TRASHFUTURE - Anti-Beeb feat. Tom Mills and Dan Hind

Episode Date: June 17, 2025

Tom Mills and Dan Hind talk to us about their work on what a functioning BBC might look like, and how that’s less about finding the exact right political balance (any day now, surely!) and more about ownership structure and material factors. In the first half, we are once again overtaken by events, as this seems to be another “week where decades happen” in global politics. Get more TF episodes each week by subscribing to our Patreon here! *T-SHIRT ALERT!* We now have ‘Say Goodbye to His Uncle’ shirts available for preorder, as well as a reissue of the TF ‘What If Your Phone Was the Cops’ shirts from 2018! https://trashfuture.co.uk/collections/all *MILO ALERT* Check out Milo’s tour dates here: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/liveshows *TF LIVE ALERT* We’ll be performing at the Big Fat Festival hosted by Big Belly Comedy on Saturday, 21st June! You can get tickets for that here! You can also get tickets for our show at the Edinburgh Fringe festival here! Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

Hello everyone, welcome to this free episode of TF. It's the free one. It's the free one. It is the remote one. It's Riley and Hussein are in the UK. Whereas we have said field correspondent Milo to monitor the developing situation by scrolling on his phone in Istanbul, Turkey. That's great. Milo, what have you learned?

You are effectively like a foreign correspondent because like my very brief stint in foreign correspondence did largely involve going to Istanbul to watch a bunch of journalists who were filing stuff from Syria Mostly scroll on their phones in Istanbul. I mean and look what more do you want? I mean as as a wise man once said, you know, Istanbul is always the first stop baby That's correct. So I think this is if you wanted to broadly categorize our Episodes there are movie episodes there are book episodes, there are live shows, there are sort of normal news episodes and so on and so on. There's a whole vertical of

overtaken by events episodes. This is one of them. And the big event is that Milo has like the cleanest fade I've ever seen in my life. His fade's amazing, but he's not had an ice cream in days. Yeah. They just keep taking him away. I don't know. Other one's got to do something about this. Yeah. It's either that or it's going to be to be like the army is going to need to come in and reimpose secularism and distribute ice cream fairly. Well, my question about the Turkish ice cream men is if they never give the ice cream out, what are they doing with it? You know, where does it go? You just resell it to the next guy and don't give it to him. You never need to re-up on your supplies.

Yeah, that ice cream is years old. So yes, this is one of these episodes where we have been decidedly overtaken by events. Something that keeps happening. Yeah. Or happens with more and more frequency. Not all, events have sped up. We are in one of... We're not going slower. Events are going faster. And I want that on the record. Kinda. Yeah. What happens with more and more frequency? Not all. Events have sped up. We are in one of- We're not going slower. Events are going faster. And I want that on the record.

Kinda. Kinda. You know, this is no longer one of these weeks where decades happen. It's one of those lunch breaks where centuries happen. So what we have today is in the back half of the episode, I, a while ago, spoke with Tom Mills and Dan Hind, who are two academics campaigning to make the BBC less terrible. And we have a whole conversation in the back half about exactly how it got as bad as it is, the end of the sort of impossible political task it has to perform and why it keeps on defaulting to, we have to appease reform voters, we have to appease reform voters.

And might as well talk about bargain hunt. It's just bargain hunt alone. And I also intended to sort of cover a couple of the news items that we spoke about, but didn't have time for on the last bonus episode with Josh. However, I would like to just instead speak about what's happening now in the Middle East. That is to say, beyond heavily implied nuclear brinksmanship by Israel, indiscriminate targeting of Iranian civilians, which of course they have fine form for, as part of its, I would say now, quite reckless attack on Iran, Israel has turned to making AI slop posts about why

it's good that they're doing this. And Europe should say thank you to Israel for continuing to act as the main destabilizing force in the Middle East and the wider, much wider region. They're so cool, man. They're like the friend that you have the group chat with all the other friends specifically to talk about what they've done now. As like a Western ally, they're like, you know what, they've been a Western ally for so long. We can't really stop being friends with them now, but they're constantly embarrassing us. They're always doing shit. They're getting too drunk. They're throwing up all over the nightclub floor.

No one knows what to do. Everyone's avoiding their texts. Yeah. So I've seen a couple of very official Israeli accounts and this goes into the file of AI Slop is the aesthetic of modern fascism, vertical as well, which is Niftali Bennett posting AI pictures of Paris getting nuked. And then again, saying, Israel, you're welcome, Paris, that you're not getting nuked by Iran right now. Or the same, another official IDF account, again, using AI in a video generator to make a fun Lego Star Wars style story of the strikes that they've carried out on Iranian senior military commanders, nuclear scientists, and of course, like dozens and dozens and dozens of civilians already.

Yeah. Hussain, have you seen these? Yeah, I saw the Paris one this morning. It was certainly sloppy. I have no way to describe it other than just like, in a way, all this AI stuff is perfect for a place like Israel because so much of their myth-making is based on bullshit and fantasy, but their standing, whatever you want to call it, or at least the propaganda, it's been difficult. I think they found it difficult, at least in part,

to continue proliferating it when it's so filled with contradictions. When the first wave of Iranian missiles hit, breaking some of the fantasies about the unique capacity of Israeli defensive technology, for example, or just even the whole, like, even all the sort of, like, oh, the Iranians are targeting civilian areas and they're targeting babies and with no sort of fucking sense of irony whatsoever. But like a lot of their sort of propaganda rests on like, or like the struggle with it are the contradictions inherent in them.

And the thing about like the AI technology is that it's perfect for reconciling some of those contradictions, so to speak, right? By projecting like these bizarre fantasies, which are the only way to make it make sense. And the Israeli tactic of, we want to be shown as this fearless state that you don't mess with, but also we're precious little flowers. And grays could hurt us and we need all this defence and we need all this protection because we are the victims. And holding those two things together has been a very difficult thing, I imagine, for them to show the world. And the AI slop, I think, is one way of trying to reconcile those contradictions.

