Access to information and entertainment, provided via the BBC and public libraries as a universal basic service, is important. Not just to educate, inform and entertain as per the BBC’s Reithian mission but vital to maintain the bonds that underpin the imagined community of our nation. The fragmented alternative of personalised subscription media choices would diminish both our national cultural capital and soft power.

As streaming services proliferate either the cost to an individual subscriber of ‘keeping up’ goes up or their choice becomes more limited. How many could afford to subscribe to several services? Given how important it was in the general election, how many lack the broadband capacity for reliable streaming? Never mind the data processing we have to consent to in order to consume streaming media as opposed to free to air broadcasts.

It is easy for those who can afford premium services and have access to premium infrastructure to think that universal basic services don’t matter and the market will fill the gap. Once such a principle is selectively established then it is easily then applied to services such as education, transport, health or waste. The questions as to whether they are necessary in the present form, what are the alternatives and who pays apply to any current public service. Why should the NHS be sacrosanct rather than be funded by personal insurance like other instances of risk protection? Yes it deals in life or death matters but hopefully each individual uses it sparingly rather than most days. If the BBC is unnecessary why not also public libraries now that the world has moved on and their services are available at cost elsewhere?

No other broadcaster provides the same range and diversity of the BBC’s multichannel output in a single place never mind the innovation of the BBC’s R&D department and the training the BBC Academy provides to the media industry. I think our media sector would be poorer in a pure free market than with the current mixed economy of commercial and public sector broadcasters funded by various methods with the BBC as keystone. Perhaps there are legitimate questions about whether the BBC, like any public service, should pay salaries at the market rate, and whether non-payment of the licence fee should be a civil rather than criminal offence, but those is a different issues to how it should be funded. The BBC is a remarkably good value national asset given all that it does for its cost of less than £3 a week per household.

That our national broadcaster is funded by licence fee not general taxation does allow those who do not wish to have a TV or use iPlayer to opt out of paying. Just like anyone who doesn’t use a car doesn’t have to pay VED. Both are similar systems and it’s an offence to avoid paying them if you access the infrastructure.

However, 95% of households still have a TV (down only 3%), 85% watch live TV, evasion has declined and the proportion of complaints about TV licensing halved to 0.05% (Source: Parliament House of Commons Library Briefing on TV Licensing, January 2019). Perhaps the world is moving on but it doesn’t seem to have yet.

This strikes me as something, like Europe, that is currently a non-issue for most people but risks becoming an issue if those few who are strongly against the BBC succeed in turning it into another divisive and unnecessary culture war.