Why we should shut these bastards down now and add TV Licensing to the unemployment figures.
Raze White City to the ground and cast salt upon the earth…
Hat tip: Biased BBC
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42 comments to BBC, destroy, now |
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They should be proud to have been in Jail fighting against Statism. I would make some T-Shirts.
White City should be converted into The Museum of Propaganda.
Some say it already has.
Sounds to me that if Guy Fawkes were around now, he’d not be going after Parliament – it would be White City the sappers would be digging under. I’d help set the fuse, I would.
BTW, if you’re a gov’t watcher for the NuLabor masters, I’m a Yank, so you can just kiss my fat a$$. This is horrible and Kafkaesque in the worst way.
I suppose it’s not possible to swear out a criminal complaint (perjury) against the person responsible for seeking the arrest warrant, and also filing a civil action against him for false arrest and/or abuse of process? Seems to me it would be worth the effort, even if both wind up being dismissed, simply to cause him grief and to send a message.
Laird- spot on. That’s what I would do. It’s police harrassment. I think you’d win too, if you kept your nerve and insisted on an accurate picture of wanton and unjustified arrest and detention.
A detail I couldn’t glean from the links – had the guy paid, but TV licensing had lost the record of his payment, or had they forgotten to send him a renewal notice? Either way it stinks, but it’s always handy to know the full story.
Further developments.
I wonder how many other British families have sat down together and seriously discussed emigrating as we have. So far we have elected to stay, our daughter has just got settled in a new school and besides, all my ties are here, everything I love is here, but if something like this ever happened to me I think that I would find myself unable to stay.
I am typing this with such deep sadness at what has happened to a country that I used to be proud to be a part of. I feel powerless to do anything to reverse the decline of our most basic rights.
Philip,
This doesn’t really have anything to do with the BBC, more with “the unique way it is funded” – tax-farming by Capita – and the way the safeguards against the oppressive use of court procedures have been reduced in the name of ‘efficiency’.
I was listening to R4 today. They led World at One with Osborne, then they had an interview with Mandelsohn. At 2 they led the news again with Osborne. At 3 they led with Mandelsohn trotting out the concentrating on hard-working families crap, then Smith & Hillsborough. Maybe somebody at the BBC got a phone call, wrong headlines, change them.
Guy,
I would say that this has everything to do with the BBC. By stating that the responsibility rests with the outsourced provider, Capita, the moral charge against the BBC, but from which their funding is supplied, becomes diluted. This is a similar ‘let off’ for the Minister who knew something was going on but offloads responsibility on the quango.
Capita are culpable for the crap service and this particular unfortunate outcome. The BBC sets the framework. Any companies responsible are contracted by the BBC to undertake this task.
There are some who say that we should privatise the BBC and maintain its service as a whole. It should be broken up and sold off. Given the goodwill value, perhaps we could sell the brandname to the Arabs as an acronym.
A licence to recieve TV signals….
Really, it’s not funny anymore. Please stop this sick joke.
I would not be surprised if in the next 5-10 years a government decides to tax internet access.
I would not be surprised if in the next 5-10 years a government decides to tax internet access.
According to this link from over two years ago, someone already has.
Clicky(Link)
The BBC sets the framework
No it doesn’t. It lobbies for increases in licence fee, but essentially it only takes and spends the money. Its spending decisions it is culpable for, and I think the criticism of those would be the same whatever the form of taxation it was paid for from. The licence fee framework and the powers exercised are granted by the government.
Your line is like blaming the benefit recipient or the NHS for the behaviour of HMRC. You may not approve of them having the money, but it is not reasonable to condemn them for taking it, nor to imagine they can be expected to give any thought to how it is collected.
The BBC want to get rid of the licence fee which is expensive to collect and getting increasinly unpopular, and replace it with an internet tax, collected by ISPs and thus unavoidable. So far as I know, they’re already claiming you need a licence to watch stuff on their shitty website.
OFCOM ultimately want some kind of internet tax funding not just the BBC, but vastly more welfare for wankers, right across every kind of media including publicly paid for web content.
That’s why we need to be very cautious about “abolish the licence fee” campaigns. If they succeed, they’ll succeed in the government going away to “consult” and coming back with some even more heinous tax. The only worthwhile campaign is an Abolish The BBC campaign (not privatise; close it down).