Effectively, perhaps, I don't know, but at least in the internal culture, I imagine this stuff is somewhat effective in at least reaffirming the myth making that it often relies on for its own sense of legitimacy. Yeah. I mean, the myth making is certainly very effective as these are sort of broadly very highly supported domestically. Well, I thought that sexy Judy Dench was very convincing about how the Iranians were going to nuke Paris and I can only wait to hear from horny John Cena on the same matter just to close the issue. But so, look, this is being recorded on the 16th of June, still very early days, but,

you know, without sort of discussing in detail exactly sort of what it is that, you know, that has happened and how, right, which I think we'll aim to do with someone who's a bit more of an expert on the subject soon. Hey! Yeah, our foreign correspondent accidentally went to the wrong country. Sorry. Look, I tried to ask the ice cream man about it, but he wouldn't tell me anything. He kept being about to tell me something and then he'd take it away again.

Basically, there are a few things, right? You can look at what the Americans and the Israelis say. You can look at what European leaders are saying as well. And it paints very different pictures that are likely headed the same direction, which is if you look at American and Israeli leaders, beyond the Americans sort of doing their usual kayfabe of, oh, we don't want to be involved, et cetera, et cetera, in which I'll believe when I see. A lot of what's being discussed is, to me, about as realistic as the Trump-Gaza plan,

which is, oh, what's going to happen is that we are going by projecting an enormous amount of violence onto the Iranian state as well as civilian centers. We are going to create mass casualties, disable the country's leadership, drive a wedge between the people in the government, destroy Tehran itself, which again, Israeli leaders are talking about with glee because Israel has one modus operandi when dealing with countries, people it considers to be hostile, which is more or less everyone around it, which is kill everyone and level everything. Iranian society is varied ethnically, ideologically, religiously.

The government is not universally popular, but the campaign that the Israelis are waging seems to be focused on just destroying the Iranian state more than anything else, which is, to be perfectly honest, a fucking terrifying prospect primarily for the people who are about to have a failed state inflicted upon them. But also like this is going to once again, we know what happens when you have lots of rosy assumptions about just getting rid of the bad government that a new one will step out. I mean, the ultimate irony of course, is the fucking like a Pahlavi, right? Getting on video, got a fucking cameo and being like, oh yeah, the people of Iran yearn for democracy.

The heir of the fucking Shah saying the people of Iran yearn for democracy would be brilliant satire if it wasn't so fucking tragic. But I mean, the likely outcome of destroying the whole state is God fucking knows. But all you can imagine is that we know what happens again when like a multi-ethnic, multi-faith territory has its state totally destroyed by outside forces. We saw that with Iraq. I mean with

Iran it's just bigger and more varied religiously and ethnically. I mean again the same before the episode we were talking about this. Like yeah it would they would without a state it would splinter into what? Balochis, Azeris, Arabs, like how many ethnic, let alone religious divisions would there be? Yeah. Like we've seen this happen before. And like, we've also seen this happen in Syria. We've seen it happen in Libya. Like it's still sort of happening. And so there is like a playbook in terms of like how to dismantle a state. The only difference I sort of feel here is that like in the past, there was at least some talk about like, you know, you'd

sort of like cause a state to collapse. But in the peak war on terror years, it's like, okay, we're actually going to do state building. We're going to bring in a new people's government. We saw this in Afghanistan, for example. We saw this in Iraq as well. Every time it's been used as a failure. But I feel like in this instance, for the Israelis, it's not about state building. I don't think for them it's like they want to install an Israeli-friendly government.

I think they benefit from a fractured state. I think they benefit from it falling apart. This is like, what if you had all the violence of the war on terror, but without any of the faux optimism of it? Which is a very scary prospect. Also we're talking about the displacement of tens of thousands of people at least. We're talking about a worsening of a refugee crisis at a time when hostility towards refugees is extremely high, particularly in Europe. And so we're talking about global destabilization. And I don't want to sort of exaggerate when I say

because I do sort of mean that in a very literal sense. We're talking about like a greater destabilization that is completely needless. It's like completely unnecessary and could be, if not stopped, at least kind of limited if there was any sort of serious attempt to rein in this Middle Eastern rogue state that just wants to sort of go to war with everyone. It is so galling to see Ursula fucking Von der Leyen or to even see like, you know, Stammer as well just say, oh, we call on a diplomatic solution. Great. Fine. But well, we say we call on a diplomatic solution, but we also have to acknowledge, by the way, that Iran is like the main destabilizing force in the region.

Right. It also like, yeah, it relies on a sort of fantasy as well of like, this is like, Iran is like this kind of like, you know, it actually is the rogue state and it's like hell bent on getting a nuclear bomb. And the moment it gets a nuclear bomb, it's going to drop it on like Paris, apparently. But also like, it's going to drop it straight on Israel, right? Which is not true. It's kind of like a complete ignorance of like, how politics works in Iran. How the sort of relationship between politics and the religious clergy. I don't think we necessarily need to go too deep into it. And if we were, I feel like there are better people to talk about it. But

nevertheless, the main thing is this is a complete fantasy. Khamenei has said many, many times he doesn't want to build a nuclear weapon. There is a fatwa, like the highest declaration to be like, we are not going to build a nuclear weapon. Even on like Iranian news channels this weekend, as the country is being bombed, like you have generals being like, yeah, we don't want to build a nuclear weapon. We'll see how things go like later on. But at the moment, the policy is we're not building a nuclear weapon. That's supported by that.

Evident just to jump in. There's evidence supporting that from the IAEA as well. It is fucking 2003 all over again, but instead 9-11 was done to the country that we're creating the manufacturing, the consent to invade. Yeah. And it's maddening just in the sense of like, we sort of know where this goes, but also it's largely happening because of his actual rogue state just sort of decided that they want to do it for like both political reasons and like, you know, and for religious reasons as well, right? For sort of like, whatever they view, like what the integrity of the Jewish state sort of entails and like what kind of, what is necessary for its safety. And if that means

like going to war with countries that have not attacked it or occupying parts of countries that have not attacked it, like, you know, it's, it's like a price that you are sort of told to accept. And like, it's absolutely maddening. And I think the sort of like thing that is the most frustrating and something that will sort of just make you feel really like that your sort of mind is somewhere else is just like, this is catastrophic and no one seems to be willing to stop it. And if anything, like if you try to stop it in any form, whether that's like a flotilla or trying to shut down like a weapons manufacturer or even like protesting, like you are much more likely to be punished for trying to stop the catastrophe than to sort of like let it happen. I always like to talk about this guy, this thinker from the 1950s, a guy called C. Wright

