Now, you won’t find me leaping to the defence of the Tories very often. I tend to regard them as just an unpleasant arse cheek of which the other is Labour. I leave it to your imagination where the Lib Dems are… All are much of a muchness. When drawing a distinction, it is about which of these deeply unpleasant parties is the less egregious, not which I actually prefer, as the answer will always be “none of the above”. I despise them all, just not all equally.
So it is with some reluctance that I find myself pointing out that some of those swivel eyed loonies aren’t actually so swivel eyed at all. Indeed, some of the things they espouse are in tune with many of the electorate. Indeed, it is the lefties who throw such epithets about who are out of touch and, dare we say, a little touched.
In his silly article, Donald Macintyre berates the die hard anti-coalition Tories as loonies. However, not all of the things he lists as part of their manifesto are indeed loony at all.
Okay, so banning the burqa is particularly nasty and the reasoning is absurd. However, I wouldn’t use the term loony to describe it – it is deeply authoritarian and as such should be vigorously opposed. It should not be down to politicians to decide what people wear. After all, give the bastards a micron and they will come back for a parsec. Equally, the demand for National service is straight out of the knee-jerk (with the emphasis on the jerk) Colonel Blimp mentality of the nineteen fifties. So, yeah, the loony thing does at face value look justified. But, dig deeper and you get the gems where the left is working so hard to demonise dissent; hence the loony tag.
Decriminalising non-payment of the BBC tax, for example. Well, that doesn’t sound even remotely loony, nor does the proposal for privatising it. The Beeb has spent too long peddling its nasty little leftist agenda on the fat of money extorted from viewers regardless of whether they want to watch it, for far too long now. So, yeah, let it sink or swim in the marketplace along with other providers. Nope, not loony at all.
Then we get to little nuggets about relaxing the smoking ban. A perfectly sensible suggestion to allow the property owner to allow smoking in a suitably ventilated room. Nope, not loony at all. Perfectly reasonable step in the right direction and, frankly, one that would – if they are ever given the opportunity – the vast majority of ordinary people would support. Because, out here in the real world, most ordinary people are not rabid, vindictive anti-smokers.
Or what about removing subsidies for wind farms? Those useless drains on the taxpayer purse that are nothing more than the vanity projects of the green religion. Not only a blot on the landscape and killers of wild birds, they are a waste of our money. So, yeah, remove the subsidies and no, not loony at all.
The peach of course is the proposal to withdraw from the EU. This is a reasonable stance to take. The EU is a bloated, expensive corrupt, unelected and unaccountable authoritarian monstrosity. Withdrawal from such a club is again, perfectly reasonable and contrary to what the EUphiles try to claim, the world will not come to an end. So, the position on this is contrary to that of the EUphiles, but it is not loony – it is a different opinion. Holding a different opinion does not make someone a loony – unless, of course, the extent of your political discourse runs to flinging about cheap insults in order to avoid actually having to put up a robust defence of your own position. As a piece of journalism, it is pretty dire.
So, while on balance, there are some odd proposals that won’t ever see the light of day (thankfully) and some are so deeply authoritarian, I would never vote for a party that supports them, there are some reasonable ideas that I do support and so do many of the people I meet, socialise with and work with on an every day basis.
It’s Mr Macintyre who needs to visit the shrink here by the looks of it.
Okay, so banning the burqa is particularly nasty and the reasoning is absurd.
Is it possible to have an intensely bitter loathing of and aversion to the niqab, yet think that banning it is not a good idea and will not help matters one iota? The problem isn’t the niqab, it is Islamism.
It should not be down to politicians to decide what people wear.
We also know that the niqab would be laughed out of existence if Muslims and their constant intimidation and implicit threats of violence had nothing at all to do with it. The brutal mockery alone would kill it off.
There is a lot of disgusting Islamist ideology hidden behind that thing and what it represents. It’s an aggressively divisive symbol of religious fanaticism. We need to find out how to fix it and do so. Actually standing up for freedom and our values would be a good start.
