Tory failure to scrap the BBC licence fee is another nail in the party’s coffin

Shamelessness and entitlement are the chief features of today’s elites, but even the worst instances lag badly behind the BBC. In a sane world, it would beggar belief that a broadcaster whose viewing and listening figures are plummeting, that is mired in scandal, whose executives’ salaries are a public outrage and whose political bias has reached the level of hysteria in reporting on Gaza should be demanding the right to mug licence taxpayers of nine per cent more in Danegeld to watch other channels. 

But this is not a sane world: it is the establishment bubble in which a vanishingly small minority bleeds the majority to support its privileged existence. In round terms, the BBC wants to increase its annual licence fee from £159 to £173.30 from next April. The corporation has been bleating about the freezing of the licence fee for two years, but has still managed to scrape together £525,000 (or 3,302 licence fees) to remunerate Tim Davie for presiding over this Ponzi scheme of the airwaves, as director general.

By a similar heroic effort, it also found £1.35m (8,490 licence fees) to keep Gary Lineker in the style to which he is accustomed (for football punditry and, more importantly, woke exhortations to the masses). Now it has determined that its puny income of £5.7bn needs to be increased by nine per cent. So, what does the Government think?

You could not ask for a better example of the Tory Party’s masochistic Stockholm Syndrome mentality regarding the BBC – a corporation that viscerally hates it and discredits conservatism at every opportunity – than the pathetic response of culture secretary Lucy Frazer to the imperious rattling of the begging bowl in Portland Place. She described the proposed licence fee increase as “very high” and said that the BBC must remain “value for money”.

The last time the BBC represented value for money was on the occasion of the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953. The minister said that she was “looking at” the licence fee increase. Over the past decade and more, Conservative ministers have spent a great deal of time “looking at” things, but never fixing them. There is only one reasonable, let alone Conservative, answer to the licence fee and that is to abolish it.

Since the electorate removed the incubus of Nick Clegg and his crazies from around the neck of the Conservative government in 2015, the Tories have had eight years to scrap the licence fee and, preferably, the BBC along with it. Instead, as with every challenge to true conservative values, we have seen milquetoast responses: a freezing of the licence fee, a kicking of the can down the road to 2027, when the BBC charter comes up for review and Conservative governance will be a distasteful memory.

It is extraordinary that, for generations, the Conservative party had the reputation for ruthless self-preservation, yet in recent times has dug its own grave. Repeatedly, the Tories have been presented with golden opportunities: to remould Britain post-Brexit, to secure permanently the support of the Red Wall electorate by halting immigration, cutting taxes and removing petty annoyances such as the BBC licence fee. Instead, they opted for open borders, net zero lunacy and electoral oblivion next year.

The Tories lacked the basic political nous to take out the global propaganda machine that was subverting them relentlessly and spreading its ultra-leftist poison through the World Service. BBC coverage of Gaza has been as biased as North Korean state broadcasting. A corporation that claims to be concerned about “disinformation” (a term for any news coverage that contradicts its own narrative) is leading the world in pro-Hamas propaganda and suppression of any information discreditable to the terrorists – sorry, “militants”, in BBC Newspeak.

Militants are people who bring a car factory to a standstill: terrorists are people who murder babies. The moral dyslexia of the BBC renders it incapable of making that distinction. Nor can the corporation see that it is in auto-destructive mode by weaponising everything, from children’s programmes to the World Service, to reflect its metropolitan woke obsessions. In the developing world, the BBC World Service has replaced Radio Moscow as the purveyor of leftist dogma to subvert stable societies based on the family and religion.

This is not new. As long ago as the 1960s, the Wednesday Play, whose producers prided themselves on “pushing the boundaries”, marked the beginning of the BBC’s subversion of all the institutions and values that cemented British society. The corporation led the way in helping to convert a substantial portion of the beleaguered working class into an underclass, by undermining the family. Every degeneration that afflicted British society in recent decades was promoted by the BBC.

It likes to pose as holier than other broadcasters because it is untainted by commercialism, despite its non-licence fee funded “international charity” BBCMA (BBC Media Action) reportedly receiving £46m from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. More hilarious is its continued claim to be “a provider of impartial, independent and trusted content the world over”… Domestically, it is devastating local broadcasting.

Last year 400,000 people stopped paying the licensing fee. It will be interesting to see this year’s figures and even more so next year’s, when the long-suffering helots are asked to shell out £173.30. We have heard much recently about international law, in the context of immigration; but why has no corporation or government tested the legality of one favoured broadcaster acting as gatekeeper to almost 500 other television stations? By what right does the BBC obstruct access to competitors? In what other commercial activity would such a situation be tolerated?

That it is supported by a so-called Conservative government is eloquent testimony to how far the ruling party has departed from conservatism. It has become clear that nothing – absolutely nothing – will provoke the Conservatives into doing anything that is remotely Tory. A downright allergy to conservatism is now embedded in their DNA.

Reform UK, now at 11 per cent in the latest poll, has almost a year to embrace and shout from the rooftops hardline measures on every issue the Vichy Tories have refused to address, from net zero immigration – or, preferably, an immigration moratorium – to privatising both the BBC and Channel 4. A sell-off of BBC shares is estimated to raise £5bn in revenue which could be directed towards genuinely conservative projects, including paying compensation to the 2,203 people who, between 1995 and 2018, were sent to prison for non-payment of the BBC licence fee.

BBC prosecutions are running at almost 1,000 per week, an intolerable situation. Yet, as the situation becomes more indefensible, we must be on guard against the kind of tricks the incoming Labour government might deploy, if it felt that stubborn defence of the status quo was becoming an electoral liability. Watch out for weasel proposals to replace the licence fee with a Media Tax.

This could take the form of a tax on broadband connections of around £138 per year, either paid directly by consumers or imposed on internet service providers and passed on by them to consumers, which would again hit the people who currently find the licence fee unaffordable. Any such ploy should be made politically a non-starter.

The only acceptable alternatives would be for the BBC to run advertising, or introduce a Netflix-style subscription service. Since, however, to maintain its present services, the BBC would need to sign up 24 million users, each paying £13 per month – good luck with that, Auntie. 

The reality is that the pampered BBC, if released from its government-sponsored safe space, would not survive long in the wild. The corporation stopped being viable many years ago: once deprived of the licence fee, as will soon become a political necessity, this useless and unpopular institution could only disintegrate and die. It will not be mourned.

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