Mills. C. Wright Mills was an American sociologist. And so he wrote this book in 1956 called The Power Elite. And this was specifically about Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and like the way that the Rand Corporation especially would think of nuclear proliferation. And I think I mentioned it on this show years ago, but I think it's worth talking about again, especially in the context of the Western policy of either allow Israel to do whatever it wants with its neighbors or the Western European policy of allow Israel to do whatever it wants with his neighbors, but feel bad about it. And so this book, it has this concept, which is really useful, that is called crackpot realism,

which is the idea that you can believe that your actions are making the world a materially safer place by, for example, engaging in nuclear proliferation between peer states, right? That you would believe, okay, well, we, the United States, in order to make a much safer world must in fact make nuclear war more likely so that it's less likely. And you would say, well, this is insane. Obviously, this is insane. We should try to have fewer nuclear weapons. And so I think there's sort of two valences in which you can think about this.

Number one is in order to make the world safe, it appears that the argument now from American, European leaders and even Gulf leaders as well, but like less loudly, I guess, because they're, they hate Iran, but they're a little more worried about, you know, the active destabilization. And I thought it was America that had the golf leader. Am I right? That's right. Thank you very much, Milo. But we must create more failed states in the, and you don't also, you don't need to be like a partisan of like the specific government of the Islamic Republic to see that that is a terrifying fucking prospect for literally everybody. That will make the world infinitely less safe. On the other hand, you also can see,

okay, well, if you look at the lessons of Libya and North Korea as two disparate examples, right? And if you look at and you would say, okay, well, as two disparate examples, right? And if you look at, and you would say, okay, well, surely what this is teaching all the countries of the world is that you cannot rely on anything like international norms anymore to protect you. I mean, this is that you could argue that that was learned in Libya, right?

In 2012, 2013, you could argue that's when that lesson was learned. You cannot rely on anything to prevent you from being attacked by the West when they deem it convenient. And so fucking, I don't understand now why Palau wouldn't be racing to build a nuclear bomb because that's clearly the only thing that can keep you safe. It is again, making the world less safe by adding more violence to it. Yeah. They've gone, they've gone the Kickstarter in the episode notes if you want to donate

to the Palau nuclear weapons effort, because we are raising money for them. We wouldn't want anything bad to happen to those guys. I was also going to say, actually, amusingly on this note, did you see that the Russian government has offered to broker a peace deal between Israel and Iran? And they've also said that they will happily accept Iranian uranium. And I used to have this thing about how any announcement by the Russian foreign ministry can only truly be understood if you put like 17 winky face emojis after it. And this is the most winky face emoji thing the Russian government has ever said in my

opinion. Well, we wouldn't want anyone starting a war, would we? Perhaps you should talk to some real experts on peace and not building any nuclear weapons like us. So the idea then that this has to not just be allowed but supported, right? on peace and not building any nuclear weapons like us. So the idea then that this has to not just be allowed but supported, right? Because what's Starmor doing? He's moving, he's strengthening the RAF presence in Cyprus.

Welcoming the RAF, he's encouraging them to go further. Go further than Cyprus to Israel and then Iran. Now, again, whether that's to join some kind of broader hastily thrown together coalition of the willing to try to just not learn any of the lessons of the last 22 years, or whether that's to defend British bases in the region is unclear, it doesn't really matter to be honest. Because as long as the, again, the states who have also been like just recently starting to gently speak out against Israel, right? Canada, Germany, surprisingly, France, UK, and so on.

As long as they maintain this fiction that Iran is the main destabilizing force in the region and that most of what Israel is doing is self-defense, then what will happen is the, again, mainly American-supported, the sort of, to largely eliminate Iran as a state. And all of the things that go with that. And I mean, if you want to look at the representative, bloodthirsty UK columnist view, I of course have Matthew Syed here from The Telegraph, who writes, mutually assured destruction.

You may remember the phrase, pundits often intimate that nuclear war can't happen because nobody would launch a first strike in the knowledge that the inevitable counterattack would kill them too. But this is wrong. The logic may work for Western leaders. It might work with Russia too. You think Putin with his looted billions young girlfriend in venality wants to die? Not a chance. He leaves behind a young girlfriend, a young, beautiful girlfriend. This actually works

best in the Trump voice. They call him the Leonardo DiCaprio of Russia. Okay, they get to 25, he says, bye bye. He carries his 25 year old girlfriend on his shoulders all the time to protect him from being shot. Here he says, not a chance. Not even Kim Jong Un wishes to perish instead enjoying his imperial harem with the monstrous privileges he steals from his people. But religious fanatics like the Iranians are radically different. They want to die. Can you imagine that this is published in a major broadsheet? Of course you can. We've been doing this show

for a long- if you've been listening to this show for more than two weeks, of course you could imagine that that would be published in a major broadsheet. But if this is, let's say, respectable media thinking, this is much more naked than anything that happened in 2001 or 2002 even. This is just, hey, they want to die, so we have to kill them before they kill us anyway. Again, this feels to me like cheerleading, that is the possibility of one of the greatest expansions of death and suffering to be visited upon the world recently, which unfortunately is a very fucking high bar.

Yeah. The thing about guys like Matthew Syed is, and I think it's worth bearing in mind, is that I don't think that he's even being said in a cynical way or to carry water for something. It's just like, that's just actually what he thinks, which is kind of interesting and instructive in the sense that it strikes me as like Iran has completely the opposite reputation of what it actually is, in the sense that I feel like Iran acts quite rationally and quite low key in a kind of

like, yeah, they do some shit. They fund some fucking what you might call terrorist organizations or whatever, but it's done in a bit of a geopolitics chess way. They're not really fanatics at all. They're kind of geopolitical strategy in terms of how they behave. Yeah. Well, I mean, they have been in a low level simmering conflict for a long time with a country also who's very keen

on destroying them. This is also another aspect because I find him, I don't want to say fascinating because I don't find him particularly interesting, but he's like, from what I understand, he makes like part of his income from doing business, you know, those types of like business and leadership talks. I was just looking up some of his stuff and like the thing that comes up is the first thing that comes up is like why business leaders lead need like a growth mindset or whatever, which like, yeah, like great stuff. But one of like, obviously a lot of his columns have sort of been about like one of them is called like a true friend of Israel. Like every true friend of Israel, I'm obliged to say enough. And this is about, well, this

