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?

It is an interesting question, and personally I am more inclined to believe that it’s the latter – that the print and broadcast media can and do often sway the beliefs of the general populace.

Take the report delivered by US General David Petraeus in Washington this morning on the effectiveness of the military troop surge implemented by President Bush. In his report General Petraeus commented that the objectives of the surge were largely being fulfilled, though further time would be needed for a better analysis.

I must say, in depth the report did not particularly interest me, as is no doubt the case for many other people. What was of interest was not necessarily facts and figures, but the overall picture that was painted. Was the surge working: yes or no? The answer seemed to be yes, it was.

Yet, as I watched the broadcast media’s coverage on General Petraeus’ report; that of Sky, ITV and the BBC, I was left with the distinct impression that even before it had been delivered, the journalists had set out to find fault with it from the beginning and to claim that it ‘did not represent the situation on the ground’, as one ITV reporter put it, because it did not fit their world view.

As with all reports of this type, there are good sides and bad sides; achieved targets and failures. The same was true of the Petraeus analysis. However, can you have imagined the response if the report had said the surge had been a strategic failure? Would the BBC for example, have been extolling to its license fee paying audience about some of the benefits the surge had achieved in Iraq? Of course not, their whole coverage would have been completely and utterly and entirely negative.

The print media’s analysis of the surge in tomorrow’s papers will merely reflect the latest episode in the ongoing saga of how public opinion on British military operations in the Middle East has slowly shifted over the intervening years – from initially being on the whole supportive or indifferent to now becoming increasingly negative.

When the Iraq war began, there were people who were strongly for and against it. However, one way or another many people did not really care about the conflict in Iraq. Yet, over the months and years, when bombarded by a constant and daily stream of negative anti-war, guilt-tripping media reports, then attitudes changed.

Much of that initial indifference has been turned into anger, annoyance and weariness at the seemingly never ending struggle. But would that weariness have been evident if the media had been positive about the Middle Eastern conflicts? Probably not.

I cannot imagine that the government centre puts much effort into keeping its occupants under lock and key, and the fact that so many have escaped from that centre in recent months is testament to that.

Five Live interviewed a local man who lived close by to the centre over the phone about how he had apprehended one of the escapees in his back garden. The man went on to tell them that this was the third time it had happened recently, and said he would not be surprised if it happened again.

The man then expressed the view that those in the Asylum centre should be sent back to where they came from if their application had been failed, and that in not doing so the Government was costing taxpayers in this country a large sum of money to pay for the Asylum seeker’s constant upkeep in a centre which they continued to trash.

Needless to say, he was cut off very quickly by the BBC after those honest comments.

His response stated that he would not be standing down because he wished to help re-establish the BBC’s code of conduct throughout the whole corporation, and that he had the full confidence of the BBC Board in this undertaking.

Where have we heard something similar to this before? Ah yes, that’s right, it’s exactly the same type of response elicited from Labour Ministers Charles Clarke and John Reid after successive Home Office scandals. They created or had a hand in the scandal and then claimed to be the solution to fix it. How convenient.

Well, it didn’t work out in the end for either Charles Clarke or John Reid, and I hope that it doesn’t for Mark Thompson either. However, if Thompson goes, the BBC Board will only bring in another equally inept individual who won’t do anything but persist with the biased status-quo of a corporation who continue to take the license fee far too much for granted, and with little regard for those who pay it.

Mark Thompson said that the BBC’s latest problem was down to only a small number of individual staff who did not take fairness, integrity and honesty to heart. But, in reality the BBC itself is the problem – not just any one part of it. The whole corporation is an unaccountable and uncontrollable mess, and until it is abolished or privatised the problems will only grow.