Shuffling desks will not solve the BBC's problem The BBC is at a familiar point in its life-cycle. In the wake of scandal, a new regime has been installed, which has promised to avoid the mistakes of the past and return the corporation to its roots as a public service broadcaster. In this instance, Lord Hall, the new director-general, has pledged to cut a swathe through the bloated and dysfunctional management structure, the failings of which were most grotesquely illustrated by the Jimmy Savile debacle. This week, his chosen head of news, the former Times editor James Harding, started work, tasked with reinvigorating the output of an estimated 8,000 journalists. But can the BBC really be fixed? If the problem could be solved by shuffling desks on the executive floor, that would be one thing. But it cannot. The issue is that, on the most fundamental level, an organisation that purports to speak to - and for - the nation largely represents one small slice of it. New research from the Centre for Policy Studies proves what many will know already - that ideas and voices from the Right are far less likely to get a fair hearing than those from the Left. A proposal from a free-market think tank, if it is covered at all, will be given a "health warning" to alert viewers that it can safely be despised. A report by its Left-wing equivalent will be waved through as the impartial work of unbiased experts. In its periodic bouts of navel-gazing, the BBC makes great play of its efforts to monitor and correct such bias. But it is almost impossible to eradicate entirely, since it is utterly unthinking. On issues such as immigration, welfare and Europe, a metropolitan distaste for the unvarnished prejudices of the plebeians blinded the BBC to what the public thought and felt. Even as Ukip soared in popularity between 2007 and 2012, the coverage it received actually fell. It was in such an environment, staffed with the right kind of people with the right kind of views, that a culture of soaring executive pay could establish itself, as chum rewarded chum - to the point where the police are now investigating whether some of the pay-offs amounted to fraud, given that a quarter of senior managers got more than they were entitled to. If they are truly to accomplish their mission, Lord Hall and Mr Harding need to be willing to challenge this consensus. So far, the omens are not good. Not only has James Purnell, a former Labour Cabinet minister, been recruited as head of strategy, but one of the few attempts to break with the bien-pensant orthodoxy, a documentary on welfare presented by John Humphrys, was recently upbraided for technical breaches of the impartiality rules - a powerful signal from the BBC Trust, headed by Lord Patten, not to repeat the exercise again.