was that period of time when the columnists like all decided that like perhaps Israel went too far with like the deliberate starvation. But he frames it as like by starving the children of Gaza, Hamas is getting exactly what it wants. And this is like another example of like, well, if you are like a sort of like Arden and rabid Israel supports there, and most of the time, if you are from that, my feeling, like my sort of argument is like, if you are from that, my feeling, my sort of argument is like, if you are from that position, you're either there because you

are sort of, you deeply, deeply hate Muslims. That's like one thing. And the other, or the other thing is like, you like have some attachment and you're finding it very difficult to like, sort of rationalize that attachment, right? And so you kind of like go around in circles, like to kind of still present Israel as sort of being the innocent party, even as it is like using like deliberate tactics that are in a fit like, that are basically war crimes, right? And the Iranian attack is, I think is good. Well, the sort of like current conflict of Iran is really good cover for these people who I think were like really struggling to be like, how do I defend the state that's like starving children and in a way starving people in a way that like, you know, you can't

really defend without sounding insane. And now they sort of have, you know, now they don't have to really talk about Gaza anymore. Like now they can sort of talk about the real thing, which is, you know, we've had this state that like wants to destroy, that has said that it's wanting to destroy Israel for like, you know, since its inception, which is not true. And the thing about like, I read Nafi Sayed's column and the thing is like, you know, since its inception, which is not true. And the thing about like, the like, I read Nafi Sayed's column and the thing is like, again, it's not like the very basis of the argument about like the sort of, you know, the mullahs who want to sort of like build a nuclear state. It's not true. None of it is true. And like the thing is like to him, none of it matters, right? And no one's going to fact check him about it.

No one's going to like say, Hey, like where's, well, you know, what's the sourcing behind the idea of like, you know, they want the sourcing behind the idea of, they want to build this nuclear armed state. It is the same type of fantasy that leads to these bizarre AI renditions because that's the only way to really rationalize what this state is doing. So much of it should be seen in the realm of like entertaining fantasies and entertaining very childish fantasies in which like there is a good guy and a bad guy and the good guy must always be Israel. And like, I just, you know, and if that means like, you know, plunging the world further into war and like creating more displaced people and then

writing columns like saying that the displaced people should not like be housed anywhere because, you know, you know, just because of reasons who, you because of reasons who might be, et cetera, et cetera. Like it's just, I don't fucking know man. I feel like it's just, it's really ghoulish. Well look, that's all we have time for on the first half. It's certainly not the last we'll discuss of it. We might even get someone with more regional expertise to come and talk to us about it. So hold on for that. But I'm now going to throw to myself, Tom and Dan, in the past for me, future for you, near future for you. And we're going to talk about the BBC.

Now, also, I wonder if I did the thing that I often do when I open these segments, which is, oh, ha ha ha, what a fun previous segment that was, et cetera, et cetera. Go ahead and disregard that. So we will... I had fun. Yeah fun yeah so yeah we'll see you there hello everybody uh joining us from the first half. Welcome to the second half. Some time has passed and now you're here with me for one of my trademark straight ahead

discussions with some serious guests who we don't want to interrupt by doing accents over or whatever. I'm very happy to be joined by Tom Mills and Dan Hind, who have both been on the, hey, the BBC's kind of fucked beat academically for several years now. And we've recently authored a report for Commonwealth on how it can be unfucked, not by the pure idealism of fiddling with its journalistic biases or the makeup of its stars or whatever, but actually by looking at its ownership structure and how it's actually constituted as a company. So Tom, Dan, welcome to the show. It's been a long

time coming. Thanks, Avius. Thanks so much. It's great to be here. Yeah. So when most people talk about reforming the BBC, they generally talk about something I alluded to just now, which is changing the perceived political bias of the news organization. You know, the whole sort of Robbie Gibb campaign to be like, Maitless is too woke. We got to do something about Maitless. She's too woke. This is how we're gonna get the BBC to be popular among people again. Or even like what the more sort of progressive or liberal efforts, which are about say, oh, we need to get more representation in the BBC and so on and so on.

But none of these really have worked because the BBC is an institution that what we were talking before the episode started, Dan, we talked about as being basically in crisis for the last four decades or so. So take us in, like what's, what's going on and what have people been trying to do? Okay. So this is very much Tom's area of expertise. So in like, in very quickly, I'm going to throw it over to him, but as I see it, the BBC has been at the forefront of a state project, which is aimed to strip the public

sector of agency, strip it of a kind of collective intelligence in this kind of magical thought that if we, if we de-skill the public sector sufficiently, the private sector will leap in and create these dynamic new enterprises. So every time the BBC has tried to innovate since the late 80s, early 90s, the government of the day has stepped in and said, no, you're distorting the market and therefore, you can't, for example, become a major player in social media. You can't become a major player in the digital sector. So we were talking earlier about its presence in the podcast sector. It cannot respond to changing circumstances in anything the right way. And

this comes down to a structural vulnerability to government pressure. So Tom, what would you add to that picture? Yeah. I mean, I suppose one thing to say is that the BBC has changed a lot. There has been efforts to reform it. So in some ways, it's a very different institution to the institution it was going into the 1980s, as Dan said. It has been hampered in terms of its innovation in the last few decades, but prior to that, there was innovation. It just wasn't

in really a direction that improved the BBC's actual social role. So basically what happened was the BBC was two things really. Like one, it was much more integrated into the market. So often what you see on the BBC now is being commissioned and produced in the private section. The BBC becomes a sort of branding for British creative content. And then on top of that, you have the kind of political character of the BBC, which you alluded to before. So these kind of debates about BBC impartiality, the particular kinds of biases of people who work there. Now, we could have a long detailed conversation about particular personalities at the top of the BBC, that

does matter. I think the context for understanding that, as Dan says, is the overall governance structure of the BBC, which actually hasn't changed a huge amount. I mean, there have been some not insignificant changes to the way that the board's organised, but I mean, essentially the system of accountability at the BBC is political. It's a highly marketized organization which it didn't used to be until the 1980s, but it's also, if anything, even more politicized than it was then. I think the context for these twos and throes over the BBC's political bias needs to be understood in that context. It it's also a very hierarchical organization, right? So the particular personalities at the top, which people would be criticizing on Twitter

