If they want to replace the licence fee an alternative that's well-considered must be ready to go.
Cackhanded short-termist tinkering tomfoolery is what gave us devolved bodies everywhere except England. Lack of planning also meant leaving the EU was handled very poorly indeed.
Just not liking the licence fee is not sufficient because there has to be something.
Of course Dorries hasn’t the intelligence for that sort of thing, so she’s just announced that it will go and told the BBC to work out how they are going to be funded in future. Obviously anything they come up with won’t satisfy the Govt one way or another (either because it transfers costs to general taxation, focuses on areas the govt doesn’t support, proposed things which will give it greater independence (and therefore freedom from Govt interference), is unpopular with real Tory core supporters (as opposed to activists), at which point...
Of course we should abolish the TV license - its 2022. But the problem that the Dorries "intelligentsia" have with the BBC isn't the license fee, its that it exists. And even if the "we'll scrap the fee in 2027 3 years after we lose power!!!" threat had any teeth that wouldn't be the end.
We pay for so much content already. What difference does a BBC subscription make? I'd pay it happily. Spin the commercial arm back out and the BBC can make cash to pay for all the FTA stuff like radio. Done.
Labour need to get all over this. Who is their culture spokesperson?
Rachel Wearmouth @REWearmouth · 5h 'Vote Conservative to end the BBC' doesn't sound like an election-winning slogan, does it?
It would be surprisingly popular. However, that's not the choice.
The choice is:
Vote Conservative and the BBC will continue but you won't have to pay for it by threat of imprisonment and you'll only pay for it if you want it.
Or:
Vote Labour and the status quo remains and your granny might end up in prison for owning a telly.
Ditching the licence fee actually seems like good, progressive politics to me as it's not the rich who end up in trouble for not paying their licence fee at the end of the day and for younger people who would rather watch Netflix or YouTube the whole concept of the licence fee is just bizarre...
I'm surprised Labour is so wedded to a telly tax.
Labour should be massively in favour, of ending the single most regressive tax in the country, which takes up so much court time and prison time, giving people criminal records which can be held against them later in life, for the crime of not contributing to Gary Lineker’s seven figure salary.
To be fair I doubt it is prison time. More like wasting time in the civil courts. The main reason why Labour are so keen on the BBC are because it is part of the 'left liberal' establishment which is a large part of its power base. Looking at the BBC, the problem is that a lot of its news coverage etc is not impartial or objective anymore, and the intolerant "woke" agenda has seeped in to a large part of its output. We have had 5 years of Conservative government trying to tackle this, but they get nowhere. So it is reasonable to conclude that there is no hope. On the other hand, its about £10 a month. Not a big deal compared to the coming doubling of energy bills.
Not the civil courts, the criminal courts. TV licence violations are 10% of all cases heard by magistrates, and are mostly poor people with chaotic lives, either unable to afford the licence or guilty of nothing more than administrative errors. A disproportionate number of women and minorities receive criminal records for licence fee evasion. The penalty is a fine, and those imprisoned are for failing to pay the fine.
In any other circumstance, Labour MPs would be all over this, but they like the BBC more than they care about the 200k poor people receiving criminal records every year.
I stand corrected. I thought that the license fee was decriminalised, but see that the government have yet to make a decision about that, so they have chickened out of it. The situation is far worse than I thought, based on that data (which dates back to 2013, but I doubt much has changed). At the very least, the enforcement of the licensing fee should be made a civil matter and no one should be going to prison over it. The whole situation is a complete disgrace.
The problem with a compulsory-but-decriminalised licence fee, is that you end up with bailiffs going to granny’s house with a court order to seize the TV.
As I said on yesterday’s thread, trying to explain to a foreigner the concept of the licence fee, is even more difficult than trying to explain the NHS.
You’ve said this before but its total bollocks. Plenty of countries have a form of TV licence.
Germany, France, Japan, etc.
Just reading about Germany, it sounds like households pay irrespective of whether they have a tv or not.
Personally I’d like to scrap the license fee as I have to pay through the nose for the stuff I actually watch (live sport) and I don’t see why I have to pay for eastbenders.
However, what I find particularly odd about the license fee is that it’s a household poll tax. A student (okay, I bet none bother these days) have to pay the same fee as the Queen in Windsor castle. Surely it would be better to tag it on to council tax so that the higher bands pay more.
Well yes, I agree.
I don’t really support the tv license but I do support the BBC.
You really do a hopeless job of making an argument sometimes. You can hardly deride the Conservatives for making populist pitches to “abolish the licence fee” (as a stealth long term attack on the BBC) whilst basically advertising yourself as a ready recipient of that populist pitch.
I appreciate your feedback but I’m not really trying to make an argument. Merely to give my own opinion.
If they want to replace the licence fee an alternative that's well-considered must be ready to go.
Cackhanded short-termist tinkering tomfoolery is what gave us devolved bodies everywhere except England. Lack of planning also meant leaving the EU was handled very poorly indeed.
Just not liking the licence fee is not sufficient because there has to be something.
Mr. W, be fair. "Navy ordered to shoot illegal immigrants" will probably take at least one day's headlines away from "PM remains incompetent, lying fool".
RN are currently in a replacement cycle for their interceptor boats, but the 60 or so new ones won't arrive for a year or two.
Good morning fellow pb-ers. And the lurkers .... you know who you are.
I find the idea of using the Navy to turn back or otherwise 'obstruct' migrants very troubling. I'm quite sure it will be 'popular' in the bars of Conservative Clubs, but the idea of saving lives at sea is, as I understand it, widely held among those who actually are at sea, and should an overloaded dinghy turned around, sink and lives be lost, then whether the Government could cope with the natural revulsion in the Admiralty has to be 'doubtful'.
The Greek and Australian navies did it when ordered to. The RN would be no different. A possible difference is that they'll probably be doing it live on Sky News given the relative proximity of operations in the channel.
Noted. I seem to recall revulsion though, at what happened in the Aegean Sea.
But did solidarity make anyone else in Europe help them out?
Of course Ms Burley has such excellent credentials wrt to covid rules......
Doesn't change the fact 2 journalists have said from at least 2 sources that Boris was both responsible for the party and lied about it.
Or the fact that at least one of them is a known Labour supporter who wasn't sacked when she and several of her colleagues broke covid rules. I'm sure she will be equally diligent in probing Sir Keir's rule breach ..
Good morning fellow pb-ers. And the lurkers .... you know who you are.
I find the idea of using the Navy to turn back or otherwise 'obstruct' migrants very troubling. I'm quite sure it will be 'popular' in the bars of Conservative Clubs, but the idea of saving lives at sea is, as I understand it, widely held among those who actually are at sea, and should an overloaded dinghy turned around, sink and lives be lost, then whether the Government could cope with the natural revulsion in the Admiralty has to be 'doubtful'.
The Greek and Australian navies did it when ordered to. The RN would be no different. A possible difference is that they'll probably be doing it live on Sky News given the relative proximity of operations in the channel.
Noted. I seem to recall revulsion though, at what happened in the Aegean Sea.
But did solidarity make anyone else in Europe help them out?
Labour need to get all over this. Who is their culture spokesperson?
Rachel Wearmouth @REWearmouth · 5h 'Vote Conservative to end the BBC' doesn't sound like an election-winning slogan, does it?
It would be surprisingly popular. However, that's not the choice.
The choice is:
Vote Conservative and the BBC will continue but you won't have to pay for it by threat of imprisonment and you'll only pay for it if you want it.
Or:
Vote Labour and the status quo remains and your granny might end up in prison for owning a telly.
Ditching the licence fee actually seems like good, progressive politics to me as it's not the rich who end up in trouble for not paying their licence fee at the end of the day and for younger people who would rather watch Netflix or YouTube the whole concept of the licence fee is just bizarre...
I'm surprised Labour is so wedded to a telly tax.
Labour should be massively in favour, of ending the single most regressive tax in the country, which takes up so much court time and prison time, giving people criminal records which can be held against them later in life, for the crime of not contributing to Gary Lineker’s seven figure salary.
To be fair I doubt it is prison time. More like wasting time in the civil courts. The main reason why Labour are so keen on the BBC are because it is part of the 'left liberal' establishment which is a large part of its power base. Looking at the BBC, the problem is that a lot of its news coverage etc is not impartial or objective anymore, and the intolerant "woke" agenda has seeped in to a large part of its output. We have had 5 years of Conservative government trying to tackle this, but they get nowhere. So it is reasonable to conclude that there is no hope. On the other hand, its about £10 a month. Not a big deal compared to the coming doubling of energy bills.
Not the civil courts, the criminal courts. TV licence violations are 10% of all cases heard by magistrates, and are mostly poor people with chaotic lives, either unable to afford the licence or guilty of nothing more than administrative errors. A disproportionate number of women and minorities receive criminal records for licence fee evasion. The penalty is a fine, and those imprisoned are for failing to pay the fine.
In any other circumstance, Labour MPs would be all over this, but they like the BBC more than they care about the 200k poor people receiving criminal records every year.
I stand corrected. I thought that the license fee was decriminalised, but see that the government have yet to make a decision about that, so they have chickened out of it. The situation is far worse than I thought, based on that data (which dates back to 2013, but I doubt much has changed). At the very least, the enforcement of the licensing fee should be made a civil matter and no one should be going to prison over it. The whole situation is a complete disgrace.
The problem with a compulsory-but-decriminalised licence fee, is that you end up with bailiffs going to granny’s house with a court order to seize the TV.
As I said on yesterday’s thread, trying to explain to a foreigner the concept of the licence fee, is even more difficult than trying to explain the NHS.
You’ve said this before but its total bollocks. Plenty of countries have a form of TV licence.
Germany, France, Japan, etc.
Sweden abolished it in 2018. Popular all round.
And that’s fair enough, but its another country very familiar with the concept.
Your point being?
I thought that was obvious. @Sandpit has been repeating bollocks about having to pay a tax for tv/media being alien to foreigners and it clearly isn’t.
That’s nothing to do with the merits of it mind.
I wasn’t aware of Japan, but otherwise it’s very much a Western European concept.
Wiki reckons only 15 countries have something like a licence fee, covering around 3% of the world’s population. So 97% of people haven’t grown up with the concept.
Labour need to get all over this. Who is their culture spokesperson?
Rachel Wearmouth @REWearmouth · 5h 'Vote Conservative to end the BBC' doesn't sound like an election-winning slogan, does it?
It would be surprisingly popular. However, that's not the choice.
The choice is:
Vote Conservative and the BBC will continue but you won't have to pay for it by threat of imprisonment and you'll only pay for it if you want it.
