In the 21st century we should be able to imagine life without the BBC licence fee

The argument is not really about the corporation’s content, but its power to force us to pay for it

Lord Hall, the directorgeneral of the BBC, announced his retirement this week. Speculation about his successor started immediately. Such speculation is based on the out-of-date idea that it matters who holds the job. Once upon a time, the directorgeneral did matter, for two reasons. The first was that he (always he, not she) exercised real editorial control, and therefore decided what was broadcast. The first director-general, Sir John Reith, did this; hence the phrase “Reithian values”. The second reason was that the BBC was so dominant in broadcasting that the person in charge of it was unassailably powerful.

Whenever prime ministers got fed up with the BBC, they therefore used their right to appoint the corporation’s chairman. The chairman they chose would get rid of the “wrong” directorgeneral and put in the “right” one.

Thus the Labour prime minister, Harold Wilson, wearied of his Leftwing former supporter, the directorgeneral Hugh Greene, and put in as chairman a former Tory minister, Lord Hill, to edge him out. Thus Margaret Thatcher, furious at the BBC’S antitory bias under the director-general Alasdair Milne (father of Jeremy Corbyn’s lovable lieutenant, Seumas), made Marmaduke Hussey chairman. In due time, Hussey appointed the highly effective moderniser John Birt as director-general.

Things are different now. The BBC is such a huge bureaucracy that no D-G can give it an editorial character. There are no “Hallian” values. Nowadays, its executives are entirely ensnared in their own processes. Look at the comical row about its rates of pay for women – for which the BBC’S only solution is spending much more licence-fee payers’ money.

The bigger change is technological, and therefore competitive. Satellite and cable television, deregulation of radio, and then the internet and all its works, have meant that you can watch or listen to British media all day, all your life, without ever having to use the BBC. Millions under the age of 40 do exactly that. But if you have any form of live terrestrial television on any device, you must pay the BBC £154.50 a year for a television licence. If you fail to do so, you can be dragged to the magistrates’ court, where you will be fined up to £1,000. Nearly 200,000 people, most of them poor, are thus humiliated in court every year.

Even this scale of unjust persecution cannot prevent technological evasion, so the BBC’S revenue is starting to slide. The system looks doomed. Until quite recently, politicians were so scared of being trashed by the BBC that they dared not reform it. Indeed, the modernising project of David Cameron’s leadership was a way of getting kinder coverage from the BBC by seeming less Rightwing. Now alternative technologies, and the victory of Brexit after nearly four years of unremitting BBC opposition, have altered all that.

Boris Johnson’s thumping majority has proved it is possible to win big without having to talk to the BBC on its terms. His party paid no electoral price for defying the traditional BBC invitation to come on and be humiliated. For the first time in the corporation’s century (due in 2022), it will have to get used to the feeling that the Government does not need it.

How, then, should the Boris administration treat the BBC? It is being advised to avoid “trench warfare”. It is true that the soft Left will try to unite behind the proposition that the BBC is a “national treasure” which the Tories are trying to destroy. Its rhetoric is starting to equate the BBC with the NHS as a sacred cow. There might be some backlash, especially among more educated voters, against Tory “philistinism” and political interference.

The danger of braking, however, is greater than that of accelerating. Big bureaucracies always try to win over their critics with soft words – the well-known phenomenon by which ministers “go native” among officials. This is already happening. Note the sudden prominence given on the BBC to the late, great Sir Roger Scruton, the Tory thinker whom, in life, it scorned.

Don’t be fooled: much better to maintain the Dominic Cummings refusal to take the BBC at its own valuation. It is well worth any government’s while to harass the BBC when it lets slip its political views. As a chartered body funded by a compulsory licence fee, it has to take seriously all accusations of bias. And as a body with its own impermeable, uniform, would-be right-on culture, it is frequently guilty as charged.

Indeed, if the Left does try explicitly to turn the BBC into its fortress in the culture wars, that will only confirm what millions know already – that it has been such a fortress for decades. When I say “the Left”, I am not speaking in strictly party terms (though I am sure very few BBC high-ups vote Conservative). I mean the more generalised de haut en bas wokery which treats Greta Thunberg as Joan of Arc and the wider population as prejudiced idiots.

At present, BBC News is running items under the title “Our Planet Matters”. Of course it matters. One resents the insulting implication that millions of us think it doesn’t. But in what sense is this news? Why are we forever being preached at and ticked off? The long story of the Brexit struggle has shown millions of Leave voters that the BBC despised them, and tried to deny their voice – for example, by weighting almost all panels and audiences on Question Time and Any Questions? against them. To jumble two well-known metaphors, Boris should strike while the iron has entered our souls.

When Nick Robinson grilled me on the Today programme a few weeks ago, he warned me against a split society, such as that in the United States, where no media is shared by people of differing views. My answer was that such a split has already been created here – by the BBC. Of this, the

Brexit story is the final proof.

In terms of methods, however, it would be foolish – and wrong – for the Government to try to act like some exterior super-editor trying to “gag” the BBC. Except in egregious cases, the Government’s concern should be not particular programmes, but the system, especially the money.

In taking its stance, it is rightly looking at the issue from the point of view of the licence-fee payer. The phrase “poll tax” is an exactly correct description of the licence fee. Like all undifferentiated poll taxes, it bears heaviest on the poorest. And every year, the service has more and more free riders as the rising generation finds ways of not paying.

There are two obvious steps to take. The first, already hinted at by the Government, is to decriminalise non-payment, turning it into an ordinary debt without the shame of a criminal court. The second would be to cut the licence fee substantially, say by half. Rather than trying to dictate what programmes should be cut, this would leave the decision to the BBC. For the first time, its “wider still and wider” doctrine would have to reverse. Then it would have to make up its mind what mattered, and how to keep it.

I do not necessarily disagree that some things on the BBC – notably Radio 3 and 4 – are good for our culture. If they are, ways, such as subscription, can be found of paying for them. But let’s see what the public wants, instead of telling it what it must have.