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Sheer impertinence The BBC top brass are demanding a rise in the licence fee, which is levied on all people who buy a television regardless of whether they watch BBC programmes or not. The fee increase is – so we are told – designed to fund the various digital television ventures the BBC believes it needs.
As I frequently have to explain to my American friends who are left aghast at the situation, the BBC licence fee must be paid, on penalty of a heavy fine, and possibly gaol. In reality, there are people who probably have gotten away with non-payment but the threat is real enough.
In the age of the Internet, satellite and cable, how long can this monster remain in existence? And for how long can it claim that without its privileged source of income, exacted with the ultimate sanction of imprisonment, our culture would be in ruins? Who seriously believes that argument today?
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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I would like to believe that democratic politics would kill off the B.B.C.s special tax. However, I do not believe this.
Not all of the B.B.C. collectivist agitprop (in both news and current affairs – and in its cultural and entertainment productions) is from conviction (athough there are many dedicated collectivists in the B.B.C.).
Some of the collectivist broadcasting is a matter of self interest. If as many voters as possible are kept in a collectivist anti freedom state of mind they will support politicians who are unlikely to get rid of the “licence fee”. It really is as crude as that.
Much of the B.B.C.’s hatred of Mrs Thatcher was based on the fear (however unlikely in reality) that this lady would get rid of their special tax.
On technology.
I do not have much knowledge of these matters – but I am told that there are already methods to get television via the internet in ways that the B.B.C. ‘s detector vans (yes they really do exist – it is like the National Socialists going round occupied Europe during World War II, trying to find people sending messages by radio) can not register.
So (if this is true) people should see the end of the B.B.C. – as everyone just throws out their television sets and says (to any inspector) “no I do not watch television, the computer – oh that is for e.mail”.
Every time I start getting depressed about American politics (runaway spending, eroding civil liberties, the supreme court vacancies, illegal immigration), I visit your site and read some of the articles and I feel a little a better. At least over here there are a few politicians fighting the good fight for limited government (there are a few Reagan Repubs left). Of course there are plenty of politicians here that want to bring a “European” model of government over here. Shudder!
I was reading the National Review’s blog talking about the British Conservative party:
http://corner.nationalreview.com/05_10_09_corner-archive.asp#079166
Any chance that any of these guys are a decent alternative to Blair. You guys are generally dismisive of the Tories, so I’d like to hear your opinion (is the British Conservative party the same as the Tories? I’m so clueless).
Keep up the good fight. Next time I’m at the range I’ll fire some extra .357 magnums for you (from my Ruger GP100 with the 6 inch heavy duty barrel).
Quite frankly the BBC have now openly shown their absolute contempt for their viewers and listeners by this action. When one considers that not only do UK tax payers pay a large sum towards the blasted Sirius Radio system, but then the BBC has the nerve to charge US listeners a subscription to listen to their station. A great way to showcase British radio abroad I should think … not.
Now Mark Thompson is also suggesting that British taxpayers (forget “licence payers” – that is intended to make it seem as though the licence isn’t another tax) should pay for BBC3 to BBC7, UK History, UK Documentary etc., and beyond. Bear in mind that some of these channels already reap a sizeable sum from the commercial sector in advertising revenue, despite the fact that they also enjoy state funding for all programme making and administration.
Of course with the advent of online TV (the BBC is going to introduce its own “iMP” service according to that article) we shall no doubt see Mark Thompson pressing for computer owners to be
taxedmade licence payers as well.Hopefully we shall see 14 year old computer users as well as vicars and retired social workers being imprisoned for failing to pay the £5 “inflation charge” on next year’s licence fee.
I take a fairly relaxed view about this.
The licence fee is an anachronism, especially as it is levied only on TVs but also funds BBC radio and internet presence.
The licence fee will become unsustainable in a multi-channel digital world where channels can be encrypted and available only to subscribers and delivered over the internet as well as over the air or by satellite. In such a world, the faster the licence fee increases, the sooner it will encounter public resistance and this will force a complete rethink of the nature of the BBC and the way it is funded.