What an absolute shocker about those poor people being victimised by the State in the guise of the BBC – and how sad it seems to me. I am a British expat and had not realised this sort of thing had been going on in the UK. But you know, if you combine the State control aspects of this with the added dimension of how the Beeb seems to have progressively arrived at its current execrable level of quality of Internet news coverage/reporting, I do think the Beeb – or more likely the archaic thinking inherent in the Beeb Board of Governors – has effectively made the Beeb redundant. A sort of suicide. I thus very regretfully agree with this blog post – it looks like it has to go. No question. But this is not all of the matter.
The compulsory TV tax (sorry, licence fee) was always “wrong” in my view, but I could never figure out a better alternative to it – the commercial TV output was (and is) generally of such poor quality (yes, I am sure there are exceptions) that they were not a real alternative at all, and falling back on dumbed-down documentaries from US satellite transmissions was certainly no alternative to the unsurpassable quality of most BBC documentaries. This is about education in general knowledge, via TV.
What I mean about quality of news reporting is this: My earliest recollections of the BBC are from times when, as a child in the ’50s, I would listen, fascinated to the big old multi-valve radio in our living room. It could receive transmissions on Long, Medium and (after I had rigged up an extended outside aerial wire) 3-bands of Short Wave. I would listen to world news reports from the BBC, from the US (Voice of America), from the USSR (in English) and China (in English).
The UK and US news reports were roughly similar in having a relatively unbiased tone, and I could understand them, though some of the differences in their non-news items were perplexing – e.g., I had to work hard to understand what Billy Graham’s radio evangelism was all about.
“How can the Russian and Chinese news broadcasts report the news with such different views?” I once asked my parents, and received the answer “They are designed to make you think in a particular way, whereas the BBC and the US news reports are not – at least, not since the wartime propaganda finished.”
Having thus experienced since childhood the relatively objective quality of reporting of world news and the superb quality of entertainment (e.g., The Goons) on BBC radio, and later, on TV (when there were no independent radio or TV broadcasters in the UK), I suppose I became spoiled. It was so good. I loved Radio Caroline when it came on the air with its music – I slowly forgot to tune in any more to radio Luxembourg! But nothing could eclipse the Beeb for news, intellectual entertainment (plays and documentaries), new music (e.g., Top of the Pops, The Old Grey Whistle Test) and humour. Even if this is still the case, it does not justify continuing to put up with the sort of State control recently reported.
The BBC Internet news reporting and World Service TV used to be the standard of honesty by which I judged all others. However, I now think they are about as reliable as Al-Jazeera TV. The Beeb now seems to allow hugely inadequate and biased reporting of international affairs, and seems to hush any reference that could perhaps be deemed critical to feel-good liberalisms anent the state of affairs internationally or at home – especially political and sociological issues. For example:
(a) The direction that so-called “human rights” are being pushed by the UN (e.g., the proposal to make “defamation of region” a criminal offence, or “upsetting the feelings of religious believers”. This is important international news about limiting free speech, and legalising sectarianism and ideological fascism.)
(b) The current fiasco in 10 Downing street over Labour-initiated smear campaigns (that’s important home political news and comment about corrupt practices);
(c) The creeping Islamification and introduction of Shariah law in those once-British cities/towns (e.g., Leeds) where there are cohesive pockets of Muslims (that’s important home sociological news and comment).
No, the BBC must not talk of these things which are amongst the proverbial “elephants in the room”. Well, if the BBC cannot report, discuss and critique them, then of what use is the BBC except as a State propaganda machine, and what of the nation’s much-vaunted freedom of speech? I think it is criminal for the British public to be forced by the State to continue to pay tax to this propaganda machine, under threat of imprisonment. This is extortion. “Not only will you hear and see what we want you to hear and see, but by golly we will make you pay for it as well.”
“How’s that for unbiased?” – as Groucho Marx might have put it.
BBC
TICK TOCK, TICK TOCK, TICK TOCK
EVERY BREATH YOU TAKE
EVERY MOVE YOU MAKE
WE WILL BE WATCHING YOU
Can you please leave the honor of obliterating the BBC to the Israelis, since the BBC (Belsen Broadcasting Corporation) is nothing more than an English language Der Stuermer bent on bring about a Second Holocaust?
“You may not approve of them having the money, but it is not reasonable to condemn them for taking it, nor to imagine they can be expected to give any thought to how it is collected.”
Why the hell not? If someone stole money from me and you (knowing this) accepted it from this person, then I’d damn you for taking it.
Are you really trying to say that the BBC has no moral culpability whatsoever for this kind of thing?
I’m with Philip and Ian B – I want the BBC abolished because I want an end to publicly institutionalised theft, propaganda funded by such theft and the heinous James Naughtie.
I’ll be gone by christmas, thank goodness. This ship is sinking, and I’m not ashamed to be a proverbial rat.
