The award-winning writer behind The Thick of It and Veep has accused ministers of effectively trying to kill off the BBC and urged people to defend it against politicians and Rupert Murdoch.

Armando Iannucci said it would be “bad capitalism” to diminish the national broadcaster, and said the debate about its future had been poisoned by the newspaper industry.

“If the BBC were a weapons system, half the cabinet would be on a plane to Saudi Arabia to tell them how brilliant it was,” Iannucci told an audience of leading TV executives at the Guardian Edinburgh international television festival.

“And yet, it’s quite the reverse. They talk of cutting down to size, of reining in imperialist ambitions, of hiving off, of limiting the scope, with all the manic glee of a doctor urging his patient to consider the benefits of assisted suicide.”



The rallying cry, in the 40th annual James MacTaggart Memorial Lecture in Edinburgh, comes at a critical moment for the BBC.

In July, the government struck a funding deal that saw the BBC management agree to shoulder the estimated £750m burden of paying for free licence fees for the over-75s and followed up that action with a green paper set to debate the scope and scale of the corporation.



In a speech entitled We’re All in This Together – deliberately echoing the language used by the chancellor, George Osborne – Iannucci said the “extremely subjective opinions” of senior ministers were putting the UK on a “dangerous path, a creeping imperial ambition that’s doing international harm to our stock”.

Iannucci compared the behaviour of the current government with Tony Blair’s defence of his decision to invade Iraq in 2004, when the former prime minister said of his justification to act: “I only know what I believe”.

Suggesting that the Conservative government did not reflect all of public opinion, Iannucci said: “The problem of ‘I only know what I believe’ is now putting pressure on public service broadcasting to conform to the political norms of the party in power, no matter how slim its majority, or how low its share of the vote.”

Hours before Iannucci’s high-profile intervention, ministers were already seeking to allay concerns about the future of the corporation. John Whittingdale, the culture secretary, said it was unfortunate there had been a need to strike a speedy financial settlement after the election to cover a financial deficit, before the discussions about the renewal of the BBC’s charter had even begun.

Culture secretary John Whittingdale says editorial freedom for the BBC is paramount. Link to video

Asked by veteran ITN newsreader Alastair Stewart whether the desire to diminish the BBC was unfinished business from his days as an adviser to Margaret Thatcher, Whittingdale said it was absolute nonsense. “Nobody is talking about dismantling the BBC,” he added.



The culture secretary did, however, suggest that the BBC could cut costs without resorting to cutting channels such as BBC4. “Lots of people think there is still scope for cuts to BBC management,“ he said.



Iannucci, who has won fame and fortune on both sides of the Atlantic, said the British television industry felt under attack and that his US counterparts could not understand why the government would want to reduce the power of the BBC rather than encourage it further.

“To them it looks like we’re going mad,” he said. “This is toxifying something that could otherwise make more money internationally. Simply put, it’s bad capitalism.”

He also contrasted the criticism of the BBC with the expansion of global media giants, saying: “Capitalism is pursued where it helps the BBC’s competitors, and a most peculiar form of Maoist state control is advocated when it doesn’t.”

“It’s Facebook and Google who came along and ate up all newspapers’ classified ads. Yet it’s the BBC, who run no ads, that gets the blame, while it’s Google and Facebook that get the helpful tax arrangements from HMRC.”



Iannucci, who has worked for Sky, HBO and Channel 4 as well as the BBC, quoted from both James Murdoch’s 2009 lecture and one given by James’s father, Rupert, in 1989 to suggest that both believed that media groups could no longer focus on one area, unless that media group happened to be the BBC.

“Dismantling it [the BBC] is madness. The question shouldn’t be how do we cut it down to size, but why should we?” he said.

“It makes no economic or cultural sense to tell this country’s best online media presence, one that serves the public freely, that projects our cultural impact globally, to make itself a little bit worse.”



With a swipe at TV executives rather than the content producers and viewers, Iannucci also criticised the “one-sided nature” of the appointments to Whittingdale’s advisory panel into the future of the broadcaster.

“It’s like a car company was looking into what car it should make next, but only spoke to the managers and not to any of the engineers. Or drivers. You cannot have a meaningful root and branch review of television, if you’re only going to deal with one branch.”



In a passionate but humourous speech he described as playful but deadly serious, Iannucci made it clear that when it came to bias the press had more to answer than the BBC.

“Where does it come from, this spooky force bending the ear of chancellors and ministers and civil servants and asking them to cull the BBC?” he asked. “Let’s for the sake of argument call this force M, for Mysterious.”



“The BBC is funded by and speaks to the country. The country is not the government. More people pay for the BBC and watch it than vote for any one political party. And politicians convinced that, because they are in government, their views and values are the majority opinion of the day, are slaves to an illusion.”