ARE you pleased by the news that the BBC has been fined £150,000 by regulator Ofcom for the lewd and disgusting comments by Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross?

Are we to suppose that the BBC will pay the fine with its own money? But the BBC has no money of its own. We shall pay the fine for the Ross and Brand outrage from the licence fee. What a wheeze, eh?

How those two unelected quangos, the BBC and Ofcom – and, of course, their fans in the metropolitan elite – must be chortling at this stunt they have pulled at the expense, literally, of the long-suffering public.

This news comes soon after it was revealed that any incoming Tory government will freeze the licence fee for one year. Any Tory government worth its name would abolish it altogether. But we know there is a done deal between the BBC and David Cameron’s lot (Labour-lite) whereby the Tories promise to retain the licence fee in exchange for the corporation’s promise not to rubbish the party during the election campaign.

The licence fee is an iniquity. And only last week the BBC was sharply rebuked for the threatening style of its licence-collecting policy, which amounts to “we know where you live” corporate aggression.

It is absurd that the licence fee – relentlessly increased over the years – should still be the means by which a national broadcasting service is funded. It’s as if we’re living in the old Soviet Union with the BBC made up of various commissars for entertainment, factual programmes, news and comment, and so on. No doubt there is a wellpaid commissar for abusing the public.

The programmes as a job lot are not worth paying for. No rational person would pay for the BBC schedules if they had to go and buy them in the supermarket.

Whatever happened to the old contract which defined the purpose of the BBC as being “to inform, educate and entertain”?

One piece of forgettable consumerist trash – with blatant product placement – follows another: Cash in the Attic – raising money for patio furniture; Bargain Hunt; Car Booty.

Then the excrescences which are the children’s programmes – exercises in the corruption of youth – and the vulgar soap operas, which create a monstrous horde of couch-potatoes and then pander to it.

But the worst aspect of the BBC is its institutional political bias. Its news and current affairs programmes resemble a broadcast manifesto from the Ministry of Propaganda.

It’s easy to itemise this. It is against the good things about the US, such as its international influence in defence of Western values and aid to the world’s poor, but in thrall to the tawdriest aspects of American pop culture – the inescapable noise that passes for “music”; the sickening Oscars and the love affair with left-wing playwrights.

The BBC despises and constantly mocks the best of British history and tradition. The whole course of our national life is seen only as a series of events for which we must apologise.

It prefers despotic, backward Arab states, which are both havens for terrorism and cruel towards women, over the democratic and fiercely self-critical state of Israel.

There are some good programmes on the BBC. But there are many more and better on commercial broadcasting channels. Public broadcasting, funded by a punitive tax, has no place in modern Britain.