Leaving aside for the moment the possibility that recently-leaked government documents might have oozed out deliberately to minimise their chances of ever coming to pass, the whole idea of breaking up the BBC along regional lines does not seem to address the government's apparent concerns in the wake of the sexed-up dossier affair - unless those concerns are primarily for revenge.
Of course, we've seen government revenge on broadcasters before, such as Thatcher axing Thames's franchise for "Death on the Rock". And it's certainly difficult to think of any other reason for splitting the BBC into four separate regional broadcasters.
Apart from anything else, it would simply make things four times as difficult and four times less efficient. Four broadcasters for some regulator to regulate instead of one. Four sets of staff all doing the same thing but on a smaller scale. Four major production facilities... sure, I can imagine the government signing for the extra expenditure now.
And you would still need a network to handle necessary national programming. Wouldn't it be more difficult to have four regional broadcasters with a national opt-in network (say like an old-style ITV) than to have one national broadcaster with regional opt-outs? And my goodness, the latter is just what we have now. Why mess with it? Well... no reason at all, unless you're out for revenge.
For some reason since the late Seventies we have allowed ourselves to be convinced that lots of little bits is somehow intrinsically better than one unified organisation - unless that organisation is an enormous multinational corporation. (So "some reason" evidently has something to do with Margaret Thatcher, then.) Lots of railway companies that work no better than their predecessors did before 1948 instead of one, integrated whole. Lots of power, water and telephone companies trying to rip us off.
Is fragmentation really such a good idea? Just think about it and inevitably you'll conclude the answer is "no". But sorting that out seems to be on no party's agenda, despite the fact that "bring back British Rail", for example, is something almost everyone you talk to can agree upon.
Yes, you can run any size of organisation well or badly. You can run a large organisation badly, and oversight is how you keep an eye on that in the case of a publicly-owned body. But you have economies of scale. Think how many fewer unsightly cellphone towers there would be if there was just one company instead of many, for example.
And in the case of the BBC, how can it not be more expensive to have four when you currently have, and need, only one? Only by cutting back, of course, and this is obviously the real idea: to take away the power and influence - divide and rule.
Sorry, that's not a good idea.
The fact that governments and others of all political and economic stripes have complained, at one time or another over the past 80 years, about the BBC is an indicator that it's doing the right job. The BBC needs to remain free - and whole - to tell us what is really going on. It's a vital part of the democratic life of the country, and to continue to carry out that role it needs to retain a certain "critical mass" - big enough, successful enough to set standards. Splitting it up would be a very effective way of silencing a vital voice of truth, albeit a voice that does, sometimes, make mistakes - as do we all.
Revenge remains a bad reason to split up or emasculate what is still the world's best broadcaster - and there don't seem to be any good ones. Quite simply, it ain't broke: why "fix" it?
