 Andrew Neil, the BBC's most feared political interviewer, has this weekend taken to Twitter complaining that Owen Jones, a friend of the show, has been trying to cancel him. However, ultimately, it was not a left-wing journalist but BBC budget cuts that would put an end to his show at the BBC. The Andrew Neil show, which pitched the presenter against major politicians every Wednesday evening, has been off air since the start of the coronavirus crisis, but the BBC's announcement today means it will not be returning, Neil had previously told the Radio Times. He feared he would be made surplus to requirements. He's apparently been talking to other broadcasters. Obviously, he used to work for Rupert Murdoch at the Sunday Times. He could be going back there to Times Radio. At this point in time, we do not know, but the biggest story other than Andrew Neil, although we will talk about that in a moment, is the numbers behind the scenes. The cuts which have taken out Andrew Neil's show have also taken out 520 jobs at the BBC. That's from a workforce of around 6,000. That includes 450 job cuts that were announced as part of an £80 million savings drive in January and then put on hold because of coronavirus and includes another 70 extra jobs going from the newsroom. This is also in the context of the government really doing one on the BBC. You might have seen all the Tory politicians trying to get you outraged at the fact that the BBC have cut free TV licenses for the over 75s. Everyone will have to pay for it now, whatever your age. What they don't normally mention is that the BBC have been pushed into this position because the government cut their own subsidy. It used to be the government that subsidised directly the free licenses for over 75s. They took that away and then imposed strict budget cuts that the BBC have had to make, you know, a pretty difficult decision. I'm going to go straight back to you, Dalia. What do you make of all of this? Andrew Neil is famously, as we've mentioned on this show, a presenter who is far more right-wing than you would ever get away with being left-wing as a mainstream BBC host. He's chairman of The Spectator, which prints some of the worst bile on Britain's newsstands, but he also is pretty good at holding politicians to account of whatever stripe. What's your take? There are two issues here, I think. There is the issue of the cuts to the BBC and what kind of impact that is happening on, you know, our sort of media landscape as a whole. So I think it's sort of sad that this is being reduced to a story that's just about Andrew Neil. I would like to see sort of the breakdown of who are the people that have been axed, particularly kind of like the staff members that sort of make the producers, etc. What is the breakdown of the other people behind those numbers so that we're not just focusing on Andrew Neil? I also think that generally, as we see particularly big media organisations, you know, not just broadcast but also newspaper having to really trim all of the sort of fat right to the bone of their organisations, we see much less work, you know, in terms of sort of more critical and investigative analysis being done. Recently, the Victoria Derbyshire show, which I think, you know, was kind of quite a good example of what a public broadcaster should do, sort of like really thoughtful, interesting, you know, investigative pieces into issues that are often marginalised by by other parts of the media was also axed recently. What I think Andrew, so I think there's that issue of, you know, what is the impact of these BBC cuts in the particular relationship between historically between the Tories and the BBC and how it has both been a very friendly relationship, but also to an extent, a relationship where the Tories have constantly tried to sort of undermine the BBC. But I also think that what is happening here, because before this was announced, what we saw was a lot of, you know, Andrew Neil really getting stuck into this kind of recent iteration of cancel culture debate, where, you know, he sort of, as you know, really went after Owen Jones, blaming him for trying to cancel Andrew Neil just because he was sort of softly critiquing on Twitter like Andrew Neil's politics. And as you said, the fact that Andrew Neil is able to get away with being far more right-wing than anyone else is able to get away with being left-wing and that, you know, apparently amounts to being cancelled. And I think that what we're seeing is a lot of these particularly very right-wing pundits, but not just right-wing pundits, also people that are kind of, you know, not feeling part of the tide when it comes to social justice issues, failing to actually argue on the actual points at hand. So whether that is trans rights, or whether it's anti-racism or things like that, failing to actually talk about the actual issue that you want to talk about and the actual issue that they want to push back on. And so instead framing it, protecting themselves and their jobs by framing their position as an issue of free speech and cancel culture and the Twitter mob, right? So we don't talk about cancel culture and free speech when it comes to talking about the people, the groups, the opinions that are systematically stopped from entering into, you know, the media or