So I understand why you are angry about this compulsory tax to pay for the BBC, but change is coming and any rise in licence fee will only hasten it.
Yes, but when? The last review of the BBCs charter in 2000 should have put a timetable in place for the abolition of the licence fee – something like a reduction of 10 pounds a year until it was gone. (I would prefer the licence fee abolished immediately and the BBC split into 37 pieces that are then either privatised or closed, but lets try to keep some sense of political realism) However, it didn’t. As it happens, the BBC has a government in power that is ideologically sympathetic to it in power for the 2007 review, and it is therefore attempting to grab as much money as it can while the going is good. If this seven year charter is allowed to run its course, we have this ridiculous tax until 2014. I agree that by that point the whole thing will look really ridiculous, but even then we probably get a gradual phase out rather than sudden eliminaition, so we are still paying this wretched thing in some form until at least 2020. This is worth getting upset about.
The real threat from the BBC comes from the ongoing rumbling from over there that they want to tax computers. I can see it making sense from their warped worldview, since the internet is poised to obsolete their “business model”. Luckily, it’s probably not politically saleable – they missed the window really, it would have been much easier to impose a decade ago.
The foot in the door for the BBC is the facility of many modern computers to receive television,manufacturers produce all singing and dancing computer entertainment centres,the bigger the scope for the BBC tax.
The BBC itself has to be viewed in the same way as a great feudal church grant the power to tithe and the say in the affairs of state,it is going to just as hard to get rid of.
The onlt current hope is Gordon Brown will get skint enough to sell it off.
Listening to the BBC reporting this debate on its own news channel is hilarious. The BBC anchorman will ask the tricky question about whether people will appreciate the rise and the BBC spokesperson will say “yes, they want it”.
Nobody, therefore, questions whether it should exist at all and instead we get all this tripe about “protecting vulnerable groups” that might in some way be hurt by the planned switching off of the Analog signal. (I can only think that the anolog signal is somehow connected to the pattern of their brainwaves, perhaps balancing cosmic ray effects). All this talk of “protecting” is then used to justify the rise in the fee.
Its so one sided its painful.
Simon Gibbs writes:
“…the planned switching off of the Analog signal…”
Ugh! That would be something like an ANALOGUE signal, would it?
Sorry to be a pedant, but while I only scream silently at
general howlers, that sort of creeping Americanism drives me nuts.
That aside, of course, I agree with what you say.
This is wonderful news, I’ll soon be refusing to pay the BBC even more money.
The threat is real but they’ll only get you if you’re stupid enough to reply to letters, let inspectors in and show them you have a TV but no licence. Many of us (whoops! many people) have refused to be extorted by the BBC for years. Screw’em.
No, here in the US, NPR and PBS are funded by “viewers like you” … and some funds that are collected by the IRS. That’s from the Federal Income Tax, whether you watch PBS or not, whether you own a television or not.
It’s amazing the confidence of this confidence trickster organisation. But then, it was ever thus. If the confidence trickster didn’t show the front to the people he/the organisation is trying to con … So they boldly demand more and more subservience, in the form of tribute when it’s all a charade. They have absolutely nothing to offer that other channels aren’t offering free/via advertising, or by a willingly-made choice to subscribe.
It’s a house of cards. The Brits should have The Big Switch Off in advance. As in, now. Stop paying in numbers that simply can’t be coped with. Just say no, but make certain hundreds of thousands of other people are also saying no at the same time. Pointless fighting this on a case-by-case basis. It’s got to be overwhelming. Their revenue has got to crash through the floor and the floor below that. But how?
How do you publicise it? Za-Nulab is never going to let its hungry propaganda behemoth go wanting.
