THE NEW WHITE Paper on the future of the BBC posits a supposedly new-look corporation, committed to buying British programmes and selling British citizenship, and no longer driven by ratings.

The White Paper is designed, we are told, to put the focus on delivering value for money for the licence payer. The transformation that will achieve this is twofold. First, the National Audit Office will be asked to run a fine-tooth comb through the corporation’s accounts. And secondly, the BBC Governors will be replaced by a BBC Trust.

Wow. What a radical breakthrough! The BBC will have to let some people have a look at its books, and a group of establishment placemen and women will be given a new name and told that they should be on the side of the licence-fee payer.

According to Tessa Jowell, the Secretary for Culture, Media and Sport, whose work this White Paper is: “The Trust really will be the voice of the licence-fee payer. Every move it makes should be informed by the views and interests of licence-fee payers.”

Forgive me for spoiling the party in White City, but I have an alternative suggestion — a more direct means by which my views and interests can be expressed. Instead of forcing everyone who owns a TV to hand over £126.50 to the BBC, with the threat of imprisonment to anyone who refuses, how about allowing me to keep hold of my own money, and to spend it as I, rather than a bunch of left-liberal chattering class broadcasting type clones, see fit to do?

I do not hand over £126.50 a year to a British Cinema Corporation and ask it to decide for me what films I should see — what percentage should be romantic comedies, how many should be foreign, the number that tell me that the Israelis are the root of all the world’s problems and the proportion that are based on the premise that eurosceptics are boggle-eyed nutters.

I decide that for myself, and hand over my money at the box office. No one forces me to pay for those I don’t want to see or to pay for them to be made.

In an age when broadcasting was new-fangled and exotic, there might once have been a case for the State to compel us to pay a broadcasting tax. Today the notion of such a tax — the licence fee — is simply preposterous. Put that in your White Paper, Ms Jowell.