Hunt saboteur

I’d long imagined that the Culture Secretary merely organised yoghurt, but no. It appears that Jeremy Slang-Rhyming has decided to meddle in the affairs of the BBC.

Doubtless the former Charterhouse and Oxford University management consultant – he must be from the good kind of management rather than the public sector kind, a critical condem distinction – has conducted a line by line analysis of the corporation’s expenditure over the last five years, giving him a full grasp of its affairs, thus enabling him to make the definitive statement that there is “extraordinary and outrageous” waste at the BBC. Or perhaps he just read it in the Daily Fail.

It appears, for instance, that 85 execs at the BBC are paid more than £142,500pa, or more than the Prime Minister’s salary. You might take from that the fact that the PM – not the current moon faced one, but a theoretically good one – should be paid more in a year than John Terry gets in a week, but let’s not digress. For Mr Slang-Rhyming is on a roll, fully embracing the politics of envy that he and his ilk so derided when Labour were in power.

Basically, it’s all the fault of Jonathan Ross for getting so much money. Never mind that the Tories have spent years telling us that the best should get rewarded and, as it goes, Ross is as good as it gets at his job, adding considerably more to the sum of human happiness across the spectrum than, for example, the aforementioned Mr Terry, who earns considerably more.

And lest we forget, as the head of a production company, Ross is also an employer, precisely the kind of private sector entrepreneurial spirit that is going to fill the gaping hole in the economy that Slang-Rhyming and his colleagues are currently digging. Incidentally, why hasn’t Jeremy Clarkson been similarly scapegoated for his big BBC pay packet? Because he’s a Sun columnist, of which more later.

So the answer? Well, amid the current self imposed austerity – the one that the majority of the world economists seem to think is reckless at best – the BBC needs to cut its cloth, and the best way to do that is reduce its funding. Which of course makes no sense. The BBC gets its revenue from the licence fee. It does not take any other tax revenues, and therefore, there’s no way it can be part of deficit reduction, unless the government wants to nick some of the BBC’s money for something else. So that justification is, plain and simple, garbage.

What is going on is something rather more cunning. A cut in licence fee is shamelessly populist at a time when Slang-Rhyming and his mates are busy shredding the economy and charging us more and more tax for the privilege. They think that by knocking £20 off the fee, we’ll all be enthralled. This is because you notice you’re paying tax when the licence fee demand comes, but you don’t really think about it when you buy things in a shop and the VAT is largely hidden from view.

So, if you buy a £600 TV for example, after January you won’t necessarily notice that you’ve already paid £12.50 more tax than if you’d bought it today, thanks to the VAT increase. That’s why the Tories, the party who introduced VAT and the only party that has ever increased it, love it so much. People don’t really think they’re paying it – they blame the shop for charging them too much rather than the government for having money out of their pockets.

Oddly, at a time when we are looking to exports to boost the economy, Slang-Rhyming does not note the value of the BBC’s exports, the fact that it sells its programmes to broadcasters all over the world thus helping our balance of payments. It’s ability to sell its programmes on DVD also indicates the quality of its output. People might queue for a copy of “The Office” but they’re rarely camping out overnight to get their hands on “Come Dine With Me” are they?

Culturally, the BBC is the real crown jewels in this country, giving us a standing in the world that any other country would love to have. When you go online, do you ever consult any foreign news agencies for information? Few Brits do. But people all over the world turn to the BBC for their information because they trust it. They do not turn to Sky or to Fox. And there’s the nub of it all. Payback time.

Because after throwing the weight of his newspapers behind the neo-Conservatives, Mr Murdoch wants his pound of flesh. He wants the BBC brought to its knees, he wants them to have less and less money for programming, less to spend on sports. He wants the list of protected free to air sports events to disappear so that he can own Wimbledon, the FA Cup Final, the World Cup, the lot.

As Sky subscriber numbers stubbornly refuse to go up, as the market has been opened up to other competitors to carry his products – another reason for turning on the previous government – Murdoch needs another magic bullet like the Premier League, the institution that saved him from bankruptcy. More sport is it, coupled with a collapse in the BBC’s other core programming so that whatever Godawful garbage he shovels out on his countless channels, there will be no alternative.

More important, if the BBC’s ability to scrutinise the news is compromised, how much easier it will be for him and his lackeys in Downing Street to do whatever they like without being questioned? They’re already trying to decide who is allowed to go on “Question Time”, next they’ll be vetting the questioners, and presumably only going on Sky. A win-win for Murdoch and the government.

So, the Murdoch empire or the BBC, the choice is yours. The BBC costs you just under 40p a day, for which you get four TV channels, the BBC online network, the national and local radio stations, and a rare reason to be proud of this country.

Or you can get The Times, a shadow of its once impressive self, online, at an annual cost of just under 29p a day. How many radio stations and TV channels does it also provide for that subscription? That’ll be none. Precisely the amount of intelligent comment we’ll have left in this country if Slang-Rhyming is allowed to emasculate the BBC.

He should have stuck to yoghurt.