The House of Commons on Monday evening was at its most self-righteous. It’s true that there are many problems that members of parliament can’t solve. We had just, for instance, spent two hours listening to them explaining to each other that the welfare system was too expensive and created perverse incentives, but also that any changes to it were unacceptable.
But they were all certain — quite certain — that they could do a better job of organising live coverage of the Glastonbury Festival than anyone in the BBC’s outside broadcast team.
The brief debate on the failure of a BBC producer to pull the plug on the corporation’s feed from one of the five stages it was livestreaming saw the chamber in almost total agreement. Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy arrived to denounce the “appalling and unacceptable scenes” of the rap group Bob Vylan chanting “Death to the IDF”. She had, she told us, called the director-general to demand an explanation.
To MPs still struggling with the concept of the Red Button, it’s all too baffling
Those of us who have waited for Nandy to engage with some of the big issues facing her department, from the future of British television to copyright protection for creative industries, were stunned by her sudden dynamism. If only we’d known that punk rap was what it took to wake her up.
As for the Conservatives, who had barely shown up to discuss welfare, here finally was an opportunity to engage in a bit of bloodsport: BBC bashing. Stuart Andrew, who claims to be the Shadow Culture Secretary, demanded an inquiry into the broadcaster’s Glastonbury coverage. It wasn’t clear whether he thought it should be judge-led and on oath. He also demanded to know whether streaming the event “constituted a breach of Section 22 of the Public Order Act”. If it did, then there would be an interesting question to be answered by Kemi Badenoch, who brought the incident to much wider attention on Saturday by tweeting a video of the offensive remarks.
At some level, MPs may have suspected that the whole reason bands say appalling things is to provoke outrage and get coverage. The festival’s other controversial signing Kneecap should be giving Badenoch a cut of their earnings, so determined is the Tory leader to get their name into the public mind. So instead they focused a lot of their outrage on the BBC.
They managed this despite, or perhaps because of, a certain amount of confusion about what had actually happened. Nandy, among others, referred repeatedly to the corporation having “broadcast” the gig — it was in fact livestreamed on iPlayer — and several contributors seemed to be under the impression that families cuddling up in front of BBC Two to watch a bit of Rod Stewart had instead been treated to antisemitic chants. To MPs still struggling with the concept of the Red Button, it’s all too baffling.
Caroline Dinenage, a Conservative, slammed the corporation’s laxity. “They took a reported 400 people” to the festival, she complained. “What were they all doing?” Helpfully, she answered her own question in literally the next sentence, explaining that the festival was “a vast operation, with multi simultaneous live shows.”
Nandy likewise expressed bafflement that it might require so many people to introduce, film, edit and transmit several days of live coverage of the country’s largest music festival. She has been Culture Secretary for almost a year now, and it would be really fascinating to hear what she has been up to in that time.
Reform’s Richard Tice announced that “the BBC is institutionally antisemitic.” He didn’t mention that in the last 12 months his party leader has declared just short of £400,000 in payments from rival broadcaster GB News (poor Lee Anderson has to struggle by on a mere £100,000 a year from the station).
The one voice of dissent was independent MP Ayoub Khan, who suggested there was “hypocrisy” that the Culture Secretary made statements about antisemitic chants but not about anti-Arab ones. Nandy was having none of that. “I could not disagree more,” she said, slamming her folder onto the dispatch box. “The reason I’ve brought a statement to the House today is that our national broadcaster, which is funded by the license fee, which is paid for by the public has broadcast something that is deeply offensive.”
Nandy was clear that she was putting the BBC on notice. One failure, she said, was “something that must be gripped. When you have several, it’s a problem of leadership.” You could say the same about governments, of course.