or X for God knows how long. The reason they're there is that in a very hierarchical organization, they're appointed by people or approved by people at the top who are then connected to government. So basically what you have is this quite constrained like organization, which is integrated into the market, which has experienced quite severe cuts to its funding and which is constantly under political pressure. And that's created this kind of very sort of stultified market bureaucracy. So that's where we are with the BBC. Now, why hasn't it innovated? Well, it hasn't innovated, as Dan says, because it's been constrained from doing so by market

actors. But also, it's been reaching ever since the 1980s for a kind of response to that neoliberal critique of the BBC, and has never been able to land on anything apart from a basically sort of patrician model. And that's what we, Dan and I, together and separately for longer than I care to think about, have been working on. The question, OK, we know what some of the issues are and we can talk about them in more detail, but what might we do about that?

How can we come up with a model which isn't the old patrician status model, but also isn't one based on sort of market metrics? So if we were to sum up, I think, the position of the BBC going into this question, it's been given a mission of you have to appeal to everybody in the market and everybody in the market is everybody watching TV, radio, all this stuff, not just in news and entertainment. It means you have to compete not just with also with things like Love Island or Channel 4 format. You also have to compete with TikTok and YouTube. Also, you have to do so without pissing off

the pensioners who's like the core constituency of every major party of government in the UK. Also, you can't invent anything to do so and you have 10 pounds. Yeah. I mean, and I would add to that, you know, there's a deliberate sort of constraint, right? Because like if they make something that's popular, they get attacked by the private competitors. If they make stuff that isn't popular, then they get attacked by the right for producing like niche content for like elite or niche audiences, right? So they're damned if they do and damned if they don't. Basically what we've created is a whole

bunch of internal constraints about how the BBC interacts with Britain that has rendered it exclusively, essentially, a production mill for Americans to buy DVD box sets of Doctor Who. Well, in culture, I would say you see this movement towards market-like homogeneity. So obviously, the original vision for marketisation for culture was that the market's going to then deliver what people want. But obviously, that's not what markets actually do.

And anybody who understands the market of cultural production realises that's not what's going to be produced. Now, there's very interesting questions around how we could remodel cultural production. And the story there, I think, as you say, is commercialization and homogenization and lack of distinction from the private sector. But on top of that, of course, you have the news aspects. So there's very important social function, which in some ways has been kept quite separate

from that arena of culture, but suffers from a lot of the same problems. Not so much marketisation, but certainly politicisation and an inability to respond exactly to the sociological complexity of Britain and the world today, but also technological innovation. Behind all of this really is the lack of political will to allow the BBC to innovate in these areas, to technologically innovate. Mason- What Riley was getting at, which I think is really key, is that we are in a situation where the BBC is this incredibly bullyable institution. Everyone can take a hit at the BBC. There's a very large, well-funded media system that's constantly punching the BBC.

You've also got a political establishment which punches the BBC behind closed doors as well. And there's a kind of institutionalised masochism about the position that the BBC finds itself in, because it can't really claim a basis for legitimacy on the current model. You just can't justify, whether it's cultural decision-making or decision-making news and current affairs, by some kind of claim to a superior understanding, right? That kind of model of public service where you have a Mandarin elite who can know better and can see further than the population that is dead, right? As a source of legitimation. It's being killed from any number of angles, but it's simply not

justifiable now for the BBC to claim an independence on that basis. So what we're looking at now with charter renewal in a couple of years time is the opportunity to put the BBC on a new footing, right? To legitimate it in a new way. If I could just interrupt for one second, because we have many American listeners. The BBC's current footing, if I understand, because so they understand where we're coming from, where we're going. As I understand it, it's a public corporation that isn't owned by the government, but that's accountable to ministers.

Well, yeah, I mean, basically, I mean- So it's actually quite an exotic institution because it's a chartered corporation which is embodied by and consists of, the last time I looked, the members, the sort of flesh and blood members of the board. So it's not what you think of when you think of a public limited company. It's not, as it were, an artefact of law in quite

the same way. It is actually constituted by the flesh and blood people who are appointed to, you know, fill its board. And this is a model for public, you know, for arm's length public institutions that goes back to the Bank of England and goes via the East India Company and so on. So it's a contraption, it's a technique that the British state has used when it wants to have plausible deniability about one of its core functions, whether it's conquering India, making money up or in this case, kind of filling our heads with whatever they're keen that we believe and whatever they're keen that we laugh about.

Sorry to interrupt you there. I just wanted to give them the context of what this was. And the final thing to say is that unlike the Bank of England or the East India Company or any number of other chartered corporations, BBC has historically had a 10-year lifespan. It's been renewed every 10 or now 11 years or like there's sometime extensions. But the thinking is that periodically the BBC will have to justify itself to parliament and will be given a new set or a revised set of public purposes or like its mission will be revised over time. In 2027, parliament will create a new charter which will come into effect in January of

2028. And it will be created by, I mean, God knows what the Labour government will be thinking at that point, but let's say their thinking doesn't change from now, it will be created by a Labour government who is kind of quickly run out of ideas and is scrambling. Yeah. So it arrives at a point of maximum vacuity in the Labour Party. They don't know what to do. They've arrived in office on a wave of unthinking careerism and they've found that everything's on fire and they have no clue what to do about it. Just to add to that point about the BBC's temporary constitutional structure. I mean, really, I don't know how interested American listeners are with British constitutional process but I mean, really, I don't know how interested American listeners are with British constitutional

process. But I mean, it's a- A lot of them do seem to be. They do stick around. Fine. That surprises me. But anyway, really, the BBC is, as Dan said, it's a creature of the crown, right? So it's actually the privy council, which is the remains of the discretionary power

of the monarch that controls appointments at the BBC. But behind that archaic facade is basically what happens is, it's not even really Parliament. What happens is the Minister of the Crown and effectively, in this case, Lisa Nandy, but actually effectively it will be number 10, it will be the Prime Minister who makes the call, will decide this. And usually it's taken place behind closed doors, a negotiation between the leadership of the BBC and number 10. So it's always been very much a non-public affair and one in which it's really the government that controls the BBC, has power of life and death over the

BBC. Mason- And by the government, by the way, you obviously mean Rupert Murdoch and the major media magnates as well, right? Who come in the back door and talk about what the BBC should and shouldn't do. Because it's really, it's whoever the government is afraid of. Correct. Means that they, then they can make the, the government can make the BBC afraid of the same stuff.

