Spare the BBC from meddling of here-today and gone-tomorrow politicians – Andrew Vine

What appears to be a deliberate campaign to at the very least undermine the corporation, and possibly destroy it altogether, is under way and nobody voted for that only a few weeks ago.

BBC can’t expect to charge a licence fee for online clickbait – David Behrens

This is a campaign motivated by spite, not concern for the millions of viewers and listeners who would be the poorer for a diminished BBC, an act of revenge for what was perceived to be bias during the long agonies over Brexit.

Why lack of compassion over BBC licence fee is an insult to Yorkshire pensioners – Yorkshire Post letters

The public needs to wake up to what’s going on, and make it clear to MPs that they should lay off because the BBC – for all its flaws – is both a much-loved institution and one which deserves its place at the heart of national life.

Pensioners say BBC licence fee is not worth the money for over-75s – Yorkshire Post letters

It is one of the great unifying forces in Britain, the broadcaster to which millions turn instinctively when great events happen at home or abroad, and the benchmark by which all other television is rightly judged, whether in its entertainment or documentary output.

Public service broadcasting, free of commercial influence, matters and in the BBC we have the finest example anywhere in the world.

None of that appears to cut any ice with the Government. There is naked hostility towards the BBC from the Conservatives.

It’s there in the decision to make it responsible for funding free television licences for the over-75s and decriminalising failure to pay it, seriously affecting the corporation’s fundingg. An early sign of this was the cutting of 450 jobs in its news operation last week.

And it’s obvious from the arrogance of ministers boycotting the flagship Today programme on Radio 4, on the grounds that they might be asked searching questions, which is what journalists are there to do on behalf of their audience.

But it’s also apparent from the ever-louder background noise about the changing media landscape, and questions over the licence fee’s future. This adds up to a form of guerrilla warfare designed to put the BBC on the defensive.

Not that the corporation bears no blame for the difficulties in which it finds itself. The disgraceful disparity in pay between male and female staff was a spectacular own goal that should never have happened in a properly-run organisation.

Nor did it cover itself in glory over Brexit. There is some justification in the charge that its attitude at national level leaned towards the London-centric Remain point of view and failed to reflect the frustrations of Leave-supporting areas, especially in the North.

As an institution, it sometimes appears annoyingly metropolitan in outlook and curiously lacking in awareness that about 86 per cent of Britain’s population lives outside London.

And it can be guilty of leaning too far left. Watch or listen to any of its comedy panel shows – especially those on Radio 4 – and often those paid to appear might be card-carrying members of Jeremy Corbyn’s constituency party, which is especially jarring after the country’s overwhelming rejection of Labour.

But these are all failings that can be fixed, and should not be used as a pretext for destroying the BBC or rendering it so timid that ministers can be confident that the national broadcaster will not dare put them on the spot.

At its finest, which it is a majority of the time, the BBC is a beacon of what the best in broadcasting can be and certainly better than the alternative of a plethora of subscription services.

Instead of a British institution reflecting the life of the nation in its news output and producing entertainment, drama and documentaries of broad appeal, our country would be ill-served by American-owned channels full of dross and juvenilia.

Take Netflix, with its cartoonish, overblown, soap-opera of a flagship series, The Crown, aimed squarely at a US audience. Does that really measure up against the best of recent BBC output like Gentleman Jack, Dracula or Fleabag?

No, not for a second.

But subscription-only and commercial channels is the way many Conservatives, possibly including Boris Johnson, would have our broadcasting landscape.

Yes, young people may not be watching the BBC very often, but that tells only part of the story. Most of them – thankfully – don’t go to hospital very often or claim benefits either, but that’s no reason to dismantle universal services that are to the benefit of all.

And that’s how we need to think of the BBC – as part of the national fabric, a force for good whose virtues far outweigh its faults, and which costs each of us a very small amount of money each week to provide a service which is overall the envy of the world. The BBC doesn’t belong to any Government, and should not be subject to political buffeting. It belongs to all of us, and if a bunch of here-today, gone-tomorrow politicians attempt to muck that about, we should tell them where to go.