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Monday’s going to be a big day for Johnson – politicalbetting.com

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  • WhisperingOracleWhisperingOracle Posts: 8,480
    edited January 2022
    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    alex_ said:

    Good morning, everyone.

    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.
    BiB - typical lefty thinking that people won't be able to think for themselves and will do just whatever the evil right wing media tells them to.
    How has Fox News influenced political culture and debate in the US, would you say ?
    US is not my area of expertise so I have no idea.

    But in general the media reflects not directs what people think. People like to read/consume views similar to their own. Quite why Socialist Worker doesn't have the circulation of the Daily Mail is I'm sure down to a right wing media plot.
    It's far more complex than that, I would say. The media both reinforces, accentuates and simplifies views that people already have, and sometimes develops entirely new ones.

    Again, don't disagree and there are sometimes "new views" but that surely is at the margin. No one here, for example, would read the Graun/Torygraph and have a moment of epiphany while those who don't care as much about politics would not think of picking up a paper of the "opposing" view.
    It's more that people's instincts can be profoundly exaggerated in various directions. If you read reasonably balanced but still conservative media, you're much less likely to storm the Capitol than if you're an American who watches Tucker Carlson every day on Fox, for instance.
  • LostPasswordLostPassword Posts: 14,772

    I'm actually enjoying this debate on the BBC.

    Personally, I'd keep things as they are but I can see that's not going to be tenable.

    Some good suggestions coming from all sides here on PB.

    If only Doreen Norris and her colleagues were listening.

    A fairly minimal change, but one that still gets rid of the licence fee, would be to hypothecate VAT revenues from Netflix subscriptions, TV sales, broadband, smartphone sales and charges to the BBC.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 46,268
    Jonathan said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    glw said:

    alex_ said:

    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?
    Netflix Premium is £13.99 a month. That is more than the licence fee, and is the one that allows different people to watch different programmes at the same time, like they can with the BBC.
    I've never heard of Netflix Premium. They recently increased their prices so that we now pay £9.99 for three simultaneous screens, something like me while away from home for work, my wife back at home and my daughter at University - something which would require three TV licenses if our devices were plugged in.
    How much is Netflix in the UK?

    Netflix currently offers three pricing plans, each of which have a monthly payment: Basic: £5.99 (up to standard-definition quality and stream to just one device at any one time) Standard: £9.99 (up to high-definition quality and steam to two devices at once) Premium: £13.99 (up to 4K Ultra HD quality and stream to four devices at once) You can check which payment plan you’re on – and change it – in your account settings.

    Read more: https://www.which.co.uk/reviews/tv-providers-and-services/article/what-is-netflix-aBbB84i7gvLv - Which?
    Curious that Netflix is held as model just as it us peaking and losing its creative mojo.
    It is difficult to know whether the undoubted dip in drama quality is a genuine decline, or simply another dreary consequence of Covid. My guess is the latter. So many shows have been put on hold, hard to film, lacking the right people, hamstrung by location issues and so forth

    Look at the recent Amazon Prime edition of the Grand Tour. Carnage A Trois, with Clarkson et al testing out French cars in various "amusing ways". It was poor. Disjointed, incoherent, peculiar. Even if you don't like The Grand Tour, it is normally well-produced and with a clever narrative. This had none of that

    Why? Surely, Covid. A show about French cars was meant to be made in France, with the trio tootling around Paris, down to Provence, maybe a trip to the Pyrenees and Le Mans. = Lovely TV and with a geographical goal. Instead for no obvious reason (other than the unspoken presence of Covid) it was in.... Wales. with bits in Surrey. And the Midlands. And it all looked hastily rammed together

    We will have to wait til Covid is absolutely in the rear mirror before we can start saying Netflix has peaked
  • I'm actually enjoying this debate on the BBC.

    Personally, I'd keep things as they are but I can see that's not going to be tenable.

    Some good suggestions coming from all sides here on PB.

    If only Doreen Norris and her colleagues were listening.

    A fairly minimal change, but one that still gets rid of the licence fee, would be to hypothecate VAT revenues from Netflix subscriptions, TV sales, broadband, smartphone sales and charges to the BBC.
    But that takes money away from the general pot spent elsewhere. It will need to be made up by increasing another tax or taxes.
  • Leon said:

    alex_ said:

    Good morning, everyone.

    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.
    The BBC is an accident of history, but it is a lucky accident. All governments think that the BBC is against them - and that is mostly a good thing.
    The BBC, like all organisations, makes mistakes but generally the level of television is higher than it would be without it.
    If the government messes too much with the BBC we could end up with Fox 'News'.
    An elderly, quite right wing uncle, of mine said that you only believe the BBC is of no value until you go and live in America and experience their idea of TV
    Given that you are circa 90 years old then your uncle must be 120. Which makes sense as this is an opinion which has not been true since about 1989. American TV used to be crap long long ago, but anyone who has watched the Golden Age of Drama (mostly American, and led by America) knows that it now puts out phenomenal TV in drama, and many many other categories - from sports to current affairs.

