The licence fee is not perfect, but it’s better than anything else that anybody else has proposed, because it’s absolutely vital that the BBC remains independent of government of all kinds, because one of its key roles is to hold politicians and Government to account, and it cannot be fettered by the idea that, because the BBC is robust in uncovering things that are untoward, they might get their licence fee slashed. In recent times, there have been lots of risks of that happening.

I think that it’s underplayed just how important the BBC is as an institution in our public life. Professor Brian Cox, who has done more for popular understanding of science than perhaps anybody else in recent memory, described the BBC as a public institution first, and a media company second, and I completely agree with that. We have to understand that those three letters—BBC—are probably the best recognised logo anywhere in the world, and we should dismantle it at our risk. They may not be as effective at selling the Wales brand as getting into the semi-finals of a major sporting competition, but there’s no doubt that the way in which the BBC both projects Wales to the wider world and projects back onto our own understanding of our own Welshness is seriously important.

I take issue with Bethan Jenkins on one issue, which is that we cannot explain the Brexit vote based on the fact that all the newspapers were published in London, because obviously London, in the main, voted to remain. I think it’s much more complicated than that, but it’s certainly the case that, because the majority of newspapers—and there’s a declining readership of newspapers—are produced in London, the coverage of Wales is miniscule and extremely impoverished. So, that is why it is doubly important that we have a very strong broadcasting element in Wales in order to enable people to understand the world that we live in and the politics that we operate in.

We have to recall that, in the days before the Broadcasting Act 1990, the ITV companies, too, were obliged to have regional content, and that helped reinforce the vigour and rigour with which the BBC undertook its obligations. Since the disappearance of the regional ITV companies under Mrs Thatcher’s slashing, really, we’ve got an entirely impoverished ITV regionally, and it has enabled this withering on the vine of the BBC radio and television coverage. It’s almost surprising that they manage to do as much as they do with the little that they have, but it’s absolutely vital to the public discourse about what it is that makes up our public realm that we do have radio and television, because with 25 per cent of our population functionally illiterate, that is the way the majority of people receive their information and their understanding of the world. And it is extremely dangerous when we go out campaigning and we listen to people telling us, ‘We’re not voting Labour any longer because of the cuts you’ve made to the disabled’. It takes your breath away, but that is the level of misunderstanding about what is going on in the world, and who is making decisions on people’s behalf, that it got us to where we were on the referendum.

There was an excellent website provided by the BBC to try and deconstruct the claims and counterclaims of the ‘leave’ and ‘remain’ teams, but I very much doubt whether most people who were struggling to understand what this complicated referendum was about ever got there, and it would have been so much better if we had addressed some of the counterintuitive inspirations for why people were voting ‘leave’, which were mainly from people who lived in areas where there were very few immigrants, and yet people were inspired to vote ‘leave’ on the grounds that it was going to put a stop to immigration. There would have been plenty of programmes that could have explored that contradiction, and might have enabled people to have a better understanding of what was at stake.

But I think we have to go back to the fact that the Reithian role for the BBC to inform, educate and entertain has to be kept as one, and we cannot have the BBC fragmented into only doing serious programmes and not doing popular ones. So, I think it’s absolutely vital that this new board is, in the main, done by a public appointments process. I understand that the Government will need to appoint the chair, but the rest of the board, including the representative for Wales, need to be appointed by the public appointments process.