Boris Johnson will struggle to get his plans to privatise Channel 4 through parliament after a backlash from within his party, senior
Conservatives believe.
The plans to raise £1bn-plus by selling off the state-owned channel sparked furious opposition from people such as
Ruth Davidson, the former Scottish Tory leader, and former cabinet ministers Damian Green and Jeremy Hunt.
Senior Tories told the Guardian that Johnson would probably struggle to get his plans through the House of Lords, and could face a revolt in the Commons as well.
The proposal was not in the Conservative party manifesto, making it easier for peers to challenge the legislation necessary to make the sale.
The backlash came after
an internal Channel 4 email revealed that the culture secretary, Nadine Dorries, was pushing ahead with plans to privatise the channel after 40 years in public ownership.
Davidson led calls for the government to reconsider, saying: “Channel 4 is publicly owned, not publicly funded. It doesn’t cost the taxpayer a penny. It also, by charter, commissions content but doesn’t make/own its own. It’s one of the reasons we have such a thriving [independent] sector in places like Glasgow. This is the opposite of levelling up.”
Green pointed out the channel was founded by a Conservative government, with part of its remit being to boost Britain’s private sector television sector: “The sale of Channel 4 is politicians and civil servants thinking they know more about how to run a business than the people who run it. Very unconservative. Mrs Thatcher, who created it, never made that mistake.”
Julian Knight, the Conservative chair of the culture select committee, said he had concerns privatisation was “being done for revenge” after Channel 4’s critical coverage of Brexit and Johnson. He also said the potential sale proceeds were “irrelevant” in the scale of the national debt but that he would back a sale if it was part of an overhaul of all public service broadcasting.
Jeremy Hunt, a former culture secretary, told Sky News: “I’m not in favour of it because as it stands Channel 4 provides competition to the BBC on what’s called public service broadcasting – the kinds of programmes that are not commercially viable – and I think it would be a shame to lose that.”
He said he had never considered privatising it when he was culture secretary.
Another Tory who criticised the proposed sale was the father of the house, Peter Bottomley, who said it was “bad for the diversity of television, bad for viewers and bad for independent producers”, adding: “It was considered in the mid-1990s and turned down. It should be rejected now.”
www.theguardian.com
