The former Conservative chancellor Nigel Lawson once said that the National Health Service was the nearest thing the English people had to a national religion, but surely the BBC must come close behind. Our state broadcaster is frequently mentioned as a source of Britain’s international “soft power”, with Top Gear alone sold to more than 200 countries around the world.
The comparison between the NHS and the BBC is apposite, because these institutions suffer from several of the same malaises: overmanaged while their front lines are under-resourced, a few individuals at the top enjoying bloated salaries while low-paid workers with insecure contracts pick up the slack from redundancies and cutbacks at the bottom.
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