Make Every Second Count

What is to stop Donald Trump or his close relatives from buying TikTok? And what are its threats to American national security? Defined as what? The political security of the Democratic Party? Even then, though, in what way, exactly? In similar vein, tomorrow’s march was always to have been not only for a ceasefire, but also against BBC bias. So yes, it is most certainly going ahead, right when the Government was trying to work out how the BBC was to be funded into and in the middle third of the twenty-first century.

Following the introduction both of the Universal Basic Income and of Modern Monetary Theory’s Job Guarantee, then a suitably renamed version of the licence fee ought to be made voluntary, with as many adults as wished to pay it at any given address free to do so, including those who did not own a television set but who greatly valued, for example, Radio Four. One would not need to be a member of the Trust to listen to or watch the BBC, just as one does not need to be a member of the National Trust to visit its properties, or a member of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution to be rescued by its boats.

The Trustees would then be elected by and from among the members. Each member would vote for one, with the top two elected. The electoral areas would be Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, and each of the nine English regions. The Chairman would be appointed by the relevant Secretary of State, with the approval of the relevant Select Committee. And the term of office would be four years.

Here as elsewhere, we ought to be bypassing the weedy brains of the Liberal Establishment and the brainless brawn of the municipal Labour Right, in order to secure the representation that had never been afforded by those who had presumed to speak for our people, but never to our people. Yes, that would indeed involve doing deals with the Conservatives. We could not possibly get less out of them than we had ever managed to get out of the Keir Starmers of the world.