It's a tax but for some reason making it separate from the normal tax system makes it harder for the government to force political views on it... even though the government could easily pass a law saying "the board of directors of the BBC shall go to jail unless all reporting favours the Tories"
I think that's actually a reasonable point of view. The Brits I know have a feeling of ownership towards the BBC that they don't towards other public affordances.
...Apart from the NHS, that is. Which hardly prevented the Tories from sabotaging it for private profit.
Maybe the Conservatives (or their donors) didn't care quite as much about the Beeb? There's not a lot of money in it, and the gestures they did make towards it seemed to keep it from exposing too many of their other "projects", or maybe it was toothless all along. I dunno.
Still, it's an excellent broadcaster - still, in my opinion, the gold-standard in the English-speaking world - even if (perhaps) diminished from what it once was.
