According to Caroline Dinenage, the chairman of the committee who bizarrely describes herself as a Conservative: “Unless the Government urgently intervenes to rebalance the playing field, for every Adolescence adding to the national conversation, there will be countless distinctly British stories that never make it to our screens.”

Seriously? Do these people really think we should all be paying an extra couple of pounds a month for every streaming service we subscribe to?

Netflix, perhaps understandably, immediately hit back, arguing that “in an increasingly competitive global market, it’s key to create a business environment that incentivises rather than penalises investment, risk taking and success”.

Quite so. In fact, the Netflix tax that the committee is pushing, along with self-interested campaigners from the broadcasting industry, is a ridiculous idea. Here’s why.

To start with, and you might think a committee of MPs would have noticed this, the UK already has a TV tax. It is called the licence fee, and it is used to fund the BBC, which is supposed to make “distinctively British” output.

It costs everyone £174.50 a year, regardless of whether the people who pay for it like the stuff it is used to make or not. Indeed, the licence fee, or tax as it should more accurately be known, already costs more every year than the standard ad-free Netflix subscription.

It is hard to understand why people should also start having to pay a second tax on top of that, designed to do much the same thing.

Next, it will inflame trade tensions with the United States at the worst possible moment. As it happens, all the main streaming services are owned by giant American companies. It may not be explicitly written that way, but this will look very like a direct levy in one of the major US exports into the British market.

It is surprising, to put it mildly, that the committee has not paused to consider whether this is really the right moment to hit the US with what amounts to a discriminatory tariff. The guy currently in the White House does not really seem to like that sort of thing.

If we impose a Netflix tax, we can forget about negotiating a special deal for our auto or pharmaceutical companies. We will be hammered with retaliatory tariffs instead. It hardly seems worth it.

Third, who will distribute the money and who will they be accountable to. Not the viewers, that much is for sure. Instead we will all be forced to hand over a chunk of cash every year that will presumably be put into a fund that will be controlled by a self-perpetuating clique of TV producers.

We can expect to see lots of Left-wing social dramas and documentaries about the threat posed by the far-Right and the toxic legacy of colonialism.

Think Channel 4, but without the requirement to actually serve an audience. It will be elitist, politically driven programming that will get funded, and the stuff that the people forced to pay for it all actually want to watch will be completely ignored.

Finally, it will be yet another blow for hard-pressed consumers. Taxes in the UK have already reached a 70-year high, and there still does not appear to be anything like enough money to fund every worthy cause.

Even worse, we have a blizzard of minor, complex taxes that clutter the system.

To take just one measure, according to the Institute of Chartered Accountants, which takes this kind of thing very seriously, the combined length of the yellow and orange tax handbooks has risen five-fold since the 1970s. We have green taxes, nudge taxes, and sin taxes, all designed to tweak something or other.

The result? We have a tax system that is creaking under its own absurd complexity. The very last thing we need is yet another fiddly little charge to add to the mess we already have.

Sure, other European countries, such as France and Spain, have levies on American TV and films to protect their own culture. But why would we want to follow them? They are hardly models of fast-growing, innovative economies.

The UK has developed a class of Westminster politicians who always think that yet another tax is the answer to every problem. Whatever happens, their answer is always the same. Slap some kind of levy on to it and everything will work out for the best.

It is ridiculous. We need to get out of that mindset, and permanently ruling out a Netflix tax would be a very good place to start. We don’t need it, it won’t fix anything and it will prove far too expensive.

The campaign should be called off before it does any more damage.