I get letters constantly threatening me with prosecution. I don’t have a TV licence because I don’t think the output from the BBC is worth paying for. I’m even more determined not to pay because of the constant stream of threatening letters they send me.
I was talking about this to someone, and they told me that people have been jailed for not paying! Not just for a few days, but for a few months! Is this true?
If I was in the same situation as the guy who wrote the article then I would do the same thing as he did. This kind of thing really pisses me off. If the G-men want to get into my house then they’ll have to go to a magistrate and get a search warrant. Bastards!
Yeah, it seems that they do. It is hard for North Americans to understand, but Brits need a licence for their TV’s. I guess that it is really just another tax, but IIRC (and there have been threads about this in the past) there are vans that go around and can detect if there is a TV being used and then they check the address against a DB of people who have paid the licence fee.
They claim that they have detection vans that can detect if you have a TV operating in your home, but this is widely regarded as mostly scaremongering. In reality, it is far more likely that they target people who simply don’t have a TV licence registered at an address.
Herge, I’d have more sympathy for your position if you didn’t watch BBC at all (or listen to the radio stations, use the news services, the website, etc.), but I’m guessing you probably do - correct me if I’m wrong. If a service is (in your opinion) substandard, but you continue to use it, does not exempt you from paying for it.
Also, I believe people are jailed for contempt of court or non-payment of court-raised fines, not directly for non-payment of the license fee.
I also agree, however, that the payment tactics are very heavy-handed; worse so than they are over here (where the state broadcaster really is worthless; the BBC is superb in comparison).
I own a car and live in Washington, DC. I hate having my car registered. The roads are shit here, and the city makes me go through these stupid safety inspections that are designed to point out things that I don’t really think have anything to do with safety – for example, my car would fail the safety inspection if my windshield wipers happened to be in poor condition.
I already pay tons of taxes – DC has something like the second highest state income tax rates in the country, not to mention all the sales taxes and overzealous meter maids that hand out tickets like candy.
Plus, there’s just the whole anti-freedom aspect of being compelled to have numbers displayed on one’s car, upon penalty of law. My grandfather fought the Nazis so that people wouldn’t have to be labeled like this.
That guy in the Spectator column is clearly a hero. He was completely justified in taking out his anger with government policies on the stormtroopers at the local Dixons. The US and the UK are both countries of astounding wealth, and it is completely fascist to believe that citizens should pay for basic government services.
How can we enjoy “freedom” if things are not “free?”
Whatever the rights or wrongs of the BBC’s funding, the government doesn’t see a penny of that money. The BBC and the government are not the same thing.
Not being a European, I have some concern about this.
Lemme get this straight: you are expected to pay a tax of some sort if you have a device in your home capable of receiving broadcast radio waves in some form or fashion?
It’s not a pan-European thing. I don’t need a license for my TV: I do need to pay for my cable package. Which gets more expensive per month. In their defense, they do scrap one channel per month as well, so it all evens out, or something.
But no, the TV I can own without any repercusions, and should I hook it up to a satellite, I don’t pay any taxes on it at all (other than the VAT at purchase, of course).
I’m having problems parsing this. The reason the UK and US governments are wealthy is down to taxation. Without taxation, they’d be shit-poor. If you want services that are free at the point of delivery, you can’t just pull their funding out of your ass - the money has to come from somewhere.
Herge, just out of curiosity, is there a model for broadcasters that you might prefer? E.g. all broadcasters to be privately funded, a la the US.
Correct me if I am wrong but isn’t the BBC mandated by the British government? Didn’t the government have to make the licence fee a law? Doesn’t the fee support the BBC? Put another way, since we already know the BBC is a crown corporation (at least that would be the Canadian term) they would be funded by the government one way or another. The licence fee is the method that the government is using to pay for operating costs. Also, look at the cite that I provided:
The government might not get their hands on the cash, but the cash isn’t there without the government.