UK Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy was widely expected to change jobs when her good friend Andy Burnham became Prime Minister this week, but she has remained in post and is now comfortably the longest-serving in that role for well over 10 years.
Now, a set of decisions that Nandy is due to make over the coming months could make her one of the most consequential Culture Secretaries in recent memory… in America that is.
This trio of major calls that loom over Nandy could end up upsetting or possibly ingratiating virtually all the major U.S. studios, streamers and tech giants, coming at a time when Burnham will be attempting to keep relations with Donald Trump rosy after the solid work put in by his predecessor Keir Starmer.
First up, it was just before UK Parliament broke for recess and just before Burnham became PM that Nandy left the Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) $110B mega-merger unread.
She had initially said she was “minded to intervene” in the deal on media plurality grounds but failed to provide an update in time. David Ellison and co will now have to wait until September 1 at the very earliest to discover if the deal will be either probed or greenlit by British regulators.
This, as a reminder, could be an incredibly costly Nandy intervention, because the agreement has a “ticking fee” commitment to WBD shareholders of 25 cents a share — roughly $650 million — for every quarter its takeover does not finalize beyond Q3.
Ellison attempted to charm Nandy back in Jan during a much-publicized trip to Europe but any charm will dissipate if she causes his beloved deal to run into the “ticking fee” period. In the U.S., of course, he continues to hit stumbling blocks and the merger is currently on pause in response to a lawsuit from a dozen states.
With the Paramount-WBD deal firmly remaining in the spotlight, WBD’s previous suitor Netflix will be fuming if Nandy pushes on with a controversial plan for the BBC licence fee to expand to subscribers to streamers like Netflix, Disney+ and Prime Video.
The BBC has floated the plan in a desperate bid to generate more from the £180 ($240) annual fee. It has repeatedly stressed that while 94% of the UK population use its services every month, fewer than 80% pay the £180, leading to a loss of hundreds of millions of pounds per year.
Without a great deal of info about how it would actually work in practice, Nandy recently signaled that she is behind the proposal that would see people who watch non-live content on streamers forced to pay the licence fee, and would even task streamers with helping collect the charge.
The Motion Picture Association, which represents big streamers and studios, had already pushed back, saying the plan will have a “downstream impact on viewers and their viewing experience,” yet this doesn’t appear to have halted Nandy. She says she has had conversations with the streamers over various ideas and continues to point out that the government will never bring in a streamer levy, an idea taken up by several other nations that would force the SVoDs to pay a small amount of their UK subscription revenue to a cultural fund for British content.
Netflix in particular is already on the European regulatory warpath. It has bristled frequently at other nations that force the streamer into local content quotas and funding obligations but has regularly praised the UK for leaving it free to do what it wants in the nation that birthed Adolescence and Baby Reindeer. Forcing its subscribers into effectively funding a rival would surely go against this grain.
And then there is the tech giants. In amongst everything else, the UK is going ahead with a full social media ban for under-16s while also drawing up legislation that would require YouTube and TikTok to carry public service content prominently, which could prove quite the algorithmic headache for these tech behemoths.
This idea was first floated at the RTS Convention by, you guessed it, Lisa Nandy, who said it will be “vital in the fierce battle against mis and disinformation.”
Had Nandy been removed from her post earlier this week, it is impossible to tell if her successor would have changed tack on any of these three crucial upcoming decisions.
But as it stands, she appears keen to follow through, and the American entertainment and tech giants that would be impacted would be numerous. Many of these companies have got closer and closer to Trump during his second presidency, some relying on his or his allies’ say-so to force through various deals.
In their first-ever call during his first few hours as PM, Burnham invited Trump to his home city of Manchester, which also happens to be where Nandy is from. Were Trump to take up this offer, the Culture Sec may fancy making herself scarce.