    Watch how the Americans cover an election. Super hi tech and slick, it makes us look Neanderthal. It may be biased, but then, if you don't like the bias, you can turn over to a different station and get a different bias. And of course the Americans have this thing called the Internet, with stuff on "Youtube" etc etc



    Seeing as you are the most reactionary old fart with views that would make a 90 year old Col. Blimp wince, it is a bit rich for you to be ageist. Having read one of your Dan Brown-esque novels and also the general nonsense you write on here (amusing though it is for its general stupidity) I am not really that interested in what you might consider to be culture or high art. Thanks anyway.
  • IanB2IanB2 Posts: 47,092
    edited January 2022
    Stereodog said:

    Carnyx said:

    DougSeal said:

    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.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2022/01/16/boris-johnson-grilled-downing-street-parties-tory-anger-boils/

    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.
    The service standards of the postal service in the Victorian age were astounding, as you say, even if it was Londoners who enjoyed the most impressive service, with deliveries made throughout the day and a sameday service across much of the capital.

    When I was in charge of planning postal services for the City of London in the 1980s, we still had the sameday delivery within the EC1-4 postcodes - pillarbox emptied at around 0830 and items sent out for delivery at 1130 - which was the last remaining vestige of the Victorian service. But it wasn't tremendously reliable, resting upon a hand search through the pile of letters from the box collection to fish out the City items before the rest of it was put aside for processing in the afternoon - and so we didn't advertise or tell anyone about it.
  • eekeek Posts: 24,797
    Leon said:

    Jonathan said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    glw said:

    alex_ said:

    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?
    Netflix Premium is £13.99 a month. That is more than the licence fee, and is the one that allows different people to watch different programmes at the same time, like they can with the BBC.
    I've never heard of Netflix Premium. They recently increased their prices so that we now pay £9.99 for three simultaneous screens, something like me while away from home for work, my wife back at home and my daughter at University - something which would require three TV licenses if our devices were plugged in.
    How much is Netflix in the UK?

    Netflix currently offers three pricing plans, each of which have a monthly payment: Basic: £5.99 (up to standard-definition quality and stream to just one device at any one time) Standard: £9.99 (up to high-definition quality and steam to two devices at once) Premium: £13.99 (up to 4K Ultra HD quality and stream to four devices at once) You can check which payment plan you’re on – and change it – in your account settings.

    Read more: https://www.which.co.uk/reviews/tv-providers-and-services/article/what-is-netflix-aBbB84i7gvLv - Which?
    Curious that Netflix is held as model just as it us peaking and losing its creative mojo.
    It is difficult to know whether the undoubted dip in drama quality is a genuine decline, or simply another dreary consequence of Covid. My guess is the latter. So many shows have been put on hold, hard to film, lacking the right people, hamstrung by location issues and so forth

    Look at the recent Amazon Prime edition of the Grand Tour. Carnage A Trois, with Clarkson et al testing out French cars in various "amusing ways". It was poor. Disjointed, incoherent, peculiar. Even if you don't like The Grand Tour, it is normally well-produced and with a clever narrative. This had none of that

    Why? Surely, Covid. A show about French cars was meant to be made in France, with the trio tootling around Paris, down to Provence, maybe a trip to the Pyrenees and Le Mans. = Lovely TV and with a geographical goal. Instead for no obvious reason (other than the unspoken presence of Covid) it was in.... Wales. with bits in Surrey. And the Midlands. And it all looked hastily rammed together

    We will have to wait til Covid is absolutely in the rear mirror before we can start saying Netflix has peaked
    From what I remember it was supposed to be filmed in France and then new Covid rules threw a spanner the plan just days before filming began. Hence the disjointed show as they tried to do something (anything) given that everyone had been booked to film.
  • boulayboulay Posts: 3,773
    TOPPING said:

    boulay said:

    boulay said:

    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 as it is however I think there are two routes to this.

    Firstly inevitably in a few years I can see that there will no longer be the traditional broadcast medium - as all tvs become internet ready, as older generations are replaced by those who have already adopted internet tv/streaming then it’s easier to put all tv behind subscription. So if you want to watch the bbc in the future it’s going to be via streaming and so you will need a log-in anyway as you do with iPlayer etc now.

    In the transition however I don’t think it would be a huge issue if there was a dual approach. Broadcast BBC covered by a smaller basic licence fee covering BBC1,2 and BBC news. Then an additional BBC subscription service where you have all the bbc channels but a much improved IPlayer - the current layout is awful for starters - but more importantly forget Britbox and have all of BBC historic content on the subscription system.

    So for example I would happily subscribe just for access to all the old Michael Wood docs and the BBC’s other history docs from the past. I don’t really like the fact that the BBC take a fee/tax to access a “national asset” but then someone there decides which of the limited catalogue we are allowed to see. If these programmes were paid for by the taxpayer/licence fee payer/British public then they have the right to access them - at present by hiding them behind Britbox it’s already created a two tier service anyway.

    This model could also work for ITV etc - free to air basic channels but then a total subscription service (ad free if you want to pay extra) with all the back care log he at a click.
    Why would you subscribe to get Michael Wood docs when you can get them for free on YouTube:

    https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=michael+wood
    To be honest I’m a bit of a fossil and only use YouTube for music videos which at least benefits the artist to an extent.

    I would hope or expect that if the bbc went subscription they would be putting in the effort to remove their content from YouTube etc unless they are able to benefit financially from it being there.

    I have a long running argument with a family member who watches new films free online - he’s a designer for brands etc and I ask him why he thinks it’s ok to do that as if he saw someone had copied his work or was using his work without having paid for it he would go nuts so I’m not a huge fan of people wanting everything for free when it suits them.
    By the same token how come we have to pay for BritBox's BBC output when we have already paid for it via the license fee when it was made first time around.
    Agreed, as I pointed out in an earlier post it’s a bit off that programmes paid for by the licence fee payer/tax payer are hidden behind a further subscription service so you are being asked to pay twice for it - and then it’s down to some bod at the bbc to determine which of these gems we are allowed to see on IPlayer - and they fucking choose wall to wall Mrs Brown’s Boys…… (slight exaggeration) and then their history section seems to be the David Olusunga channel half the time with a side of Janina Ramirez and re-hashed Marr.
  • AnabobazinaAnabobazina Posts: 19,620
    alex_ said:

    alex_ said:

    For those that missed it, we learned last night from the Telegraph that Plan B will NOT be rescinded in full, indeed the masking will stay on public transport and in shops.

    As I have said several times, that’s the problem with temporary restrictions. They recall Milton Friedman’s observation that there is nothing so permanent as a temporary government programme.

    Whilst I agree my immediate concern isn’t public transport and shops. It is wider “crowded spaces”. Which impacts on my social activity. What are they saying about that?
    Is that the rule currently? In which settings exactly? I actually didn’t know that.
    Anything inside, “crowded” (ie no social distancing and not defined as hospitality I believe.
    I didn’t actually know that! So conference centres etc? Crikey.

    I’m not sure this mask-continuation idea is widely known about in our political class. My sense was that everyone (Lab, Lib or Con) assumes Plan B will be dropped on Wednesday week.

    According to the Torygraph, it won’t be…
  • Scott_xPScott_xP Posts: 32,739
    Most worrying thing for Tory MPs this morning might be assessment by Sir John Curtice.

    He told @TimesRadio it was "remarkable" that a majority of 2019 Tory voters now disapproved of the PM's performance and they were unlikely to fully recover 10 point drop in the polls

    https://twitter.com/Smyth_Chris/status/1483017380481712128
  • FarooqFarooq Posts: 10,775

    Leon said:

    alex_ said:

    Good morning, everyone.

    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.
    The BBC is an accident of history, but it is a lucky accident. All governments think that the BBC is against them - and that is mostly a good thing.
    The BBC, like all organisations, makes mistakes but generally the level of television is higher than it would be without it.
    If the government messes too much with the BBC we could end up with Fox 'News'.
    An elderly, quite right wing uncle, of mine said that you only believe the BBC is of no value until you go and live in America and experience their idea of TV
    Given that you are circa 90 years old then your uncle must be 120. Which makes sense as this is an opinion which has not been true since about 1989. American TV used to be crap long long ago, but anyone who has watched the Golden Age of Drama (mostly American, and led by America) knows that it now puts out phenomenal TV in drama, and many many other categories - from sports to current affairs.

    Watch how the Americans cover an election. Super hi tech and slick, it makes us look Neanderthal. It may be biased, but then, if you don't like the bias, you can turn over to a different station and get a different bias. And of course the Americans have this thing called the Internet, with stuff on "Youtube" etc etc



    Seeing as you are the most reactionary old fart with views that would make a 90 year old Col. Blimp wince, it is a bit rich for you to be ageist. Having read one of your Dan Brown-esque novels and also the general nonsense you write on here (amusing though it is for its general stupidity) I am not really that interested in what you might consider to be culture or high art. Thanks anyway.
    Leon's nonsense is never "general". It is specific, distilled, curated nonsense.
  • TazTaz Posts: 10,704

    I'm actually enjoying this debate on the BBC.

    Personally, I'd keep things as they are but I can see that's not going to be tenable.

    Some good suggestions coming from all sides here on PB.

    If only Doreen Norris and her colleagues were listening.

    A fairly minimal change, but one that still gets rid of the licence fee, would be to hypothecate VAT revenues from Netflix subscriptions, TV sales, broadband, smartphone sales and charges to the BBC.
    Why even consider that. It makes the BBC 100% reliant on the state for its income.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 46,268
    Stocky said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    alex_ said:

    Good morning, everyone.

    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.
    BiB - typical lefty thinking that people won't be able to think for themselves and will do just whatever the evil right wing media tells them to.
    Haha! Whereas Tory accusations of left-wing BBC bias is... fair enough, and needs to be sorted?
    I don't care, frankly. I couldn't care less about editorial bias because it's up to me to decide whether to consume the output or not. Except that left or right I am forced to pay for the BBC. Which, when written down, sounds absolutely absurd.
    I disagree with Barty - I'm a big fan of the BBC but even I am growing weary of its output. The New Year's Eve show was a disgrace:

    https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/bbc-complaints-nye-fireworks-blm-nhs-b1784293.html

    https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1542945/bbc-news-new-years-eve-coverage-london-politics-news-spt

    Oh God yes, Whenever I think "we must preserve the BBC for all its flaws" - which is most of the time, as it happens - if I think of that New Year's Eve show then I do a small puke in my mouth and think: Let It Die

    It really has to lose the Woke Lecturing Shit or people like me, otherwise reasonably disposed, will turn on it, and then it is in real trouble
  • StereodogStereodog Posts: 395
    IanB2 said:

    Stereodog said:

    Carnyx said:

    DougSeal said:

    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.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2022/01/16/boris-johnson-grilled-downing-street-parties-tory-anger-boils/

    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.
    The service standards of the postal service in the Victorian age were astounding, as you say, even if it was Londoners who enjoyed the most impressive service, with deliveries made throughout the day and a sameday service across much of the capital.

    When I was in charge of planning postal services for the City of London in the 1980s, we still had the sameday delivery within the EC1-4 postcodes - pillarbox emptied at around 0830 and items sent out for delivery at 1130 - which was the last remaining vestige of the Victorian service. But it wasn't tremendously reliable, resting upon a hand search through the pile of letters from the box collection to fish out the City items before the rest of it was put aside for processing in the afternoon - and so we didn't advertise or tell anyone about it.
    Amazing. I'm just about old enough to remember listening out for the second post if the thing I wanted didn't arrive in the first one
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,712
    edited January 2022

    alex_ said:

    alex_ said:

    For those that missed it, we learned last night from the Telegraph that Plan B will NOT be rescinded in full, indeed the masking will stay on public transport and in shops.

    As I have said several times, that’s the problem with temporary restrictions. They recall Milton Friedman’s observation that there is nothing so permanent as a temporary government programme.

    Whilst I agree my immediate concern isn’t public transport and shops. It is wider “crowded spaces”. Which impacts on my social activity. What are they saying about that?
    Is that the rule currently? In which settings exactly? I actually didn’t know that.
    Anything inside, “crowded” (ie no social distancing and not defined as hospitality I believe.
    I didn’t actually know that! So conference centres etc? Crikey.

    I’m not sure this mask-continuation idea is widely known about in our political class. My sense was that everyone (Lab, Lib or Con) assumes Plan B will be dropped on Wednesday week.

    According to the Torygraph, it won’t be…
    Dropping wearing of masks in shops and public transport however when still in winter when Covid rates are higher would likely lose more votes than it wins
  • FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 76,274
    edited January 2022
    At the end of the day sticking with the BBC licence is advocating for managed decline of the BBC, where there are handstrung by their own limitations under the very rules they wish to continue under.

    It unenforceable model, which the younger demograpic have less and less interested in, and all the mega corpoartions will eat the high end lunch and the low end Youtuber / Twitch bite massive chunks out of.
  • OldKingColeOldKingCole Posts: 31,722
    HYUFD said:

    Question: If Bojo goes, can Dorries be far behind?

    And Rees Mogg. Who else but an incompetent like Johnson would appoint these fools.
    Priti Patel, Dorries and Rees Mogg are all Boris loyalists as they all came into the Cabinet when Boris became PM and are on the right of the party
    And your point is?
  • kamskikamski Posts: 4,199
    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    darkage said:

    Sandpit said:

    darkage said:

    Sandpit said:

    GIN1138 said:

    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.

    Slightly out of date source, gives 13% as the figure, nearly 200k prosecutions per year https://fullfact.org/news/do-tv-licence-offences-account-one-ten-court-cases/

    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.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licence
    Nonsense
  • RogerRoger Posts: 18,891

    HYUFD said:

    Question: If Bojo goes, can Dorries be far behind?

    And Rees Mogg. Who else but an incompetent like Johnson would appoint these fools.
    Priti Patel, Dorries and Rees Mogg are all Boris loyalists as they all came into the Cabinet when Boris became PM and are on the right of the party
    And your point is?
    All three would be out on their ear if Boris gets booted out?
  • TazTaz Posts: 10,704
    HYUFD said:

    Taz said:

    https://www.cityam.com/youtube-and-netflix-among-most-watched-channels-as-streaming-booms/

    in 2019 Youtube and Netflix were in the top four channels watched in the UK

    The BBC may be more than its TV channels but as fewer and fewer people watch it or engage with it for any reasonable length of time it is going to be the end of the license fee irrespective of the politics.

    Which would mean commercial ads on the BBC for the first time and at least iplayer going subscription service only
    That’s fine, if that’s how it ends up.
  • RobDRobD Posts: 58,941
    kamski said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    darkage said:

    Sandpit said:

    darkage said:

    Sandpit said:

    GIN1138 said:

    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.

    Slightly out of date source, gives 13% as the figure, nearly 200k prosecutions per year https://fullfact.org/news/do-tv-licence-offences-account-one-ten-court-cases/

    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.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licence
    Nonsense
    The stats are nonsense?
  • OnlyLivingBoyOnlyLivingBoy Posts: 14,915
    Leon said:

    alex_ said:

    Good morning, everyone.

    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.
    The BBC is an accident of history, but it is a lucky accident. All governments think that the BBC is against them - and that is mostly a good thing.
    The BBC, like all organisations, makes mistakes but generally the level of television is higher than it would be without it.
    If the government messes too much with the BBC we could end up with Fox 'News'.
    An elderly, quite right wing uncle, of mine said that you only believe the BBC is of no value until you go and live in America and experience their idea of TV
    Given that you are circa 90 years old then your uncle must be 120. Which makes sense as this is an opinion which has not been true since about 1989. American TV used to be crap long long ago, but anyone who has watched the Golden Age of Drama (mostly American, and led by America) knows that it now puts out phenomenal TV in drama, and many many other categories - from sports to current affairs.

    Watch how the Americans cover an election. Super hi tech and slick, it makes us look Neanderthal. It may be biased, but then, if you don't like the bias, you can turn over to a different station and get a different bias. And of course the Americans have this thing called the Internet, with stuff on "Youtube" etc etc



    US election coverage is absolutely dire. We do it much better. Even when my side is losing (ie most of the time) it is high drama with a brilliant cast. US election coverage is just a load of graphs interspersed with James Carville shouting at people.
    Apart from the Crown I'm struggling to think of a really good Netflix original show. It's mostly just expensive looking shit with awful dialogue. The Eurovision film was good but only in a camp so bad it's good kind of way.
    I hope that the BBC survives.
  • kamskikamski Posts: 4,199
    RobD said:

    kamski said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    darkage said:

    Sandpit said:

    darkage said:

    Sandpit said:

    GIN1138 said:

    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.

    Slightly out of date source, gives 13% as the figure, nearly 200k prosecutions per year https://fullfact.org/news/do-tv-licence-offences-account-one-ten-court-cases/

    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.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licence
    Nonsense
    The stats are nonsense?
    RobD said:

    kamski said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    darkage said:

    Sandpit said:

    darkage said:

    Sandpit said:

    GIN1138 said:

    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.

    Slightly out of date source, gives 13% as the figure, nearly 200k prosecutions per year https://fullfact.org/news/do-tv-licence-offences-account-one-ten-court-cases/

    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.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licence
    Nonsense
    The stats are nonsense?
    Yes.

    Even the Wiki article Sandpit links to says Pakistan has a licence fee. That is almost 3% of the world's population already.
  • IanB2IanB2 Posts: 47,092
    edited January 2022
    Stereodog said:

    IanB2 said:

    Stereodog said:

    Carnyx said:

    DougSeal said:

    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.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2022/01/16/boris-johnson-grilled-downing-street-parties-tory-anger-boils/

    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.
    The service standards of the postal service in the Victorian age were astounding, as you say, even if it was Londoners who enjoyed the most impressive service, with deliveries made throughout the day and a sameday service across much of the capital.

    When I was in charge of planning postal services for the City of London in the 1980s, we still had the sameday delivery within the EC1-4 postcodes - pillarbox emptied at around 0830 and items sent out for delivery at 1130 - which was the last remaining vestige of the Victorian service. But it wasn't tremendously reliable, resting upon a hand search through the pile of letters from the box collection to fish out the City items before the rest of it was put aside for processing in the afternoon - and so we didn't advertise or tell anyone about it.
    Amazing. I'm just about old enough to remember listening out for the second post if the thing I wanted didn't arrive in the first one
    Over the years, with improvements in transport and automated sorting, most of the mail was done for the first delivery and second deliveries got lighter and lighter. I remember once in the City we had a second delivery going out with just eleven items for the whole route.