One way might be the well-trodden Human Rights crapola. It must be against your “human rights” to be forced to pay for a medium of information you don’t want. But how do you find enough – as in tens of thousands – to join you? I am afraid you have left it too late and the BBC is in control. This partnership will not go away.
Pete_London has it exactly right. Why bother getting upset? Simply ignore the license dunning letters and don’t let the bastards in when they show up at your door. I lived in London for a good few years and never paid a penny for my television. I ignored the letters and told them to piss off when they arrived at my door. That was the end of it. My wife was horrified and thought we would be arrested, but all my neighbors told me “don’t be an idiot, you don’t have to pay them”. If you let them in and admit you have a TV then you may have a problem. If you simply tell them to go away there’s little they can do.
Then again, we were living in Harlesden where compliance was probably pretty low. Maybe they focus their enforcement more in upscale areas. Whatever happened to the fellow who was openly refusing to pay the fee? He wrote a column for the Telegraph.
No. They focus on the downscale areas where people are easily bullied by “authority” and chaps with clipboards. Middle class and/or expensive neighbourhoods have people who retain solicitors, have solicitors and barristers who are relatives or friends or are solicitors or barristers themselves. It’s the ignorant single mothers in council flats they bully and threaten with imprisonment. And actually imprison, breaking up a little family and putting the children in care. They do it by postcode.
The thought of some of those clipboard nazis possibly having an encounter with some of the native yobs makes me warm and fuzzy. If the fellas in poorer areas actually thought it out, organized and sent out a nice little welcoming committee next time the beeb drew a bead on some poor single mother.. hmmm. They’d probably demand an APC and an armed escort after a few such meetings.
According to the BBC website:
I wonder where he thinks the £3.9bn came from.
Verity:
Sounds like you need PledgeBank.
“I shall refuse to pay the BBC license fee, but only if 10,000 other people make the same pledge.”
Monique, in Northern Ireland that is how it works. The “scary” areas don’t get bothered much by license inspectors.
Bob Mologna
Verity’s right, the BBC target the less well off, council estates, the simple minded etc and has a fine record of seeing single mothers incarcerated for not giving in to extortion. Whenever the BBC piously tells us of yet another outrage against the poor, the downtrodden, the underclass, the image of a single mother in the slammer always pops into my head, for some reason.
Jonathan Miller is the fella you were thinking of. His refusal to pay:
He lost his case in a magistrate court and was fined £150. He refused to pay for a licence, stating that it was incompatible with the Convention on Human Rights. As it was just a magistrate court it’s no surprise that the verdict went against him. The last I heard is that he was considering taking it to the High Court.
Let’s say the license fee was scraped. What’s to say the government wouldn’t just fund the BBC through the IRS (or such British equivalent)? That’s what they do here in Portugal, where the state TV get’s something like 1.5 billion euros a year…
The licence fee is a tax on televisions. The BBC is making money hand over fist by selling rights/DVDs of its show abroad. The BBC is asking for a rise in the licence fee as they believe people are better off and should pay more. It has sod all to do with television whether digital or analogue and has everything to do with redistribution of wealth.
Let’s hope this is the final act arrogance that finally kills off the monolith that is the BBC.
madne0 – funding the BBC through tax would cause issues as it would then be goverment funded and thus not impartial. (Of course the BBC is already biased towards the gov, but thats another post).
the other major target for the men with clipboards appears to be students, a group usually niave,poor and far enough from home to be forced to pay.
If the BBC want to charge they should encrypt all their channels and sell a decoder box for £200 (or whatever).
One way of legally not paying the telly tax is to have a 75-year-old move in with you. That way the TV licence can be in their name, and once one is 75, one is entitled to a free TV licence. (My family lives with my grandma, and early last year we found this out. Within the week the TV licence was in her name, saving us £120-something per year.)
The license fee is just a hypothecated tax. As such, it is preferable to the BBC being funded out of general taxation.
The real question, of course, is not how the BBC should be funded (a rather uninteresting technical question) but whether it should be funded.