Or:
Vote Labour and the status quo remains and your granny might end up in prison for owning a telly.
Ditching the licence fee actually seems like good, progressive politics to me as it's not the rich who end up in trouble for not paying their licence fee at the end of the day and for younger people who would rather watch Netflix or YouTube the whole concept of the licence fee is just bizarre...
I'm surprised Labour is so wedded to a telly tax.
Labour should be massively in favour, of ending the single most regressive tax in the country, which takes up so much court time and prison time, giving people criminal records which can be held against them later in life, for the crime of not contributing to Gary Lineker’s seven figure salary.
To be fair I doubt it is prison time. More like wasting time in the civil courts. The main reason why Labour are so keen on the BBC are because it is part of the 'left liberal' establishment which is a large part of its power base. Looking at the BBC, the problem is that a lot of its news coverage etc is not impartial or objective anymore, and the intolerant "woke" agenda has seeped in to a large part of its output. We have had 5 years of Conservative government trying to tackle this, but they get nowhere. So it is reasonable to conclude that there is no hope. On the other hand, its about £10 a month. Not a big deal compared to the coming doubling of energy bills.
Could you give an example of woke agenda creeping into BBC? Its all news, sports, radio and celebs to me....
IIRC Labour also had problems with the BBC - wasnt it the dodgy dossier Iraq story that saw all the pain and misery and of course the strange death of Dr Kelly, not to mention the DG Greg Dyke's departure - this idea that BBC news is anti Tory is a nonsense... it just keeps reporting difficult stories.
The example I gave yesterday was 6 Music presenters continually praising BLM in the summer of 2020. It wouldn't care if it was a commercial station, but to hear it from a supposedly impartial, objective public service broadcaster felt a bit too close to communism.
There are other examples, but that was the worst one.
Ah yes, the classic being against racism woke agenda. Give your head a shake.
Well in my case I just turned the radio off, which fortunately I am free to do.
Were BBC6 music presenters taking a serious anti racist stance, then I might look at the situation in a different way; but lots of racism is ignored and could never be condemned in the same way on a public service broadcaster - racism through deportations of foreign born people by the government, racism through the stripping of citizenship of dual nationals etc etc. So, unfashionable racism. As I have said previously, BLM have little really to do with fighting racism and everything to do with identity and power. If the people in the BBC are too politicised to see this then the whole organisation should be defunded, they can peddle their propoganda on the open market, a sort of 'fox news plus' for the progressive left.
Of course Ms Burley has such excellent credentials wrt to covid rules......
You can hardly blame her for sticking the boot in. Not from a “taking the moral high ground” perspective but as one who did actually suffer consequences for her rule breaking. It would be different if she’d been basically let off with a light slap in the wrist.
Of course we should abolish the TV license - its 2022. But the problem that the Dorries "intelligentsia" have with the BBC isn't the license fee, its that it exists. And even if the "we'll scrap the fee in 2027 3 years after we lose power!!!" threat had any teeth that wouldn't be the end.
We pay for so much content already. What difference does a BBC subscription make? I'd pay it happily. Spin the commercial arm back out and the BBC can make cash to pay for all the FTA stuff like radio. Done.
The commercial arm, BBC Worldwide, is already separate.
In any event the BBC is already preparing itself for the abolishment of the license fee in my opinion, and has been for some time.
iPlayer is obviously already fairly separate and can easily be put behind a subscription wall. Radio is the same with the BBC Sounds brand and associated apps.
I was told an aide directly questioned Boris about his plan to attend the Downing Street party. Dominic Lawson was told the same thing. As, reportedly, was @KayBurley. So the question is who's lying. The people we have all talked to independently. Or No 10. https://twitter.com/DPJHodges/status/1482989145035358210
So the liar is still there and breaking the BBC is offered up as the ultimate dead cat. Politics is tediously predictable.
I wonder how far the concept of opt in subscription will go. Can is be applied to other things in government? An NHS membership? Join the nuclear defence club? No reason why not technically?
I was told an aide directly questioned Boris about his plan to attend the Downing Street party. Dominic Lawson was told the same thing. As, reportedly, was @KayBurley. So the question is who's lying. The people we have all talked to independently. Or No 10. https://twitter.com/DPJHodges/status/1482989145035358210
It doesn't make any difference because Boris won't go.
However, there is a simple test to see if Boris lying to you - his lips are moving and sound is coming out*
* this may not be true 100% of the time but it's safer to operate on the basis that a pack of lies designed to get him through the next 30 minutes is coming from his mouth
Is not party politics just organised hypocrisy? If they do it, it's villainy of the highest order, If we do it, there's always a good excuse. Starmer does have a tendency to look guilty when defending hypocrisy. It makes him a nice person, but not a good politician.
BoJo's basically a lazy sod. Masterly inactivity can be useful, but not combined with waffle and ignorance. His main crime for me? Never finishing a sentence unless someone gives him a script.
I was told an aide directly questioned Boris about his plan to attend the Downing Street party. Dominic Lawson was told the same thing. As, reportedly, was @KayBurley. So the question is who's lying. The people we have all talked to independently. Or No 10. https://twitter.com/DPJHodges/status/1482989145035358210
It doesn't make any difference because Boris won't go.
However, there is a simple test to see if Boris lying to you - his lips are moving and sound is coming out*
* this may not be true 100% of the time but it's safer to operate on the basis that a pack of lies designed to get him through the next 30 minutes is coming from his mouth
It’s been mentioned that this may explain the Govt’s apparent willingness to retain masks post January.
Of course Ms Burley has such excellent credentials wrt to covid rules......
I still don’t understand why every single minister doesn’t start their interview with her “Well I see we have an expert on dodgy partying asking the questions today”.
I still don’t understand why every single minister doesn’t start their interview with her “Well I see we have an expert on dodgy partying asking the questions today”.
So, Minister, you admit the party was dodgy. Why hasn't BoZo resigned?
Yet, judging from what I've just heard on @BBCr4today, Conservative MPs are doing a bang-up job of spinning that reaction 'on the doorstep' this weekend wasn't half as bad as they feared. All the polls and focus groups must be wrong, I guess. https://twitter.com/jamesjohnson252/status/1482739732723515396
Boris to use the Navy to stop border crossings of migrants and ban boozing at No 10 and fire failing advisers as he begins a relaunch. Growth will also be turbocharged across the North and Midlands
Everyone wants to turbocharge growth. The problem is that, if there were easy answers, they would have already been done.
Echoes many of the other policies of this government, which are normally heard in the Conservative Club bar, prefaced by "They should just..."
Take the licence fee. It's easy to say that it's a bad thing. In lots of ways, it is. But once you start poking into the details, the suggested alternatives look worse (general taxation gives the government too much power) or fanciful (the rest of the world will be so keen to pay subscriptions for the BBC that we can have it for free).
I don't really see how general taxation gives the government any more power than a license to levy the tax yourself at a level set by the government.
It doesn't. What it might do is force the government to actually have a medium term plan, rather than the current strategy of slowly squeezing the BBC to death, and disclaiming responsibility.
I'd be shocked if Tory MPs allow for masks to linger on with no end date. They'd have to be specifically renewed as well because the mandate expires with plan b.
Feel like it's just a telegraph report intended to help Boris fight them off and show he's a proper Tory.
I was told an aide directly questioned Boris about his plan to attend the Downing Street party. Dominic Lawson was told the same thing. As, reportedly, was @KayBurley. So the question is who's lying. The people we have all talked to independently. Or No 10. https://twitter.com/DPJHodges/status/1482989145035358210
We know who is lying. The Liar in Chief. Everything he says on this subject is a lie.
On R4, Nadhim Zahawi briefly tries to bring up the No 10 counter argument about Keir Starmer needing to apologise but allows Nick Robinson to immediately change the subject back again. Felt a bit like his heart wasn't in that part of the agreed lines to take. https://twitter.com/peterwalker99/status/1482992215647567879
Any Tory that thinks a few populist policies designed to get him through the next news cycle is a reason to retain Johnson is totally deluded. This is not a news cycle issue. Whatever your general view on how much the “partygate” story has been blown up by the media (my view - a great deal) these are not isolated revelations from a few weeks or months ago. This is stuff going back almost two years and indicative of the way Johnson runs his Government. And consequently there are inevitably going to be other examples across the whole slew of Govt that will appear whenever the media and disenchanted insider fancies.
The Tories should thank their lucky stars that it’s coming out now when there might still be time to turn it around and with Labour still some way off presenting a coherent alternative policy narrative. There really is little point in delay (eg. until may elections), when delay cuts into that recovery time. All that will do is make May worse than it might have been and make their Councillor base even more angry. The biggest joke is the idea that somehow Johnson himself is the man to restore authority.
Of course Ms Burley has such excellent credentials wrt to covid rules......
I still don’t understand why every single minister doesn’t start their interview with her “Well I see we have an expert on dodgy partying asking the questions today”.
She probably isn't clever enough, but it would provide the opportunity for her to point out that she didn't lie about it and took her punishment. And wasn't the person who wrote the rules in the first place.
Labour need to get all over this. Who is their culture spokesperson?
Rachel Wearmouth @REWearmouth · 5h 'Vote Conservative to end the BBC' doesn't sound like an election-winning slogan, does it?
It would be surprisingly popular. However, that's not the choice.
The choice is:
Vote Conservative and the BBC will continue but you won't have to pay for it by threat of imprisonment and you'll only pay for it if you want it.
Or:
Vote Labour and the status quo remains and your granny might end up in prison for owning a telly.
Ditching the licence fee actually seems like good, progressive politics to me as it's not the rich who end up in trouble for not paying their licence fee at the end of the day and for younger people who would rather watch Netflix or YouTube the whole concept of the licence fee is just bizarre...
I'm surprised Labour is so wedded to a telly tax.
Labour should be massively in favour, of ending the single most regressive tax in the country, which takes up so much court time and prison time, giving people criminal records which can be held against them later in life, for the crime of not contributing to Gary Lineker’s seven figure salary.
To be fair I doubt it is prison time. More like wasting time in the civil courts. The main reason why Labour are so keen on the BBC are because it is part of the 'left liberal' establishment which is a large part of its power base. Looking at the BBC, the problem is that a lot of its news coverage etc is not impartial or objective anymore, and the intolerant "woke" agenda has seeped in to a large part of its output. We have had 5 years of Conservative government trying to tackle this, but they get nowhere. So it is reasonable to conclude that there is no hope. On the other hand, its about £10 a month. Not a big deal compared to the coming doubling of energy bills.
