According to "Varsity",.. here,

"At a time when the Cambridge University Conservative Association (CUCA) is caught in the throes of a Brexit campaign, who better to welcome than hard-line Eurosceptic Tory, John Whittingdale?

The Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport’s visit on Friday evening [29 April 2016] was made all the more topical in light of a recent series of scandals that have tested the privacy policies of the media industry he is in charge of regulating.

For a Minister of Culture charged with renewing the BBC’s Charter, Whittingdale conveyed an extraordinary aversion to the institution at Friday’s talk, and was met with huge guffaws of laughter when he warned “if we don’t renew it, it may be that the BBC will cease to exist, which is occasionally a tempting prospect.”

“It will sometimes drive me insane,” he confessed.

Just this week Whittingdale has spoken out in favour of plans to privatise Channel 4 and to restrict the BBC’s ability to show popular programmes at the same time as ITV. He explained that within the BBC “there is a case for having some content commission done by someone other than the BBC,” particularly with regards to children’s programmes.


On Friday Evening, the minister was pushed by the audience to talk about bias in the BBC and just about every other media organisation, at one point describing Twitter as “overwhelmingly left-wing.”

In Whittingdale’s view, the BBC itself is not explicitly “pro-Labour”, but certainly sits on the “centre-left” of the political spectrum and “has a view of the world where it finds it difficult to take seriously people who have a different view of the world.”

Two examples seemed to strike particularly close to home – “the BBC has always regarded people who want to leave Europe as vaguely mad” and “it has generally been in favour of people who like spending public money rather than those who want to lower taxes."

The minister neatly summed up his conception of the BBC as “essentially a market intervention of around four billion pounds by government”."


Varsity:- Varsity was first published in 1947, and is the independent student newspaper for the University of Cambridge.

Thanks to Bill R. (trading as WDR) for the link.