academy or research landscape to begin with. We only talk about it from the other way. People who have always felt entitled to have a platform in these various institutions and spaces who are suddenly feeling not necessarily that that platform is being denied, but it's just being contested. And so we're kind of going into that defense mode. And so what my worry is, and I think there is really a conversation that needs to be had about how we conduct our, how we conduct ourselves in these discussions and, you know, how we talk about sort of political education and moving through contradictions and disagreements. That's not the discussion that's being had in this cancel culture sort of more. What's happening here is people who have always felt entitled to having particular positions in influential institutions, having their position contested and feeling defensive about it and sort of positioning themselves as, you know, you have to hire me in the BBC or in the university. Because if you don't, I'm going to say that this is because you're afraid of the Twitter mob and you don't be seen as being cowed by a Twitter mob. So let's actually talk what we talk about what we really want to talk about, which is, you know, the gains being made by the anti-racist movement, by trans rights, by all of these issues. Let's talk about those issues rather than sort of this red herring of cancelling and no platforming, which actually is a separate conversation that needs to be had, but not when it comes to talking about the eternal right of Andrew Neil to, you know, be the BBC's flagship TV presenter. That's not a God-given right to anyone. I mean, I think something we also should be pushing is, you know, funding of journalism is a free speech issue. If people aren't paid to investigate things, then things aren't going to get found out and all we're going to have is commentary. Yeah. And the decline of investigative reporting is a perfect way in which the kind of austerity narratives of, you know, cutting back and all of that and, you know, having this whole thing of, you know, something is only valuable if it has lots of clicks and add revenue generated in comparison to how much work is needed. So you pay much less for a shocking comment piece by Katie Hopkins, and you get a lot more ad revenue than you do for, like, the payment of a forensic investigation of, like, circus connections to, like, the detention and border regime in the UK, which might not, which, you know, considering how much, how expensive research like that is, the ad revenue is not as proportionately high as a think piece by Katie Hopkins. So it's a perfect marriage of that austerity politics with the desire to really clamp down on critical journalism. So that is really the conversation that I want to be having about these cuts at the BBC rather than whether or not Andrew Neal's, you know, should for eternity be hosting, you know, his daily politics show or whatever show it is that he hosts. I'm going to go to James because one of my favorite takes on the BBC was actually from your old boss, John McDonnell, when he came on the show, we were sort of asking about, you know, I suppose the Left's love-hate relationship with the BBC. And he was saying, yeah, of course, we should be, we should be critical of their output. But one of the big problems with the BBC is that they're underfunded because the more they are, or the more they have to cut original journalism, the more they have to rely on Britain's corporate-owned press. And so he's saying what you should, if you want an independent BBC, you have to have a well funded BBC, which completely goes against like some Marina Hyde or someone from the garden, she's from the garden who also will mention their cuts in a moment, actually, who sort of tries to castigate the Left as saying they hate the BBC so much they want to privatize it. No one on the Left argues that really, maybe a couple of people on Twitter. But yeah, John McDonnell's line, you've got to fund it properly to get proper investigative journalism. And I mean, what do you see as the significance of this? Will the BBC survive the next five years under this Conservative government in its current form? No, will the BBC survive? Well, yes, because it's actually useful for any government to have the BBC around. And it has a particular relationship with the Conservative Party, because let's be blunt, the Conservative Party are in government most of the time. So that develops there. But obviously, I'm going to agree, well, not necessarily agree with John, but I do agree with him on this, which is that you're not going to get. And it's exactly the point Davia said, and I basically agree with everything she said as well, which is that you're not going to get the quality journalism, you're not going to get the in-depth investigative stuff without the BBC being funded. The people losing their jobs, I would, I would guess, there is some, you know, there are bits of Twitter and bits are left that get very head up about the BBC and serves them right in this sort of thing. To be honest with you, the people who have been making editorial decisions and basically political decisions at the BBC, they're not going to be the ones losing their jobs. That's not going to be happening. This is going to be like ordinary