HERE is a curious paradox about British conservatives. Challenge them to defend grand British institutions, from the Royal Family to the House of Lords or the lack of a written constitution, and they argue passionately about the dangers of tampering and meddling with things that evolved organically over time. They will talk about the British genius of leaving well alone. Perhaps you would not start from here, they may concede, and parts of our system may look a bit odd to outsiders, even extravagantly so. But these fragile accretions work rather well, they say, and would not survive piecemeal attempts to reform and tweak them. If it ain't broke, in other words, don't fix it.

And yet, get the same British conservatives onto the subject of the BBC, and they turn into wild-eyed Jacobins, yearning to punish and slash and burn and stick the heads of senior BBC staff on spikes. The newspapers are filled today with articles foaming about how much money various BBC executives are paid, and quoting from a report by the BBC Trust (the governing body of the corporation), saying that some of its programming is not as good as it should be.

Here is the Daily Telegraph:

"For viewers already feeling short-changed for their £145.50 annual licence fee, the trust delivers an even more damning observation on the corporation's overall strategy. It says the BBC, as a publicly funded broadcaster, has a duty to "increase the distinctiveness and quality" of all its output. In other words, it has dumbed down in pursuit of audience share. Awash with cash, it has for years been in the enviable position of being able to throw money at programmes and channels catering for every conceivable audience. Such a scatter-gun approach will inevitably turn up some gems – there are plenty of top-notch programmes on the schedules – but will also produce far too much output that has neither distinction nor quality. The trust points out that it has had to work with BBC executives over the past year "to define what distinctiveness really means". We have a better idea. The BBC's income should be subject to the same rigorous cost-cutting as the rest of the public services. Why should it be immune? Taking 25 per cent out of the BBC's budget would concentrate the minds of its generously rewarded executives and programme makers wonderfully. They would have to decide what the BBC's core activities should be. The current funding regime would be indefensible even without the crisis in public finances. It has helped to create a gold-plated behemoth that sucks the life out of local radio, commercial television, local newspapers and newspaper websites, untrammelled by any effective parliamentary oversight."

The former editor of that paper, Charles Moore, was on the BBC this morning, as it happens, on Radio 4's Today programme, sounding fairly cross about the BBC's continued refusal to publish the individual salaries of the BBC's highest paid presenters and staff. The Daily Mail, another conservative paper, offered a precis of the BBC Trust report this morning under the headline: "The BBC gravy train keeps on rolling." The article highlights the Trust's main criticisms, and leaves out everything positive, summing up the current output of the corporation as "Daytime Dullness" and the "Evening Yawn".

And here is the thing. The BBC is sometimes over-staffed on some big stories. Many of its programmes are not brilliant (though I am not a great judge, because I do not like television very much). For foreign viewers and listeners, BBC World has a lot of repeats, and the quality of World Service Radio is variable: there are some great programmes like From Our Own Correspondent, there are some matey, dumbed-down horrors like World Have Your Say. Some of the multi-million pound a year salaries paid to star presenters sound very high.

Charles Moore is right that it would not kill the BBC to publish stars' salaries: though it is not surely an issue to die in a ditch over.

Yes, it is a clique-ish institution, and snobbish towards outsiders. I have bumped into BBC teams on four continents, at airports or election rallies or hotel lobbies late at night after some long story, and have routinely marvelled at their incestuous, clannish manner. In terms of insiderishness, I think only a travelling hockey team from a very grand girls' boarding school comes close.

But the outrage is out of proportion to the sins of the BBC. Take a step back, and the BBC is not broken. I would argue it is the best broadcaster in the world: and thus on the rather short list of British things that are the best in the world. I do not like everything on the Today programme, but it is better than any other radio news show I have heard. Newsnight on BBC2 is also mostly jolly good. Because I have small children, I have become conscious of what is pumped out for their consumption, and most of it is not good: endless imported cartoons, in most places. There are some good children's shows from Australian or American public broadcasters, but nobody can match the BBC for non-commercial, interesting shows that children like to watch.

Go to any breaking news event, from riots in Iran to a combat zone in Afghanistan, and you will find the BBC, trying to get the story right. There is a cultural overlap with the British military: the same calm no-nonsense professionalism, just getting on with the job. They take accuracy and fairness seriously. They have some rogue presenters who over-egg some of their stuff, but their sins are marginal compared to the outright lies I have watched commercial reporters peddle. I remember watching a TV reporter intoning to a camera that he was on the front lines in Afghanistan when he was actually in the gardens of the house where the press pack was staying, about 10 miles from the front lines, and he was not from the BBC. I have worked alongside reporters who would invent interviews that had never happened, or plagiarise quotes from articles written months earlier: they were not from the BBC.

In America, NPR can be very good at what it does, but I remember despairing of its ponderous, haughtily above-the-news style when listening in Washington during the Iraq war. American network television has more or less given up on covering the outside world, and CNN has lost its way. French television is amazingly parochial: the evening news is all about floods in the Var and small children missing in the Loire, plus a round up of what French politicians have been up to. Spanish television is not good, Italian is dreadful, Belgian television is utterly navel-gazing, you could go on forever.

Conservatives in Britain get very cross about the fact that the BBC is funded by a "compulsory tax", by which they mean the licence fee, payable by anyone in Britain who has a television, hence the Telegraph's crack about "viewers already feeling short-changed for their £145.50 annual licence fee." But frankly, £145.50 a year is not very much money for most British families. And it is not compulsory: the last time I lived in Britain I did not have a television, so did not have a TV licence, and I could still listen to BBC radio for free.

I know conservatives accuse the BBC of being hopelessly biased towards the left, pro-EU and so on. It is probably true that there are more Guardian readers than natural Daily Mail readers on the staff of the BBC. Funnily enough, the Daily Telegraph used to defend the House of Lords in the days when it was still crammed with hereditary peers, giving it a permanent Conservative majority. Yes, it is odd for parliamentarians to inherit their seats, I recall Telegraph people saying, but that is the point of British pragmatism. The House of Lords works, they would say: tamper with the gossamer webs of tradition at your peril.

The BBC is an odd institution. Its resources do make it an unfair competitor for commercial news organisations. But it does not cost very much, in the grand scheme of things. And if it vanished, nothing else like it would take its place. And the world and Britain would be a poorer place for it.