Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Days before a national election, Prime Minister Boris Johnson has done the unthinkable, and threatened the guaranteed income of one of the most brutally coercive and climate partisan state funded broadcasting bodies in the Western world.
Boris to Consider Abolishing BBC Television Tax
VICTORIA FRIEDMAN 10 Dec 2019
Prime Minister Boris Johnson has questioned whether taxing everyone who has a television to fund the BBC is justifiable, saying that a new Conservative government would look into scrapping the TV licence fee.
Prime Minister Johnson made the comments during a rally in Sunderland on Monday, saying he was “certainly looking at it”.
He continued: “You have to ask yourself if that kind of approach to funding a media organisation still makes sense on the long-term given the way other organisations manage to fund themselves?”
“The system by funding out of what is effectively a general tax on everybody who has a TV, it bears reflection, let me put it that way. How long can you justify a system whereby everybody who has a TV has to pay to fund a particular set of channels?” he added.
"I am certainly looking at it… how long can you justify a system whereby everybody who has a TV has to pay to fund a particular set of channels?"
— BBC Politics (@BBCPolitics) December 9, 2019
Boris Johnson is asked whether he would abolish the BBC licence fee, during a Q&A in Tyne and Wearhttps://t.co/BHbg7pnNBm pic.twitter.com/7HuUFAeIx3…
Read more: https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2019/12/10/boris-to-consider-abolishing-bbc-television-tax/
I doubt Boris Johnson will actually follow through, promising to consider abolishing the license fee is not a real commitment. If Boris Johnson actually abolished the license fee he would face a significant backlash from rich urban greens, who are well served by the BBC’s partisanship.
But the fact Boris thinks he might win a few votes by threatening the BBC shows how deeply unpopular they have become in some quarters. The internet is bursting at the seams with videos of BBC unpleasantness, like the following video of BBC license fee collectors using police as backup for their debt collection.
People who can barely afford to feed their kids and heat their homes have no patience for the regressive BBC license fee, and their thuggish collection techniques.
I strongly suspect the BBC’s days as a government supported broadcaster are numbered.
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The way to do it is, as a first step, to remove the monopoly on access to the subsidy Put it into a separate contestable fund, and let the BBC bid for it against others and allow them to run advertising.
If possible sell down the government’s share in the BBC to others more experienced in running commercial media and thereby reduce the risk of the transition.
I don’t think “Rich Urban Greens” are exactly Boris Johnson’s voter base. He wouldn’t be losing much with following through with defunding the Beeb.
Some of us UK TV viewers, who have to pay an annual TV licence fee of £154, on pain of fines, debt collectors, and / or imprisonment, consider that the most appropriate acronym for the British Bullshit Corporation is ont the BBC but the BibiC …
I used to count my self among the body of opinion that the advantages of the BiBiC’s traditionally, high quality output, outweighed the disadvantages of it’s clear and obvious political bias.
I no longer subscribe to this pov and would welcome the scrapping of BiBiC funding from compulsory TV licence fees.
The grotesque Rupert Murdoch’s of this world can fill the void, I care not because i don’t consume it to any significant degree and I have learned over the years to be very discerning of that which I do consume.
Mostly, the TV is switched off. I suggest more of us should use it that way and not be used by it.
Remember : The medium is the massage …
Oh and don’t be taken in by BJ’s cheeky grin …
MG
Agreed! IIRC, while in the UK, I only paid the tax twice.
Don’t consider it, just do it.
Every year 180,000 or so people are criminalised by the BBC for non-payment of the BBC license, and 30-odd are imprisoned.
1 in 10 court cases! no wonder the criminal justice system is congested.
https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/599049/TV-Licence-jailed-England-BBC-fee-Scotland-fines
Abolition would delight me. I used to like radio 4; especially after it moved online when I could listen to podcast shows at my leisure. But now almost everything is produced by SJWs and CJWs. It’s Orwell’s Ministry of Truth.
Yeah, all great, except it won’t happen. Boris is exactly like our ScoMal here in Australia. Talk a great talk at election time, afterwards nothing. From memory, one of ScoMal’s advisers was sent to the UK to help Boris with the election, and you can see the same playbook unfolding exactly.
When JFK was assassinated, the Beeb postponed the Harry Worth comedy program for a whole 15 minutes before continuing with its broadcast.
(The usual response would have been immediate respectful solemn music with images of the great deceased, followed by an obituary intoned by Richard Dimbleby.)
The Beeb has not always been Leftie in its responses.
Expect Boris to copy-cat Norway.
BBC will be financed over the tax bill and the money appropriated by reducing taxpayers deductible amounts/personal allowance, say with £1000 per employee, value £200 per employee in the 20% tax bracket.
Yes, you will pay for BBC. As will your wife, your daughters and your parents. Everyone with an income will pay.
Oddgeir
I have not read all the comments, but in the ones I have read, the elephant in the room is missing.
Around 30% of UK voters are today going to vote for an anti-semitic party, headed by a Marxist anti-semite. A man who has associated with terrorists of all persuasions, whether Irish, Islamic or whatever. A man who has shared platforms with Holocaust deniers. With a top team who have approved of mob violence towards political opponents, opposed the Northern Ireland Good Friday Agreement, who have lamented the fall of East Germany and excused the Soviet Holocaust(s) as they praised the supposed achievements of that regime.
The lieading liberal paper in the UK, the Guardian, has endorsed this party.
The Labour Party in power, which may happen tomorrow morning, will mean that the BBC is continued and strengthened This party wants a state broadcaster. It would like it to be a monopoly broadcaster, but a state broadcaster will do for now.
It also proposes to bring about a state monopoly of Internet access. It will do this by nationalizing the largest Internet provider, and then giving fibre Internet to everyone in the country, free of charge. Thus putting all competitors out of business the next day.
What it wants is control. Of media, of information, of education providers (non-state schools will be abolished), of the curriculum.
When Eric writes “I strongly suspect the BBC’s days as a government supported broadcaster are numbered” he is assuming that it will be politics as usual in the UK after Friday.
There is a good chance that it will not be. There is a good chance that the UK will have elected the equivalent of Eric Honecker, and that the new government will come trailing a cloud behind it. In that cloud will be exchange controls, surveillance, a secret police, travel limitations, property seizures. And ethnic cleansing, starting with the Jews. But not stopping with them. It never does.
And yes, it can happen there. All it takes is cowardice, blindness and wishful thinking of the sort you can see today in the Guardian.
Thankfully Labour didn’t take power, it was a landside for Boris J’s party. So your fears were not realized. Now, hopefully, Brexit will get done. Don’t know if the “BBC’s days as a government supported broadcaster are numbered” or not as eliminating BBC funding wasn’t what the conservatives were running on, but maybe it will get looked at, which is more than you could have hoped for had the election gone the other way.
https://metro.co.uk/2019/12/12/man-cancels-non-refundable-holiday-hes-been-looking-forward-to-for-64-years-because-hes-worried-about-the-planet-11771459/
He’s just been interviewed on BBC radio. A well travelled man, been to Antarctica the galapogas etc in the eco tourist mode. Has now got a consience and is following extinction rebellion.
Poor sap