    Because staff finished and went home after the second delivery was done, holding them back from going out on the second, waiting for any late items, was always a challenge, and another obstacle to advertising the sameday service, since the posties could easily be gone after their prep with the 'sameday' items for their round still on the inward frame.
  • glwglw Posts: 9,535

    At the end of the day sticking with the BBC licence is advocating for managed decline of the BBC, where there are handstrung by their own limitations under the very rules they wish to continue under.

    It unenforceable model, which the younger demograpic have less and less interested in, and all the mega corpoartions will eat the high end lunch and the low end Youtuber / Twitch bite massive chunks out of.

    If Labour win the next general election and save the licence fee that will be it for the BBC. It will be on a path to ruin.
  • SandpitSandpit Posts: 49,614
    edited January 2022
    kamski said:

    RobD said:

    kamski said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    darkage said:

    Sandpit said:

    darkage said:

    Sandpit said:

    GIN1138 said:

    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.

    Slightly out of date source, gives 13% as the figure, nearly 200k prosecutions per year https://fullfact.org/news/do-tv-licence-offences-account-one-ten-court-cases/

    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.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licence
    Nonsense
    The stats are nonsense?
    RobD said:

    kamski said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    darkage said:

    Sandpit said:

    darkage said:

    Sandpit said:

    GIN1138 said:

    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.

    Slightly out of date source, gives 13% as the figure, nearly 200k prosecutions per year https://fullfact.org/news/do-tv-licence-offences-account-one-ten-court-cases/

    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.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licence
    Nonsense
    The stats are nonsense?
    Yes.

    Even the Wiki article Sandpit links to says Pakistan has a licence fee. That is almost 3% of the world's population already.
    Pakistan doesn’t have a TV licence. It has a charge levied on *electricity bills* that pays for public service broadcasting.
  • CookieCookie Posts: 11,184
    HYUFD said:

    alex_ said:

    alex_ said:

    For those that missed it, we learned last night from the Telegraph that Plan B will NOT be rescinded in full, indeed the masking will stay on public transport and in shops.

    As I have said several times, that’s the problem with temporary restrictions. They recall Milton Friedman’s observation that there is nothing so permanent as a temporary government programme.

    Whilst I agree my immediate concern isn’t public transport and shops. It is wider “crowded spaces”. Which impacts on my social activity. What are they saying about that?
    Is that the rule currently? In which settings exactly? I actually didn’t know that.
    Anything inside, “crowded” (ie no social distancing and not defined as hospitality I believe.
    I didn’t actually know that! So conference centres etc? Crikey.

    I’m not sure this mask-continuation idea is widely known about in our political class. My sense was that everyone (Lab, Lib or Con) assumes Plan B will be dropped on Wednesday week.

    According to the Torygraph, it won’t be…
    Dropping wearing of masks in shops and public transport however when still in winter when Covid rates are higher would likely lose more votes than it wins
    Haven't you previously reckoned that dropping Plan B restrictions would win the government support?
    Mask wearing is pretty much the only Plan B restriction which impacts me negatively, and does so in a big way.
    The only reason mask wearing wins votes is because the government have spent 20 months trying to terrify the public into submission.
  • WhisperingOracleWhisperingOracle Posts: 8,480
    edited January 2022

    Leon said:

    alex_ said:

    Good morning, everyone.

    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.
    The BBC is an accident of history, but it is a lucky accident. All governments think that the BBC is against them - and that is mostly a good thing.
    The BBC, like all organisations, makes mistakes but generally the level of television is higher than it would be without it.
    If the government messes too much with the BBC we could end up with Fox 'News'.
    An elderly, quite right wing uncle, of mine said that you only believe the BBC is of no value until you go and live in America and experience their idea of TV
    Given that you are circa 90 years old then your uncle must be 120. Which makes sense as this is an opinion which has not been true since about 1989. American TV used to be crap long long ago, but anyone who has watched the Golden Age of Drama (mostly American, and led by America) knows that it now puts out phenomenal TV in drama, and many many other categories - from sports to current affairs.

    Watch how the Americans cover an election. Super hi tech and slick, it makes us look Neanderthal. It may be biased, but then, if you don't like the bias, you can turn over to a different station and get a different bias. And of course the Americans have this thing called the Internet, with stuff on "Youtube" etc etc



    US election coverage is absolutely dire. We do it much better. Even when my side is losing (ie most of the time) it is high drama with a brilliant cast. US election coverage is just a load of graphs interspersed with James Carville shouting at people.
    Apart from the Crown I'm struggling to think of a really good Netflix original show. It's mostly just expensive looking shit with awful dialogue. The Eurovision film was good but only in a camp so bad it's good kind of way.
    I hope that the BBC survives.
    I agree that there's an awful lot of formulaic rubbish on NetFlix, although there are a few gems too. The BBC between the 1960's and mid-1990s most often was capable of far better, and occasionally now still is.
  • LostPasswordLostPassword Posts: 14,772

    Sandpit said:

    alex_ said:

    Good morning, everyone.

