Moreover, the composition of the BBC's receipts and hence its "business model" (it is, after all, a business) are all wrong for its long-run competitiveness. The income of today's global media giants is dominated by rapidly-growing money from subscriptions, and smaller and less dynamic advertising receipts. Both types of income arise, of course, from customer demand in a market setting. By contrast, the BBC does not have subscription revenues and it cannot carry advertising in the UK. The licence fee money is crucial to the financing of its operations and is justified by its obligation to provide "public service broadcasting". Similar arrangements, with state funding of broadcasting, are found in other countries, but data from Ofcom show that public money for state broadcasters has not grown at all in the last five years. 

One drawback with state funding and a consequent obligation to offer public service broadcasting is obvious. The funding is from the government of one country and public service broadcasting is to benefit the audience in that one country. But a basic long-term trend in broadcasting is towards globalisation, as ever-advancing technology enables media companies to transmit material all over the globe (and indeed throughout the internet). 

Almost by definition, a broadcasting company focused on the public service needs of one country cannot be a big player with a major market share in all the world's nations. (I do not have space here to explain why the advent of iPhones and Android devices has undermined the tax base for the licence fee, although this also is a heavy nail in the licence fee's coffin.) 

The long-run opportunity outside the UK must be far greater than that in the UK. The BBC's heyday was in the late 1940s and early 1950s when the UK accounted for 6 per cent of the world's output and 2 per cent of its population, and only radio programmes could be meaningfully transmitted across borders. A hundred years from now the UK's population will be only 1 per cent of that in all those nations (the USA, India, Nigeria and so on) in which English is the first language or the dominant language of business and high culture, and the British share of world output may not be much more. A privatised BBC, free to produce top-quality content for the world market, might then still be a national champion. A state-supported BBC restricted to the UK market will wither away, and suffer the same fate as British Shipbuilders and British Leyland.