HERE are two ways to spend around £4 billion. This is not from personal experience as I am only fit to advise on how to spend around four pounds.

Option one is to shrug your shoulders over £4.3 billion of furlough money stolen by fraudsters. That’s what Chancellor Rishi Sunak has just done.

Remember that the next time you are harassed by HMRC over some trifling amount of tax you owe. Are some sums just too difficult to go after? It seems like an awful lot of money to fall out of our collective wallet.

Here is the second way to spend about £4 billion. Run the BBC for a year.

According to the House of Commons library, total BBC income in 2019/20 was £4.94 billion, and the licence fee of £159 accounted for around 70 per cent of that.

In financial shorthand, sadly the only sort you’ll get from me, the money the Chancellor is writing off would pay for the BBC for one year. It would also pay for much else besides, but this comparison is pertinent as the government has just announced a two-year freeze in the licence fee, followed by its planned abolition.

Incidentally, the government doesn’t pay for the BBC, we do through the licence fee; governments just put the squeeze on the BBC, sometimes for reasons of ideology or political spite.

The licence fee will be replaced by who knows what. Don’t ask Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries, as she won’t have a clue about that or anything else, being too busy serving up half-truths in an overcooked sauce of ideology and spite.

Certain sections of the Tory party have long disliked the BBC – much in the way they dislike the NHS. If you have a certain cast of mind, our national broadcaster and our national health service are spin-offs from socialism, and as such shouldn’t be tolerated.

The latest attack on the BBC was wrapped up in Operation Red Meat. This was pathetically designed to distract attention from all those headlines about Boris Johnson not understanding the pandemic rules he made himself, and the endless noisy cavalcade of stories about parties and boozing in Downing Street.

A decision as big as abolishing the BBC as we know it should not be taken to divert attention from Johnson’s woes. And it should not be taken to please media barons who dislike having to compete with the BBC.

The BBC isn’t perfect; but what is? Better that we have the BBC with all its contradictions and awkward dints than being left with a diminished, neutered, sold-off, half-arsed, semi-subscription service. And all because the current crop of morally inadequate Tories dislike like the BBC.

And here’s another thing.

This argument is nearly always confined to the news. While the news is important, the BBC is much more than that. And even if you stick to news, the BBC is far from a left-wing group-thinking cabal, as Nadine Dorries pretends to believe.

One Tory argument for all this is that the “BBC got Brexit wrong”. This is ridiculous as the vote was a close call. But the BBC did get something badly wrong over Brexit. It gave far too much airtime to bloody Nigel Farage. His rants were aired so often that his extreme views were normalised.

Stepping quickly away from Farage, always a good idea, I’d pay the licence fee for the radio alone, with Radio Four and Radio Three easily being worth it (more so than the TV stations at times). And Radio 6 Music. And the website. And BBC Sounds. And the iPlayer (when our Virgin wi-fi is working).

I hope the BBC fights its corner, as doing what the government asks has so far got it nowhere.