Not the civil courts, the criminal courts. TV licence violations are 10% of all cases heard by magistrates, and are mostly poor people with chaotic lives, either unable to afford the licence or guilty of nothing more than administrative errors. A disproportionate number of women and minorities receive criminal records for licence fee evasion. The penalty is a fine, and those imprisoned are for failing to pay the fine.
In any other circumstance, Labour MPs would be all over this, but they like the BBC more than they care about the 200k poor people receiving criminal records every year.
I stand corrected. I thought that the license fee was decriminalised, but see that the government have yet to make a decision about that, so they have chickened out of it. The situation is far worse than I thought, based on that data (which dates back to 2013, but I doubt much has changed). At the very least, the enforcement of the licensing fee should be made a civil matter and no one should be going to prison over it. The whole situation is a complete disgrace.
The problem with a compulsory-but-decriminalised licence fee, is that you end up with bailiffs going to granny’s house with a court order to seize the TV.
As I said on yesterday’s thread, trying to explain to a foreigner the concept of the licence fee, is even more difficult than trying to explain the NHS.
Very different policy in Scotland - procurator fiscal fine only, almost no cases go to court I believe. Been like that for some time; don't think it's anything to do with the SNP particularly, simply that the commercial firm TV LIcensing don't have powers of prosecution in Scotland's courts and the prosecutor fiscal system has different powers to begin with and did it in a common sense way to avoid clogging up the courts.
Labour need to get all over this. Who is their culture spokesperson?
Rachel Wearmouth @REWearmouth · 5h 'Vote Conservative to end the BBC' doesn't sound like an election-winning slogan, does it?
It would be surprisingly popular. However, that's not the choice.
The choice is:
Vote Conservative and the BBC will continue but you won't have to pay for it by threat of imprisonment and you'll only pay for it if you want it.
Or:
Vote Labour and the status quo remains and your granny might end up in prison for owning a telly.
Ditching the licence fee actually seems like good, progressive politics to me as it's not the rich who end up in trouble for not paying their licence fee at the end of the day and for younger people who would rather watch Netflix or YouTube the whole concept of the licence fee is just bizarre...
I'm surprised Labour is so wedded to a telly tax.
Labour should be massively in favour, of ending the single most regressive tax in the country, which takes up so much court time and prison time, giving people criminal records which can be held against them later in life, for the crime of not contributing to Gary Lineker’s seven figure salary.
To be fair I doubt it is prison time. More like wasting time in the civil courts. The main reason why Labour are so keen on the BBC are because it is part of the 'left liberal' establishment which is a large part of its power base. Looking at the BBC, the problem is that a lot of its news coverage etc is not impartial or objective anymore, and the intolerant "woke" agenda has seeped in to a large part of its output. We have had 5 years of Conservative government trying to tackle this, but they get nowhere. So it is reasonable to conclude that there is no hope. On the other hand, its about £10 a month. Not a big deal compared to the coming doubling of energy bills.
Not the civil courts, the criminal courts. TV licence violations are 10% of all cases heard by magistrates, and are mostly poor people with chaotic lives, either unable to afford the licence or guilty of nothing more than administrative errors. A disproportionate number of women and minorities receive criminal records for licence fee evasion. The penalty is a fine, and those imprisoned are for failing to pay the fine.
In any other circumstance, Labour MPs would be all over this, but they like the BBC more than they care about the 200k poor people receiving criminal records every year.
I stand corrected. I thought that the license fee was decriminalised, but see that the government have yet to make a decision about that, so they have chickened out of it. The situation is far worse than I thought, based on that data (which dates back to 2013, but I doubt much has changed). At the very least, the enforcement of the licensing fee should be made a civil matter and no one should be going to prison over it. The whole situation is a complete disgrace.
The problem with a compulsory-but-decriminalised licence fee, is that you end up with bailiffs going to granny’s house with a court order to seize the TV.
As I said on yesterday’s thread, trying to explain to a foreigner the concept of the licence fee, is even more difficult than trying to explain the NHS.
You’ve said this before but its total bollocks. Plenty of countries have a form of TV licence.
Germany, France, Japan, etc.
Sweden abolished it in 2018. Popular all round.
Most of Europe don’t have license fees and those that do, with a few exceptions, have them far smaller than ours.
Erm, your link shows "most of Europe" does have television licences, often at levels broadly comparable with ours. France €138; Germany €220 per annum; Britain £157.
Cummings may not allow him to stay until May, though, if he has more material. I see that he ends his twitter posts with the hashtags "regime change" and "decommission shopping trolley".
Yet, judging from what I've just heard on @BBCr4today, Conservative MPs are doing a bang-up job of spinning that reaction 'on the doorstep' this weekend wasn't half as bad as they feared. All the polls and focus groups must be wrong, I guess. https://twitter.com/jamesjohnson252/status/1482739732723515396
A little unfair.
Tory MP Bowie said the mood in the party was a mix of "shame, anger and disappointment" and "it is quite clear that the apology didn't cut it" either with the public or the party in parliament.
LauraK said that the mood is very bad within the party, with even junior ministers discussing with each other what the best course of action is, with the moment of danger for the PM certainly not past.
She also mentioned rumours that Bozo is about to be interviewed by Gray.
I don't really see how general taxation gives the government any more power than a license to levy the tax yourself at a level set by the government.
With a license fee, the gross amount is capped by how many people pay the fee.
With general taxation, the amount is subject to ministerial whim.
I don't think that's right, the amount the BBC has is
- Number of oppressed subjects [government doesn't control except immigration etc] ...multiplied by... - Rate of license fee [government-controlled]: ...then subtract - Cost of obligations government gives it [government-controlled]
For the sake of argument, if the government had to legislate for the amount of general taxation the BBC gets per taxpayer instead of the total they get out of general taxation, that wouldn't meaningfully change the situation.
Today Nadine announced that the amount would not increase in the future. With direct funding she could have cut it today.
If she'd wanted to Nadine could just as well have announced that from now on the license fee will have to be cut, or that the government will put a new tax on license fees or whatever. If anything "I will make the BBC cut the license fee everyone has to pay" is politically *easier* than "the government will cut spending on the BBC".
Perhaps the word has gone out from Sunak's team. Let Johnson take the hit in May and then we have leadership election.
I’m sure Tory councillors up and down the country will be thrilled with that. Even if bad results are baked in, there are degrees of bad results. If Tories believed that local people are best served by having Tory councils and/or significant Tory representation then perhaps they might pay attention to how many seats removing Johnson (and potentially giving a new leader a brief honeymoon period)might save.
The line that “we don’t think the message on the doorsteps is as bad as feared”, combined with “we’ll get rid of Johnson when the voters revolt in May” is a delusional contradiction.
I don't really see how general taxation gives the government any more power than a license to levy the tax yourself at a level set by the government.
With a license fee, the gross amount is capped by how many people pay the fee.
With general taxation, the amount is subject to ministerial whim.
I don't think that's right, the amount the BBC has is
- Number of oppressed subjects [government doesn't control except immigration etc] ...multiplied by... - Rate of license fee [government-controlled]: ...then subtract - Cost of obligations government gives it [government-controlled]
For the sake of argument, if the government had to legislate for the amount of general taxation the BBC gets per taxpayer instead of the total they get out of general taxation, that wouldn't meaningfully change the situation.
Today Nadine announced that the amount would not increase in the future. With direct funding she could have cut it today.
If she'd wanted to Nadine could just as well have announced that from now on the license fee will have to be cut, or that the government will put a new tax on license fees or whatever. If anything "I will make the BBC cut the license fee everyone has to pay" is politically *easier* than "the government will cut spending on the BBC".
“A tax on the licence fee”? An interesting concept. Not sure if you’ve really thought it through though…
Good morning fellow pb-ers. And the lurkers .... you know who you are.
I find the idea of using the Navy to turn back or otherwise 'obstruct' migrants very troubling. I'm quite sure it will be 'popular' in the bars of Conservative Clubs, but the idea of saving lives at sea is, as I understand it, widely held among those who actually are at sea, and should an overloaded dinghy turned around, sink and lives be lost, then whether the Government could cope with the natural revulsion in the Admiralty has to be 'doubtful'.
Asides from the substantive point, with which I agree, the association between Conservative Clubs (or Liberal clubs, (which, after all, have had decades to add Democrat to their name) and the Conservative Party is massively tenuous these days. (aiui they are more or less independent drinking / WM clubs but can be asked to pay some kind of levy).
If you went into there on a Thursday night to raise a crowd for some kind of urgent cause, aiui, you'd be more likely to come across YMCA karaoke'ers than a posse of Union Flag hoisters. Or is it still different in the shires?
Still a remarkable number of 'Miners' Welfare Societies and Clubs' - tdhe local equivalent of a Conservative Club - in the Central Belt of Scotland.
Perhaps the word has gone out from Sunak's team. Let Johnson take the hit in May and then we have leadership election.
I’m sure Tory councillors up and down the country will be thrilled with that. Even if bad results are baked in, there are degrees of bad results. If Tories believed that local people are best served by having Tory councils and/or significant Tory representation then perhaps they might pay attention to how many seats removing Johnson (and potentially giving a new leader a brief honeymoon period)might save.
The line that “we don’t think the message on the doorsteps is as bad as feared”, combined with “we’ll get rid of Johnson when the voters revolt in May” is a delusional contradiction.
Yep, delusional. But that's where we seem to be, unless Brady's post sack gets filled after Gray's report.
Of course Ms Burley has such excellent credentials wrt to covid rules......
I still don’t understand why every single minister doesn’t start their interview with her “Well I see we have an expert on dodgy partying asking the questions today”.
That argument is the same as the police should be able to commit crimes because criminals do.
Labour need to get all over this. Who is their culture spokesperson?
Rachel Wearmouth @REWearmouth · 5h 'Vote Conservative to end the BBC' doesn't sound like an election-winning slogan, does it?
It would be surprisingly popular. However, that's not the choice.
The choice is:
Vote Conservative and the BBC will continue but you won't have to pay for it by threat of imprisonment and you'll only pay for it if you want it.
Or:
Vote Labour and the status quo remains and your granny might end up in prison for owning a telly.
Ditching the licence fee actually seems like good, progressive politics to me as it's not the rich who end up in trouble for not paying their licence fee at the end of the day and for younger people who would rather watch Netflix or YouTube the whole concept of the licence fee is just bizarre...
I'm surprised Labour is so wedded to a telly tax.
Labour should be massively in favour, of ending the single most regressive tax in the country, which takes up so much court time and prison time, giving people criminal records which can be held against them later in life, for the crime of not contributing to Gary Lineker’s seven figure salary.
