Ofcom blocks BBC plans for Radio 2 and Radio 5 extensions
However, it further allowed plans for new DAB+ stations Radio 1 Dance, Radio 1 Anthems, and Radio 3 Unwind to go ahead.
The watchdog is required to consider the effects of 'material' changes to the BBC's TV, radio and online public services on commercial competition.
READ MORE: 111 BBC journalists demand change at top as Israel-Palestine reporting 'crippled'
Ofcom's judgment said: 'Radio 1 Dance, Radio 1 Anthems, and Radio 3 Unwind can proceed. We found these stations would have a limited impact on fair and effective competition, which would be justified by the public value of the proposals.
'The BBC Radio 2 extension, which would broadcast music and archive content from the 50s, 60s and 70s, cannot go ahead. Although the proposal could provide some public value, this would not be enough to justify the significant impact on fair and effective competition, which includes the potential to reduce investment incentives for commercial radio operators.
'The BBC's plans to extend the broadcasting hours of Radio 5 Sports Extra may not proceed. While it could offer some public value, for example by broadening the amount of sport on linear radio, this wouldn't be sufficient to justify the significant impact it would have on fair and effective competition, in particular on the talkSPORT network.'
The National Union of Journalists (NUJ) welcomed the decisions.
Paul Siegert, NUJ national broadcasting organiser, said: "We welcome this decision by Ofcom. While a Radio 2 spin-off might have benefited audiences in terms of archive music performances, the BBC already has a network of 39 local radio stations which are perfectly placed to serve an older demographic.
'This would be an ideal time for the corporation to think again about how best to spend money from the licence fee, and perhaps channel the investment that had been earmarked for Radio 2 back into restoring some of the local programming already lost around the country."
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an hour ago
- Times
Hamas leaders in Doha ‘told to give up personal weapons'
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Spectator
an hour ago
- Spectator
Tim Davie shouldn't quit over Glastonbury
There probably never has been a time when a governing party much liked its MPs. If you are on a mission, as governments imagine they are, you are always impatient when your own side raises objections. But it is only recently that governments have seemed positively affronted by the idea that their MPs should have a say. This was encapsulated by Sir Keir Starmer when he dismissed Labour's backbench revolt over welfare cuts as 'noises off'. Off what, exactly? Legislators have the sole right to legislate and that includes the right to refuse legislation. Those, like Rachael Maskell, who parade their consciences may be tiresome, but there is no way of governing this country except through parliament (though people like Lord Hermer are striving mightily to alter this). Prime ministers are oddly blind to the ultimate consequence, which is that their MPs get rid of them. Sir Keir's blindness led to his capitulation on Monday night, turning his gigantic majority into his potentially fatal problem. It is always confusing for the BBC to decide what to ban, cut or edit. In 1972, in the wake of Bloody Sunday, it banned Paul McCartney's rather tame song 'Give Ireland back to the Irish' ('Great Britain, you are tremendous/And nobody knows like me/ But really, what are you doin'/ In the land across the sea?') but allowed John Lennon's 'Sunday Bloody Sunday' which attacked 'You Anglo pigs and Scotties/ Sent to colonise the North', complained about 'the concentration camps' (unspecified) in Northern Ireland and regretted that although 'the cries of 13 martyrs filled the free Derry air', 'not a soldier boy was bleeding/ When they nailed the coffin lids'. If you do not have your own moral compass, you will be guided only by levels of public outrage and will find these hard to predict. In the case of Bob Vylan, the story is about