You may like to read this for an alternative view. Essentially, the blogger sees the line that you take as the one pushed by Islamists and cultural relativists.
Equally, the demand for National service is straight out of the knee-jerk (with the emphasis on the jerk) Colonel Blimp mentality of the nineteen fifties.
Agree, but Colonel Blimp was a very old man and Colonel Blimp’s character was from the 1930s. By the 1950s, it was increasingly unpopular with the young and they did what they could to get out of it. It was an unpopular idea among many.
Decriminalising non-payment of the BBC tax, for example. Well, that doesn’t sound even remotely loony, nor does the proposal for privatising it. The Beeb has spent too long peddling its nasty little leftist agenda on the fat of money extorted from viewers regardless of whether they want to watch it, for far too long now. So, yeah, let it sink or swim in the marketplace along with other providers. Nope, not loony at all.
Do you go along with the Nigel Farage view of keeping some parts of it public like BBC Radio 4 and the BBC World Service (and possibly one TV channel), yet letting the rest go to subscription only?
Then we get to little nuggets about relaxing the smoking ban. A perfectly sensible suggestion to allow the property owner to allow smoking in a suitably ventilated room. Nope, not loony at all.
Well, yes, but I think I’d rather the ban was removed altogether. But, yeah, it’s not loony as far as it goes.
You probably remember the Swiss referendum on the smoking ban of last year? The Swiss public rejected a UK-style complete smoking ban, as they felt that things had gone far enough. I think that if there was ever a momentum there, that things would go back to the partial ban you describe.
For fuck’s sake, even Sweden have a better smoking policy than we in the UK have.
Or what about removing subsidies for wind farms? Those useless drains on the taxpayer purse that are nothing more than the vanity projects of the green religion. Not only a blot on the landscape and killers of wild birds, they are a waste of our money. So, yeah, remove the subsidies and no, not loony at all.
Agreed.
This is starting to sound surprisingly like the UKIP manifesto! Strange that, ain’t it?
On the EU: just see what the EU-philes come up with when they bring up alternatives. They always assume as an example that we will end up with an EEA agreement rather than a proper, independent free trade deal.
The face veils worn by some (but by no means all) followers of Islam creates a number of issues in a society where most of our communication is non-verbal. It’s why we have those emoticons, such as the ones beneath this very text box I’m typing into: they were invented as a clumsy workaround to convey that additional information normally provided by our facial expressions as we speak.
A full-face veil effectively reduces you—and by “you” I mean conservative female followers of Islam—to little more than a glorified walking Twitter feed. The effect this has on women who use such veils is that of separating them from everyone else, shutting them off from wider social interactions. In Western societies, where such veils have never been used, it also tends to make people uncomfortable: we’re talking, almost literally, to what appears to be a blank-faced shop dummy.
This is, as the previous poster points out, an issue with the way Islam itself is being interpreted. The very fact that many followers of that religion do not insist on such veils is clear evidence that it’s not quite the hard and fast rule many make it out to be. This is very much a conservative Islamic trait, rather than one held by all Muslims. After all, there are many Christians who are more than happy to use contraceptives, despite the diktats of the Roman Catholic Church’s Pope.
“It should not be down to politicians to decide what people wear.”
Three naturists walk into a restaurant…
Governments exist because they’re the least worst solution to a fundamental problem with complex societies: you need some rules to keep the wheels of social interaction nicely greased.
Societies develop cultures by creating explicit and implicit rules that allow everyone to get along tolerably well. As a rule, humans cannot handle communities of more than about 200-300 people; any more than that and the single-celled community splits into two or more communities, usually with minor cultural differences—i.e. they have slightly different rules. The more those rules differ, the less compatible the communities are.
(We’re seeing this in spades in the Middle East right now. Israel’s problems are effectively due to incompatible cultures constantly clashing with each other. What’s needed is a social buffer: a culture that can interface reasonably well with both and therefore act as a go-between, smoothing those gears.)
