You know someone is worried when they trot out the such and such British institution is 'the envy of the world' line. In today's Telegraph this was the clincher used by BBC Director General Mark Thompson to justify his claim that some people would even welcome the license fee rising to £240 per annum: http//www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2008/07/12/do1204.xml&posted=true&_requestid=145119

Like most people there are (diminishing) bits and pieces of Radio 3 and 4 that I like although I can no longer find anything worth watching on BBC televison- least of all on the new digital channels that recycle old comedy, food and property porn shows. I am not a great fan of little missie actresses doing their turn in costume dramas- according to Thompson the highlight of the BBC's output.  If I watch anything at all it is commercial Channel 5. Thompson claims, melodramatically, that things like the Proms at the Albert Hall would 'go dark' if the BBC didn't cover them. This is like saying that if Sainsbury's vanished we would suddenly be unable to buy fruit and veg.

The problem with the BBC, as many commenters on the Telegraph puff have already noted, is that the BBC reflects such an Independent/Guardian institutional bias- with no countervailing voices at all- that most of us on the centre right are not prepared to subsidise it. If and when there is a conservative government, it should immediately exploit its mandate to redirect a substantial proportion of the license fee to independent providers so as to ensure genuine diversity and representation of the tastes and views of many people in this country. The diminished BBC should also be told that the BBC recruits from too narrow a pool- nice liberal middle class humanities graduates of the Left University- leaving whole swathes of the population (and their views) unrepresented. If that brings no change of institutional culture then the rest of the license fee can go in the next parliament. In recent weeks David Cameron has indicated that he understands that the big issues are mostly cultural- let's hope he understands that the BBC is to his forthcoming administration what the trades unions were to Mrs Thatcher's in the 1980s. While he's at it, his education secretary can take a long cool look at the Left University too. After that, we might even have something to quietly boast about.