FFS!

As has already been mentioned in the comments. This is outrageous, if not unexpected.

The BBC TV licence fee could be scrapped and replaced by funding from general taxation under plans reportedly being considered by Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy.

She is said to be minded to abolish the annual fee at the end of the Corporation’s current charter in December 2027.

And there were reports last night that the money to fund programmes would instead come from taxes collected by the Government.

Ms Nandy is already exploring plans to turn the BBC into a mutual organisation where it would effectively be owned by the public.

The annual cost of the TV licence is already due to raise by £5 this April to £174.50 and will increase in line with inflation each year until 2027.

Last year, Ms Nandy promised there would be ‘an honest national conversation about the broadcaster’s long-term future’.

I and many others have made a conscious decision not to fund this hideous organisation. It should be made to stand on its own two feet, not be propped up by our tax money. Of course, a Labour government cannot read the room or choose not to. So they will simply steal the money we have been withholding.

However, last night, Whitehall sources suggested that she had already thought that the licence fee had to go although final decisions had yet to be reached.

One source told the Sunday Times: ‘Lisa does not believe that the licence fee is financially sustainable

Of course it isn’t. That’s the point we are making. We don’t want to fund this monstrosity. So forcing it through general taxation is a massive betrayal.

The Whitehall source said: ‘People have been saying for more than a decade now that the licence fee is an anachronism.

‘But then they keep going back to it.

‘Keir is prepared to think more radically.’

Stealing the money from general taxation is not thinking more radically. It is the precise opposite. Telling the BBC that they are on their own would be radical.

11 Comments

  1. “People have been saying for more than a decade now that the licence fee is an anachronism.”

    I’ve been saying it for a lot more than a decade. It became an anachronism when video recorders became common, multi channel satellite TV made it more so. Since the 1980s then, around four decades.

    • Not just the BBC but almost all of our institutions fall into the same category. NHS, education social services, welfare system, BBC etc. were all good ideas in their day but have now expanded so far beyond their original remit as to be unrecognisable and, arguably, so much of a burden they now have a negative effect on the country.
      The only solution l see is to look at all of them and ask what can the country reasonably expect (and afford) to be provided by those bodies and then scale them back to the appropriate level.
      Sadly, any party willing to reimagine the current state structure is unlikely to gain the power to change it.

      • I was thinking roughly the same thing. The Beeb tax would sort of be a drop in the ocean of all of the things that the government steals our money to spend on.

  2. Looking for a silver lining… if the BBC was funded by taxation then sooner or later it would one of those ‘extras’ that a government reduces to balance the books, or if too many people no longer watched it. On the cloudy side the BBC would feel obliged to suck up to the government that controls the funds.

  3. “a mutual organisation where it would effectively be owned by the public.” Not sure how that differs from today, practically if not legally.

    In practice I think that it would mean more government control and influence not less: at present the BBC probably takes some notice of public opinion about programmes. It may end up “owned by the public” but they will have no input into its running or productions.

  4. If Al Beeb is funded from general taxation, and this becomes a propaganda arm of the government, let’s hope the Monster Raving Loony Party get elected next time. By then, we could probably do with a laugh.

  5. The government could always sell (or give) it to the Guardian – they would be well suited to each other!

  6. Here in New Zealand, we don’t have a TV licence, it is all done by commercials. The Government is involved somewhere, I have no idea where but the stations live or die unaided. The programmes are mostly Crap, think Love Island and Ru Pauls Drag Race, but at least it is free crap.
    The idea of funding the lefty love in that the BBC has become, by general taxation is about right for this, the worst Government I have encountered in my long life.

  7. This has been predicted for a while.

    It’s THE most blatant “fuck you” possible to critics of the boy buggering commune so is pretty well inevitable.

    Wonder how much this is driven by the need to fund bloated pensions (how much of the current – severely declining – extortion is currently needed for this?)

  8. “Radical”, from the Latin radix, “root”. The root of this situation isn’t the “licence fee”; it’s that we have a corporation dominating the media which believes it has a right to exist.

    So the radical solution is to abolish it.

    “a mutual organisation where it would effectively be owned by the public.”

    No, not “effectively”. If it were effectively owned by the public, then members of the public would, as Barbarus suggests, be able to effect a disposal of their shares. It would be nominally owned by the public, as it is now as a “public corporation”. For all the good it does us.

Comments are closed.