Elections and the BBC

Earlier this week Peter Kellner in his column in the London Evening Standard strongly criticised two aspects of BBC coverage of the London Mayor and other local elections to be held next month. First, he complained that the BBC's political journalists in London, who had commissioned a poll on the election from MORI [BBC London Live poll] had been prevented by Corporation policy from including any questions on voting intention; this is merely the continuation of a policy which we have criticised for a number of years. Secondly, he has pointed out a new restriction, which will lead to all the parties being required to run their election broadcasts before Easter, a full ten days before polling day. This, arises from the introduction of pilot schemes in a number of councils across the country, whereby a few polling stations will be open early, on the Thursday, Friday and Saturday before the normal polling day, so that electors who cannot vote in the usual way will be able to cast their votes in advance. (This is just one of a number of different experimental schemes aimed at encouraging turnout or otherwise improving electoral procedures, which councils have recently been authorised to try out over the next few years; it is envisaged that those which are a success will be extended to general elections, although probably not before the next election-but-one.) Because of this, the BBC has apparently decided that it must not allow any party broadcasts during this period and indeed, if Kellner's interpretation of the BBC's intentions is correct, that any attempt at serious political journalism will be banned from the BBC for the last week. Presumably if the initiative is extended to general elections, the BBC's intention is that they would pursue this policy in those circumstances as well; and, quite conceivably, the other broadcasters may follow their lead.

Two days later Anne Sloman, the BBC's chief political adviser, replied in a letter to the Standard, confirming that Kellner's explanation of policy was BBC correct and accusing him of missing the point. "The backbone of the BBC's political journalism has always been, and will continue to be, rigorous impartiality. For this reason we rarely conduct voting intention polls, and never during an election campaign," she wrote. This is a mighty non sequitur. Voting intention polls are not a deviation from impartiality. Even if misleadingly inaccurate, which is very rare, the polls are scrupulously neutral. More usually they are sufficiently accurate to provide objective information to those in the audience, including other voters, who wish to have it. The BBC policy does not promote impartiality over partiality but ignorance over knowledge. And in an election such as that for Mayor of London, where the second-choice vote system means that voters may need some idea of the standing of the candidates to avoid wasting their votes altogether, the policy seems especially ill-conceived. One beneficiary, ironically, will be Peter Kellner, since it will ensure the ICM polls that he reports in the Standard a virtual monopoly in the field!

But Kellner's second point, and Sloman's reply, is even more worrying. "It is, and always has been, a convention shared by all British broadcasters that nothing in our coverage could influence the ballot... which is why [party election broadcasts] shouldn't be broadcast at a time when polling booths are open", she writes. This is a nonsense. For a start, for as long as there have been PEBs there has been postal voting - in recent elections three quarters of a million or more (far more than are likely to vote early in this year's experiments) have been filling in their ballot papers over the same period the broadcasts have been being shown, without any complaints. The principle is exactly the same (but the BBC hasn't thought of that). Furthermore, Sloman doesn't deny, and indeed by implication seems to accept, Kellner's suggestion that the restriction will extend to preventing political content in news coverage over the same period. It will, it seems, be back to the policy of the early 50s when the BBC dared not mention any politician in news coverage during an election campaign in case it could be considered chargeable to his campaigning expenses. Then, it took the emergence of ITV, risking coverage of a by-election in which - shock horror! - the candidates appeared on screen, before the BBC dared to make similar innovations.

What will be the effect of stopping election broadcasts and other controversial coverage several days before the poll? The likeliest, of course, is that it will damage turnout. Levels of turnout in Britain for local elections are already appalling, among the lowest in Western Europe (which is precisely why the government has authorised experimental schemes to deal with it).

Only 49% say they are "certain to vote" at the next general election [March MORI/Times poll]. And, incidentally, for all the BBC's determination that their policy is necessary in the interests of impartiality, anything leading to a low turnout is likely to be far from neutral in its political effects, as the European Election demonstrated - Labour voters, at present, are far less sure that they would vote than Tories or Lib Dems, and a broadcasting policy that stopped Tony Blair from making an eve-of-poll appeal to his supporters to turn out could potentially cost Labour dozens of seats.

In the past we have castigated those who have advocated banning the publication of opinion polls during election campaigns, and taken comfort from the fact that most of the public who support that also support banning all coverage of the election on TV and radio - reductio ad absurdum, we would have thought. But when "supporters of this policy [restrictions that will effectively mean a ban on TV and radio coverage] include Greg Dyke and the BBC's board of governors", to quote Anne Sloman, we begin to wonder what will come next. One thing is for sure. If the BBC ceases to be a reliable and comprehensive source of news coverage on issues that matter to the British people, the audience will turn elsewhere; in which case, the licence fee will not last five minutes nor the BBC itself ten. Public service broadcasting, which must include the function of being a channel of communication between candidates and voters to facilitate informed and democratic elections, is the BBC's sole defensible raison d'etre.

We should be asking the question why regulation of election broadcasting is left in the hands of the broadcasters rather than being properly regulated by neutral electoral administrators appointed for the purpose. Legislation is currently being enacted to set up an Electoral Commission, which will supervise almost all aspects of British elections, from the delineation of constituency boundaries to the enforcement of campaign spending limits. Yet, although the broadcasters will have to "have regard to any views expressed by the Electoral Commission" in deciding their policy on party political broadcasts, the Commission will not be given direct power to regulate election broadcasts, or even the crucial and often controversial question of the relative time that should be allocated to the parties. Why not? During the last election, one minor party (the anti-abortion Pro-Life Alliance) was forced to make substantial changes to its election broadcast before the TV stations would show it at all; another's (the British National Party's) was refused completely by one channel, while other channels insisted on cuts. In both cases, the reason was broadcasting policy rather than electoral law; two parties, each with a slate of legitimately nominated candidates in a general election, were prevented from putting their case to the electors in the way they preferred because broadcasting managers considered the material distasteful or that it would have been unsuitable to be broadcast in the companies' own programmes.

Is this situation satisfactory, or democratic? Given that British elections have become dependent on the party political broadcast as the principal means by which the parties can communicate directly with the electors, they should be regulated solely with regard to election law and for the purposes of securing free and fair elections. It seems to me that the appropriate body for administering such regulations is one appointed for the purpose, not the governors of the BBC - and especially not in the light of the effects of their other policy decisions, as highlighted by Peter Kellner, which seem more likely than not to be detrimental to the quality of democracy in the elections the BBC is covering.