If you were to take the extreme libertarian approach of letting anyone wear whatever they felt like, you must also allow for the possibility that some will prefer to wear nothing at all, while others might walk around in a glorified bed sheet that covers everything. The latter makes conversation difficult and will clash with most Western cultures. The former makes running a butcher’s shop difficult and will clash with anyone who has an HAACP certificate nailed to their shop’s wall. (And let’s not forget that many people only think they’ve done a decent job of wiping their arse and hands after visiting the bathroom.)
I think I broadly agree with your underlying view that the UK (and other nations) has gone too far and created too many laws—hardly surprising given how many lawyers and ex-lawyers are in Parliament today. But you still need some rules, some laws, or our complex societies simply cannot function. Too much libertarianism and you end up without any laws at all. Too far in the other direction and you get the authoritarianism we’re seeing now.
There’s a sweet spot somewhere in the middle, but I’ll be buggered if I know where that ‘middle’ is.
Surely, the restaurant owner should decide if he allows nudists or the veil, punk rockers, Goths, etc?
In the same way that publicans and restaurant owners should choose if they allow smokers or not (and not locked-away in an air-tight room either)…?
I’m not keen on the veil but I don’t think the government should control its use. If the government kept out of things more (including holding Muslims in such high esteem) we might not have so many ghettos and Muslims might be keener to integrate into Western society and dress codes…
Precisely. It disturbs me when people use the word freedom on the one hand while being ready to wield the ban stick with the other. I despise utterly the ideology behind the veil, but would defend to the death the right to wear it. And, no, I don’t consider that position either extreme or contradictory. If we allow politicians to tell us what we may wear, then we might just as well have state approved haircuts as well, because you can be damned sure that once enabled, such legislation will not stop with the burqa. The best way of dealing with the non-verbal communication issue is to be relaxed about business owners who refuse to deal with people wearing the veil unless they remove them.
You might well be playing into the Islamists’ hands with this one. I can see what you’re getting at, but I don’t think it’s a simple free choice in a lot of cases. From what I’ve read there is a huge amount of coercion from within Muslim communities, by both men and women. Women who don’t don increasingly restrictive garments will be thought of as easy and perhaps worthy of sexual assault/rape by Muslim men or not pious enough (and therefore filthy) by other Muslim women, and may actually be abused or spat at in the street. I’m sorry, but after reading the stories of what is happening in Islamic ghettoes across Europe, I have no time for any more of this stuff.
A lot of Muslim women don’t like it when the hijab and especially the niqab starts to make an appearance as it poisons the atmosphere and divides those into devout and ‘good’ and not-devout and ‘slutty’. When enough women don the thing, it can then be used to bully those that don’t. The whole bullying/victimisation dynamic is HUGE in conservative Islamic culture.
This is very much a conservative Islamic trait, rather than one held by all Muslims
Conservative?!! More hardcore extremist than simply conservative Muslim. Think Salafist/Wahhabist, perhaps the most fascistic and ultra-puritanical strain of an itself deeply sectarian and supremacist religion. Think Saudi Arabia. In fact, Saudi Arabia is the main source of this strain of Wahhabi Islam that is poisoning Islamic minds and turning us against each other, and it is the source of many of the hardline mosques and madrassahs we see here that poison minds with hateful filth.
Conservative Muslims simply wear the hijab or nothing at all. The niqab is aggressively pushy and we all know that this is the case because it forces people to interact with the thing. We wouldn’t be quite so reverent and insouciant if it came to white men wearing balaclavas and we know it. A lot of Muslims don’t like this sectarian Salafist strain of Islam, neither here nor in the dar-al Islam, and what it represents, namely the ultra-hatred of anyone who is not this ultra-conservative form of Islam. It sees basically the whole of humanity as kufr, even the vast majority of Muslims – and especially the Shia, the Ahmadis, the Alevis, the Alawites, the Druze etc etc etc.
