Few people need journalism in good times. Unless you are the victim of a specific abuse, you can cope quite happily without caring about accuracy, impartiality and holding power to account. In times of crisis, however, serious journalism is essential. The ideological forces that a crisis unleashes know it and know, too, that they must discredit reasonable scrutiny if they are to succeed.

The range and depth of the attack our troubles have produced on the BBC is extraordinary. Without consultation, the Conservatives are destroying its independence and enforcing a 20% budget cut, the equivalent of closing BBC2 and every BBC radio station.

After the election, George Osborne passed the £650m (and rising) cost of providing free television licences to the over-75s from the Treasury to the BBC. The BBC is meant to be a public service broadcaster, not a branch office of the Treasury. Yet the government is compelling it to cut services to younger viewers, including viewers living on the edge of poverty, so the BBC can fund a morally dubious benefit, which gives free licences to the elderly, however rich they may be. In return, George Osborne said he would unfreeze the licence fee and allow the BBC to raise its charges in line with inflation for the first time since 2010. It was a terrible deal. But at least it was a deal, which offered the BBC certainty about its future.

Osborne’s tiny concession was too much for John Whittingdale, a Thatcherite politician, who has been associated with half the free market and anti-EU pressure groups of the past 30 years. Despite or perhaps because of his record, David Cameron put him in charge of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, a pointless ministry that any government truly committed to saving public money would have abolished years ago. If Whittingdale could not harry the BBC, he’d have nothing to do all day. He therefore told the BBC’s media pundit Steve Hewlett last week that there was no deal. The BBC would have to fund welfare for the elderly without a guarantee of receiving a licence fee settlement in return.

The BBC ought to walk away. It ought to stand up for its independence and appeal to the public over the heads of the politicians. If arguments were settled democratically, it would win. The BBC remains one of the most trusted institutions in Britain. The trust has been earned by providing serious, accurate news for generations, which almost everyone in Britain turns to when there is a major story. This is precisely why it is so politically isolated. In good times, many mainstream politicians would have defended the BBC. But our rolling constitutional and economic crises are, unsurprisingly, producing ideological movements that cannot bear to have their “solutions” questioned or “facts” challenged. Each possesses its own version of the Marxist theory of false consciousness. The people would see that they and they alone represented the light and the truth and the way, if only the media did not brainwash them to vote against their true interests.

The Conservative right has long been the most Marxist of all. Whittingdale has already warned the BBC about its coverage of the EU, which he must know will be far more impartial than anything that will appear in the press. The flimsiness of the evidence used against the BBC is in inverse proportion to the level of outrage it generates. In all seriousness, Conservative MPs say that BBC journalists asking business leaders if they think Britain should stay in the EU is evidence of bias. The absurdity of the accusation does not bother the Tory right. It wants to intimidate the BBC into providing slavish coverage during the referendum campaign, then blame it for brainwashing the masses if it loses.

It neither cares nor understands that small “c” conservatives will be the most shocked by the slashing of BBC services Osborne and Whittingdale are planning. No one who loves the national culture can imagine Britain would be improved by the loss or weakening of Radio 4 and Radio 3. No one who thinks Britain still has ideas that the world may benefit from hearing wants to see the BBC’s foreign reporting curtailed. The difference between large “C” conservatives in Westminster and small “c” conservatives in the country is more than a change of case, it is a difference between two views of what Britain should be and who should decide what it hears and sees.

In normal circumstances, a BBC attacked by a rightwing government and press would be able to rely on “progressives” to defend it. But the SNP government in Edinburgh is more hostile to independent journalism than the Tory government in London. Say what you will about the English right, they have yet to organise Putinesque demonstrations outside broadcasters’ studios after the BBC’s political editor asked hard questions, as the SNP supporters did.

Nor do delegates at the Tory party or even the Ukip conference imitate SNP delegates and compare BBC reporters to Joseph Goebbels. The SNP wants to dominate Scottish culture as it dominates Scottish politics and shouting down the BBC and blaming it for its failures is as essential a tactic for Scottish nationalists as it is for English conservatives. And soon, I suspect, for English leftists too.

I accept that some of the English left will never have the honesty to admit what Jeremy Corbyn is and where he comes from. But as he appoints ever more far leftists to his inner circle, most must now know that he represents a strain of leftwing thought that is as conspiratorial and illiberal as the Daily Mail. The far left no more believes in freedom of speech and freedom of the press than it believes in any other freedom. It will denounce all the legitimate questions the BBC asks as “smears”. Indeed, his supporters have already explained away a Panorama investigation into Corbyn’s past as a rightwing propaganda stunt worthy of Fox.

There are many long-established institutions we could live without. If the Times or the Home Office were to vanish tomorrow, we would survive. For all its glaring faults, the majority of people know that a diminished BBC, like a diminished NHS, would diminish them. The majority of people don’t set policy, however.

In times of crisis, the activists with simple, sweeping solutions take over. Whether they are English nationalists, who want independence from Brussels, Scottish nationalists, who want independence from London, rightwingers, who hate the public sector or leftwingers who hate liberal freedoms, they all want to see the BBC beaten into submission.