Presumably, in the case of News Corporation, we can read Vince’s ‘deeply unhelpful’ as ‘not fully part of my favoured liberal-left media consensus’. How dare individuals own large numbers of newspapers and influence the British political scene. Disgraceful. Anyway, our dear Business Secretary went on to add:

We have learned from the past that having media moguls dominating the British media is deeply unhelpful, not simply in terms of plurality but because of the wider impact on the political world.

What I want to see is a very clear set of unambiguous rules… about market shares, that we don’t have dominant players and a presumption against cross-ownership between press and television.

It isn’t simply an issue of Rupert Murdoch, there are other big media companies who could have the same influence in future and we’ve got to stop that happening.

This, you may remember, is the same man who ‘declared war’ on Rupert Murdoch and News International before the phone hacking scandal re-broke (remember it was old news until the Guardian and BBC dug it out again for their own ends), and was consequently stripped of his status over media policy on the BSkyB bid. This is not about phone hacking and never was – it is about ensuring the stranglehold grip of the liberal-left over the media establishment.

Of course, a fantastic way of ensuring greater plurality of media in Britain, which Saint Vince says he so desires, is the abolition or significant downsizing of our beloved national broadcaster. The BBC is a huge, sprawling organisation, owned by the state and funded by the television licence fee. What better way of opening up the media playing field than taking apart the BBC monopoly? But will Vince be seeking to break up their dominance over the broadcast and online media? Not likely.

That is like saying, the inflation has been caused by the inflation – or indeed, that old classic, the bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy. It tells us absolutely nothing about why the prices of alcohol, transport or energy actually rose!

I’m so glad that licence fee payers fork out £3.5bn a year to fund such quality reporting by our beloved national broadcaster.

The BBC are reporting that porn protesters have hit Westminster to complain about new laws that will ban the possession of extreme images showing ‘a threat to life or serious injury to a person’s genitals’. Wonderful stuff as you can imagine.

Now, the protest consisted of a mere twenty people and it would seem that as a consequence the BBC felt the issue of violent pornography and yesterday’s march warranted an entire news article on their website with an accompanying video.

However, compare this with the level of coverage two other past protests held outside the Houses of Parliament in Westminster gained that concerned calls for the Government to honour its manifesto commitment to give a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty.

The first was back in October of 2007 and the second in February of this year, both of which I was in attendance. Now, the Referendum rallies were not mass protests on the scale of the million strong Countryside Alliance or Stop The Iraq War coalition marches – but they were still pretty sizeable with a couple of thousand people in total, and very many more than the twenty individuals at yesterday’s ‘porn protest’. Yet did the BBC (or any other news agency for that matter) cover the Referendum protests? The answer is of course, no – they did not. Not once.

Calling for a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty did not just concern a few sick and depraved individuals wanting to photograph one another performing bizarre sexual acts, but the freedom, liberties and democratic rights of an entire nation of millions of people.

Yet, it is apparent that the BBC and most other news corporations hold the discussion of the laws on violent pornography more important than whether we wish to be a sovereign nation. Even the professional photographer and ringleader of the porn protesters, Ben Westwood (son of fashion designer Vivienne Westwood) acknowledged that:

There are more important issues to be debated than this.

In that Mr Westwood is entirely correct, but it would seem that large swathes of the media would disagree. Sadly, some things it would seem never change.

To put things into perspective, the Governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King recently admitted that:

Not since the beginning of the first world war has our banking system been so close to collapse.

Compare such an alarming statement on the state of our banking system and economy with the BBC’s Political Editor, Nick Robinson and his account of George Osborne’s trip to Corfu. Someone’s journalistic priorities in the wrong place, wouldn’t you say?

If the BBC’s own domestic coverage is anything to go by, the new Middle East station will not be impartial, independent or authoritative. Instead it will be instilled with the BBC’s usual anti-Israeli, anti-Western sentiments.

Only the BBC and those that support its liberal-left, politically correct worldview desperately continue to claim that the corporation is without bias. Surely if the BBC were so impartial they would have had no reason to spent £200,000 of license fee money last year in an attempt to suppress an internal report on bias against Israel?

At the time as the BBC attempted to deny public access to the report through the courts, Labour MP Louise Ellman commented:

There has been a bias and lack of context with the BBC reporting of Israel. Problems are related to citing individual acts of Israeli aggression by failing to put them into context or explaining the reasons. It makes them look like unprovoked acts, when in fact they were reaction to a terrorist act. I would certainly like to see what’s in the report.

Much like the BBC’s coverage of the European Union, this is an example of what Lord Pearson of Rannoch recently referred to as ‘bias by omission’. Does the Middle East really need yet another news network when it already has so many other commercial broadcasters? Should the Foreign Office really be funding this undertaking? Of course not, but this Middle Eastern adventure will still go ahead nonetheless.

As with all opinion polls, exactly which questions are asked and how they are presented (in this case by telephone) is of paramount importance in ascertaining whether a survey is of any justifiable significance.

Unfortunately however, it would appear that the data for this latest poll on the Monarchy commissioned for the BBC seems to still be held privately with no indication of whether it will become publicly available in the future.

In any case, at face value I think we can safely presume that this survey confirms what most people already knew; that the Monarchy is still popular in Britain among the general public – though certainly not among our governing elites, grandees and the liberal media.

The poll comes, not by accident, at a time when Her Majesty recently made history by surpassing Queen Victoria as the longest serving British Monarch, and also coincides with the annual release of the Royal accounts officially detailing precisely how much the Monarchy has cost the taxpayer.

The BBC’s employees, and in stark contrast to the vast majority of British people, loath the Crown and despise the Queen for her overwhelming popularity while quietly seeking to undermine her public image at ever opportunity. Peter Hitchens recently wrote that in the event of Queen Elizabeth’s death:

I expect that the enemies of Britain – mostly British themselves, expensively nurtured in our finest schools and universities and generously employed by our great institutions – will take the opportunity for a new and spiteful campaign against the throne. We now know for certain that the BBC will be among them.

As Peter rightly suspects, the British Broadcasting Corporation and its employees are not the only people or organisations keenly awaiting Her Majesty’s demise. There are also a number of reasonably prominent self-styled British republicans who continue to publicly campaign (though with little obvious success) against the Monarchy. However, their arguments seem to receive a disproportion degree of coverage (mainly from the BBC as it would rather strangely happen) compared to how many people agree with them.

One of these arguments by ‘republicans’ usually put forward at this time of year to coincide with the annual report on the cost of the Crown is that it is an expensive institution that the taxpayer should not be forced to fund.

Now, there are approximately 31.6 million taxpayers in Britain. The Monarchy, according to official statistics cost the taxpayer £37.4m during 2007. Therefore, £37.4m divided by 31.6m taxpayers equals an average of £1.18 per person. This contrasts with a report on Channel Four that I recall seeing the other day stating that the Monarchy costs each taxpayer in this country 63p a year (this figure it would appear is calculated by dividing the cost of the Monarchy by the entire population of Britain which is roughly 60.5m.)

The sum of £1.18 in itself does not sound a particularly sizeable amount of money at all. Neither does £37.4m in a year when you consider that Government expenditure for 2007 totalled over £600bn. What’s more, this care and attention shown for the taxpayer by republicans is incredibly unusual considering most of them are leftists and socialists and generally in favour of ever higher levels of taxation and public spending. In short, it is an argument against the Monarchy of sorts – but it is an extremely poor one.

By way of illustration, the figure of £1.18 a year as an average cost is comparable to the National Health Employment Bureaucracy (also more commonly know as the NHS) whose expense to each taxpayer on average is £3291.14 per year, the Police ‘Service’ for £1044.30, our contingent of six hundred and forty six MPs at approximately £4.74 (this does not including the running costs of Parliament just the expenses and salaries of MPs,) and according to research by the United Kingdom Independence party, our membership of the European Union costs each taxpayer £1632 per annum, this being inclusive of our seventy eight largely useless MEPs from all parties whose existence alone has been calculated at 22p for the past year. All these figures were derived from statistics located on page fifteen of the Treasury’s Complete 2007 Budget Report and a small article on MSN UK Money.