Absolutely. So that they basically, yeah, they can, it is, it is the way that, you know, our public broadcaster is controlled by private media interests just indirectly via a kind of the sort of vacuous careerist at number 10. Correct. Whichever pack of vacuous careerists it happens to be. Yeah. I mean, they all have their own agenda as well.

But yeah, like I said earlier, everybody gets to bully the BBC. And this is a point of key, this is always a point of crisis for the institution. Normally it takes place, as Tom said, basically behind closed doors. Every now and again, something leaks out. Someone says something out of turn. George Osborne on his on his podcast, which competes toe to toe with you guys. Yeah, we're really struggling for listeners, especially the Americans. We're really struggling for listeners.

I imagine that the magic combination of Osborne and Balls. It's just catnip for the Americans. You can't beat it, can you? You can't beat the dream team. The chummy-ness of it. I mean, honestly, with how we talk about the BBC, sorry it's a bit of a tangent, I can't believe that they never came up with the, we're going to get one person from each major party to just sort of shoot the shit for a while.

Yeah. That was actually a model for their broadcasting for a while. I mean, at one time, didn't they have like William Hague and Tony Ben on site together? They didn't understand that that's, that the secret sauce for that is podcast, not TV. They're so bad at podcasting. Wasn't it Portillo and Diane Abbott shared a couch for a long time. That was kind of, it was a proto, it was a proto podcast. Anyway, you said George Os, it was a proto podcast. Wasn't it?

Anyway, you said George Osborne said something out of turn. So he says on his podcast, he says, yeah, I wouldn't like before I became chancellor, I thought the BBC was this powerful institution. It turns out I can just bully it by telling him to take away his money. So you know, as so much of British public life goes. The BBC should have reported on that. That should have been a scandal.

But of course it wouldn't be. It should have been a major. But of course it wouldn't be. It should have been a major feature of that. Also the fact that some people at the BBC did kick up a fuss about that. People were not happy about it because Tony Hall, who was director general at the time, just completely folded basically. He had been a lieutenant of the neoliberal Burt era. We don't need to go into that history, you can read my book if you're interested. He came out of very much of that marketisation of the BBC agenda and people were disappointed

with how that all played out. But as Dan said, sometimes politicians can be very straightforward about this, the extent to which they're able to influence the BBC. And in terms of like, I mean, we talked about Robbie Gibb at the beginning, but these are actual mechanisms of political control. And it's not just that journalists often like say, no one tells me what to think, or did anyone give any instructions or whatever. That's not how organizations work.

Everybody knows that. If you have someone at the top, then that changes the organizational culture, and it changes the sets of incentives, and it all filters down through an institution. And anybody with a brain cell realises that. So, on the one hand, I think you're right to avoid personalised criticism, but on the other hand, these are actual personal mechanisms whereby an organisation can change. Mason- Yeah, and we've seen a collapse of a certain kinds of like individualized or personal restraint in the ruling class.

But I don't want us to be too downbeat about the prospects for positive change at the BBC. I mean, we're going to, we'll talk a bit about, hopefully we're going to talk a bit about what, what an agenda for change might look like. I was just about to segue you into that, but you beat me to it. But before we do that, just to, you know, hope we can, we can sort of loop back and talk about again, at this moment of maximum vacuity in British political and corporate life.

The ability, I think, for individuals and small groups of informed people to change policy is unrivaled. We are at a point of inflection that we haven't seen in this country since the 1970s. So if there are a dozen technologists out there, if there are a dozen educationists or a dozen cultural workers out there who want to think about the future of the BBC, they will have an enormous impact potentially on what the BBC looks like in 2028 and therefore what this country looks like. It's the old theory of the idea at this moment of maximum vacuity, nature of horrors of vacuum,

if to put the ideas lying around down. And unfortunately, the ideas that were lying around in 2020, sort of three, four were basically Maurice Glassman's diary, essentially. Those were the ideas, it's sort of mad raving. So those were the ideas that were lying around. It was his scribbled on fag packet, wasn't it? It was just stuff he'd come up with. Yeah. And again, I sort of, I was thinking about this, right? Like, which is what you've written and what most of, I mean, to be honest, what most of Commonwealth is doing is an attempt to create some other ideas that are lying around, not because the current labor leadership are sort of principled progressives at the very least who are going to like be trying to

make the world better, but because they are going to panic because already the blue labor shit is, is absolutely hitting the wall. And, you know, they, at the time of recording, they've just been forced to do a pretty much, what, 90% U-turn on the winter fuel allowance cut. And they are now loudly talking about a U-turn on the child benefits cap. These things that were ironclad, that they were whipping votes for several, like, just last year, they're now U-turning on. They are going to be, they have nothing, they need something. The best chance to make

anything better is just to put kids, just to launch ideas at them at the moment. You know, ideas and like ideas embodied in people thinking through the implications. People and power as well. And the Green Party are going to mobilize around these issues for sure. Whether it's energy or housing or media policy. In all these areas, the kinds of things Cornwall is talking about are going to become core to a left populist agenda. And as you say, Labour's only chance of survival is to take that wholesale, whether they like it or not.

I'm not confident that they will. I think they are true believers. I think they're completely wedded to this completely exhausted consensus. But frankly, they are like, they are looking at an extinction level event anyhow. Right. And so when they go down, what we do not want to happen is to be sort of sitting around going, Oh, well, I wish we had some ideas for what to do now. Cause like only the only reformer talking about what to do.

Right. We have to have a program for government in place, whether the Labour Party pick it up or the Green Party pick it up in three, four, five, ten years time, whatever. It's going to happen. If it doesn't, then we're all going to have to go and live in Canada or something. I mean, I wouldn't speak too soon. Canada is going to probably become even more of a basket case in five years. We might do the thing like the US did where Britain has been becoming a basket case slowly for a long time. And then the US very quickly took over,

like leapt over us. And Canada- You think it kind of made sprint for the finish. I think Canada may sprint for the finish because our housing crisis is worse than everywhere else put together. But I want to talk about what you guys say that we should do.