workers at the BBC are going to be facing the chop here. So of course you support them. But also there's this question of moving to a better funding model. There are, yeah, Tom Mills and other people have done good work about what that might look like and reinforcing the public service broadcasting part of what it is the BBC should be doing. Breaking up, Tom Mills' suggestion is breaking up the BBC board and regionalising the BBC much more, putting it much more closely in touch with different local and regional communities, if you like, throughout the rest of the country as a way of removing that kind of institutionalised sort of very Westminster centric power at the top up there. If you want to sort of embodiment of that institutionalised power, Andrew Neil is part of it. We all know Andrew Neil as many, many other strings to his bow, as they say, not least of which is being chair of the board of the spectator. It doesn't really hurt him that much if he's not the person doing the interviews. He's also, I look personally, I think he's good at a certain set of things with politicians. It'll be nice to have some different kind of conversations with politicians, more developed conversations. One's where we can expand a bit. I think Stephen Sacker at Hard Talk does actually quite a good job with this sort of thing. It's still quite a confrontational interview, but it's a bit more expansive. You can talk a bit more about what you think rather than this hammering away at very, very specific points of detail that has been carefully picked by Andrew Neil's researchers out of the great massive things he could have picked, and you just hammer at that. It's a very particular style. It doesn't necessarily illuminate very much. There would be better ways to do this, and perhaps we could look at the entire pattern of how the BBC and how our mainstream journalist and mainstream media conducts political interviews now would be something to look at. I'm going to go to you, Dahlia, for final comment, and it's going to be on the Guardian cut, so it wasn't just bad news for journalists at the BBC. I'm going to get up a tweet from Jim Waterston, who is the media editor at The Guardian. He's probably one of the people who finds out this particular bit of news first. He says, Guardian announced his plans to cut workforce by 12% with 70 jobs to go in editorial departments and 110 to go in commercial roles. Revenues had been flat until the pandemic hit, now going off financial targets by well over £25 million. Dahlia, what's your take on this? I've seen various interventions on Twitter by people saying, yes, I do read The Guardian. I want it to be around, but because they spent so long trying to destroy the Corbyn project, I can't really part my cash to help them continue. Also, they've been one of the longest holdouts when it comes to putting up a paywall. What do you make of this announcement here? What should we make of it? We have a crisis when it comes to mainstream media that has dominated the airwaves and also print media for so long. I think it's a double crisis of a crisis of faith and the fact that the circulation is simply going down of a lot of these newspapers. That's not just because of the digitisation. I think it's also because, as we've seen in so many of the previous elections, the better or the worse, a lot of these massive sort of hegemonic outlets have really failed to predict what's going to understand where the public are at. I think that that kind of creating that big space between the journalistic class and everyday people is partly to do with this and the fact that a lot of people are, again, for better or worse, turning to, especially better in our situation, turning towards alternative, more independent media. I think that that is part of it. Also, I think that there is a kind of, again, as I said before, I do worry that there is an issue when it comes to how the impact, I don't think that these cuts are going to make that situation better. What these cuts are going to do is it's going to, not only, again, as we said, reduce the amount of critical journalism, but it's also going to, you know, journalism is already an incredibly poorly representative group of people that make up journalists. Not only are they something like, I think, 94% white, but they nearly 50% of UK journalists went to private school. They come from a different world, a completely different class. That's compared to only 7% of the British population went to private school. Cuts and the reduction of well-paid jobs and the increase of, you know, zero-hours contracts, insecure contracts, reliance on freelancers, reliance on poorly paid internships is only going to entrench that. It's only going to increase the number of people who go into journalism, who go into media, who come from those privileged backgrounds and have that safety net, that financial safety net to fall on to. So really, I think it's both the symptom of, you know, the kind of deepening class divide between those who own and also sort of run, make the big editorial decisions at lot of these organizations and with everyday working class people. But unfortunately, these cuts are most likely going to entrench that division. So I think that, you know, the Guardian and other organizations like this should be very worried.