Free the BBC

If anyone needed convincing of the BBC’s pathological self-importance, proof has been provided by the corporation’s news coverage of its own reorganisation. On Tuesday, a day on which back-bench Labour MPs threatened a revolt against David Blunkett’s proposed law against incitement to religious hatred, and Hamid Karzai was inaugurated as Afghanistan’s first democratically elected president, the BBC’s reporters struggled to cover any story beyond their own building. The World at One, Radio Four’s lunchtime news broadcast, devoted 26 minutes of its half-hour running time to the BBC’s proposal to make 2,900 of its staff redundant — and would no doubt have devoted the full 30 minutes to the story had not Mark Thompson, the corporation’s director-general, mercifully declined to be interviewed alongside an assortment of trade unionists, producers and junior ministers.

This magazine has itself been no stranger to the news pages in recent weeks, but we are not in the habit of clearing out every page bar the crossword in order to comment on staff changes in accounts and a minor reorganisation of the stationery cupboard.