I don't often sign petitions...

I don’t often sign petitions. Most people wouldn’t consider me particularly politically active - while I exercise my right to vote, I am far too often happy to read the news, bitch about the state of governance in this country (or the US – it’s really fucked up over there), and then leave it, whilst inwardly contemplating moving to Scotland. To be frank, I already have an excess of friends of Facebook who share pseudo-libertarian/communist/new labour/mildly xenophobic small-c conservative updates, be they attacking/defending the vicious malingerer/second messiah that is David Cameron/Jeremy Corbyn (delete as appropriate). I don’t want to become another person to unfollow.

So it might have surprised some when I shared my first petition this week – and no, it wasn’t about the farce that is Donald Trump, or even the latest cuts to our beloved NHS. Whilst those anger me, they are too blatantly wrong to be worth sharing a petition over. It was about preventing something so perversely cruel, misguided and deliberately deconstructive that I just had to speak out. As part of the government's latest white paper on the corporation, the BBC is being forced to remove 11,000 recipes freely available without advertisements, pop-ups or having to link your Facebook account. I was disgusted. The more I read, the more disgusted I was. Our darling chancellor, George “Cokehead” Osborne had decided, in a fit of rage against Nigella (despite their shared moniker) and her lot, that, and I quote:

“If you’ve got a website that’s got features and cooking recipes – effectively the BBC website becomes the national newspaper as well as the national broadcaster. There are those sorts of issues we need to look at very carefully.”

Heaven forbid people be able to get what they paid for! Those recipes – be they the ones that started Jamie Oliver’s career, dripped out of Mary Berry’s amazing repertoire of variations on cake, or were simply written up by one of the unpaid interns at the Beeb – were all funded by us, the licence fee-paying proles.

The way in which they must stop maintaining the database will also make it unsearchable, meaning that a crawler engine (like Google) won't be able to find the recipes if you searched for them. You’d have to know the exact URL, and they’re not even sure they’ll keep hosting the content at all. So, they’ll be destroying 11,000 recipes from the internet archives – because it’s an issue of national importance? Bullshit.

More than that, I object to the second part of his reasoning – that these features and recipes are “issues” we need to all look at. Ah yes, one of the main issues blocking our road to economic recovery after the mess the labour government left us in, is the excess of brownies in this country – and no, that’s not a euphemism.

Why should we be letting petty government oversight of a publicly funded media group, whose sole role is to provide varied resources for knowledge and entertainment of the public, prevent us from discovering Paul Hollywood’s secret to a good crust on your loaf? The true answer is at the heart of this messy fight with the BBC – cronyism.

“You wouldn’t want the BBC to completely crowd out national newspapers. If you look at the BBC website it is a good product but it is becoming a bit more imperial in its ambitions.”

Osborne says the BBC is becoming too imperial in its ambitions - better cut back on the number of pavlova recipes asap! Why on earth he thinks that cutting back on the BBC's publicly available recipes is going to save the failing institutions that are this country's newspapers, I will never know. It is through their own resistance to adaption that they will fail – they refuse to move into the digital world at the same speed as the rest of us, and it will cost them. Already, broadsheet sales are dropping year on year, as people turn to one of the many free online news providers that don’t have paywalls.

What our dear chancellor fails to spot is that no matter how much funding Rupert Murdoch gives his party to bend it to his will, no one in their right mind would ever think “Victoria Sponge recipe – the Sun is probably a good place to look”. No, they’ll go to one of the myriad other free content-hosting websites, with hundreds of user-reviewed recipes.

Osborne's bizarre disconnect from reality is pervasive in so many of his policies, but it really ticks me off in this one. It's not all bad news - some enterprising fellows have come to the rescue with some clever coding, pulling the text currently available on the BBC Food section and making it into a freely torrentable (which I do not advocate yada yada) package. Why this has to happen for those recipes to be preserved, I do not know – but sadly, the pictures of Ainsley Harriott in all his oily goodness will be lost.

In even better news, the good old British Library and the National Library of Iceland have both confirmed that they too have made a full copy of all the pages that were on the BBC’s Food section. So all is not lost – though how accessible their archives will be I do not know, and I suspect that all the comment functionality of the pages (hurling abuse at bakers who don’t put currants in their scones – I’m looking at you, Mary Berry) might be lost.

Still, I signed the petition. Who knows? We might be able to reverse the misguided policy, we might not. Incidentally, I managed to get 20 of my friends to sign too – so maybe I’ll have to reconsider the impact of those shared statuses on Facebook. Perhaps Donald Trump is the messiah I needed after all.