SO Blair's government has bailed out the failing BBC and guaranteed the TV licence until 2016. This is a tax and if you possess a TV set you are paying it. It is a coercive tax accompanied by threatening messages on screen to tell you that you will be punished if you don't pay.

Now forget the telly for a minute and just imagine a national daily newspaper that was relentlessly left wing and supported all the trendy, radical chic causes. Thoroughly anti-American, anti-globalisation, anti-hunting, in thrall to the hysteria about global warming and supportive of fanciful remedies to abolish poverty from the face of the earth. Happily for those who like this particular perversion of reality, there is such a paper. It's called The Guardian - but you don't have to buy it.

Now imagine that in this paper there were here and there good arts reports and some decent travel writing. But these sparse goodies were overwhelmed by a lot of soft porn and turgid items devoted to the celeb culture; and a flighty obsession with pop music and trashy series and cartoons put out for children - or kids as they say. But no coverage of Premiership football or Test cricket. Suppose this paper was proud of its cultural and comedy items but so penetrated by ideology that, even in a review of a children's book about a caterpillar, it managed to get in a dig at George W Bush?

Perhaps you're not the sort of person for whom this mixture of banality and whimsy interspersed with political bias has any appeal? You might possibly even detest the very idea of it. But suppose there were such a paper and you were forced to pay a subsidy to keep it afloat. And if you refused to pay this subsidy you could be brought before the courts and fined. Suppose also that that this newspaper had the full backing of the government, which encouraged and rewarded your neighbours for spying on you and revealing your name to the authorities if they happened to see you perusing it.

You would protest that you were living in a totalitarian state. You would be right. In fact you are right, for there is such a national daily paper: it's an electronic one and it's called the BBC.

The failing BBC is one of the very few remaining nationalised industries, along with the failing Post Office. Its news and documentary programmes are so biased as to resemble old-fashioned Soviet propaganda. The recent drama Faith about the 1984-85 miners' strike - in fact an uprising against the government embarked upon without a ballot of miners - might have been written by the demagogue Arthur Scargill himself. All the so-called satirical comedy shows are a relentless parade of left wing dogma. I complained about this and the reply I received was to say that comedy is supposed to be anti-establishment. I agree. But why doesn't the BBC understand and admit that nowadays the trendy Left is the establishment?

The mandate of the BBC was originally to inform, educate and entertain. For information, see propaganda. For education, read the sneers of left wing historians who have only contempt for our national history. For entertainment, well you'd be better off playing knockout whist with the children. Meanwhile, pay the licence fee - or else.

* Peter Mullen is Rector of St Michael's, Cornhill, in the City of London, and Chaplain to the Stock Exchange.