To be fair I doubt it is prison time. More like wasting time in the civil courts. The main reason why Labour are so keen on the BBC are because it is part of the 'left liberal' establishment which is a large part of its power base. Looking at the BBC, the problem is that a lot of its news coverage etc is not impartial or objective anymore, and the intolerant "woke" agenda has seeped in to a large part of its output. We have had 5 years of Conservative government trying to tackle this, but they get nowhere. So it is reasonable to conclude that there is no hope. On the other hand, its about £10 a month. Not a big deal compared to the coming doubling of energy bills.
Not the civil courts, the criminal courts. TV licence violations are 10% of all cases heard by magistrates, and are mostly poor people with chaotic lives, either unable to afford the licence or guilty of nothing more than administrative errors. A disproportionate number of women and minorities receive criminal records for licence fee evasion. The penalty is a fine, and those imprisoned are for failing to pay the fine.
In any other circumstance, Labour MPs would be all over this, but they like the BBC more than they care about the 200k poor people receiving criminal records every year.
I stand corrected. I thought that the license fee was decriminalised, but see that the government have yet to make a decision about that, so they have chickened out of it. The situation is far worse than I thought, based on that data (which dates back to 2013, but I doubt much has changed). At the very least, the enforcement of the licensing fee should be made a civil matter and no one should be going to prison over it. The whole situation is a complete disgrace.
The problem with a compulsory-but-decriminalised licence fee, is that you end up with bailiffs going to granny’s house with a court order to seize the TV.
As I said on yesterday’s thread, trying to explain to a foreigner the concept of the licence fee, is even more difficult than trying to explain the NHS.
Very different policy in Scotland - procurator fiscal fine only, almost no cases go to court I believe. Been like that for some time; don't think it's anything to do with the SNP particularly, simply that the commercial firm TV LIcensing don't have powers of prosecution in Scotland's courts and the prosecutor fiscal system has different powers to begin with and did it in a common sense way to avoid clogging up the courts.
Perhaps the word has gone out from Sunak's team. Let Johnson take the hit in May and then we have leadership election.
I’m sure Tory councillors up and down the country will be thrilled with that. Even if bad results are baked in, there are degrees of bad results. If Tories believed that local people are best served by having Tory councils and/or significant Tory representation then perhaps they might pay attention to how many seats removing Johnson (and potentially giving a new leader a brief honeymoon period)might save.
The line that “we don’t think the message on the doorsteps is as bad as feared”, combined with “we’ll get rid of Johnson when the voters revolt in May” is a delusional contradiction.
Leaving him in place even temporarily is a catastrophic misjudgement.
Yet, judging from what I've just heard on @BBCr4today, Conservative MPs are doing a bang-up job of spinning that reaction 'on the doorstep' this weekend wasn't half as bad as they feared. All the polls and focus groups must be wrong, I guess. https://twitter.com/jamesjohnson252/status/1482739732723515396
A little unfair.
Tory MP Bowie said the mood in the party was a mix of "shame, anger and disappointment" and "it is quite clear that the apology didn't cut it" either with the public or the party in parliament.
LauraK said that the mood is very bad within the party, with even junior ministers discussing with each other what the best course of action is, with the moment of danger for the PM certainly not past.
She also mentioned rumours that Bozo is about to be interviewed by Gray.
Tobias Ellwood, chair of defence committee, not impressed by the Red Meat
He tells @SkyNews the plan to send military to tackle Channel migrants is a "massive distraction, that isn’t what the Navy should be doing" and the BBC have done an important job reporting #partygate https://twitter.com/tamcohen/status/1482996444709666821
Surely if Bridgen and Chope have sent letters, as they are part of a joined-at-the-hip cabal of naysayers, at least 54 letters are already sitting on Brady's desk, including the one he wrote to himself.
Labour need to get all over this. Who is their culture spokesperson?
Rachel Wearmouth @REWearmouth · 5h 'Vote Conservative to end the BBC' doesn't sound like an election-winning slogan, does it?
It would be surprisingly popular. However, that's not the choice.
The choice is:
Vote Conservative and the BBC will continue but you won't have to pay for it by threat of imprisonment and you'll only pay for it if you want it.
Or:
Vote Labour and the status quo remains and your granny might end up in prison for owning a telly.
Ditching the licence fee actually seems like good, progressive politics to me as it's not the rich who end up in trouble for not paying their licence fee at the end of the day and for younger people who would rather watch Netflix or YouTube the whole concept of the licence fee is just bizarre...
I'm surprised Labour is so wedded to a telly tax.
Labour should be massively in favour, of ending the single most regressive tax in the country, which takes up so much court time and prison time, giving people criminal records which can be held against them later in life, for the crime of not contributing to Gary Lineker’s seven figure salary.
To be fair I doubt it is prison time. More like wasting time in the civil courts. The main reason why Labour are so keen on the BBC are because it is part of the 'left liberal' establishment which is a large part of its power base. Looking at the BBC, the problem is that a lot of its news coverage etc is not impartial or objective anymore, and the intolerant "woke" agenda has seeped in to a large part of its output. We have had 5 years of Conservative government trying to tackle this, but they get nowhere. So it is reasonable to conclude that there is no hope. On the other hand, its about £10 a month. Not a big deal compared to the coming doubling of energy bills.
Not the civil courts, the criminal courts. TV licence violations are 10% of all cases heard by magistrates, and are mostly poor people with chaotic lives, either unable to afford the licence or guilty of nothing more than administrative errors. A disproportionate number of women and minorities receive criminal records for licence fee evasion. The penalty is a fine, and those imprisoned are for failing to pay the fine.
In any other circumstance, Labour MPs would be all over this, but they like the BBC more than they care about the 200k poor people receiving criminal records every year.
I stand corrected. I thought that the license fee was decriminalised, but see that the government have yet to make a decision about that, so they have chickened out of it. The situation is far worse than I thought, based on that data (which dates back to 2013, but I doubt much has changed). At the very least, the enforcement of the licensing fee should be made a civil matter and no one should be going to prison over it. The whole situation is a complete disgrace.
The problem with a compulsory-but-decriminalised licence fee, is that you end up with bailiffs going to granny’s house with a court order to seize the TV.
As I said on yesterday’s thread, trying to explain to a foreigner the concept of the licence fee, is even more difficult than trying to explain the NHS.
Very different policy in Scotland - procurator fiscal fine only, almost no cases go to court I believe. Been like that for some time; don't think it's anything to do with the SNP particularly, simply that the commercial firm TV LIcensing don't have powers of prosecution in Scotland's courts and the prosecutor fiscal system has different powers to begin with and did it in a common sense way to avoid clogging up the courts.
England has nothing to learn from Jocks. Accepted PBfact.
One thing I do wonder is how the Scons and Slab view the shutting down of the BBC as a compulsory state broadcaster. At least three reasons seem pertinent, two specific to Scotland.
Of course Ms Burley has such excellent credentials wrt to covid rules......
I still don’t understand why every single minister doesn’t start their interview with her “Well I see we have an expert on dodgy partying asking the questions today”.
Burley didn't set the rules. She didn't force her Majesty to sit alone at a funeral. She didn't stop terminal cancer patients from having one last word with their children.
Johnson, Hancock and No 10 and PHE did.
Not Sky News.
See Tim Stanley for a list of ridiculous, petty rules these people insisted we follow or face police action:
A survey conducted by the Grassroots Conservatives group found that around four in 10 of its supporters wanted Mr Johnson to resign now, according to Ed Costelloe, the group’s chairman
Tory MPs claimed that "enormous anger" had been conveyed by their local associations over the weekend, with one saying five per cent of their party members had quit
It emerged on Sunday that one Tory MP’s constituency office had been daubed with the words "lies, lies, lies".
"It's not good optics is it," #KayBurley says to #NadhimZadawi, "the army bearing down on a little dinghy in the channel, full of Afghans we abandoned when we fled Afghanistan?" "We're after the traffickers." "They aren't in the boat."
'If a Prime Minister has broken the law, should they stay as Prime Minister?' - @susannareid100
Education Secretary Nadhim Zahawi says 'nobody is above the law' and they should 'face the consequences of a trial' but 'the Prime Minister does not believe he has broken the law'. https://twitter.com/GMB/status/1482997647682293761/video/1
Perhaps the word has gone out from Sunak's team. Let Johnson take the hit in May and then we have leadership election.
I’m sure Tory councillors up and down the country will be thrilled with that. Even if bad results are baked in, there are degrees of bad results. If Tories believed that local people are best served by having Tory councils and/or significant Tory representation then perhaps they might pay attention to how many seats removing Johnson (and potentially giving a new leader a brief honeymoon period)might save.
The line that “we don’t think the message on the doorsteps is as bad as feared”, combined with “we’ll get rid of Johnson when the voters revolt in May” is a delusional contradiction.
Leaving him in place even temporarily is a catastrophic misjudgement.
Allowing the moment to pass for somebody so clearly holed below the waterline also allows for events to allow him to stagger on and future assessments of “things aren’t as bad as they seem”, and even deluded optimism to emerge. I think that was even something that happened in 1997 (although possibly then there really wasn’t anyway out). When the current problems are so clearly linked to Johnson and his Govt they should have more confidence in the possibility of recovery with an alternative.
Perhaps the word has gone out from Sunak's team. Let Johnson take the hit in May and then we have leadership election.
I’m sure Tory councillors up and down the country will be thrilled with that. Even if bad results are baked in, there are degrees of bad results. If Tories believed that local people are best served by having Tory councils and/or significant Tory representation then perhaps they might pay attention to how many seats removing Johnson (and potentially giving a new leader a brief honeymoon period)might save.
The line that “we don’t think the message on the doorsteps is as bad as feared”, combined with “we’ll get rid of Johnson when the voters revolt in May” is a delusional contradiction.
In May 2019, the Tories got just 28% NEV and over 1,000 Tory councillors lost their seats.
With latest poll putting the Tories on 31% and fewer seats up the results this May may be bad but will still not be that bad
If they want to replace the licence fee an alternative that's well-considered must be ready to go.
Cackhanded short-termist tinkering tomfoolery is what gave us devolved bodies everywhere except England. Lack of planning also meant leaving the EU was handled very poorly indeed.
Just not liking the licence fee is not sufficient because there has to be something.
Of course Dorries hasn’t the intelligence for that sort of thing, so she’s just announced that it will go and told the BBC to work out how they are going to be funded in future. Obviously anything they come up with won’t satisfy the Govt one way or another (either because it transfers costs to general taxation, focuses on areas the govt doesn’t support, proposed things which will give it greater independence (and therefore freedom from Govt interference), is unpopular with real Tory core supporters (as opposed to activists), at which point...
The Government doesn't dictate how Netflix, or Disney+, or Amazon make their money (and they're all commercial free too which used to be the BBCs USP). Why should it instruct a competitor like the BBC to do so.