Slartibartfast, I think it’s wrong to think that the BBC has lost its impartiality and become biased. A lot of people present this POV and thus want it to “go back to the old days”, for instance. But it was always biased. It’s impossible for any news source, or anyone making any statement of significance, to be unbiased. This ties into the myth of “balanced, objective journalism”. There is no such thing, and the belief that there can be distorts our view of the media. Bias is in the eye of the beholder. The right winger sees Fox News as unbiased, and MSNBC or the BBC as biased; the left winger sees the reverse. The libertarian probably sees the bias in both, but would treat a libertarian news source, were one to exist, as unbiased.
The BBC has always presented the prevailing “establishment” view; that view held by the political/ruling class. In Reith’s day, that was more “conservative”. What has changed isn’t the BBC, it is the establishment, which has drifted to the hard left. The establishment is now Guardianistas, and so that is what we get from the BBC. We will never get a state broadcasting service that isn’t a pulpit for the political class to disseminate their values. That’s why it has to go (besides the awful funding method, distortion of the free market, and all that stuff). There is no more justification for a BBC that “educates” the people in conservative or libertarian values than in the current post-marxist ones. Propaganda is ubiquitous; no particular view should have a massively powerful organisation propagandising on its behalf, paid for by extracting money with menaces.
My son had 2 cops turn up at his door one evening with a warrant because he had several unpaid parking tickets. They explained the seriousness of the situation and told him to pay them the next day otherwise he would be arrested. Needless to say he paid the next day. Emigrate to Canada, I did.
When we used to work in London we would occasionally get warnings in the mail from the TV people. In big bold black letters it told us we would be jailed if we didn’t pay for our license.
The problem of course was we had never owned a television.
I’m not easily offended but the thought of these clown sending out warnings of jailtime willy nilly across the country would really piss me off.
Here in OZ, we don’t have TV licenses. We just get slogged through our taxes to pay for the ABC. A few years back, they were saying the average Australian paid ‘just 8 cents a day’, as though ‘payment’ was voluntary. Whilst we do get some good shows on it, I would prefer tax-freedom to Doctor Who, or The Bill.
Abolish the BBC asap! Nuff said.
Mike,
Why the hell not?
Do you speak as a man who has never used any product of taxation? The NHS? Roads? Or is taxation only theft someone else takes adavantage of it?
The way due process has been abused, undermined, bypassed or just plain trodden upon mirrors the same mechanisms for parking fines and speeding tickets.
A bad tax/law needs yet more bad law to enforce it.
The BBC are at fault for allowing the collection “in their name”. Conspiracy to subvert the Rule of Law? Living off immoral earnings?
Capita? State whores. I’d expect McBride to fit in nicely.
Do I expect the Tories to resolve this? No.
Sure, as soon as we obliterate our own version. Don’t hold your breath though.
Guy that’s a bollocks argument. Roads and the NHS are obviously different from the BBC. Nobody would argue that roads and healthcare aren’t vital. The BBC isn’t. It never was. Nowadays it is but one of many, many broadcasters. The point is if every BBC facility was emped this afternoon we’d all just watch Sky and ITV etc, etc.
The same cannot be said about roads or the NHS. Philip’s argument, and that of many comentators here is that the BBC ought to be scrapped entirely. Nobody says the same about the roads or the NHS. Privatize ’em, yes. The only way your comparison holds is if you’d be prepared to plough-up the M1 and board-up the Royal London.
Ian B at April 20, 2009 02:50 AM
Absolutely nails it. Can I borrow that for Counting Cats?
The only thing that I would quibble with in Ian B’s comment is that the Establishment has ‘drifted to the hard left’.
It hasn’t been a drift, it’s been a Gramscian march.
The institutions – Academia, Media, the CofE, Civil Service and Politics – have been steadily taken over by the socialists and we are seeing the results now.
They’ve not only acheived their goal of taking over, but they are well on their way to making any disagreement with their policies anathema, if not downright illegal.
This is where the media, especially but not exclusively the BBC, are essential to the socialists. The overt political bias of the Beeb is one thing, but the way they set the terms of the public debate – in everything from Climate Change to terrorism to sexual mores to which demonstrations are good and which are by hard right racist nutjobs – enables the demonisation of any dissenting views, and scares the voters away from any party which challenges the socialist agenda.
And this is not done by the News department alone. Everything from soap operas to science programs is tainted by the Beeb’s leftism. I used to enjoy watching their nature programs, but now every program spends at least 10% of it’s time subtly, or not so subtly, castigating man for ‘destroying the Earth’.