    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.
    The BBC is an accident of history, but it is a lucky accident. All governments think that the BBC is against them - and that is mostly a good thing.
    The BBC, like all organisations, makes mistakes but generally the level of television is higher than it would be without it.
    If the government messes too much with the BBC we could end up with Fox 'News'.
    An elderly, quite right wing uncle, of mine said that you only believe the BBC is of no value until you go and live in America and experience their idea of TV
    PBS and HBO are some of the world’s best television.

    CBS and NBC, on the other hand, are indeed some of the worst.
    Well maybe, and it was a while since he lived there. I really don't get the right wing obsession with defunding the BBC. It does a good job. The licence fee isn't that onerous. People need to focus their ire on some more important aspects of our society.
    The licence fee is very much like the poll tax, so it's definitely a bit weird to have the Right in favour of scrapping it and the Left equating that with the End Of Days.

    There's certainly a case for replacing the TV license with a different way of raising the money that doesn't see people jailed for non-payment, and reduces the amount of income for Capita. I've suggested hypothecating VAT revenue from related goods and services.
  • kamskikamski Posts: 4,199
    Sandpit said:

    kamski said:

    RobD said:

    kamski said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    darkage said:

    Sandpit said:

    darkage said:

    Sandpit said:

    GIN1138 said:

    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.

    Slightly out of date source, gives 13% as the figure, nearly 200k prosecutions per year https://fullfact.org/news/do-tv-licence-offences-account-one-ten-court-cases/

    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.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licence
    Nonsense
    The stats are nonsense?
    RobD said:

    kamski said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    darkage said:

    Sandpit said:

    darkage said:

    Sandpit said:

    GIN1138 said:

    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.

    Slightly out of date source, gives 13% as the figure, nearly 200k prosecutions per year https://fullfact.org/news/do-tv-licence-offences-account-one-ten-court-cases/

    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.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licence
    Nonsense
    The stats are nonsense?
    Yes.

    Even the Wiki article Sandpit links to says Pakistan has a licence fee. That is almost 3% of the world's population already.
    Pakistan doesn’t have a licence fee. It has a charge levied on *electricity bills* that pays for public service broadcasting.
    It does have a TV licence fee.

    It is referred to as a "television licence fee" in Pakistan.

  • eekeek Posts: 24,797

    This thread is no longer being Broadcast

  • RobDRobD Posts: 58,941
    kamski said:

    RobD said:

    kamski said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    darkage said:

    Sandpit said:

    darkage said:

    Sandpit said:

    GIN1138 said:

    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.

    Slightly out of date source, gives 13% as the figure, nearly 200k prosecutions per year https://fullfact.org/news/do-tv-licence-offences-account-one-ten-court-cases/

    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.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licence
    Nonsense
    The stats are nonsense?
    RobD said:

    kamski said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    darkage said:

    Sandpit said:

    darkage said:

    Sandpit said:

    GIN1138 said:

    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.

    Slightly out of date source, gives 13% as the figure, nearly 200k prosecutions per year https://fullfact.org/news/do-tv-licence-offences-account-one-ten-court-cases/

    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.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licence
    Nonsense
    The stats are nonsense?
    Yes.

    Even the Wiki article Sandpit links to says Pakistan has a licence fee. That is almost 3% of the world's population already.
    So 6% rather than 3%? I think his point still stands.
  • kjhkjh Posts: 10,462
    edited January 2022
    HYUFD said:

    Question: If Bojo goes, can Dorries be far behind?

    And Rees Mogg. Who else but an incompetent like Johnson would appoint these fools.
    Priti Patel, Dorries and Rees Mogg are all Boris loyalists as they all came into the Cabinet when Boris became PM and are on the right of the party
    There are others on the right of the party that are better (in my opinion). Dorries seems to believe what she reads on twitter and reacts accordingly. Rees Moog is just weird. Priti Patel is more mainstream from the right, but doesn't come over as intellectual in anyway with more basic instincts to immigration, crime, etc, although I grant you more in tune with the redwall probably.
  • LostPasswordLostPassword Posts: 14,772
    Taz said:

    I'm actually enjoying this debate on the BBC.

    Personally, I'd keep things as they are but I can see that's not going to be tenable.

    Some good suggestions coming from all sides here on PB.

    If only Doreen Norris and her colleagues were listening.

    A fairly minimal change, but one that still gets rid of the licence fee, would be to hypothecate VAT revenues from Netflix subscriptions, TV sales, broadband, smartphone sales and charges to the BBC.
    Why even consider that. It makes the BBC 100% reliant on the state for its income.
    No more than at present.
  • OldKingColeOldKingCole Posts: 31,722
    IanB2 said:

    Stereodog said:

    Carnyx said:

    DougSeal said:

    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.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2022/01/16/boris-johnson-grilled-downing-street-parties-tory-anger-boils/

    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.
    The service standards of the postal service in the Victorian age were astounding, as you say, even if it was Londoners who enjoyed the most impressive service, with deliveries made throughout the day and a sameday service across much of the capital.