As to that, there is surely only one possible answer – it shouldn’t.
More difficult is what to do with it after the funding has been stopped. Personally I think it should be sold-off to the private sector like any other Government asset that has some sale value, but Sean Gabb once wrote a persuasive case that given its overwhelming statist ideology, it was too dangerous to sell it off, and that it should be closed down once and for all. He might just be right.
I got caught once because I was stupid enough to let them in.
Don’t pay and if things get too stressful, you can always buy a licence pretending that you have just bought a TV.
If everyone just postponed their purchase by a couple of months each year (they’ll never get around to you in two months) the BBC’s budget would shrink by a sixth.
Jonathan Miller’s case was worse than just going before a magistrate like a normal person. He was a widely read columnist on a huge national newspaper and the BBC went insane. To his magistrates hearing, where most people turn up with a solicitor, they sent SIX barristers. For a magistrate’s hearing.
It worked. Miller realised with a sinking heart that he was a private individual – well paid, but not like that! – fighting a body that literally had unlimited funds. Six barristers for a magistrate’s hearing, and wait until they start moving in the really heavy equipment. Not being a blithering idiot, he realised that no matter how brave, and no matter how willing to be arrested and sent to prison, he could never fight the bully boys at the Beeb. They are vicious and ruthless.
This frantic, bullying, heavy-handed protection of their extracted income tells me they know that they don’t offer enough of what people want to survive without the extortion of a “licence fee”.
Verity
Spot on, and don’t they just know it. Ritter, over at biased-bbc(Link) earns a spotter badge:
Figure 29, below, shows how much the BBC would charge for subscription packages for it’s channels. If these were the only packages on offer 58% of households (14m) would opt out entirely.
– Measuring the Value of the BBC, a report by the BBC and Human Capital, October 2004
And get this, from the same report:
This is actually not satire.
Another post ruined.
Is taken from the linked report.
I blame it on Cherie Blair.
Everything, that is.
A usual argument in favour of the BBC and other public broadcasters is the ‘market failure’ one – that they can provide programmes which the market would not otherwise provide.
However, we have Radio 5 live – a national radio station occupying 2 places on the AM dial with wall-to-wall football. Can anybody plausibly tell me that the private sector would not be able to provide this service adequately? Is football such a charity case?
I resent rich companies like Manchester U and Chelsea etc getting free publicity, paid for compulsorily by people like me who aren’t even interested in football.
Pete_London writes – “The second obstacle is that it is hard to know exactly what a world without the BBC would look like. The ramifications on media, cultural, political and social life would be so profound that it is very difficult to predict what they might be. It is not too dissimilar, for example, from envisaging a country without a national electricity grid. This lack of any obvious counterfactual makes it far more complex to think of the benefits derived from the existence of the BBC than the benefits of a road or a bridge.”
This is actually not satire.
No. It is raving megalomania.
“The ramifications on media, cultural, political and social life would be so profound …” This defies parody.
“The second obstacle is that it is hard to know exactly what a world without the BBC would look like. The ramifications on media, cultural, political and social life would be so profound that it is very difficult to predict what they might be”.
It is not,I refuse to have any device which will receive any BBC broadcast in the house,how refreshing no agenda,shite soaps,banal chat shows,irritating music.I can select what one wants from around the wrld via the internet,the computer plays CDs and DVDs.No radio,but who misses James Naughtie anyway?
“The second obstacle is that it is hard to know exactly what a world without the BBC would look like. The ramifications on media, cultural, political and social life would be so profound that it is very difficult to predict what they might be”.
It is not,I refuse to have any device which will receive any BBC broadcast in the house,how refreshing no agenda,shite soaps,banal chat shows,irritating music.I can select what one wants from around the wrld via the internet,the computer plays CDs and DVDs.No radio,but who misses James Naughtie anyway?
A usual argument in favour of the BBC and other public broadcasters is the ‘market failure’ one – that they can provide programmes which the market would not otherwise provide.