If ‘republicans’ were really so angered by the cost of our supposedly undemocratic Monarchy to the general public then surely they must be equally angered by the even more astronomical cost of the undemocratic European Union and its unelected EU Commission on the British taxpayer? Unsurprisingly, bar literally one or two names on the list of supporters for Republic (a ‘republican’ pressure group) all are exactly the types in favour of the EU in its current form (though there may be an extra ulterior reason behind this – but more on that in a minute.)

Now, I personally think that the Monarchy seems good value for money considering its fundamental importance to both our constitution and traditions in this country. However, on the other hand I think it’s fair to say I believe that the Police ‘Service’ in its current state and the National Health Service are incredibly bad value for money, as is our enforced contribution to the European Union. Yet, has anyone ever given me or anyone else in this country a real choice on whether I should fund them?

Moving on though, another of the usual poor arguments wheeled out against the Monarchy is that it is ‘outmoded’ or ‘outdated’ in our supposedly modern and highly civilised, society. As with many ‘progressive’ arguments (if you can define them as real arguments) for change, they stem from a wrong-headed belief that anything new is automatically an improvement on what has gone before. This is, of course, rubbish as has been proven time and again.

Yet, it stands to reason that if the Monarchy were to be abolished, as some very few would currently wish, then another system would have to replace it and fill the constitutional void left behind. The problem is that many of these same ‘republicans’ as mentioned earlier do not know with what they would replace the Monarchy. They know what they do not what, but not what they do want – a case of ‘anything but the Queen’. Most, as their name suggests, would want a republic; but what kind of republic? One with an elected President or an appointed one? Of course we actually have an appointed one of those at the moment already. He’s called Barossa, though he goes under the guise of being Head of the EU Commission rather than a President – but there really is very little difference in the practicalities of either position.

And, as it happens, José Manuel Barossa and his Commission are also particularly fond of attacking our British Monarch too through their never-ending torrents of EU legislation. For example this has included, among many others, the removal of the Crown Mark on our Pint glasses to be replaced with a bland EU ‘CE’ symbol and accompanying manufacture date. This is in essence one unelected head of state attempting to erase all trace of its predecessor – breaking the link between Monarch and people.

I suspect that this really why ‘republicans’ in Britain represent no more than a token effort to abolish the Monarchy and the Queen that they so hate. They know that the Monarchy is slowly and quietly being abolished by stealth as we speak, so why lift a finger when your work will be done for you?

She takes her over-inflated celebrity chasing ego with her to Channel Five where I cannot imagine her new colleagues will be particularly impressed with her ludicrously over the top salary for simply reading an auto-cue.

Since hardly anyone bothers to watch Channel Five news, few people will have to suffer seeing much of her for the foreseeable future. Now, all the BBC need do is let go a few more of their highly overpaid celeb stars such as Dermot Murnaghan, Terry Wogan and Jonathan Ross.

However, his comments on immigration were of particular interest because, for the most part, Mr Cameron has avoided focusing on this topic in his quest to re-brand the Conservative party by approaching issues with which it is not normally associated.

Immigration to Britain is far too high as David Cameron pointed out in the interview, and has reached completely unsustainable levels during Labour’s ten year tenure, causing both widespread social friction, housing problems, and increased pressure on public services.

Opinion polls reveal that immigration is consistently among the top three most important issues that concern voters, and also show that Mr Cameron’s views reflect the majority of British opinion. Therefore it’s welcome news that Mr Cameron is at least tentatively discussing the issue, even if he is also discussing possible ‘green taxes’ too.

I think it’s also useful to contrast Mr Cameron’s Newsnight comments with an announcement on Sunday by Nick Clegg, the Lib Dem Home Affairs spokesman who said the problems of immigration and the ‘twilight world of illegality’ needed to be tackled by allowing the legalisation of illegal immigrants that ‘proved’ themselves.