Because as much as it's like, I love talking about the problems with stuff. Love it. Can't get enough of it. Made kind of a career out of it. But you guys have a lot of talk about what it would take to have a less hierarchical, less top-down BBC that is not so prone to crisis because of its various different incentives that pull it all different ways, which we've sort of gone through, which is mutualization. Sure. Making it a, as I understand it, making it something that is owned and controlled by its members. Yeah. So the classic definition of a mutual organization is an organization in which the members are actively and directly involved in the business, right? So

that covers a multitude of sort of institutional forms that could be adopted when you're looking at a large public service media organization that has very, I think, very kind of glaring implications for for what's needed, the scale of what's needed and the level of innovation that's required. Right. So when, when we think of large mutuals, we normally think of institutions like nationwide building society or the Cooperative Federation. It's not an institution I'm familiar with. Oh yeah.

It was started by, this is what I think is like, you know, Britain sort of reserves a lot of its functional institutions for middle-class people. It was a group of gentlemen in the 18th century wanted to import surplus port barrels from Portugal. Right. And they did this. They created a mutual organization, the Wine Society. You pay 20 pounds and you are a member for life, no nothing.

And then all of the, basically they use all of their economies of scale to basically have never raised prices in like six years. So you get, it's cheaper to buy through them than it is directly from producers in many cases. Yeah, so whenever I think about a sort of organization on its own terms, it's a successful mutual one, I always go back to them. They have actually managed to hold down inflation

for their members for years. I mean, one of the characteristics of the mutual form is that it's this kind of self-effacing success. So lots of very successful institutions are mutually organized, but they kind of vanish, right? They don't talk about themselves as mutuals. They don't promote themselves as mutuals in the way that, say, corporates are constantly. The amount of propaganda that goes into the idea of the billionaire founder, the IPO,

and all that kind of attendant razzmatazz, It's just nothing there when you look at the mutual. But anyway, what we thought was, well, if we, as members of the BBC, are going to be actively and directly involved in the, in the operations of the BBC, we need to have a set of defined powers and they're broadly a universal power to engage in decisions about what kinds of things are investigated, what kinds of things are, what kinds of things the BBC turns its attention to. And the thinking there is that's kind of a mediated analog for a Republican assembly. In the assembly, every citizen gets to have a say of some kind. They get to speak if they want to speak. And we're in a situation where unless you are

a media executive, like a heavily-bullied media executive, or a billionaire media owner, or a politician, you do not get to speak really unless you're invited on. Like you can supplicate the media and you can beg to be taken on, but the media has an enormous amount of unaccountable arbitrary power to decide who gets to speak in public and who doesn't. And what we need to establish is a situation where we all have some degree of equality of voice in the public conversation. So that's the first thing. And that would be something that we would all have, and we would exercise routinely as members of the BBC.

Fine. It's a fire and forget kind of thing. That's going to generate a huge amount of new kinds of output, right? New kinds of information, new kinds of inquiry, new kinds of analysis, new kinds of claim, counterclaim, and so on. It's a couple of-

New kinds of entertainment as well. I think that's always worth remembering. We can, we can, we'll definitely, we should talk about the cultural mission, but just to stick with the news and current affairs side for a second, that deluge of outputs is going to need kind of clarification, right? If you think of it like, you know, if you think of it, the analogy of a war system, it needs kind of filtration, right? And what we recommend is that everybody be equally eligible to serve on boards, we call them members panels, we call them jurors, you call it what you like. They're randomly selected and they

sit inside the BBC and they effectively shadow the BBC's governance and its journalism in this case. It means that journalists and executives will be in the room with ordinary people justifying their decision making, like in front of ordinary people who are potentially and often will be well informed. Right? It is itself a genre of entertainment which is sitting there waiting to be produced, right? Instead of which, what we do is we have question time where nervous members of the public ask a question of empowered millionaires on stage, right? Like the average wealth, you know, wealth of the guys on the stage is vastly greater than the audience. What we could do is have three or four hour sessions in which executives and journalists are asked a

series of questions that pinpoint why they're doing what they're doing. And they justify themselves in public to the public. The idea there is that we're trying to essentially publicize the creation of public opinion. Right? Public opinion is currently produced behind closed doors by corporate and government interests who are not accountable because what they do is not available for general deliberation. So that combination of general powers that can be casually exercised or you could be a geek about it and you could really kind of care about where your money went or you could just like every six months you give some money to somebody you quite enjoy their output, right? But the point is that once that material is being generated by a

multiplicity of different views, which are not billionaire and they're not like in-house BBC content, that material can then provide the grist for a much more deep and rumourous discussion about things that at the moment are presented to us in the most shockingly, insultingly stupid way. If you ever listen to economics coverage on the BBC, it will almost always be predicated in either, actually Nanny knows best, so there's no real discussion here, or reluctantly, we're going to have to come up with some embarrassingly stupid analogy to explain what's going on. Balancing your household budget. Balancing your household budget.. Balancing household budget.

The worst one I ever heard was someone has said that they were in, they were stood in a garage forecourt and they said, quantitative easing, it's a bit like putting imaginary petrol in your car. No, it's not. No, it's not. It's clearly not, right? No, it's not. It's not like that.

They didn't know what it was. Yeah. And sure as hell their audience at the end of it didn't know what it was. Yeah. But it's not actually something that a group of ordinary people couldn't get their heads around if they were given an opportunity to do. Also, I think it's worth saying as well, right? This isn't unique to the BBC, but it's replicated in other top-down media institutions.

It's a problem of top-down media control. It's just with the BBC, there's almost a unique opportunity to make it not top down. Exactly so, yeah. Yeah. And I think that what Dan described, I mean, it's really sort of obvious in the case of economics reporting, but I think just generally in terms of the culture of the BBC, the pattern's sort of clear. The closer you get to elite interests, if you want to put it like that, the more confusing and mystifying all of the journalism will become. And that's just a general rule. So if you want someone to describe, for example, what Britain's foreign policy is,

then they're just, you know, all kinds of all manner of nonsense will just come spilling out. We're going to war with Russia and China, I heard. Yeah, exactly. And our military of five people. It's a dream to front wall, by the way. To anybody... We're perfectly positioned for it as well. Any same person... Because the way the time zones work, it can be four, 24 hours a day. Any same person would listen to that and just think, what in the name of God are you talking about?

