Daniel Hannan is the Director-General of the IEA.
Imagine that there was a tax on every book sold, the revenue from which went to a single favoured publisher. Or suppose that anyone who owned a device capable of playing music – a phone, a tablet, smart speakers, a car stereo – was obliged to pay £174.50 a year to a single state-sponsored record label.
The BBC Charter is set to expire at the end of 2027. To retain a tax on TV sets in the age of Disney+, YouTube, Spotify and TikTok would be beyond ludicrous.
Strictly speaking, the licence fee system became redundant in 1955, when ITV was launched. To fund a broadcaster through a tax on radios or television sets made sense only when that broadcaster was alone. For most of the twentieth century, though, the anomaly seemed minor enough. The arrival of Channel 4 in 1982 and of Channel 5 in 1997 stretched the inconsistencies, though they were treated as public service broadcasters and asked for a measure of impartiality in return for privileged spectrum access.
Now, though, the anachronism is untenable. In 2024 the BBC lost its lead in audience share, and the gap is growing: Netflix has 17 million UK subscribers to the BBC’s 14 million active accounts, and is watched by seven times as many people under the age of 35.
If you combine all the BBC’s output, television and radio, national and local, it is still ahead of Netflix. But it may already be behind YouTube, and it certainly will be within a couple of years.
Familiarity blinds us to the preposterousness of our situation. The Soviet writer Nadezhda Mandelstam recalled trying to explain to a group of 1960s dissidents that, in Britain, you could buy a train ticket without asking anyone’s permission. She was met with incredulity. When people are habituated to state control, they find it hard to imagine life without it.
Still, most people under the age of 30 consume their entertainment on personal screens. If they own a TV set at all, they generally use it for gaming. To them, paying the licence fee seems every bit as mad as needing an internal passport to travel in the USSR.
A wise Corporation would seek to get ahead of the curve. Since the licence fee is doomed, the sensible thing would be to replace it in a planned and timely way, looking carefully at which functions the BBC should shed and which it should keep.
The arguments most often deployed in favour of the Beeb – that it produces wonderful documentaries narrated by David Attenborough and whatnot – are in truth terrible arguments, since those are precisely the parts of its output that would be profitable in any situation.
If the BBC became a commercial operation, funded by subscription or advertising, it would begin with immense advantages: state-of-the-art studios around the country, a matchless back catalogue of programming and, not least, the power of inertia. Millions of people would gladly subscribe to carry on watching EastEnders, Bake Off or Strictly – they would, after all, have an extra £174.50 a year to do it with.
We are creatures of habit. Fully forty years after the privatisation of BT, it still operates around half of all landlines in Britain and a third of all home broadband. Its employees, moreover, are vastly happier and better paid than when they worked for the state.
Familiarity blinds us to the preposterousness of our situation.
Sadly, the BBC lacks the courage or imagination to take the plunge. Instead, it seeks to defend itself by arguing that, in a fragmented broadcasting landscape, where other stations have clear agendas, it alone can provide impartiality.
Even in theory, this is a dubious argument, since no two people will ever agree on what constitutes impartiality. Every decision on what stories to prioritise involves a political choice, and what one viewer sees as neutral another will see as extreme.
In practice, though, that argument is finished. The BBC is seen as impartial only by that sliver of metropolitan and cosmopolitan opinion that shares its assumptions. For most people, it represents the centre-Left, just as much as, say, GB News represents the centre-Right.
There is nothing wrong with that. On the contrary, having a series of competing narratives is the surest way to ensure that stories do not get repressed or buried. But let’s drop this pretence that the BBC somehow represents an Olympian purity to which no other broadcaster can aspire.
Let the Corporation raise its own funds, and then let it pursue whatever news agenda it likes. But, for Heaven’s sake, stop taking our money and using it to traduce our values.