Ever since BBC2’s Newsnight launched an extended attack on this newspaper’s coverage of immigration issues in 2001, I have followed the way the Corporation has sought to marginalise views held by most of the people who fund it.

Before the 2005 general election it conspired with other parts of the liberal elite to suppressthe issue of immigration.

The Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams was invited on Newsnight to tell the parties not to make immigration an election issue, warning: “It’s racist to whip up the kind of anxiety that can be so easily generated on the subject.”

When Conservative leader Michael Howard refused to be intimidated, the BBC set the dogs on him. Presenters on
Radio 4’s Today programme consistently pushed the view that Mr Howard had “lurched to the Right” by making immigration a key issue, even though polls showed that the majority of the public rated it as such.

BBC journalists adopted the same approach towards Mr Howard’s modest suggestions for tax cuts, using their many
outlets to promote the view that the Tory leader was an extremist. It surely cannot be right that an organisation that
has a vested interest in high taxation (the licence fee yields more than £3billion a year) should manipulate public opinion in this way.

The Today programme has also spearheaded a BBC propaganda campaign against imprisonment, repeatedly suggesting that high reoffending rates show jails are a waste of time while failing even to consider the vital role of prisons in taking offenders off the streets and deterring many others from committing crime.

The BBC has also striven to marginalise the sceptical views held by a majority of voters about the EU. When the Irish
voted down the Lisbon Treaty this year, one BBC correspondent suggested that three million Irish citizens could not block the will of 300 million other Europeans, completely ignoring the fact that the other Europeans had not been allowed a referendum and polls showed a majority would have voted “No” if given the chance.

The Middle East is another issue where the Corporation displays its bias, sending correspondents0 chasing ambulances all over the Palestinian territories but seldom stopping to consider Israel’s legitimate right to security.

Vladimir Bukovsky, a dissident from the former Soviet Union who now lives in Cambridge, has not bought a TV
licence since 2002 after becoming incensed at BBC bias. “It seems the BBC didn’t want to walk into the trap and make me a martyr. I wanted people to see images of me being handcuffed and dragged into court…but instead the BBC retreated quietly,” he says.

John Kely, fromExmouth, has also been watching TV without a licence for six years. A Ukip supporter, he was infuriated by the Corporation’s pro-EU propaganda.

“I want it to prosecute me. By failing to pursue me, the BBC is implicitly accepting my case and others may be
encouraged to take the same course,” he says.

Right-wing writer Charles Moore will join the revolt if the BBC reinstates hideously overpaid Jonathan Ross in January, as it plans to, while former BBC presenter Noel Edmonds is on board after objecting to the Corporation’s threatening adverts about what will happen to those without a licence.

In the current recession, with advertising spending massively down, the licence fee places the BBC at a huge advantage over its commercial competitors. If it simply stuck to its core brief and delivered it objectively, that might not matter. But instead it carries on expanding into new areas of the media, pushing its Left-of-Centre world view into areas it once did not reach.

Its latest plan is to launch enhanced local news services on the internet, potentially endangering the existence of
many small local newspapers.

But the BBC should be warned: ultimately the licence fee depends on popular consent – and public patience with
its antics is wearing thin.