Liberated from state influence the Beeb should raise it's revenue however it chooses to do so. It shouldn't have anything to do with politicians and there should be no political interference.
I pay my French audiovisual tax as a matter of course through the local council tax, even though we are hardly there and when we are try to avoid watching TV as much as possible. Collection via the same means as council tax seems a perfectly reasonable approach.
The fact is the government don't like the BBC because they think it's woke. Just like the leftist twitterati don't like the BBC because they think it's a Tory propaganda machine. And Scottish nationalists don't like the BBC because they think it's a unionist propaganda machine.
Putting the future of a globally important institution like the BBC in the hands of people who self-evidently don't wish it well is not a good idea. But there's the paradox: if we want it to remain impartial and public-service oriented, then it needs to be accountable to democratic institutions. So it relies on fair play by the government. It's when that fair play breaks down, as it clearly has down now and did over Iraq under Blair, that we are left stuck.
It's not the only institution where that's increasingly the case. When the old unwritten rules of the game get trampled on we have few formal defences. Take the trend of policy announcements outwith parliament, the politicisation of the civil service, the ignoring and casting aside of parliamentary standards enquiries - first Patel, now no doubt Bercow, and so on.
I don't see a solution to any of this other than - hope of hopes - grown up politicians willing to take a cross-party, politically neutral approach to certain areas of national life where partisanship is in nobody's interest.
Of course we should abolish the TV license - its 2022. But the problem that the Dorries "intelligentsia" have with the BBC isn't the license fee, its that it exists. And even if the "we'll scrap the fee in 2027 3 years after we lose power!!!" threat had any teeth that wouldn't be the end.
We pay for so much content already. What difference does a BBC subscription make? I'd pay it happily. Spin the commercial arm back out and the BBC can make cash to pay for all the FTA stuff like radio. Done.
Can someone explain to me how a subscription would actually work for a broadcast service?
Perhaps the word has gone out from Sunak's team. Let Johnson take the hit in May and then we have leadership election.
I’m sure Tory councillors up and down the country will be thrilled with that. Even if bad results are baked in, there are degrees of bad results. If Tories believed that local people are best served by having Tory councils and/or significant Tory representation then perhaps they might pay attention to how many seats removing Johnson (and potentially giving a new leader a brief honeymoon period)might save.
The line that “we don’t think the message on the doorsteps is as bad as feared”, combined with “we’ll get rid of Johnson when the voters revolt in May” is a delusional contradiction.
In May 2019, the Tories got just 28% NEV and over 1,000 Tory councillors lost their seats.
With latest poll putting the Tories on 31% and fewer seats up the results this May may be bad but will still not be that bad
So you’re saying that leaving him in place will allow for him to spin a disastrous result as a triumph? That’s hardly good for a “leave him in place to take the blame for May strategy”though…”
In any event the BBC is already preparing itself for the abolishment of the license fee in my opinion, and has been for some time.
iPlayer is obviously already fairly separate and can easily be put behind a subscription wall. Radio is the same with the BBC Sounds brand and associated apps.
We very nearly had encryption, instead of a license fee, originally. The technology was not quite workable then - the license fee advocates were able to demonstrate how it could be cracked.
If they want to replace the licence fee an alternative that's well-considered must be ready to go.
Cackhanded short-termist tinkering tomfoolery is what gave us devolved bodies everywhere except England. Lack of planning also meant leaving the EU was handled very poorly indeed.
Just not liking the licence fee is not sufficient because there has to be something.
Of course Dorries hasn’t the intelligence for that sort of thing, so she’s just announced that it will go and told the BBC to work out how they are going to be funded in future. Obviously anything they come up with won’t satisfy the Govt one way or another (either because it transfers costs to general taxation, focuses on areas the govt doesn’t support, proposed things which will give it greater independence (and therefore freedom from Govt interference), is unpopular with real Tory core supporters (as opposed to activists), at which point...
The Government doesn't dictate how Netflix, or Disney+, or Amazon make their money (and they're all commercial free too which used to be the BBCs USP). Why should it instruct a competitor like the BBC to do so.
Liberated from state influence the Beeb should raise it's revenue however it chooses to do so. It shouldn't have anything to do with politicians and there should be no political interference.
In which case if it got no licence fee money at all the BBC would have to run adverts in the middle of every show like the ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5 channels and likely make iplayer paid subscription only like Netflix and Amazon Prime. If you do not want ads you could pay not to have them like YouTube Premium
“In a sign of the suspicion sweeping the parliamentary party, it is claimed that Tory whips have been monitoring the approach to the 1922 committee chairman’s office to see who submits letters.“
From the Telegraph. This surely has to be bollocks? Hand delivery? Even when the 1922 Committee was founded there was a functioning postal service.
If they want to replace the licence fee an alternative that's well-considered must be ready to go.
Cackhanded short-termist tinkering tomfoolery is what gave us devolved bodies everywhere except England. Lack of planning also meant leaving the EU was handled very poorly indeed.
Just not liking the licence fee is not sufficient because there has to be something.
Of course Dorries hasn’t the intelligence for that sort of thing, so she’s just announced that it will go and told the BBC to work out how they are going to be funded in future. Obviously anything they come up with won’t satisfy the Govt one way or another (either because it transfers costs to general taxation, focuses on areas the govt doesn’t support, proposed things which will give it greater independence (and therefore freedom from Govt interference), is unpopular with real Tory core supporters (as opposed to activists), at which point...
The Government doesn't dictate how Netflix, or Disney+, or Amazon make their money (and they're all commercial free too which used to be the BBCs USP). Why should it instruct a competitor like the BBC to do so.
Liberated from state influence the Beeb should raise it's revenue however it chooses to do so. It shouldn't have anything to do with politicians and there should be no political interference.
Then it will be sold off to the highest bidder and subject to editorial bias from whoever's got enough money to own it. Some foreign oligarch, most likely.
Another great British institution trashed on the altar of neoliberalism.
Of course we should abolish the TV license - its 2022. But the problem that the Dorries "intelligentsia" have with the BBC isn't the license fee, its that it exists. And even if the "we'll scrap the fee in 2027 3 years after we lose power!!!" threat had any teeth that wouldn't be the end.
We pay for so much content already. What difference does a BBC subscription make? I'd pay it happily. Spin the commercial arm back out and the BBC can make cash to pay for all the FTA stuff like radio. Done.
Can someone explain to me how a subscription would actually work for a broadcast service?
Let's pass that question on to Dorries. I'm sure she has the answer.
If they want to replace the licence fee an alternative that's well-considered must be ready to go.
Cackhanded short-termist tinkering tomfoolery is what gave us devolved bodies everywhere except England. Lack of planning also meant leaving the EU was handled very poorly indeed.
Just not liking the licence fee is not sufficient because there has to be something.
Of course Dorries hasn’t the intelligence for that sort of thing, so she’s just announced that it will go and told the BBC to work out how they are going to be funded in future. Obviously anything they come up with won’t satisfy the Govt one way or another (either because it transfers costs to general taxation, focuses on areas the govt doesn’t support, proposed things which will give it greater independence (and therefore freedom from Govt interference), is unpopular with real Tory core supporters (as opposed to activists), at which point...
The Government doesn't dictate how Netflix, or Disney+, or Amazon make their money (and they're all commercial free too which used to be the BBCs USP). Why should it instruct a competitor like the BBC to do so.
Liberated from state influence the Beeb should raise its revenue however it chooses to do so. It shouldn't have anything to do with politicians and there should be no political interference.
It would also scrap all of its public service commitments on that basis. You're basically saying the organisation should be scrapped, and government provide startup funding for a very late to the market streaming competitor.
Perhaps the word has gone out from Sunak's team. Let Johnson take the hit in May and then we have leadership election.
Events are not that well orchestrated.
To get rid of Johnson the tory MPs would have to be some combination of decisive, principled and brave. If you think about your average tory MP it's obvious why Johnson will be in place for a while yet.
Of course we should abolish the TV license - its 2022. But the problem that the Dorries "intelligentsia" have with the BBC isn't the license fee, its that it exists. And even if the "we'll scrap the fee in 2027 3 years after we lose power!!!" threat had any teeth that wouldn't be the end.
We pay for so much content already. What difference does a BBC subscription make? I'd pay it happily. Spin the commercial arm back out and the BBC can make cash to pay for all the FTA stuff like radio. Done.
Can someone explain to me how a subscription would actually work for a broadcast service?
Of course they can't because it has the twin characteristics of an almost-pure public good: non-exclusion and non-rivalry.
'If a Prime Minister has broken the law, should they stay as Prime Minister?' - @susannareid100
Education Secretary Nadhim Zahawi says 'nobody is above the law' and they should 'face the consequences of a trial' but 'the Prime Minister does not believe he has broken the law'. https://twitter.com/GMB/status/1482997647682293761/video/1
If they want to replace the licence fee an alternative that's well-considered must be ready to go.
Cackhanded short-termist tinkering tomfoolery is what gave us devolved bodies everywhere except England. Lack of planning also meant leaving the EU was handled very poorly indeed.
Just not liking the licence fee is not sufficient because there has to be something.
Of course Dorries hasn’t the intelligence for that sort of thing, so she’s just announced that it will go and told the BBC to work out how they are going to be funded in future. Obviously anything they come up with won’t satisfy the Govt one way or another (either because it transfers costs to general taxation, focuses on areas the govt doesn’t support, proposed things which will give it greater independence (and therefore freedom from Govt interference), is unpopular with real Tory core supporters (as opposed to activists), at which point...
The Government doesn't dictate how Netflix, or Disney+, or Amazon make their money (and they're all commercial free too which used to be the BBCs USP). Why should it instruct a competitor like the BBC to do so.
Liberated from state influence the Beeb should raise it's revenue however it chooses to do so. It shouldn't have anything to do with politicians and there should be no political interference.
So you’re going to “liberate” it from its public service broadcasting responsibility as well. And allow it to take whatever editorial line on news etc it damn well pleases? The Tories don’t complain about what they perceive as “BBC bias” because it is funded by the licence fee! They do so because it is enormously influential and trusted by millions of voters!
Suggesting that the BBC sees Netflix/Amazon/Disney as competitors is laughable. They don’t due a fraction of things the BBC does (or is required to do as part of its core remit). It’s role isn’t to make money!
I pay my French audiovisual tax as a matter of course through the local council tax, even though we are hardly there and when we are try to avoid watching TV as much as possible. Collection via the same means as council tax seems a perfectly reasonable approach.