Put it this way – people wearing the niqab in a lot of Muslim countries would be stared at/greeted with suspicion. I had a friend who actually lives in a Muslim-majority country in the Middle East that has seen a lot of sectarian war (and who is an ex-Muslim himself) and he was frankly horrified by what is going on in the UK. He said that parts of the UK look like Saudi Arabia (and he wasn’t putting this lightly either), and that where he lives, Muslims don’t dress like this and never have. He was genuinely shocked and frightened for the West and he was contemptuous our immigration policy, saying that he couldn’t believe that we imported the “world’s trash”.
This isn’t ‘conservative’ Islam; this is fundamentalist Islam.
srael’s problems are effectively due to incompatible cultures constantly clashing with each other.
Israel’s problems are because of a bunch of fascist, Hitler-admiring Islamic savages intent on wiping them out and committing genocide, and who tell the world that this is exactly what they want to do. They tell us this every week on Arab TV. In fact, on day two, that’s exactly what they tried to do (see the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, where seven Arab countries invaded Israel with the intent of committing a second Holocaust).
As the Islamic Hadith goes (this one is immensely popular with the Palestinians):
The problem that a liberal society like Longrider advocates is this: how do you deal with people that are utterly determined to use your fundamental freedoms in order to subvert and disfigure your freedoms with the intention of destroying them for everyone and by putting something deeply reactionary and hateful in its place? Islam stands against everything we, as a free society, is supposed to represent.
A free society needs to defend itself from its enemies. It doesn’t matter if it’s Christian fundamentalists, Islamic supremacism, neo-Nazi racism and terror, communist fanaticism or whatever else. It needs to defend itself. At the moment, it is singularly failing to do that.
I am not disputing your comments on Islam (although this is not the subject of the OP) as we are in agreement on it. However, banning certain items of clothing is not the solution even if there is coercion. Do you really think the coercion will disappear? When politicians grant themselves the power to dictate dress for one group they will extend that power – not “if” but “when”. They are always seeking to expand their power. Martin Niemoller’s words are as true today as when he penned them. First they came for the Muslims but I was not a Muslim.
You do not defend liberty by suppressing liberty.
Great stuff, LR.
“You might well be playing into the Islamists’ hands with this one. I can see what you’re getting at, but I don’t think it’s a simple free choice in a lot of cases. From what I’ve read there is a huge amount of coercion from within Muslim communities, by both men and women”
Criminalizing women who wear the veil is a funny way of dealing with the issue of coercion. It is like prosecuting the victims of child abuse rather than the perpetrator.
“A free society needs to defend itself from its enemies”
A free society that starts dictating to women what they may wear is not a free society, it is a tyranny and has become the enemy itself.
Precisely. Succinctly put.
I am against a ban, not for it. What I’m saying is that there is a lot of nasty attitudes behind the thing and it’s just not a simple freedom/non-freedom thing (and it often carries with it some very negative cultural baggage that we aren’t standing up to). I am of a similar mind to Hirsi Ali on the niqab.
My point is that we are only having this debate because of a deeply fascist subset of an already intolerant religion/political ideology. If it had been white non-Muslims wearing something similar (as a fashion trend, say) it would be ridiculed and the people wearing it would also be mocked. They would still be allowed to wear it, but it would be social death.
The ninja outfit deserves much more open mockery, but we all know why this isn’t happening. (It’s reduced to brave souls on the Internet to do that job.)
I repeat: I am against a ban.
Then we would appear to be violently agreeing with each other.
“Surely, the restaurant owner should decide if he allows nudists or the veil, punk rockers, Goths, etc?”
I don’t think it’s that simple…
I’m going to digress slightly: What about publicly-owned infrastructure, such as trains, buses and trams? Do you allow individual drivers to tell passengers they don’t like the look of to get lost? Should it be imposed by the franchisor—typically a local or regional authority—or the franchisee? And who, ultimately, gets to decide on what that policy should be?
