You know the Tories are worried about their core vote when they start talking tough on the BBC licence fee.

Rishi Sunak took time out of his Cop28 jaunt to declare that the Corporation must ‘cut its cloth appropriately’. Meanwhile, Culture Secretary Lucy Frazer is against the planned £15 increase in the fee, which comes after a two-year freeze agreed between Auntie and the government. The new hike, set for April, will reflect the 12-month average of inflation, bringing the annual cost to television viewers to £173.30.

Frazer is concerned about any increase being ‘sustainable for families across the country’ and so she reportedly wants to use a different metric for inflation, the consumer price index as of September, which stood at 6.7 per cent. Under this calculation, the TV tax would rise by only £10.65 to a mere £169.65. Disgruntled right-wingers claim there’s no value in having the Conservatives in government, but that’s just not true. We can put a value on it: £3.65.

No doubt this will be frustrating for conservatives who oppose any increase in the licence fee or want to see it abolished altogether. All I can advise is that they elect a critic of the BBC as leader of the Conservative party then campaign hard enough that he wins an election with an 80-seat majority. Then the licence fee’s days will be numbered.

I snark, of course, but I snark for a reason. The licence fee is another example of pundit government, in which ministers have come to see their primary function as commentating on political controversies rather than making law and policy in response to them. This might be understandable if the government was in a minority status in the House of Commons or if the issue in question was so fundamental that acting threatened to split the party.

This government’s stance on the licence fee is a timeline of do-nothingism

But neither of those things are true. There is something fundamental going on but it’s in the Conservative philosophy of government. The party – left and right, Leave and Remain, frontbench and backbench – considers the business of government to consist of briefing journalists, tweeting concerns, complaining on GB News, and doing absolutely nothing to change things. In fairness to them, you can’t get more conservative than that.

This government’s stance on the licence fee is a timeline of do-nothingism. Three days before the 2019 election, Boris Johnson said at a campaign event in the North East: ‘At this stage we are not planning to get rid of all TV licence fees, though I am certainly looking at it.’ Three days after the election, Treasury minister Rishi Sunak (whatever became of him?) announced a review into whether non-payment of the licence fee should continue to be a criminal offence. In February 2020, ministers launched a consultation asking the public ‘whether the government should proceed with the decriminalisation of TV licence evasion by replacing the criminal sanction with an alternative civil enforcement scheme’.

However, in December 2020, the Daily Telegraph reported that, following the departure of licence fee reform advocates Dominic Cummings and Lee Cain, Johnson was shelving decriminalisation. One month later, ministers published their response to the consultation, declaring themselves ‘concerned that a criminal sanction for TV licence evasion is increasingly disproportionate and unfair in a modern public service broadcasting system’, but adding that they had decided to take ‘no final decision’ on decriminalisation ‘at this time’. In a broadcasting white paper published in April last year, the government repeated these concerns and added that it was ‘particularly concerned’ about licence fee prosecutions against ‘vulnerable elderly people’ and ‘the ongoing disparity in the proportion of sanctions against women’, noting that 74 per cent of all people convicted in 2019 were women. Concerned, particularly concerned, but not concerned enough to do anything.

And now that there’s the faintest chance the government might actually do something, it would involve hiking the licence fee by slightly less than the BBC would like. So while the Conservatives are worried about their core vote switching to Reform or staying home come the election, they seem to believe a difference of £3.65 will be enough to woo back voters who regard the licence fee as iniquitous and the organisation it funds institutionally hostile to conservatives and conservatism. Again, this is pundit thinking at work. ‘The Conservatives limited an inflationary rise in the licence fee’ is serviceable enough to chuck near the bottom of a lines-to-take email but it has little merit beyond that.

Those of us who believe in the BBC despite its many flaws have allowed ourselves to become complacent and some of our rationales for the licence fee haven’t kept pace with social, technological or media consumption changes. We haven’t had to make the case for a long time, in part because, for all their huffing and puffing, the Tories have no intention of making any changes beyond the margins. We shouldn’t assume this will always be the case. As with immigration, house-building, cultural confidence and much else, the Tories’ failure to carry thorough its core voters’ wishes on the licence fee is likely to be an important fault line in the soul-searching-cum-civil-war that follows the next election. In the unlikely event that a coherent conservatism emerges from that exercise, the licence fee would be one of many issues abruptly ripped out of the SW1 consensus.