The fact is the government don't like the BBC because they think it's woke. Just like the leftist twitterati don't like the BBC because they think it's a Tory propaganda machine. And Scottish nationalists don't like the BBC because they think it's a unionist propaganda machine.
Putting the future of a globally important institution like the BBC in the hands of people who self-evidently don't wish it well is not a good idea. But there's the paradox: if we want it to remain impartial and public-service oriented, then it needs to be accountable to democratic institutions. So it relies on fair play by the government. It's when that fair play breaks down, as it clearly has down now and did over Iraq under Blair, that we are left stuck.
It's not the only institution where that's increasingly the case. When the old unwritten rules of the game get trampled on we have few formal defences. Take the trend of policy announcements outwith parliament, the politicisation of the civil service, the ignoring and casting aside of parliamentary standards enquiries - first Patel, now no doubt Bercow, and so on.
I don't see a solution to any of this other than - hope of hopes - grown up politicians willing to take a cross-party, politically neutral approach to certain areas of national life where partisanship is in nobody's interest.
The idea of introducing consumer choice into government services and taxation does not need to stop with the BBC. You could broaden that to a whole range of things.
Opt out, save money. If you don’t think you get value from the military band package, the civil list package or the Trident package, no problem just uncheck the box.
Of course we should abolish the TV license - its 2022. But the problem that the Dorries "intelligentsia" have with the BBC isn't the license fee, its that it exists. And even if the "we'll scrap the fee in 2027 3 years after we lose power!!!" threat had any teeth that wouldn't be the end.
We pay for so much content already. What difference does a BBC subscription make? I'd pay it happily. Spin the commercial arm back out and the BBC can make cash to pay for all the FTA stuff like radio. Done.
Can someone explain to me how a subscription would actually work for a broadcast service?
The original plan was for an encryption device to be on Freeview boxes, same as with Sky boxes, but the BBC vetoed the idea because it might lead to their channels being changed to subscription-based services by a future government.
Broadcast TV, using radio waves, probably only has a handful of years left now anyway.
“In a sign of the suspicion sweeping the parliamentary party, it is claimed that Tory whips have been monitoring the approach to the 1922 committee chairman’s office to see who submits letters.“
From the Telegraph. This surely has to be bollocks? Hand delivery? Even when the 1922 Committee was founded there was a functioning postal service.
Perhaps the word has gone out from Sunak's team. Let Johnson take the hit in May and then we have leadership election.
I’m sure Tory councillors up and down the country will be thrilled with that. Even if bad results are baked in, there are degrees of bad results. If Tories believed that local people are best served by having Tory councils and/or significant Tory representation then perhaps they might pay attention to how many seats removing Johnson (and potentially giving a new leader a brief honeymoon period)might save.
The line that “we don’t think the message on the doorsteps is as bad as feared”, combined with “we’ll get rid of Johnson when the voters revolt in May” is a delusional contradiction.
Leaving him in place even temporarily is a catastrophic misjudgement.
Not according to my taxi driver the other day it wouldn't be.
Gave him credit for Brexit and the vaccines. Actually feel sorry for him, were the words.
And no the taxi driver wasn't Albanian so I suppose not as insightful but still.
Good morning fellow pb-ers. And the lurkers .... you know who you are.
I find the idea of using the Navy to turn back or otherwise 'obstruct' migrants very troubling. I'm quite sure it will be 'popular' in the bars of Conservative Clubs, but the idea of saving lives at sea is, as I understand it, widely held among those who actually are at sea, and should an overloaded dinghy turned around, sink and lives be lost, then whether the Government could cope with the natural revulsion in the Admiralty has to be 'doubtful'.
The Greek and Australian navies did it when ordered to. The RN would be no different. A possible difference is that they'll probably be doing it live on Sky News given the relative proximity of operations in the channel.
Noted. I seem to recall revulsion though, at what happened in the Aegean Sea.
Essentially the EU is paying the er... local strong men in Libya to stop the migrants. The strong men have created a heavily armed "Coast Guard". Which chases down the boats and imprisons the would be immigrants.
Since they then have warehouses full of prisoners to feed, they auction their labour to farmers.....
This lovely diagram of the conditions they keep the immigrants in, is certainly thought provoking....
Of course we should abolish the TV license - its 2022. But the problem that the Dorries "intelligentsia" have with the BBC isn't the license fee, its that it exists. And even if the "we'll scrap the fee in 2027 3 years after we lose power!!!" threat had any teeth that wouldn't be the end.
We pay for so much content already. What difference does a BBC subscription make? I'd pay it happily. Spin the commercial arm back out and the BBC can make cash to pay for all the FTA stuff like radio. Done.
Can someone explain to me how a subscription would actually work for a broadcast service?
It can't and it's disingenuous to say that it can. It could conceivably charge for the iPlayer by just rolling it all into Britbox. That won't be enough to subsidise the broadcast side so the only two alternatives are public funding or adverts. Conservatives used to believe in not trashing institutions just for the sake of it.
Perhaps the word has gone out from Sunak's team. Let Johnson take the hit in May and then we have leadership election.
I’m sure Tory councillors up and down the country will be thrilled with that. Even if bad results are baked in, there are degrees of bad results. If Tories believed that local people are best served by having Tory councils and/or significant Tory representation then perhaps they might pay attention to how many seats removing Johnson (and potentially giving a new leader a brief honeymoon period)might save.
The line that “we don’t think the message on the doorsteps is as bad as feared”, combined with “we’ll get rid of Johnson when the voters revolt in May” is a delusional contradiction.
In May 2019, the Tories got just 28% NEV and over 1,000 Tory councillors lost their seats.
With latest poll putting the Tories on 31% and fewer seats up the results this May may be bad but will still not be that bad
So you’re saying that leaving him in place will allow for him to spin a disastrous result as a triumph? That’s hardly good for a “leave him in place to take the blame for May strategy”though…”
Shouldn’t the comparator be May 2018 though…?
The comparator will be May 2018 though yes so the Tories will likely lose seats if Boris has not recovered sufficiently by then. If so then a VONC should happen then.
He either loses it or if not survives until the next general election in 2024 given the results were so awful in May 2019 even a Boris led Tories would likely gain a few councillors in May 2023
If they want to replace the licence fee an alternative that's well-considered must be ready to go.
Cackhanded short-termist tinkering tomfoolery is what gave us devolved bodies everywhere except England. Lack of planning also meant leaving the EU was handled very poorly indeed.
Just not liking the licence fee is not sufficient because there has to be something.
Of course Dorries hasn’t the intelligence for that sort of thing, so she’s just announced that it will go and told the BBC to work out how they are going to be funded in future. Obviously anything they come up with won’t satisfy the Govt one way or another (either because it transfers costs to general taxation, focuses on areas the govt doesn’t support, proposed things which will give it greater independence (and therefore freedom from Govt interference), is unpopular with real Tory core supporters (as opposed to activists), at which point...
The Government doesn't dictate how Netflix, or Disney+, or Amazon make their money (and they're all commercial free too which used to be the BBCs USP). Why should it instruct a competitor like the BBC to do so.
Liberated from state influence the Beeb should raise it's revenue however it chooses to do so. It shouldn't have anything to do with politicians and there should be no political interference.
Then it will be sold off to the highest bidder and subject to editorial bias from whoever's got enough money to own it. Some foreign oligarch, most likely.
Another great British institution trashed on the altar of neoliberalism.
If they want to replace the licence fee an alternative that's well-considered must be ready to go.
Cackhanded short-termist tinkering tomfoolery is what gave us devolved bodies everywhere except England. Lack of planning also meant leaving the EU was handled very poorly indeed.
Just not liking the licence fee is not sufficient because there has to be something.
Of course Dorries hasn’t the intelligence for that sort of thing, so she’s just announced that it will go and told the BBC to work out how they are going to be funded in future. Obviously anything they come up with won’t satisfy the Govt one way or another (either because it transfers costs to general taxation, focuses on areas the govt doesn’t support, proposed things which will give it greater independence (and therefore freedom from Govt interference), is unpopular with real Tory core supporters (as opposed to activists), at which point...
The Government doesn't dictate how Netflix, or Disney+, or Amazon make their money (and they're all commercial free too which used to be the BBCs USP). Why should it instruct a competitor like the BBC to do so.
Liberated from state influence the Beeb should raise its revenue however it chooses to do so. It shouldn't have anything to do with politicians and there should be no political interference.
It would also scrap all of its public service commitments on that basis. You're basically saying the organisation should be scrapped, and government provide startup funding for a very late to the market streaming competitor.
Unfortunately yes. As mentioned yesterday, it was disastrous that the Cameron administration, supposedly so flexilble on digital issues and also sceptical of state overreach, disallowed the original streaming proposal in 2012, probably in fact on the same sort of grassroots-pleasing populist nonsense grounds as Dorries yesterday, when giants like Netflix were just getting started.
It could have become a global streaming public service giant, but now that combination looks much more difficult to achieve.
Surely if Bridgen and Chope have sent letters, as they are part of a joined-at-the-hip cabal of naysayers, at least 54 letters are already sitting on Brady's desk, including the one he wrote to himself.
My guess is they are still short. Sounds like maybe 25-30 letters. I presume that any one of the leading leadership candidates can flick a switch and get the remaining 25 or so letters in at any time of their choosing.
But that's the nuclear option and all of them will wait for Gray.
“In a sign of the suspicion sweeping the parliamentary party, it is claimed that Tory whips have been monitoring the approach to the 1922 committee chairman’s office to see who submits letters.“
From the Telegraph. This surely has to be bollocks? Hand delivery? Even when the 1922 Committee was founded there was a functioning postal service.
Postal service was a lot better in those days in terms of numbers of collections and deliveries during the day, and pretty good in terms of time taken to deliver.
Of course we should abolish the TV license - its 2022. But the problem that the Dorries "intelligentsia" have with the BBC isn't the license fee, its that it exists. And even if the "we'll scrap the fee in 2027 3 years after we lose power!!!" threat had any teeth that wouldn't be the end.
We pay for so much content already. What difference does a BBC subscription make? I'd pay it happily. Spin the commercial arm back out and the BBC can make cash to pay for all the FTA stuff like radio. Done.
Can someone explain to me how a subscription would actually work for a broadcast service?
It can't and it's disingenuous to say that it can. It could conceivably charge for the iPlayer by just rolling it all into Britbox. That won't be enough to subsidise the broadcast side so the only two alternatives are public funding or adverts. Conservatives used to believe in not trashing institutions just for the sake of it.
BBC: The largest consumers of the BBC are concentrated in the Tory core vote. The alleged lowest consumers are the U30s.