All of which makes being forced to pay for it doubly offensive. But then we’ve all got used to being robbed at gunpoint to pay for our own enslavement.
Silly me, I always thought a court of law would contact you to enable you to state your case, not convict you in absentia when you had not even been told of the case, date, time etc. Then to press for an arrest owing to none payment of fine…………..er the fine goes to the court not the BBC so it is the court that should contact you saying unless it was paid by X a warrent would be issued. This lack of communication here seems very, very strange.
If you like Nick. Most flattering 🙂
Guy,
Do you speak as a man who has not suffered his values to be stolen from him by the State, and has not then been told it is for the good of society by the BBC?
Why do you get off so on such obscene pedantry?
The general tone of these comments is that it’s OK to not pay taxes for stuff you don’t think is essential. It’s an understandable reaction, but not really very far sighted.
Campaign against the license fee or the BBC itself by all means, but don’t be surprised when you get taken to court for non payment of fines. The heavy handedness of the license fee collectors appears to be frequently matched by the extreme stupidity of the general public, who think that if you keep on throwing letters away you’ll magically escape having to do anything.
Guy, you say
‘You may not approve of them (the BBC) having the money, but it is not reasonable to condemn them for taking it, nor to imagine they can be expected to give any thought to how it is collected.’
Wrong.
The BBC is the Television Licensing Authority. It has full reponsibility under the law for collecting the licence fee and can choose to do the job with its own staff or to subcontract the work to other comapnies. The bbc has freely chosen Capita to do the work and obviously fuly approves of their methods.
J,
Going to jail on a point of principle is precisely the point of not paying taxes, though it seems that the couple in question did not have this in mind. Disobedience to the rotten law however, must not only be principled, it must be socially organised to be effective.
Capita is a dreadful company – one of those firms that specialises in corrupt cooperation with the state.
In the United States the leading example is General Electric.
As for the B.B.C.
Its support of the left is not new – as “That was the week that was” in the early 1960’s showed.
No “satire” about (for example) the failings of the National Health Service – but plenty of “satire” about Conservatives and conservative values and principles. Interestingly the Conservative Prime Minister of the time (Super Mac) agreed with a lot of the “rebel” stuff on the show (as he was basically a 1930’s “Progressive” himself).
The change has been that there used to be a lot of apolitical comedy (and other stuff) on the B.B.C. – but the proportion of this nonleftist stuff has shrunk over time.
Now it is viturally all left and far left stuff.
It is blatent.
Which, in a way, is good – as the mask is torn for all to see.
So he was arrested for non-payment of fines?
So what? How else would fines be enforced?
Why didn’t he just pay the fine when he got it? That way he wouldn’t have been arrested.
@Ian B
I would concur with your suggestion that “…it’s wrong to think that the BBC has lost its impartiality and become biased.”, though I distrust people who might seem to suggest that I could be “wrong-thinking”.
I only ever regarded the Beeb as being “relatively unbiased” (that was the term I used). Certainly, I understand the impossibility of anyone – especially a journalist – being able to be truly objective and impartial. I’d have to believe that pigs could fly, first.
No, what I have noticed is that the Beeb’s bias seems to be really showing nowadays – which is why I have stopped paying them much attention. I don’t much care whether they lean a bit to the right or to left to suit the Gestablishment – that would be unavoidable – but if they’ve now taken to driving off to one side of the road altogether, then anything they utter cannot be trusted, and goodness knows what they are omitting to mention to us. No honest reporting there, that’s for sure.
It sometimes seems to me that the only person who is capable of giving a balanced view of world affairs nowadays is that great statesman, the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
By the way, I had been meaning to ask you this for some time now: are you the same Ian B who used to work at a small company called DRS in Milton Keynes?
@chip
That’s interesting. If you do not have or use a TV and if you nevertheless get occasional warnings in the mail from the TV people, saying in big bold black letters that you would be jailed if you didn’t pay for a TV licence that you did not have to have, then that could be construed as unnecessarily threatening, extortion, vexatious or aggravated nuisance.
You either put up with it or not. The majority of people would probably prefer the first option.
Have you ever considered taking out an injunction against the company sending you the threatening mail?
If you did that, then they would be obliged to sharpen up their mailshot targeting, or suffer a fine. This could benefit a lot of people, and not just yourself. It could snowball. Anybody has the legal right to take out such an injunction for that sort of thing – if they want. You don’t necessarily have to be a vexatiously litigious person either.
I’d suggest that you chat with a lawyer about it. Might be worth a crack if not too expensive – and you’d not be putting up with it either.