management of coverage, not endorsement, of dreadful views. It does not exhibit the monstrous anti-Israel bias daily apparent in BBC documentaries, news reports, BBC Verify, BBC Arabic, Jeremy Bowen etc. It is more a lack of due diligence. I doubt the resignation of Tim Davie would produce visible improvement. He is actually the first D-G even to admit and pursue the anti-Semitism problem. More shocking is the way the Glastonbury crowd (and therefore, unthinkingly, the BBC) rolls with this type of thing. If – unimaginable, I know – an extreme-right popstar had appeared and announced that he hated 'Zionists' and that Israeli soldiers should die, he would have been howled down. But the left has so normalised Islamist extremism that the overwhelmingly white, middle-class establishment audience has no sense of its weirdness. In a passage not widely reported, Bob Vylan announced to the Glastoholics, 'We are not pacifist punks here. We are the violent punks.' Some of them cheered. Was that a tattoo of a guillotine that I saw on his right arm? Does Glastonbury have to suffer the fate of the Manchester Arena before they understand? Ex-prime ministers are sparing in their public interventions. So far as I can see, Rishi Sunak had made only one Commons speech (as opposed to asking questions) since leaving office – on Rachel Reeves's first Budget. Last week, however, he made his second, in Westminster Hall. It began: 'I last spoke on this subject in this very place back in 2016. A lot has changed in the last nine years – notably, ten chief secretaries to the Treasury, seven chancellors and, indeed, five prime ministers – but one thing that has not changed is my view on grouse shooting.' From that good start, Mr Sunak went on to argue that the sport 'is a part of our local social fabric, and… one of the world's great conservation success stories'. He criticised the tendency of 'some conservationists… to act as though farmers and gamekeepers are somehow trespassing on Britain's landscape, but without their hands repairing our dry-stone walls or their dairy cows keeping the fields lush, the rural beauty of our countryside would soon fade. Heather moorland… is rarer than rainforest, and 75 per cent of it is found right here in Britain. It is a national treasure.' The fanatic Chris Packham, who was attending the debate, was seen to hold his head in his hands as he listened. I hope this oration marks the start of Mr Sunak's comeback. Charm is easy to recognise but notoriously hard to describe. Sandy Gall, who has just died aged 97, had it. When he and the tipsy Reggie Bosanquet co-presented ITN News in the 1970s, charm was visible nightly on the nation's screens. It had something to do with being at ease, a lack of self-importance and the sense that the pair were often repressing laughter. Sandy retained these qualities in many dangerous situations covering wars for more than half a century, and into old age. In 2010, when he was 82, we accompanied him to Afghanistan. It was supposed to be a holiday, plus a visit to the charity which he had established to give prosthetic limbs to children injured by the war when he first covered Afghanistan, hidden in Russian-occupied territory, in the 1980s. Sandy's two rules for later journeys there were that he should never have security – it just makes one a target, he said – and that he should always carry a bottle of whisky, which was illegal. It being high summer, he had advised us not to bring waterproofs, but when we flew in a light aircraft to see Bamiyan and the mountainside which held the colossal Buddhas smashed in their niches by the Taliban, we found the place flooded. The airport was on a plateau. Our hotel was visible below, surrounded by water. Undismayed, Sandy ordered ten donkeys to carry us through the inundation and breakfast to eat until these could be found. By the time we had finished the breakfast, the waters had sufficiently receded for the donkeys to be laid off. He was a dear man, neither broken by the horrors of war, nor puffed up by his courage in the face of them – a true reporter.
