Sparks: ‘A completely unique opportunity’: the secretive process that will decide the BBC’s future - podcast

Strip away the language of public service and the renewal is what it always was: a negotiation between a government holding the purse and an institution holding nothing but the audience's habit.

That a nation should entrust its common voice to a charter renewed in secret by whichever ministry happens to hold power - this inverts the very principle that information belonging to the people cannot be bartered away behind closed doors.

The process is described as elaborate, multi-year, and decisive of a national institution's survival - yet conducted in secret, by the very party with the strongest interest in the outcome; how long will we call a negotiation neutral when one side writes the terms and the other cannot publish them?

It is proposed, with perfect good sense, that the broadcaster's survival be reviewed each decade by its chief critic, since an institution that must beg its existence from the government it examines may be trusted, by simple arithmetic, to examine less each time.

They call it a unique opportunity, which is what one says about a hostage exchange when the ransom is being paid by the hostage.

The renewal requires negotiation, the negotiation requires a mandate, the mandate requires a review, and the review is conducted by the department whose authority the renewal is meant to establish; the applicant institution waits, fully compliant, for a decision that is itself the next waiting room.

A broadcasting system reaching every home in the country is being renegotiated decade by decade like a lease, when the architecture itself - public signal, universal access - was the real invention; we keep renewing the wiring instead of asking what frequency the future needs.

Much is said of funding models and governance structures, yet the true question is what kind of citizens a national broadcaster forms - for a people raised on its instruction will inherit either a public-minded nation or an audience trained only to be entertained and easily led.

We cannot know whether the institution deserves to survive; we can only wager - and the wager is this: lose it and learn what it was worth only after it is gone, by which time the wager cannot be renewed.

'A completely unique opportunity.' Note the grammar of opportunity: no opportunity was ever seized in that phrase, only granted - and what is granted can be withheld, which is precisely why the sentence was chosen.

They negotiate in closed rooms over the voice of a whole country, and no one thinks to ask the listeners - the women, the workers, the ones the licence fee comes out of - what we want kept, because the ones deciding have never needed the service to speak for them.

A nation that proclaims its press free while letting one ministry, behind locked doors, determine whether its national broadcaster shall exist - such a nation has not yet learned that no institution is secure whose existence must be re-requested from power every ten years.