But actually, what the BBC does is it hosts these quite serious sounding conversations, with just no element of seriousness to them whatsoever. And you see it on economics. There's been a lot of work done over how the BBC reports the economy, as to take Dan's example, and the BBC itself produced a report on this about the weaknesses or own coverage of their bad energies. They're not institutionally able to do anything different, for the reasons we've already discussed. Just to add to, we can talk a bit more about the specific mechanisms that Dan's

discussed, but I suppose one thing that I'd like to point out is that the mode of engagement with members is not a mode of engagement which is simply one based on consumption or even support. Now, one thing we've not talked about, which I think is really important, and we do need to clarify, is that we envisage that everybody would be a member of the BBC. So this isn't a subscription type model. It's not a voluntary model. You can be, you don't have to be actively involved in it, right? But that is your right. So we see it as a universal, a universal mutual, which is quite a quite different, quite different

model. I mean, going back to your example of the Wine Society or whatever it was called, part of the reason why they don't promote themselves is that their model's working well. They've got their members, the members are happy, they don't particularly need more members. It's not like a PLC where you have to promote people to behave and see you in certain ways in order to mould public perceptions and that leads to all sorts of corporate propaganda. They can quietly get on with what they're doing. That is not a good model for the BBC, in our view. But the model of interaction is not one of- I can't believe I called the BBC for their Enfremur Bordeaux this year and they had nothing.

What I was going to say was that your relationship with the BBC is not one of like, deliver me my content, like deliver me my cheap wine, right? What we want to do is introduce an ability for members of the BBC, i.e. the population of the UK, to make judgments about what they want to be investigated, what they want to be produced. And that's different to me saying, I like Trash Future, I'm going to pay for it because I'm going to consume it. Because I could make a judgment, I could never listen to you guys and think, oh, I just want them to do what they're doing.

Because I want to live in a society where Trash Future exists or the wine society exists. So do I. Well, I'm sure you do for very material reasons. But the point I'm making is that the members will be able to make judgments, which are not even based on like consumption or judgments as to like behavior, right? So the other option you can have for a large digital media institution is to say, well, we kind of know what our members want because we spy on them and figure out what they watch and what they have watched and stuff like that. That's very different

to what we're saying BBC should be doing. We're not, and I mean, we need to talk more about journalism, but to switch it to sort of culture for a second. I don't know anything about wine, right? So I don't really know what I'm going to enjoy when I read the bottle, but I kind of know whether I've enjoyed it after I've drunk the bottle or like half a bottle or whatever. With culture, it's kind of similar, right? We don't know what we want. We don't know what we want really at all. That's why markets can't deliver cultural products. But we do know what we value after we've been exposed to it.

Mason Treskens They can deliver cultural products that are the same again and again and again and again. Jason Vale Yeah, which is what the big corporations do. They reduce risk and they churn out stuff that they know is low risk. And obviously the problem with that is that things get more and more boring and less creative over time. So then you get a sort of, you know, startup culture, which is supposed to be like disrupting things and producing new stuff. But you know what? It's going to end where they're just going to get computers to write it. I don't know. I don't know. Maybe I'm being futuristic. Oh, I'm just throwing it out there. Like in the future,

they'll have machines that can just write stories. You're just writing some words. I love this. I always say, yeah, liberate me from writing stories so I can do the dishes better. Exactly. We've got important cleaning stuff to do. Unfortunately, we are coming slightly to the end of the time that we have.

However, where can people find your report? On Commonwealth's website. So the report is called Our Mutual Friend. So if you Google it, they will find it there. We go into quite a lot of detail in that report as to how we think the BBC could be made more accountable to its membership. But there's also much shorter digestible bullet points as to how this will work. What we're trying to do there is show how the public can make authoritative judgments about what the BBC should be doing, how it should be doing it. Basically, the BBC is made directly accountable to the public

rather than accountable to politicians and the elites that they represent. That's in short what the model is about. Also, around a sort of a non-market ecology, if you like, of journalism and creative content that can feed into the BBC and transform it in a similar sort of way, which happened in the neoliberal period. The BBC became more commercialised, BBC money went into the private sector, private sector models and culture and programming came back into the BBC, and there was this process of cultural transformation. So that's in headline, but we should have gone into more detail if we hadn't talked so much about why. That's a good way of thinking of the BBC as being a big cog for a much broader mutualisation

of the British economy, British cultural production, more broadly British economic activity. Like I touched on earlier, this is an opportunity, I think, for quite small groups of people who are motivated to see positive change, to think about the kinds of public institutions they want, right? If we can actually mutualise the BBC, if we can democratise the BBC, if you want to use that language across its educational, cultural and informative missions. Like we have a different proposition for the way that we do our politics, the way we do our economic and social life.

It could be a major, major kind of breakthrough, I think, for designing a post-capitalist imaginary. Yeah. I don't know. Everyone seems to really love this one. People really love this way of arranging sort of social, intellectual, cultural, public life. They're crazy about it. It's got centuries left to run, I'm sure.

But imagine not. These fumes will take us into the 2500s. Yeah. Anyway, anyway. Dan, Tom, it's been a real delight talking to you guys. And go check out the report. We'll link it in the description of the episode as well. And mutualise your local state broadcaster.

All right. Thanks a lot, guys. Thank you. Thanks. Thanks. And we're back just for the sign-offs. So thank you very much again. And what a previous segment that was, by the way. Oh, so previous. Very relevant as well. Oh, yeah. So thank you very much for being a free subscriber. You can get a bonus episode,

it'll be coming out this Thursday. There are probably a few tickets left to the live show on Saturday I imagine. Yeah, get on that. So you can come to those if you're in town. There are shirts, those presales are going to be ending soon. And then go to Milo's websites for his various tour dates. This week, fucking Refugee Action on the Thursday, Glue Factory on the Friday. Those are the big dates. Please, Refugee Action is most important. We really need something. So, Ann is going to help. I mean, look, we're on the precipice of a refugee crisis. Maybe if there's one gig, you should be going to when you think about it.

All right. All right. So, we will see you in a few days. Bye everybody.