It's time to be on high alert.
Over the next few months, people with vested interests and fierce ideology will argue that the BBC has 'become too big' or 'distorts the market'. What they mean is that their friends – such as Rupert Murdoch – want a greater slice of that 'market' to extract higher profits from it and exert more power over the media landscape.
Don't be fooled: if we allow this government to diminish the BBC, they will chip away at it until it is nothing more than another 'service provider' run along commercial principles, forced to 'compete in the market' for advertising revenue and thus finding itself at the whim and mercy, and playing by the rules, of Big Business: exactly where they want it to be.
The BBC is without parallel anywhere in the world. It took some 90 years to get to where it is today – without a doubt the most respected independent public sector broadcaster there is – and it will take the Tories less than a decade to tear it apart, if we let them.
This is, very sadly, a time of high stakes and so, yes, another signature, another tweet, another email is required, urgently.
And if you balk at the licence fee: please be serious. Even if you never watch TV, the BBC is still the best 50p you're likely to have spent today. Or yesterday. Or will spend tomorrow. Even if you never listen to any BBC radio station and don't ever use the iPlayer. As a cultural asset, as a rich layer in the fabric of social coherence in this country and as signal emitter of benign, broadly enlightened 'soft power' globally, a publicly funded, independent BBC is still worth a lot more than your fifty pence a day. The world really, genuinely, is a better place for the BBC. Those that tell you it is not so do not have your, or the country's or anybody else's other than their own, interests at heart. They simply want something they cannot have, and rather than not have it, they would destroy it. Don't let them: the BBC is a global beacon and a national treasure. Stand up and fight for it!
There's a petition that you can sign to start with right here.
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