The thing I find so ludicrous about this one is that much of British media regulation for the past 100 years has been designed to prevent us from finding out just what the market might or might not offer, because most forms of private competition have been been actively illegal. Private radio stations were not allowed until the early 1970s, and the owners of the only “private” television channel until 1996 had very little control over its programming, this being largely controlled by public bureaucrats. Things are far better than they were, but the structure of the market is still horrendously warped by the presence of the BBC and the history of the British broadcasting market.
(I wrote about this in detail on Samizdata here).
The situation with the BBC offends me not only because of the licence fee (which offends me a lot) but because it prevents me from seeing the superior programming that might be produced if the market was allowed to produce it.
I do not myself own a television set, but I still recieve intimidatory letters from the licensing authority, together with inspectors attempting to search my house. Asking whether they have a warrant normally concludes the interaction.
However, these filth still have detector vans whose accuracy and reliability regarding the location of television sets is minute (and serve chiefly to intimidate the poor and ill-advised, by which I also include magistrates), so you can still end up being fined for watching an imaginary television.
I regard the suggestion that television be paid for out of general taxation as abhorrent. I don’t have a television because the programmes currently broadcast are beneath contempt. I do not see how this is to be improved by taxing those who don’t watch them. After all, look how marvellous other services provided ‘out of general taxation’ have become.
What about East Enders…..
“What about East Enders?”
What about it? It is, without a single doubt, depressing, victim-mongering crap. There is something about the theme tune and the whining tone of the actors on it that makes me want to pull out a gun and shatter the screen, a la Elvis.
Michael Jennings, as usual, makes the excellent point that the BBC and the current tv setup in this country creates a vast opportunity cost. The barriers to innovation and better programming created by the existence of this privilege behemohth are considerable. I am not so naive to think that tv will reach a golden age if the BBC is consigned to the flames, mind. The state of the culture in this country is in such a state that improvement will take some time.
I gather that the administration and collection of the licence fee has now been handed over to Capita – an organisation that does not believe in the right of judicial arbitration and has its own “appeal” tribunals – which obviously always find in Capita’s favour.
The BBC now joins a company with the unenviable record of managing John Prescott’s personal website, builds uninhabitable barracks for USAF personnel in the UK, collects congestion charges for Ken Livingstone, doles out council wages, books driving tests and has a reputation for employing itinerant illegal immigrants on its call centre helpdesks.
Actually Crapita got that back in 2003- no wonder they can afford 6 barristers at a time in court!
RESISTING the TV TAX 101:
It all works by postcodes. Each desk officer at licensing HQ gets one or two (depending on population) and they spend all day trawling computer generated lists showing who lives there and if there is a licence at the address. The results of the trawl are sent to the field offices for the Gestapo teams to do the actual door knocking. Don’t answer and there’s sod-all thay can do about it. If you get a threatening letter just say one of the household is over 75…….they can’t prove it, or couldn’t back in 991 when I did some contract work at their offices!!
I was joking about East Enders…
Libertarian and free market concerns pale against the most compelling reason for abolition of the BBC, in my opinion.
I mean of course, the removal of endless medical dramas (medisoaps, as I call them) from our screens. They all have exactly the same theme: NHS staff are all selfless angels with convoluted personal lives.
Just think: No more ‘Casualty’ no more ‘Holby City’ (a.k a. Casualty meets Eastenders). Bliss.
Per
The situation with the BBC offends me not only because of the licence fee (which offends me a lot) but because it prevents me from seeing the superior programming that might be produced if the market was allowed to produce it.
Michael, could you direct me to a country where the market is producing a significantly higher quality television “product”?
It also, with a few payTV exceptions produces virtually unwatchable content, unless you BitT_orrent the stuff.
Of course, this whole discussion is going to become moot over the next decade as the concept of broadcast shceduled TV takes it’s place next to the Buggy Whip as cutting edge technology.