BBC's plan for the North a 'half-baked attempt to colonise its culture' - David Montgomery

The BBC's latest gesture justifying its existence by moving operations out of London is a half-baked attempt to colonise its culture across the country.

It is not a levelling up of the media, but rather the BBC's instinctive drive to dominate with the effect of suppressing local publishers and local creativity.

It is the existing and new local and regional media organisations that the taxpayer should be supporting rather than the expansion of a single institution with a century of in-bred Portland Place culture.

The proposition of the BBC exporting its brand to the regions through the transfer of indoctrinated staff and its outmoded ideas is a creative atrocity rather than creative devolution. This is illustrated by the patronising, London centric pronouncements of a new soap for The North and a BBC One 'tailored' for Yorkshire, the North East and North West.

The introduction of 100 reporters in towns that have never had BBC TV journalism is the misuse of public funds to make a direct assault on the commercial media - and why is the all conquering BBC so confident that these communities prefer its somewhat tarnished brand to the incumbent local news providers.

Instead of embarking on colonising the regions the BBC should be cut down to size, limited to a national channel provider with a similarly reduced licence fee to be eventually replaced by subscription.

It is an affront to democracy in an era of wide media choice that viewers should be forced through the licence fee to pay for content that either they do not want or in some cases find objectionable.

There is more than enough spectrum on all platforms for the country to be enriched by commercial media providers with their roots in local communities rather than an inefficient, stagnating blow-in from London that has somehow discovered the regions at the tail-end of its existence.

Let other providers have a turn - there is an abundance of talent in the regions that can surface under its own steam without the assistance of the BBC. That would be genuine creative and geographical diversity.