How to save the BBC? Privatise it

Three years ago, our columnist and former editor Charles Moore was summoned to Hastings Magistrates’ Court to pay £807 for refusing to pay his television licence. He was protesting against the BBC’s ‘gross violation of its charter’ by broadcasting obscene phone calls made by Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand to the former Fawlty Towers actor Andrew Sachs. The court did not have much time to hear his case, or anyone else’s. That day, 560 others would have been prosecuted for not paying their dues to the BBC. Now it has risen to 700 a day, accounting for an extraordinary one in ten of English court cases.

We now know why the Beeb needs the money: it has paid some £60 million in severance payments to various senior managers in the last eight years. When seven BBC executives were asked to explain this to the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee this week, they exuded a sense of collective bewilderment that they should be brought to account.