One of the most grating and nauseating verbal constructions of our times – ‘Our NHS’ – has with grim inevitability began to evolve and expand. It was only a matter of time before someone or some organisation deemed it necessary to affix that possessive determiner to another state-run organisation, and you hardly need to guess which one.

‘A GB News presenter has said the BBC should hand “several million pounds” of licence-fee payers money to Donald Trump. We must defend our BBC from those who want to destroy it.’ So ran a post on Friday on from the official X account of the Liberal Democrats. Elsewhere, its leader Ed Davey almost used this much-dreaded construction in the Guardian this week, when in context of Trump’s threat to sue the BBC, he wrote of ‘our most precious British institutions’. 

Don’t be surprised to hear more of ‘our BBC’ in the forthcoming weeks, as those who seek to defend the corporation at all costs become even more emotional and hysterical. It will be unfurled for the same reasons that devious and........

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