I have a free TV licence. I am certainly eligible.
The TV licence fee has gone up by £10.50 today after a price hike was confirmed in December.
Regular licences now cost £169.50 and black and white TV licences face an increase of £3.50, up from £53.50 to £57.
Culture Secretary Lucy Frazer confirmed the 6.7% rise in a statement to MPs last year but added that she was launching a review of the BBC’s funding model.
The fee has previously been frozen for two years.
Sooner or later, the grift must end.
But not everybody needs a licence fee, some are exempt, like if you’re older than 75 and claim pension credit.
Actually, anyone can be exempt. Just stop watching broadcast TV and don’t use BBC iPlayer and cancel your licence. Job done. I don’t even have a TV anymore. So, no licence and no payment of £169.50.
Even the BBC seems to be getting weary of their own grift.
Their latest “suggestion” of having progressive Telly Tax rates for the better off, got zero traction and sank like a lead balloon.
They’re fighting a continual battle between a declining number of license payers, ever increasing budget pressure and their Telly Tax demands being refused inflationary adjustments.
Tim Davie is too Tory for the incoming Labour establishment, so he’ll get replaced ASAP with some Marxist, but even under Labour there’s no appetite for reform other than to make the TV License easier to dodge through decriminalisation of the Telly Tax.
The problem with the BBC proudly displaying their Marxist bias is other than changing the senior executives to make sure they’re all card carrying party members, they don’t need to do anything else because all the middle management are already on message.
Talk of the BBC becoming fully paid for by taxes (a BBC dream going back to inception) will never happen because Labour won’t spend £10 billion a year just to shore up the BBC’s finances as it would make their own lives more difficult. Same applies to adding the Telly Tax to onto other bills like the Council Tax or Electric for the same reason.
So for the foreseeable future the BBC will continue to struggle and decline.
Good.
’They’re fighting a continual battle…’
No, a LOSING one.
Almost the same here – got rid of my license years ago. I download movies etc via the evil bit torrent- the only cost is for my vpn. The vpn also comes in handy on holiday if i’m using free wifi – i also route it via my vpn. Gave up the license becuase there wasn’t anything i wanted to watch on any channel.
Coming up on a dozen years for me. I’ve still got a CRT idiot lantern so that hasn’t been able to show anything since they switched the analogue signal off shortly after the 2012 Olympics. When it or the DVD player attached to it stop working I’ll figure out if I want to replace it with (if at all).
Since Mrs L died, I’ve hardly used it. A weekend back, I took the cover off as I knew the screen had been deteriorating. It is now unusable, so it went out in the junk. I’m in the process of renovating and decorating the house for a new relationship. She isn’t interested in the TV either, so that’s that really.
Congratulations!
Thankyou.
Clarissa – “CRT idiot lantern”…
Priceless – a thousand upticks!