The BBC and Channel 4 may soon be safe from Tory attacks

Public service broadcasting has been threatened by a hostile government for years. A Labour win offers the chance for a reset

On 5 July, if polling predictions are correct, the Tories will be out of power. Among the repercussions will be that the BBC and Channel 4 – two of our great creative organisations – will have to get creative and start solving some of their own problems. Bailing out broadcasters won’t be a Labour priority.

The BBC’s licence fee, more than 100 years old, might be a good place to start. It’s clearly unjust in some regards: you pay it even if you want to watch every channel but those operated by the BBC, and a single mother in Barnsley pays the same as the king. All those clever people in the BBC (and an awful lot of people work there – more than 21,000 at last count) need to come up with an innovative alternative.

Dorothy Byrne is the president of Murray Edwards College, Cambridge. She is a former head of news and current affairs at Channel 4, and delivered the MacTaggart lecture in 2019