The Beeb can’t compete, so Ofcom will cheat

A quiet panic is setting in across Britain’s governing institutions. They know the centre cannot hold, yet they double down on control. The week’s headlines expose the impulse: regulate the algorithm, mandate the media, censor the sentiment. If the public won’t obey, nudge them harder.

Far from safeguarding democracy, the British state is repurposing its machinery to manage perception. Whether it’s Ofcom hardwiring propaganda into your TV, HMRC lecturing staff on national shame, or civil servants flagging TikToks that challenge asylum policy, the logic is clear: you can have your vote, but not your voice.

Contra Brief exists to expose this elite insecurity and call its bluff. If the state wants to police your mood, your media and your memory, it should at least admit what it’s doing. Because the public is waking up and what they want isn’t regulation, it’s representation.

Comment

“The BBC is now too tired, too sclerotic,” writes John O’Connell in The Critic, “to have the courage of its convictions.” So Ofcom has stepped in as its carer, spoon-feeding its content to a public that’s long since switched off.

The numbers are grim. Children aged 4–6 already watch more YouTube than all the public service broadcasters combined. Teenagers spend nearly half their screen time on TikTok. So what’s the plan? Not to compete. To coerce. Enter the Media Act, which hardwires BBC iPlayer to the top of smart TVs whether users want it or not. Next up: algorithmic promotion of “public service remit content” on YouTube. If you won’t watch it, Ofcom will try to make you.

As O’Connell notes, even the funding model has lost touch with reality. Stream Netflix or Disney+ without ever touching the BBC and you may still have to pay. Why? Because the government “is scrabbling around for any way to fund the Beeb which doesn’t involve a modern, 21st century funding model.”

Nowhere in Ofcom’s 65-page PSM Review is there a meaningful discussion of the licence fee. Because the game isn’t innovation. It’s institutional preservation. And if the BBC can’t earn relevance, the state will impose it.

The Polemic

Scott Lewis, Regional Director for South Wales at the Great British PAC, posted a viral thread this week that struck a nerve. Its central claim? Britain doesn’t build. It brands, borrows, and broadcasts but the engine room is empty.

Once, the world came to us for steel, ships, and industrial ingenuity. Now? As Lewis puts it, “No one wakes up in Shanghai, Lagos, or Dubai thinking: I need something from Britain.” That isn’t xenophobic lament. It’s economic reality. Cadbury? Sold. ARM? Sold. British Steel? Sold. Water, airports, telecoms foreign-owned and foreign-run. What’s left is a hollowed-out shell. The logo remains. The ownership doesn’t.

This is not a story of market failure. It’s elite failure. Whitehall sold the crown jewels to plug fiscal holes and fund bureaucratic growth. The Treasury calls it GDP. Lewis calls it what it is: “just numbers about numbers - bankers trading made-up money for imaginary value.”

It would be funny if it weren’t national strategy. Meanwhile, Britain taxes its small builders, buries its entrepreneurs in compliance, and imports both capital and dependency. The real economy - oil, grain, semiconductors - is somewhere else. We settle for Zoom calls about pronouns and pat ourselves on the back for Net Zero targets while importing Chinese steel.

But Lewis doesn’t stop at diagnosis. He demands ambition: an end to the managed decline, and a state willing to build again. Not empire redux, but sovereign capacity. Ownership. Output. Optimism.

That’s the choice. Continue as Britain™, a franchise economy living off its past. Or reclaim Britain as a builder, a producer, and a nation that matters.

Full essay here →

Comment

The British public may not know it, but the government has been quietly monitoring their online speech, especially when it touches on immigration, asylum hotels, or “two-tier policing”. Tony Diver’s investigation in The Telegraph reveals that civil servants in a renamed Covid-era “disinformation” unit are now flagging TikTok posts that highlight migrant unrest or question asylum hotel secrecy.

The emails, obtained via a US congressional subpoena, show Labour officials warning tech firms that such content might “exacerbate tensions”. One post flagged with “urgency” simply shared a rejected FOI request and referred to “fighting-age males”. Another featured a street scene captioned “Looks like Islamabad but it’s Manchester”. No requests for takedown, just veiled pressure—and the suggestion that criticism itself is a threat.

The unit, now called NSOIT (National Security and Online Information Team), operates from the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. It was formerly known as the Counter Disinformation Unit, set up during the pandemic to monitor so-called misinformation about lockdowns, vaccines and government policy. Today, it appears to have been quietly repurposed to monitor speech around immigration and policing.

Public frustration is rising over taxpayer-funded asylum hotels, sporadic disorder, and inconsistent policing. Rather than address it, Labour seems more concerned with regulating the mood. Robert Jenrick’s phrase “two-tier Keir” now applies as much to speech as it does to sentencing.

“Mean tweets get you a longer prison sentence than many violent offences,” warned US Congressman Jim Jordan, who exposed the emails. He wasn’t wrong.

Britain didn’t vote for speech policing by stealth. But it got it anyway.

Worth watching

In the latest New Culture Forum episode, philosopher Yoram Hazony revisits his provocative book The Virtue of Nationalism, making a bold case for nationalism as a moral and historical force for freedom. He traces its biblical and Protestant roots, arguing that national self-determination once liberated peoples from the imperial ambitions of Catholic universalism. But since the 1960s, globalist ideology has gained ground, blaming nationalism for the tragedies of the 20th century. Hazony warns this has revived older civilisational conflicts and urges a clear choice: a world of free nations or a return to imperial domination, masked today as American-led global governance.

Quote of the week

Until next time,