Spectator
an hour ago
- Spectator
And now let's bomb Glastonbury
A small yield nuclear weapon, such as the American W89, dropped on Glastonbury in late June would immediately remove from our country almost everybody who is hugely annoying. You would see a marked reduction in the keffiyeh klan, for a start, and all those middle-class Extinction Rebellion protestors would find, in a nanosecond, that their rebellion was pointless, because extinction had arrived even more summarily than they expected. Go on, glue yourselves to that, Poppy and Oliver. Street drummers, liberal politicians, provo vegans, radical rappers, spiritual healers, Billy Bragg, that bloke who owns Forest Green Rovers, druggies, tattooed blue-haired hags, almost the entirety of middle-class London – all evaporated. I am not saying that we should do this, of course – it would be a horrible, psychopathic thing to do. I am merely hypothesising, in a slightly wistful kinda way. One on Glasto, one on Brighton, and the UK would soon begin its recovery, with only a few chunks of gently glowing cobalt 60 left to remind us of what we are missing. One on Glasto, one on Brighton, and the UK would soon begin its recovery The BBC would cease to exist, too. It identifies Glastonbury as an expression of the UK 'coming together', which shows you how much it understands about the country. It has poured millions of pounds of licence-payers' money into its coverage, and 400 staff were there last weekend, including the director-general, Tim Davie. Or at least 400 staff were actually working there – I'll bet another 400 or so were there in their little tents, desperate to surf the vibe or whatever the phrase is. All those people, then, and they still couldn't get it right. Nor should we take seriously their claims that pulling the ridiculous Bob Vylan from air would not be anywhere near as simple as flicking a switch. It is every bit as simple as flicking a switch, in that all they had to do was flick a switch. They had rafts of presenters who could have filled the time, plus cameras at every other stage in the festival site. All it needed was someone with the merest vestige of sentience to make the decision – but, then, this is the BBC we are talking about. Whoever was in charge of output at that moment – almost certainly someone called 'Johnny' or 'Ayesha' – probably just thought the stuff about the IDF was 'top bants'. In truth, I am not much worked up about the Bob Vylan (or Kneecap) stuff, per se. They were only doing what an endless list of hip young musicians have done at every summer festival going all the way back to Country Joe McDonald and 'one-two-three-four what are we fighting for?' – i.e., channelling infantile far-left agitprop devoid of nuance and context to an audience of gullible drongos. The difference is that the BBC decided to cover it, thinking – as it unquestionably does – that the majority of the country would be cheerfully humming along with Bob Vylan's tuneful music and are entirely down with the sentiments expressed. That is the BBC's real crime. It is worth a brief digression here on the nature of protest songs, of rock musicians playing politics and whether they have an effect or not. The BBC would argue that they do have an effect, that they tap into a perhaps previously unexpressed sentiment among the wider public and hence herald great change. Au contraire. In the mid- to late-1960s, the more protest songs and festival chants there were, the further to the right swung the rest of the electorate. As evidence, I would point you in the direction of Richard Nixon's comprehensive victory in 1968 and then, after Country Joe had done his stuff at Woodstock, a landslide in 1972. They all seriously believed McGovern was going to win that one, so wrapped up inside their radical bubble were they all (including the broadcasters). All those youthful protests of the 1960s resulted in surprise victories for the right at the polls a few years later – in the UK with Ted Heath in 1970, in France with an unexpected win for Pompidou in 1969, and of course the USA. The more fervently they insist that they are right, the more likely it is that the rest of the country will tell them to get stuffed. I suppose it is possible that Bob Vylan will do for Tim Davie, the DG – although he is the least of the corporation's problems, frankly. He knows he has a workforce which, in its arrogance, subscribes to a set of political beliefs unshared by the people who pay for its existence. And it is so endemic that there is nothing he can do about it. One little thing I noticed: the BBC News dutifully covered the Bob Vylan debacle and did so even handedly. But on every single occasion, on radio and TV, the story was immediately followed by a report of Israeli 'atrocities' in Gaza. Every single time. Do you think that is an accident? There was a programme on BBC Radio 4 on Monday, as part of the 'Currently' series, about Louise Lancaster, an environmental protestor who was finally (on her fifth conviction) handed down a four-year sentence (later reduced to three years) for organising a protest which seriously inconvenienced hundreds of thousands of people. You would be hard-pressed to find a more egregiously biased example of broadcasting. Lancaster – a middle-class teacher from Grantchester – was portrayed as a kind of saint, suffering state persecution for her entirely valid beliefs. The Sun and Daily Mail were mentioned disparagingly and every action taken by Lancaster lauded. The BBC decided first to commission this rubbish and then put it out. Can you imagine it doing a similar piece about Lucy Connolly? Not a chance. That is the real problem with the BBC. It is utterly incapable of recognising the bias it displays every day on an hourly basis, no matter how often that bias is pointed out. Bob Vylan, frankly, is the least of it.