It's not alleged, Ofcom measure that sort of thing. It used to be just children and teenagers that watched more Netflix than all BBC output, as far as I can tell from the slighly opaque way the data is presented that now might be true for the under 35s.
We could be fast approaching the point when Netflix is the top source of television in the UK, a position held by the BBC almost since the invention of television itself.
Maybe the licence fee should go to Netflix if that's what people are choosing to watch?
If they want to replace the licence fee an alternative that's well-considered must be ready to go.
Cackhanded short-termist tinkering tomfoolery is what gave us devolved bodies everywhere except England. Lack of planning also meant leaving the EU was handled very poorly indeed.
Just not liking the licence fee is not sufficient because there has to be something.
Of course Dorries hasn’t the intelligence for that sort of thing, so she’s just announced that it will go and told the BBC to work out how they are going to be funded in future. Obviously anything they come up with won’t satisfy the Govt one way or another (either because it transfers costs to general taxation, focuses on areas the govt doesn’t support, proposed things which will give it greater independence (and therefore freedom from Govt interference), is unpopular with real Tory core supporters (as opposed to activists), at which point...
The Government doesn't dictate how Netflix, or Disney+, or Amazon make their money (and they're all commercial free too which used to be the BBCs USP). Why should it instruct a competitor like the BBC to do so.
Liberated from state influence the Beeb should raise it's revenue however it chooses to do so. It shouldn't have anything to do with politicians and there should be no political interference.
So you’re going to “liberate” it from its public service broadcasting responsibility as well. And allow it to take whatever editorial line on news etc it damn well pleases? The Tories don’t complain about what they perceive as “BBC bias” because it is funded by the licence fee! They do so because it is enormously influential and trusted by millions of voters!
Suggesting that the BBC sees Netflix/Amazon/Disney as competitors is laughable. They don’t due a fraction of things the BBC does (or is required to do as part of its core remit). It’s role isn’t to make money!
Yes absolutely. Allow it to take whatever editorial line it damn well pleases. Why on earth not.
The thing that always gets me (and I may have, er, mentioned it on PB a time or two) is when some RT journalist is interviewed on the Beeb and the Beeb guy says "but you're just a state run broadcaster..."
During the pandemic the BBC's (or at least its website's) was indistinguishable from the government line on the virus. Complete with long story about some 16-yr old who had suffered from Covid and hence we should all be scared. They are at it again today describing (at length) how some young woman with ME is "terrified" of going out because she might catch Covid.
Of course we should abolish the TV license - its 2022. But the problem that the Dorries "intelligentsia" have with the BBC isn't the license fee, its that it exists. And even if the "we'll scrap the fee in 2027 3 years after we lose power!!!" threat had any teeth that wouldn't be the end.
We pay for so much content already. What difference does a BBC subscription make? I'd pay it happily. Spin the commercial arm back out and the BBC can make cash to pay for all the FTA stuff like radio. Done.
Can someone explain to me how a subscription would actually work for a broadcast service?
The original plan was for an encryption device to be on Freeview boxes, same as with Sky boxes, but the BBC vetoed the idea because it might lead to their channels being changed to subscription-based services by a future government.
Broadcast TV, using radio waves, probably only has a handful of years left now anyway.
More specifically, the BBC lobbied and won the following change. Originally, for a TV/device to be Freeview compliant, it had to offer the ability to decrypt encrypted channels. After the change, they didn't *have* to offer it.
This meant that *some* Freeview boxes/TVs were sold without the ability to decrypt. So the BBC could argue that encrypting their channels would shut some people out - poorest, oldest etc.
“In a sign of the suspicion sweeping the parliamentary party, it is claimed that Tory whips have been monitoring the approach to the 1922 committee chairman’s office to see who submits letters.“
From the Telegraph. This surely has to be bollocks? Hand delivery? Even when the 1922 Committee was founded there was a functioning postal service.
“In a sign of the suspicion sweeping the parliamentary party, it is claimed that Tory whips have been monitoring the approach to the 1922 committee chairman’s office to see who submits letters.“
From the Telegraph. This surely has to be bollocks? Hand delivery? Even when the 1922 Committee was founded there was a functioning postal service.
Postal service was a lot better in those days in terms of numbers of collections and deliveries during the day, and pretty good in terms of time taken to deliver.
When I was studying Gladstone's correspondence at University he could get 4 deliveries a day in London. He fired off letters like emails. The post is a reminder that things don't always get better as time goes on.
Just listened to the Raworth/SKS clip. Sozza but he had beer and sandwiches in the constituency office when, as Raworth explained to him, beer and sandwiches in the office were explicitly forbidden by the rules.
So it's a what kind of woman do you think I am situation. We have established that SKS broke the rules, just as BoJo did, it's just a question of to what degree.
“In a sign of the suspicion sweeping the parliamentary party, it is claimed that Tory whips have been monitoring the approach to the 1922 committee chairman’s office to see who submits letters.“
From the Telegraph. This surely has to be bollocks? Hand delivery? Even when the 1922 Committee was founded there was a functioning postal service.
Postal service was a lot better in those days in terms of numbers of collections and deliveries during the day, and pretty good in terms of time taken to deliver.
Er... a first class letter posted reasonably early is next working in the UK, generally.
If they want to replace the licence fee an alternative that's well-considered must be ready to go.
Cackhanded short-termist tinkering tomfoolery is what gave us devolved bodies everywhere except England. Lack of planning also meant leaving the EU was handled very poorly indeed.
Just not liking the licence fee is not sufficient because there has to be something.
Of course Dorries hasn’t the intelligence for that sort of thing, so she’s just announced that it will go and told the BBC to work out how they are going to be funded in future. Obviously anything they come up with won’t satisfy the Govt one way or another (either because it transfers costs to general taxation, focuses on areas the govt doesn’t support, proposed things which will give it greater independence (and therefore freedom from Govt interference), is unpopular with real Tory core supporters (as opposed to activists), at which point...
The Government doesn't dictate how Netflix, or Disney+, or Amazon make their money (and they're all commercial free too which used to be the BBCs USP). Why should it instruct a competitor like the BBC to do so.
Liberated from state influence the Beeb should raise it's revenue however it chooses to do so. It shouldn't have anything to do with politicians and there should be no political interference.
So you’re going to “liberate” it from its public service broadcasting responsibility as well. And allow it to take whatever editorial line on news etc it damn well pleases? The Tories don’t complain about what they perceive as “BBC bias” because it is funded by the licence fee! They do so because it is enormously influential and trusted by millions of voters!
Suggesting that the BBC sees Netflix/Amazon/Disney as competitors is laughable. They don’t due a fraction of things the BBC does (or is required to do as part of its core remit). It’s role isn’t to make money!
Yes absolutely. Allow it to take whatever editorial line it damn well pleases. Why on earth not.
The thing that always gets me (and I may have, er, mentioned it on PB a time or two) is when some RT journalist is interviewed on the Beeb and the Beeb guy says "but you're just a state run broadcaster..."
During the pandemic the BBC's (or at least its website's) was indistinguishable from the government line on the virus. Complete with long story about some 16-yr old who had suffered from Covid and hence we should all be scared. They are at it again today describing (at length) how some young woman with ME is "terrified" of going out because she might catch Covid.
You may want that. The idea that the Tories want that on the other hand…
Of course we should abolish the TV license - its 2022. But the problem that the Dorries "intelligentsia" have with the BBC isn't the license fee, its that it exists. And even if the "we'll scrap the fee in 2027 3 years after we lose power!!!" threat had any teeth that wouldn't be the end.
We pay for so much content already. What difference does a BBC subscription make? I'd pay it happily. Spin the commercial arm back out and the BBC can make cash to pay for all the FTA stuff like radio. Done.
Can someone explain to me how a subscription would actually work for a broadcast service?
The original plan was for an encryption device to be on Freeview boxes, same as with Sky boxes, but the BBC vetoed the idea because it might lead to their channels being changed to subscription-based services by a future government.
Broadcast TV, using radio waves, probably only has a handful of years left now anyway.
How does that work for terrestrial broadcasts? A: It doesn't.
The largest section of TV consumers receive via digital terrestrial only.
If they want to replace the licence fee an alternative that's well-considered must be ready to go.
Cackhanded short-termist tinkering tomfoolery is what gave us devolved bodies everywhere except England. Lack of planning also meant leaving the EU was handled very poorly indeed.
Just not liking the licence fee is not sufficient because there has to be something.
Of course Dorries hasn’t the intelligence for that sort of thing, so she’s just announced that it will go and told the BBC to work out how they are going to be funded in future. Obviously anything they come up with won’t satisfy the Govt one way or another (either because it transfers costs to general taxation, focuses on areas the govt doesn’t support, proposed things which will give it greater independence (and therefore freedom from Govt interference), is unpopular with real Tory core supporters (as opposed to activists), at which point...
The Government doesn't dictate how Netflix, or Disney+, or Amazon make their money (and they're all commercial free too which used to be the BBCs USP). Why should it instruct a competitor like the BBC to do so.
Liberated from state influence the Beeb should raise it's revenue however it chooses to do so. It shouldn't have anything to do with politicians and there should be no political interference.
Then it will be sold off to the highest bidder and subject to editorial bias from whoever's got enough money to own it. Some foreign oligarch, most likely.
Another great British institution trashed on the altar of neoliberalism.
Sounds good.
Or if you don't like that, it could be entrusted to the BBC Trust on a charitable basis like the National Trust.
Of course we should abolish the TV license - its 2022. But the problem that the Dorries "intelligentsia" have with the BBC isn't the license fee, its that it exists. And even if the "we'll scrap the fee in 2027 3 years after we lose power!!!" threat had any teeth that wouldn't be the end.
We pay for so much content already. What difference does a BBC subscription make? I'd pay it happily. Spin the commercial arm back out and the BBC can make cash to pay for all the FTA stuff like radio. Done.
Can someone explain to me how a subscription would actually work for a broadcast service?
The original plan was for an encryption device to be on Freeview boxes, same as with Sky boxes, but the BBC vetoed the idea because it might lead to their channels being changed to subscription-based services by a future government.
Broadcast TV, using radio waves, probably only has a handful of years left now anyway.
How does that work for terrestrial broadcasts? A: It doesn't.
The largest section of TV consumers receive via digital terrestrial only.
And all BBC freeview terrestrial channels would have adverts like ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5 without any licence fee income. Iplayer would become subscription only however
Comments
We pay for so much content already. What difference does a BBC subscription make? I'd pay it happily. Spin the commercial arm back out and the BBC can make cash to pay for all the FTA stuff like radio. Done.
