not incense me when I joined the Today programme. I had started my career as an adviser to Labour’s Shadow Cabinet. I believed Conservatives were morally deficient and was delighted that most of my colleagues agreed. Those who thought otherwise were considered oddballs to be pitied. But as I climbed the BBC ladder the atmosphere began to grate. Producers argued when asked to consider private schools in a report on educational standards and complained when instructed to interview a French opponent of the euro.

BBC journalists are aware of their duty to be impartial but they understand it intellectually not instinctively. While the BBC would never endorse one political party, its dominant attitudes are rigidly social democratic. Those values are so dominant that they are treated as virtues not opinions. It is why a BBC correspondent cried when Yassir Arafat died and a Today presenter referred to the Labour Party as "we";.

These political prejudices are innate because too few BBC employees have ever experienced life in the free market and those who have are often refugees from it. The corporation grows its own managers in preference to recruiting from outside and advertises for staff in left-wing newspapers.

The left-wing consensus can only change if the BBC reforms its selection procedures and eradicates a hierarchy that is modelled on the Civil Service. Changes proposed by the present Director-General do not address these issues. They must, because the BBC does not accurately reflect the diversity of opinion in Britain. Mr Davies is right to worry.

Tim Luckhurst is the author of This is Today, a Biography of the Today Programme