Cleaning becomes orders of magnitude more expensive if there’s even the slightest risk of being exposed to human tissue or waste. It ceases to be some bloke with a sharpened stick stabbing at crisp packets and can move rapidly into biohazard suit territory depending on circumstances. Nobody’s walking through a train and wiping down each and every plastic (or, worse still, cushioned) seat whenever a passenger stands up. Same goes for buses.
Furthermore, there’s a damned good reason why Homo Sapiens invented clothing and it wasn’t just to keep the weather off: our clothes get dirty precisely so we don’t have to. Short of fitting public showers on every street corner, it’s going to be hard for nudists to stay clean all day while out and about.
If you think that biohazard suit comment was in jest, consider that we already have no end of fundamentalist, extremist theists—and extremists supporting many other viewpoints aren’t hard to find either. (For a species that has ironically named itself “The Wise Man”, we’re really, really good at inventing new ways to propagate ignorance and stupidity.) That means fundamentalist, extremist nudists will appear. Some of them will be women. Women have a tendency to ovulate once every 28 days or so. Add those together with the preceding and that biohazard suit comment isn’t quite so funny.
How many restaurants and pubs do you think will bother to allow nudists in at all when faced with the need to not only wipe down the tables, but disinfect the chairs, the bar counter and stools, and everything else too? What about offices? Do you think the minimum-waged cleaning staff are going to be happy about disinfecting everything a typical office worker might have touched during the day?
Nudity in your own home, on your own property? Not a problem. On private property where the owner permits it, fine. On public property, where everyone has to suffer the resulting costs? That is a problem.
I have nothing against speaking your mind. I don’t believe in “freedom from offence” as it’s incompatible with “freedom of speech” (not, not “expression”; there is a difference). Be as racist, misogynistic and hateful as you like. Spout as much saccharine bollocks about how your invisible friend is better than someone else’s. I couldn’t care one whit. Talk is cheap.
But there’s a difference between saying something and doing something. Actions have the potential for harm. That harm might be direct, such as punching people in the face. Or it might be indirect, such as my nudity example above.
Which brings me back to the full-face veil…
Your right to believe in forcing all women to wear a full-face veil ends the moment it causes actual, objective, harm. (Not “offence”, please note. Actual, objective harm.)
And such veils do cause harm. You cannot teach a girl wearing such garb: the teacher cannot see her face and thus loses 70% of their ability to communicate effectively. As teaching any student successfully requires successful communication, that means a student wearing the niqab or burqa is actually, objectively harmed because they literally cannot be taught using Western teaching methods. (Learning from books is perfectly fine, but Western societies tend to require 16-18 years of mass education, if only to ensure everyone can read all the signs and warnings littering our streets.)
That the fundamentalist extremists who push for the niqab or burqa also happen to believe that women shouldn’t be educated is therefore no great surprise.
There is, I think, a case to be made for formally banning anything that can cause actual, objective, harm. The niqab and burqa are incompatible with many aspects of Western societies and may well be considered harmful, though I don’t think this is inherently universal: as computing technology improves, it becomes less easy to justify present mass education systems anyway and reading a textbook on a tablet in your own home does not clash with the wearing of either the niqab or burqa as neither are required when you’re at home in your own room.
However, a particularly strong case could be made by the medical profession: how do you spot a stroke in someone who’s entirely covered from head to foot? How can you tell if such a person is in pain? How can you provide CPR without removing that veil and violating the patient’s sacredly held belief? For these reasons alone, there is some justification for proposing a ban on full-face veils in public areas.
In nudity’s case, the issue is one of practicality: the cost to the community would be very high. If a private property / vehicle owner doesn’t mind your preference, there’s no problem there, but nudity in public areas is not something I’d support. It would cause harm to the community in the form of added costs. Only if said costs would not harm the community (e.g. it’s filthy rich) would public nudity be viable. But this depends entirely on the community, or communities, involved.
I think I’ll make this my last “Great Wall Of Text” post. If you’ve read this far, we both need to get out more.
