This week the culture secretary, James Purnell, resurrected the policy of sharing the BBC licence fee income around other worthy users, telling us this "huge elephant in the room" needs to be looked at rigorously. Please, spare us that hoary old chestnut, writes Maggie Brown
Twin passions: Nicolas Sarkozy appears to be almost as taken with the BBC as with supermodel Carla Bruni. Photograph: Sipa Press/Rex Features
What no one raised at the Oxford media summit is that the top-slicing idea, which may see the cutting down and undermining of the BBC, is quite at odds with international developments.
Just across the channel, French president Nicolas Sarkozy is not only besotted with Carla Bruni. He is also a huge fan of the BBC. So much so that he plans to end the French public service channels' partial dependence on advertising and turn them purely non-commercial.
He wants them, and a revised global French language news channel, to uphold domestic production and export France's cultural values, as effectively as the BBC has done through the World Service. He plans to fund this swiftly by imposing levies.
Here in Britain we need to sit up and let some fresh air into our public service broadcasting debates. To sit in an audience as I did on Thursday and hear top-slicing, or rather contestability for licence fee funding make a serious comeback is deeply depressing.
Top-slicing is not a new idea - it has been on the agenda for at least a decade, promoted strenuously by a group of academic economists. At the heart of the current problem is something that goes beyond Britain's borders and the ancillary but worrying issues of Channel 4's funding gap or whether to finance socially useful websites to reach teenagers.
The biggest problem undermining almost all media is that people do not want to pay for content. They want it free. And as media proliferates, competition for attention intensifies and advertising income dissipates.
Look across the creative industries: EMI is in trouble, iPods and downloads make free file-sharing ubiquitous, and newspapers battling free giveaways to commuters cannot charge for access to their websites.
It was not until Freeview arrived five years ago that digital television could march into every home. Channel 4 tried to charge for downloads of programmes, but was forced to go down the free route, and what has happened to music may cut away at television's advertising stream.
The best and bravest brains in media policy need to think outside of the top-slicing box. Britain once again needs to lead the civilised world into a new media era, to protect the creation of valuable but vulnerable programming and creative artists.
One way would be by an act of political intervention, to introduce a modest but universal levy on everyone as they connect to digital services. This second media tax could then be disbursed to public service causes and to those artists to whom copyright payments are due.
Under this scenario the BBC licence fee would remain earmarked for the BBC. I'm with chairman Sir Michael Lyons on this one. People understand the direct link. But it should not be allowed to grow beyond RPI.
The truth is that the BBC is not a problem. It is not moribund, it is providing independent and impartial news and information, which puts its services at a premium. It is a great cultural institution, revered and trusted more than any other in the UK. So, don't threaten it, leave it alone.
