Time to pull the plug on the BBC? asks Nigel Hastilow

This vast, taxpayer-subsidised propaganda arm of Jeremy Corbyn’s ultra-left momentum movement really doesn’t deserve to exist in its present form.

The latest abomination follows the news that the BBC employs 96 people on more than £150,000 each – not to mention the many more who get their cash ‘off the books’ to skip the boring necessity of paying tax.

Having now secured an inflation-proof licence fee for the next decade, the State broadcaster is ready to splash the cash – on its own staff.

No fewer than 1,763 employees have been awarded 10 per cent pay rises. The average increase for these people is almost £8,000 a year, meaning they were already on £80,000.

The total cost of this act of obscene generosity is £13.4 million.

Why ‘obscene generosity’? Because the BBC does not have to earn any of its money thanks to the licence fee – a poll tax imposed on anyone who watches the telly – and because average earnings for the whole country rose just 2.1 per cent in the past year.

The Government doesn’t have the money to pay teachers or nurses an extra 10 per cent but apparently the cash is so abundant at the BBC it can afford such munificence for its already well-paid junior executives, producers and journalists.

There is no justification for this lavish distribution of poll tax-payers’ money and surely the day is long past when the State needed its own broadcaster. It might have been appropriate to establish a State monopoly 90 years ago. And there is no doubt the BBC has a long, noble history which we should all be very proud of.

But that has little relevance in an age when there seems to be an almost infinite number of radio and TV stations to choose from let alone an incalculable preponderance of websites.

It is bizarre that in an age of such media diversity, the BBC still maintains its monopoly position, dominating the airwaves and the internet with vast sums of money which make it almost impossible to compete with.

The Beeb still attracts one-third of all television viewers, compared with ITV’s 21 per cent. Channel 4 – another quango which, thankfully, we don’t subsidise – gets 10 per cent while Sky struggles to attract 8.3 per cent of viewers.

This does not mean the BBC produces all the best programmes. On the contrary, it simply means it continues to bask in the benefits of its monopoly position. Advertising may not earn the corporation any money but it does allow one channel or radio station to promote their own products and services ad nauseam.

And then there’s the £201 million a year the BBC spends on its website – redefining, without anybody asking it to do so – what ‘broadcasting’ actually means.

Unfair, State-subsidised competition would not be tolerated in any other industry yet they take it for granted in the self-admiring hall-of-mirrors world of the BBC. The quango has abandoned its original aim to ‘inform, educate and entertain’.

These days it’s clear not just from its news and current affairs content but in everything from sport to coverage of the Glastonbury music festival that its aim is social engineering.

The BBC’s well-paid executives don’t have any connection to the real world. When they send someone out into ‘the provinces’, it’s as if they are reporting from a strange and foreign land.

They despise money-making businesses – a disdain which has now infected Theresa May’s Conservative Party (see below).

They have no understanding that mass immigration might not be an unmitigated benefit. They can’t understand why we voted to leave the EU and will do everything in their power to make sure it doesn’t happen.

They impose their social attitudes on the rest of us whether we like it or not and do not tolerate deviation from their politically-correct norms.

As the BBC’s Andrew Marr – one of the many Scotsmen and women running the outfit – has said: ‘The BBC is not impartial or neutral. It’s a publicly funded, urban organisation with an abnormally large number of young people, ethnic minorities and gay people. It has a liberal bias not so much a party-political bias. It is better expressed as a cultural liberal bias.’

This means we pay for their self-indulgent claptrap and become its victims at the same time. The constant drip-drip of the liberal bias is a form of subliminal manipulation.

The BBC is steadily moulding us all in its preferred liberal image to the ultimate ruination of the country.

I doubt if anyone employed by the BBC these days would say she was proud to be British. They laugh at patriotism and their aim is to force the rest of us to share this contempt for our country.

The BBC is the enemy within. We must pull the plug before its executives achieve total domination – and even bigger pay packets.