Setting aside for a moment that we already have public decency legislation, so the issue of public nudity is never going to arise anyway (and given this, I’m not sure why you use it as an example), publicly owned transport is owned and operated by an owning body – usually First Group these days. They as the owners may set whatever rules of carriage regarding dress they choose so again, it ain’t going to arise because no carrier is going to allow nudity on their buses, trains or trams. So if they choose to prohibit nudity then so be it. Their gaff, their rules. Same with bars and restaurants. As a motorcyclist I have to accept that some establishments won’t allow me to go in wearing leathers and that’s just too bad. Their gaff, their rules. It is not fine for politicians to decide what we may wear. Ever. And the public decency legislation does not decree what we should wear, merely that we cover the naughty bits.
In the case of medical emergencies, well the wearer will just have to accept the risk as we all accept risks when we make choices in life. This is not a justification for a ban. If someone prefers to die rather than let another remove their veil, then they die. Their choice.
As far as harm is concerned, it is not the garment that is causing harm and unless women choose to leave abusive husbands there is not much that the law can do and nor should it as to assume that a relationship is coercive or abusive without good evidence is an intrusion into private life without good cause. If a woman wants to cover up, then she should be allowed to do so and have to accept that some people may not want to do business with her. Her choice, her chosen consequences. None of the state’s business.
Setting aside for a moment that we already have public decency legislation, so the issue of public nudity is never going to arise anyway (and given this, I’m not sure why you use it as an example), publicly owned transport is owned and operated by an owning body – usually First Group these days. They as the owners may set whatever rules of carriage regarding dress they choose so again, it ain’t going to arise because no carrier is going to allow nudity on their buses, trains or trams.
You don’t see the huge potential for extreme intimidation, disruption, violence and possibly jihadi murder and terrorist attacks against the company, their employees from thousands of psychotic Muslimahs and their mahrams – sorry, husbands and families – along with a ton of jihadis and home-grown terrorists from any major company that decided to ban the niqab in their shops or other public businesses? I seriously think in that situation that there would be terror attacks.
In any case, the hassle would be immense to such a point that I think they would be forced to back down.
We’re not talking about a couple of peaceful people wanting to boycott a shop here. We’re talking asking people to put their lives and the lives of their families on the line. A little like Pim Fortuyn. And look what happened to him.
I remember reading about a case that took place a few years ago where a niqab clad woman demanded that she get on a go-karting ride with her niqab on. The attendants repeatedly advised her that she must take it off if she got on the ride due to very serious safety reasons. She completely refused their advice that she have her go-karting ride against all advice.
Guess what happened? The niqab material got caught in the go-kart when she was going at speed and she strangled herself to death.
The insane stupidity of Islam for you. I hope she had a final split-second realisation as she strangled herself to death for the glory of Allah.
See here.
“The Beeb has spent too long peddling its nasty little leftist agenda on the fat of money extorted from viewers regardless of whether they want to watch it”
God, you’ve got to be pretty far gone to think that the BBC is a haven for left wing thought. Historically the Beeb always hedges its bets and tries not to rile the politicians of the day. It only gets into trouble with the political establishment when the political establishment is run by extremists. Thus it got into a lot of trouble with Thatcher as just about anything other that total acceptance of her point of view was regarded a Treason. The other extremist was Blair and his obsession with Iraq, which naturally also got the BBC into trouble.
Presently it can hardly say anything against Coalition policies. It has nothing to say on the appalling death toll on disabled people who have been reduced to penury, a policy initiated by the so-called “left” New Labour but continued with gusto by the Coalition. It says nothing about big government surveillance favoured by the conservatives and the hard authoritarian right of the Labour Party. Or about a host of other contoversial measures.
By all means campaign against the licence fee if you wish but don’t make out that the BBC is some kind of left wing propaganda machine. You just make yourself look ridiculous by doing so.
I don’t make myself look at all ridiculous. Attempting to deny what is on my television screen certainly would.
When I watch the BBC, which I do a lot, I see a conservative organisation playing safe not to rile the present government. I certainly see no left wing agenda. Chance would be fine thing.
