The BBC is a public good. It’s a mark of the existential danger the corporation is now in that this statement has become controversial; that the home of David Attenborough and Panorama, of Blue Peter and In the Night Garden and groundbreaking drama and comedy, from Cathy Come Home to Fleabag, is now so friendless.

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Barely anyone has a good word to say for the poor old Beeb, consumed as it is by accusations of supposed political bias against every political faction going; which is why whoever succeeds the outgoing director general, Tony Hall, has their work cut out. But it’s a public good all the same, and one we will regret letting slip through our fingers.

I am not here to argue that the BBC gets nothing wrong. Like every organisation on the planet, it employs humans who make mistakes, some serious. It’s been slow to respond to everything from equal pay claims to the risks of its journalists using social media to express personal opinions; it has rushed to break stories that haven’t been thoroughly fact-checked. But every pointless row over whether Newsnight maliciously made Jeremy Corbyn’s hat look more Russian, every accidental cockup blown up into a scandal by social media partisans, must be almost as welcome in Downing Street as among the BBC’s commercial rivals. The more the spotlight falls on the programmes that divide viewers, not the ones everyone loves, the better; the more discredited the BBC, the more easily it can be thrown to the vultures.

It’s not news that some Conservatives have longed to break up the BBC for decades; but what’s often missed is that this is as much about business as pleasure. All governments gripe about news coverage, but what energises Tories in particular is a profound ideological belief in the merits of private over public and a conviction that the BBC is abusing its monopoly to hold the private sector back.

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The siren voices here aren’t ministers moaning that Andrew Neil was mean to them, but lobbyists for Apple and Amazon, Sky and Netflix, who would love to knock a powerful competitor out of the market. Imagine how much easier their life would become if the BBC could somehow be confined to the worthy stuff that doesn’t make money, like local radio or educational children’s programming, or if even part of the licence fee were split between rival providers.

The likes of Netflix and Amazon Prime have established themselves in a crowded market by throwing vast amounts of cash at content, and so far viewers have been the winners from a golden era of telly. There is so much stuff out there to binge-watch it’s impossible to keep up with everything, and that opens the door to an insidious argument that streaming services could now take care of providing the fun stuff while a skeletal BBC does earnest good works in the background. Expect to hear more Tories arguing, as the 2022 licence fee review grows nearer, that it’s unfair to make viewers pay a compulsory fee for content they might not even watch, plus voluntary subscriptions for channels they might prefer. Why not just let viewers decide what they want to pay for? Don’t be surprised to see this free-market argument couched as a consumer-friendly bid to cut household bills.

Yet it’s the safety net of public funding that lets the BBC take risks creatively – bringing on new screenwriters, say, or showcasing new music – and commercially, cross-subsidising current affairs programmes that everyone thinks are important but relatively few actually watch compared with, say, Strictly Come Dancing. Let its commercial rivals pick away at the popular bits and the BBC would emerge a horribly shrivelled thing, losing the authority and reach a national public service broadcaster should enjoy.

There’s no guarantee, meanwhile, that streaming services will keep churning out the high-quality drama they’re currently offering, in effect as loss leaders. The Amazon model was always to spend big and make losses upfront in order to achieve dominance. By the time its customers realised how many bookstores had gone out of business, not to mention what was happening to workers inside Amazon’s warehouses, it was too late to wonder if that was wise.

But proponents of breaking up the BBC would rather not dwell on this. They’d prefer to soften the BBC up for attack by eroding public affection for it – and whipping up anger over political bias does that job, while simultaneously providing cover for avoiding tough interviews. (Downing Street’s refusal to put ministers on the Today programme represents not just the knowledge that they can reach voters directly through Facebook Live instead, but that their supporters won’t see this as ducking scrutiny; many consider the BBC biased against Brexit, and thrilled to see it boycotted).

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The BBC’s job over the next two years is to show it still offers brilliance and distinctiveness in return for the licence fee. Where it makes mistakes, it isn’t above criticism. But BBC bashers in turn should be aware of whose bandwagon they’re unwittingly joining by making the perfect the enemy of the good. Don’t let it become just another institution that we only miss when it’s gone.

• Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist