WHAT do the Tories really have against the BBC? You don’t see many people marching in the streets demanding that cuts to be made at the BBC. So on whose behalf is the government acting here and what is it that it wants?

The Tories’ problem with the BBC is purely ideological. According to the neoliberal free-market fundamentalism to which they subscribe, only the private sector, unregulated markets and cut-throat competition can provide progress. The fact that the BBC has become so successful and globally admired through public funding goes against their world view.

If there’s money to be plundered from the public sector, then in Tory eyes it should be their public school chums and business allies who benefit, not the undeserving poor or lazy working classes. Who would benefit most from a dismantled BBC? Their competitors and Tory mouthpieces: the Murdoch, Rothermere and Barclay media empires.

The right is constantly bashing the BBC for its supposedly left-wing bias, though you’d think they’d love the Beeb. Look at the way BBC News worships the royal family, its unquestioning coverage of Western foreign policy and businesses, it’s promotion of fear, and almost complete disregard for the developing world — especially Africa — unless it’s seriously bad news.

If you only took the world view presented by BBC News, you’d probably think monarchy was natural, that welfare spending caused a global financial crisis, that all Muslims are scary, and life beyond the West was nasty, brutal, short and in need of rescue. Well, none of this sounds that dissimilar to what the rest of the mainstream right-wing media peddles.

Of course there are quite a few structural, cultural, economic and political reasons for this misrepresentation of the world, and the BBC is by no means alone in this nor totally at fault.

Take Israel for example. The BBC clearly struggled last summer when the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) launched Operation Protective Edge and butchered over a thousand Palestinians. The actions of the IDF horrified pretty much all sides of British society, so it was hard to find a coherent argument in defence of its actions.

As always, the BBC was accused of presenting a bias. In response someone at the BBC decided to feature a ticker tape at the bottom of the screen during the news, depicting the number of Palestinian and Israeli deaths on opposing sides of a line, like it was some sort of football match rather than a bloody massive human tragedy.

The death toll tally was absurd as the Palestinian toll ran well above a thousand (over a third of these were civilians), completely dwarfing those on the Israeli side (who were almost all professional soldiers).

The reason for this is simple. Israel has a fully functioning, globally recognised government with all the diplomats, ambassadors, businesses interests, lobbyists and well-funded public relations (propaganda) apparatus in London which the Palestinians simply do not, and that can cause the BBC a lot of trouble.

It’s a sad reality of the mainstream media that it is beholden to owners, revenue from advertisers, flak from competitors, censorship by the intelligence services and an adherence to dominant social paradigms.

Although the BBC is not beholden to advertisers, it has to keep audience numbers high in order to justify its licence fee.

This explains why the BBC plays it relatively safe and tends to style its news in a similar way to its competitors.

The BBC also has plenty of Tory supporters on its staff. Michael Gove, before he became the worst Education Secretary in history and now the man charged with destroying human rights, worked on BBC radio. Previous political editor Nick Robinson was intricately involved with the Young Conservatives during Thatcher’s reign of terror. Andrew Neil, host of BBC flagship shows Daily Politics and This Week, is also chairman of the company that owns the right-wing magazine The Spectator and a former Tory Party researcher to boot. The list could go on.

Take a look at its upper echelons. BBC Trust chair Ronda Fairhead is also a director of HSBC, beloved bank of billionaire tax avoiders the world over. Its vice-chairman, Roger Carr is also the chairman of BAE Systems, which makes its money from all manner of killing machines which it sells to the militaries of Saudi Arabia, Israel, Afghanistan, Egypt, Zimbabwe and other such valiant defenders of peace and freedom.

John Whittingdale, the Culture, Media and Sport Secretary tasked with the government’s licence fee review review, has been an outspoken critic of the BBC and once described the fee as worse than the poll tax, which is odd since he adored the person responsible for that. During the phone-hacking scandal, the media also questioned his links to News International — though stopped short of any serious allegations.

The review will question the BBC’s purpose, scale, funding, governance and political impartiality, as well as examine whether it would benefit from a “clearly defined set of values.” By trying to present an objective middle ground, the BBC should, if it does its job properly, anger all political persuasions.

The problem is that objectivity doesn’t really exist in journalism. If it did, imagine the way terrorists attacks against (or carried out by) the West would be portrayed. Deciding where the middle ground lies is a difficult task. The fact that the Tory government may decide this is very worrying, especially when taken into account with their other attacks on our civil liberties.

So far, the Tories have planned to scrap the Human Rights Act and replace it with a with a British Bill of Rights and Responsibilities (which sound as if only Britons are permitted