Maybe your observation skills need honing.
I think you are simply imagining things that are not there. That you are unable to respond with any concrete examples of this “left wing agenda” whereas i can cite many examples of the BBC adopting a conservative line suggests that my observational skills are quite up to scratch.
Okay, so here’s one example
This is not to mention the tendency to fail miserably to challenge anyone peddling the orthodoxies so beloved of the left – AGW, for example or banker bashing, peddlers of the junk science surrounding smoking or other health related issues or joining in enthusiastically in bullying tax avoiders, despite avoidance being perfectly legal and not remotely immoral. Just listening to the airheads who present the breakfast news clearly demonstrates this bias on a daily basis. And I say this as someone who for years sat on the mid-left of the political spectrum.
He’s obviously never looked at, say, BBC Watch (not Biased BBC) who cover the BBC’s often inaccurate and biased Israel coverage.
But, yeah, the BBC is like that on a whole host of different topics. It’s news for much of the time feels ‘canned’, as though it is simply press release material.
I would much rather the Beeb was cut down to size. Most of it we don’t need and most of it can be run on a commercial basis. The BBC can manage it outside the UK with their BBC America/BBC Entertainment/UKTV channels; why not inside the UK too?
Having spent some time working abroad—I currently reside in Italy—I think I agree with you in that it could do with having some of its fat trimmed, but that the core of the BBC should be retained.
For the life of me, I cannot understand why Radios 1-3 continue to exist given that they merely duplicate other, private, stations and add nothing of value to the market. Radio 4, despite its tendency to hire the same old faces over and over, does at least offer a very rare outlet for audio drama and comedy. (None of the private national radio stations offer this.) A couple of the digital channels could be quietly dropped, or possibly merged.
But the real joy is BBC iPlayer and I will personally declare war on the UK if that is killed off…
The UK actually punches well above its weight in the entertainment sector. Compare with RAI (Italian state TV), which manages barely a fraction of the BBC’s output. And RAI is not only ad-supported, but Italians also pay a TV license too. (In fact, it’s a myth that only Brits pay such TV licenses; most Europeans do as well. And, believe me, they get a hell of a lot less in return.)
Be very careful what you wish for. RAI is probably the only TV channel that has proved you can stretch that “Deal or No Deal” format to fill a whopping two hours. No, I’m not kidding. The sheer quantity of cheap filler is astonishing: hours and hours of studio-bound chat shows, cut-rate reality shows, staggeringly long quiz shows… if you thought daytime TV was trite, shallow and worthless, imagine having to watch it for most of the evening too.
Which is a shame as RAI can make some excellent TV when they’ve a mind to. It’s just that they hardly ever do so any more. (RAI pretty much dropped the ball around the mid-1970s and hasn’t been the same since.)
Far more countries have a TV license than most Brits seem to believe. Given how much Italians pay for theirs, the BBC gives surprisingly good value for money.
However, perceptions of bias at the BBC do have some merit. Given that it has to justify its Charter every 10 years or so, it cannot afford to shoot itself in the foot by biting the hand that feeds it too often. Even so, there is no shortage of satirical news panel shows on the BBC at the moment. There are some old episodes of “Have I Got News For You” on YouTube which provide ample evidence that they were quite happy to take the urine out of whoever was in charge at the time. It’s just a shame that there hasn’t been a proper ‘lefty’ government since the 1960s. But that’s hardly the BBC’s fault.
I take it you would feel similarly of Radio 5 live? Also, most of the digital radio only channels could do to go.
Eh? The Italian licence fee is cheap compared to the UK one.
They pay €112 a year (or about £96). The UK licence fee is £145.50 (€175).
Feel bad for the Swiss, though. Their TV licence is a whopping 462.40 Fr., or £320 a year!
XX It should not be down to politicians to decide what people wear. XX
When it is not worn as a political statement, I would agree.
But Bin bags ARE worn as such.
Better ban tee shirts then.