It'll be like the cod war.
https://www.newstatesman.com/comment/2022/01/boris-johnson-never-thought-the-rules-applied-to-him-at-last-the-public-has-noticed
Article: EuCo funding for detention camps in Libya, cooperating with militias:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/12/06/the-secretive-libyan-prisons-that-keep-migrants-out-of-europe
One possible change given German Govt current focus on demographics is that they may blow up Schengen again.
(Sorry to be depressing - I am not hopeful.)
('Man' in the Churchillian sense, of course.)
Wiki reckons only 15 countries have something like a licence fee, covering around 3% of the world’s population. So 97% of people haven’t grown up with the concept.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licence
Were BBC6 music presenters taking a serious anti racist stance, then I might look at the situation in a different way; but lots of racism is ignored and could never be condemned in the same way on a public service broadcaster - racism through deportations of foreign born people by the government, racism through the stripping of citizenship of dual nationals etc etc. So, unfashionable racism. As I have said previously, BLM have little really to do with fighting racism and everything to do with identity and power. If the people in the BBC are too politicised to see this then the whole organisation should be defunded, they can peddle their propoganda on the open market, a sort of 'fox news plus' for the progressive left.
iPlayer is obviously already fairly separate and can easily be put behind a subscription wall. Radio is the same with the BBC Sounds brand and associated apps.
https://twitter.com/DPJHodges/status/1482989145035358210
I wonder how far the concept of opt in subscription will go. Can is be applied to other things in government? An NHS membership? Join the nuclear defence club? No reason why not technically?
However, there is a simple test to see if Boris lying to you - his lips are moving and sound is coming out*
* this may not be true 100% of the time but it's safer to operate on the basis that a pack of lies designed to get him through the next 30 minutes is coming from his mouth
BoJo's basically a lazy sod. Masterly inactivity can be useful, but not combined with waffle and ignorance. His main crime for me? Never finishing a sentence unless someone gives him a script.
https://twitter.com/jamesjohnson252/status/1482739732723515396
What it might do is force the government to actually have a medium term plan, rather than the current strategy of slowly squeezing the BBC to death, and disclaiming responsibility.
Feel like it's just a telegraph report intended to help Boris fight them off and show he's a proper Tory.
With general taxation, the amount is subject to ministerial whim.
Today Nadine announced that the amount would not increase in the future. With direct funding she could have cut it today.
.@nadhimzahawi: "Yes he is."
https://twitter.com/paulwaugh/status/1482991537906724866
https://twitter.com/IsabelOakeshott/status/1482991926471282688
https://twitter.com/peterwalker99/status/1482992215647567879
The Tories should thank their lucky stars that it’s coming out now when there might still be time to turn it around and with Labour still some way off presenting a coherent alternative policy narrative. There really is little point in delay (eg. until may elections), when delay cuts into that recovery time. All that will do is make May worse than it might have been and make their Councillor base even more angry. The biggest joke is the idea that somehow Johnson himself is the man to restore authority.
Politicians - a job for people with a cause, no matter how muddle-headed.
Bojo is both, yet he lacks the cause.
https://www.uofgschooloflaw.com/blog/2015/05/12/tv-licenses-and-decriminalisation-has-anyone-noticed-what-happens-in-scotland
Tory MP Bowie said the mood in the party was a mix of "shame, anger and disappointment" and "it is quite clear that the apology didn't cut it" either with the public or the party in parliament.
LauraK said that the mood is very bad within the party, with even junior ministers discussing with each other what the best course of action is, with the moment of danger for the PM certainly not past.
She also mentioned rumours that Bozo is about to be interviewed by Gray.
- Number of oppressed subjects [government doesn't control except immigration etc]
...multiplied by...
- Rate of license fee [government-controlled]:
...then subtract
- Cost of obligations government gives it [government-controlled]
For the sake of argument, if the government had to legislate for the amount of general taxation the BBC gets per taxpayer instead of the total they get out of general taxation, that wouldn't meaningfully change the situation. If she'd wanted to Nadine could just as well have announced that from now on the license fee will have to be cut, or that the government will put a new tax on license fees or whatever. If anything "I will make the BBC cut the license fee everyone has to pay" is politically *easier* than "the government will cut spending on the BBC".
The line that “we don’t think the message on the doorsteps is as bad as feared”, combined with “we’ll get rid of Johnson when the voters revolt in May” is a delusional contradiction.
https://digitaleditions.telegraph.co.uk/data/820/reader/reader.html?#!preferred/0/package/820/pub/820/page/9/article/251966
He tells @SkyNews the plan to send military to tackle Channel migrants is a "massive distraction, that isn’t what the Navy should be doing" and the BBC have done an important job reporting #partygate
https://twitter.com/tamcohen/status/1482996444709666821
And Chris Loder, another Tory MP, on the same programme https://twitter.com/JohnRentoul/status/1482996853939527682/photo/1
Johnson, Hancock and No 10 and PHE did.
Not Sky News.
See Tim Stanley for a list of ridiculous, petty rules these people insisted we follow or face police action:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/01/17/britains-failed-establishment-will-never-apologise-catastrophe/
It comes as new signs of a Tory grassroots backlash emerged.
#Thread👇
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2022/01/16/boris-johnson-grilled-downing-street-parties-tory-anger-boils/ https://twitter.com/TelePolitics/status/1482995817862602752/photo/1
With Mr Johnson facing the biggest political crisis of his premiership, more evidence emerged of an angry reaction among Tory voters to allegations of lockdown-breaking parties https://twitter.com/TelePolitics/status/1482995826020524033/photo/1
A survey conducted by the Grassroots Conservatives group found that around four in 10 of its supporters wanted Mr Johnson to resign now, according to Ed Costelloe, the group’s chairman
Tory MPs claimed that "enormous anger" had been conveyed by their local associations over the weekend, with one saying five per cent of their party members had quit
It emerged on Sunday that one Tory MP’s constituency office had been daubed with the words "lies, lies, lies".
Other MPs say emails of complaint have flooded into inboxes https://twitter.com/TelePolitics/status/1482995833775734785/photo/1
"We're after the traffickers."
"They aren't in the boat."
https://twitter.com/AGildedEye/status/1482975997007958017
Education Secretary Nadhim Zahawi says 'nobody is above the law' and they should 'face the consequences of a trial' but 'the Prime Minister does not believe he has broken the law'. https://twitter.com/GMB/status/1482997647682293761/video/1
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2022/jan/17/lego-sued-over-leather-jacket-worn-by-toy-antoni-in-queer-eye-set
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/dec/10/investing-in-lego-more-lucrative-than-gold-study-suggests
With latest poll putting the Tories on 31% and fewer seats up the results this May may be bad but will still not be that bad
Liberated from state influence the Beeb should raise it's revenue however it chooses to do so. It shouldn't have anything to do with politicians and there should be no political interference.
The fact is the government don't like the BBC because they think it's woke. Just like the leftist twitterati don't like the BBC because they think it's a Tory propaganda machine. And Scottish nationalists don't like the BBC because they think it's a unionist propaganda machine.
Putting the future of a globally important institution like the BBC in the hands of people who self-evidently don't wish it well is not a good idea. But there's the paradox: if we want it to remain impartial and public-service oriented, then it needs to be accountable to democratic institutions. So it relies on fair play by the government. It's when that fair play breaks down, as it clearly has down now and did over Iraq under Blair, that we are left stuck.
It's not the only institution where that's increasingly the case. When the old unwritten rules of the game get trampled on we have few formal defences. Take the trend of policy announcements outwith parliament, the politicisation of the civil service, the ignoring and casting aside of parliamentary standards enquiries - first Patel, now no doubt Bercow, and so on.
I don't see a solution to any of this other than - hope of hopes - grown up politicians willing to take a cross-party, politically neutral approach to certain areas of national life where partisanship is in nobody's interest.
Shouldn’t the comparator be May 2018 though…?
From the Telegraph. This surely has to be bollocks? Hand delivery? Even when the 1922 Committee was founded there was a functioning postal service.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2022/01/16/boris-johnson-grilled-downing-street-parties-tory-anger-boils/
Another great British institution trashed on the altar of neoliberalism.
You're basically saying the organisation should be scrapped, and government provide startup funding for a very late to the market streaming competitor.
To get rid of Johnson the tory MPs would have to be some combination of decisive, principled and brave. If you think about your average tory MP it's obvious why Johnson will be in place for a while yet.
And they vote.
Suggesting that the BBC sees Netflix/Amazon/Disney as competitors is laughable. They don’t due a fraction of things the BBC does (or is required to do as part of its core remit). It’s role isn’t to make money!
Opt out, save money. If you don’t think you get value from the military band package, the civil list package or the Trident package, no problem just uncheck the box.
Broadcast TV, using radio waves, probably only has a handful of years left now anyway.
Gave him credit for Brexit and the vaccines. Actually feel sorry for him, were the words.
And no the taxi driver wasn't Albanian so I suppose not as insightful but still.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/12/06/the-secretive-libyan-prisons-that-keep-migrants-out-of-europe
Essentially the EU is paying the er... local strong men in Libya to stop the migrants. The strong men have created a heavily armed "Coast Guard". Which chases down the boats and imprisons the would be immigrants.
Since they then have warehouses full of prisoners to feed, they auction their labour to farmers.....
This lovely diagram of the conditions they keep the immigrants in, is certainly thought provoking....
He either loses it or if not survives until the next general election in 2024 given the results were so awful in May 2019 even a Boris led Tories would likely gain a few councillors in May 2023
It could have become a global streaming public service giant, but now that combination looks much more difficult to achieve.
But that's the nuclear option and all of them will wait for Gray.
We could be fast approaching the point when Netflix is the top source of television in the UK, a position held by the BBC almost since the invention of television itself.
Maybe the licence fee should go to Netflix if that's what people are choosing to watch?
The thing that always gets me (and I may have, er, mentioned it on PB a time or two) is when some RT journalist is interviewed on the Beeb and the Beeb guy says "but you're just a state run broadcaster..."
During the pandemic the BBC's (or at least its website's) was indistinguishable from the government line on the virus. Complete with long story about some 16-yr old who had suffered from Covid and hence we should all be scared. They are at it again today describing (at length) how some young woman with ME is "terrified" of going out because she might catch Covid.
This meant that *some* Freeview boxes/TVs were sold without the ability to decrypt. So the BBC could argue that encrypting their channels would shut some people out - poorest, oldest etc.
So it's a what kind of woman do you think I am situation. We have established that SKS broke the rules, just as BoJo did, it's just a question of to what degree.
The question is, will Bozo be the one being asked to get down on all-fours?
The largest section of TV consumers receive via digital terrestrial only.
Or if you don't like that, it could be entrusted to the BBC Trust on a charitable basis like the National Trust.