Lord Hall and his batman, James Purnell, have so far played the issue fairly cool - the licence-fee system is, they say, pretty good, and with a few tweaks should stay.
The BBC's Director of Public Policy, James Heath, has gone a little further: in a blogpost, he's argued that the licence fee is not just pretty good, it's brilliant, and all other alternatives haven't been thought through and are daft (my precis, not his). This has incurred the wrath of Ryan Bourne, Head of Public Policy at the IEA, with a counter-post that ends "the arguments in favour of the licence fee are weak..the Beeb will have to come up with better". Mr Heath rejoined battle, with a second blog that starts with lessons from Greek mythology, just to raise the intellectual level and increase the accessibility of the debate. Mr Bourne counters again, with the Aristotelian logic favoured on social media, Twitter.
BBC response is actually quite funny - if they really believed all within it, they wdn't be worried abt subscription: http://t.co/GCQcAk9cmS
— Ryan Bourne (@MrRBourne) July 24, 2014
Where will it end ? What's the form here ? Bourne (Sir Joseph Williamson's Mathematical School, Rochester and double first, Magdalene College, Cambridge) supports Derby County and Gillingham, and describes himself as "dry as dust". Heath (York University and three years as a Labour party researcher) boasts two titles on his cv, Director of Public Policy and Controller of Policy and Regulation, but a modest pay package of £89,500 - lower than at least 250 others at Auntie. - In other news of deep thinkers, Diane Coyle, thwarted in her bid to step up from Deputy Chair of the BBC Trust, has chosen an interesting book to review today: "Madmen, Intellectuals, and Academic Scribblers". I'm reading nothing into it.
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