Hold your nerve Nadine...BBC needs radical reform
FIRST the good news: the television licence fee is on its way out after being branded “completely outdated” by Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries. The gutsy Ms Dorries will come under heavy pressure from some BBC insiders to change her mind, but she is highly unlikely to do so given a series of polls showing public opinion resoundingly on her side.
When the BBC’s existing royal charter expires in 2027 it seems clear that the £159 compulsory annual fee for anyone wanting to watch live TV will be kaput.For many of us, those five years will seem like five years too long and we’d like to see Ms Dorries accelerate her review and implement radical reform before the next election. Yet the wheels do tend to turn slowly in politics when big changes are afoot – after all, look how long it took to implement Brexit.
The key test is what BBC funding model Ms Dorries will recommend to take the place of the licence fee, which is proving increasingly difficult to collect given growing public disquiet about BBC bias and a massive switch to online streaming services, particularly among younger generations.
And believe it or not, there is a risk of something even worse than the licence fee emerging. At least anyone furious about BBC bias currently has as a last resort the option simply not to get a licence and to stop watching live TV. Let’s be honest, there is also a growing chunk of viewers who don’t bother paying for a licence and adopt a “catch me if you can” attitude towards enforcement of it.
BUT MOVES are afoot among the BBC elite to push ministers to bring in a licence fee replacement that would be impossible to avoid or evade in this way. The idea would be to introduce a BBC stealth tax as a levy on top of an essential household utility bill, rather like a council tax precept or one of those sneaky green levies that gets put on our energy bills without most of us even being aware of it.
That would be an outrage, completely eradicating consumer choice, further adding to cost of living pressures and allowing the BBC to continue to be unaccountable to its viewers and to enforce a biased political and cultural agenda upon them.
So instead, Ms Dorries should steel herself to expose the Corporation to the disciplines of genuine competition, making it fight for subscriptions by offering programmes people are prepared to pay for.
Such a move would certainly lead to an outpouring of fury among the BBC’s many “household names” who regularly take to social media to condemn the Government for its policies. No doubt Ms Dorries would be accused of being a philistine and a wrecker of one of the glories of Britain.
But the British public would be with her and would surely see the financial vested interests at play when presenters who are not nearly as indispensable as they consider themselves to be go in to bat for the system that has made them rich.
On top of pushing the BBC to offer subscription channels for premium output, Ms Dorries could allow it to air a controlled volume of advertising, as well as continuing to sell its output abroad and receiving revenue from classic shows via BritBox, as it does now.
SUCH A hybrid funding model could be implemented in return for the Corporation continuing to operate a core free-to-air offering on Freeview, including its news channel, BBC1 and local radio stations.
Given the huge economies of scale and brand visibility the BBC would start out with, many millions of us would surely opt to subscribe to its premium services and it could almost certainly offer monthly packages for a lot less than rivals such as Sky demand.
And we would know we were volunteers and not being dragooned. If a blabbermouth leftist such as Gary Lineker were to attempt to lever his political views into non-political programming then we would be free to stop paying for him and his ilk.That in turn would surely lead to senior BBC management taking a much firmer line against infuriating virtue signalling, helping the corporation once again to become a genuine voice for the whole nation.
The current BBC self-adoring trailer tells us that it belongs to “all of us”. That is an increasingly empty claim given the deplorably skewed coverage it has offered on a whole host of contentious subjects over the past couple of decades.
Ms Dorries has a chance to call time on the funding racket that has enabled such bias. It won’t make her popular with metropolitan media types. But millions of ordinary TV viewers will be praying that she holds her nerve.
‘Growing number of viewers adopt a catch me if you can attitude’