    When I was in charge of planning postal services for the City of London in the 1980s, we still had the sameday delivery within the EC1-4 postcodes - pillarbox emptied at around 0830 and items sent out for delivery at 1130 - which was the last remaining vestige of the Victorian service. But it wasn't tremendously reliable, resting upon a hand search through the pile of letters from the box collection to fish out the City items before the rest of it was put aside for processing in the afternoon - and so we didn't advertise or tell anyone about it.
    Went on a trip round the postal museum a few years ago; the difference in service levels was very notable. Apparently too, the service from outlying areas to and from London was good; a friend used to talk about his grandfather posting a card early in the morning in Colchester telling associates in London that he would, after all, be with them for lunch and it arriving well before he did.
  • MoonRabbitMoonRabbit Posts: 12,415
    edited January 2022
    TOPPING said:

    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.

    Degree?

    Did someone send out an email saying bring a bottle?

    You are saying degree, others saying completely different beast. Different DNA an such.

    Fair enough, you are entitled to your opinion. 🙂
  • turbotubbsturbotubbs Posts: 14,884

    For those that missed it, we learned last night from the Telegraph that Plan B will NOT be rescinded in full, indeed the masking will stay on public transport and in shops.

    As I have said several times, that’s the problem with temporary restrictions. They recall Milton Friedman’s observation that there is nothing so permanent as a temporary government programme.

    Lets wait and see. Governments of all stripes have a habit of kite flying.
  • kamskikamski Posts: 4,199
    RobD said:

    kamski said:

    RobD said:

    kamski said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    darkage said:

    Sandpit said:

    darkage said:

    Sandpit said:

    GIN1138 said:

    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.

    Slightly out of date source, gives 13% as the figure, nearly 200k prosecutions per year https://fullfact.org/news/do-tv-licence-offences-account-one-ten-court-cases/

    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.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licence
    Nonsense
    The stats are nonsense?
    RobD said:

    kamski said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    darkage said:

    Sandpit said:

    darkage said:

    Sandpit said:

    GIN1138 said:

    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.

    Slightly out of date source, gives 13% as the figure, nearly 200k prosecutions per year https://fullfact.org/news/do-tv-licence-offences-account-one-ten-court-cases/

    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.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licence
    Nonsense
    The stats are nonsense?
    Yes.

    Even the Wiki article Sandpit links to says Pakistan has a licence fee. That is almost 3% of the world's population already.
    So 6% rather than 3%? I think his point still stands.
    I'm just saying "only 3% of the world population have grown up with a TV licence fee" is nonsense. It will be more than 6% too. Pakistan was just an example. The wikipedia article is far from exhaustive, but even there the listed countries with TV licences adds up to way more than 3%. This is obvious just from briefly looking at the article.
  • MoonRabbitMoonRabbit Posts: 12,415

    For those that missed it, we learned last night from the Telegraph that Plan B will NOT be rescinded in full, indeed the masking will stay on public transport and in shops.

    As I have said several times, that’s the problem with temporary restrictions. They recall Milton Friedman’s observation that there is nothing so permanent as a temporary government programme.

    Lets wait and see. Governments of all stripes have a habit of kite flying.
    Anaboabzin is right, it will just highlight the guidance destroying “you mean here, not there?”

    I wonder if it’s to do with not wanting the commons benches maskless yet.
  • sladeslade Posts: 1,921

    Stereodog said:

    Stereodog said:

    Carnyx said:

    DougSeal said:

    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.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2022/01/16/boris-johnson-grilled-downing-street-parties-tory-anger-boils/

    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.
    That got replaced by telegrams - which were even more frequent and immediate. Which in turn got pushed back by the telephone - which were even more.... etc.

    It's almost like progress involves change.
    I have a Victorian post office manual that says you don't need to package game birds if they're not too high. Just tie the address label around their neck. Try replicating that service today. I highly recommend R M Ballantyne's excellent novel "Post Haste- A tale of Her Majesty's Mails".

    For the record I'm joking. Of course progress needs change. The novel is real though and a hilarious read. One of the female protagonists has a line saying "Oh do tell me more facts about the Post Office"
    Stereodog said:

    Stereodog said:

    Carnyx said:

    DougSeal said:

    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.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2022/01/16/boris-johnson-grilled-downing-street-parties-tory-anger-boils/

    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.
    That got replaced by telegrams - which were even more frequent and immediate. Which in turn got pushed back by the telephone - which were even more.... etc.

    It's almost like progress involves change.
    I have a Victorian post office manual that says you don't need to package game birds if they're not too high. Just tie the address label around their neck. Try replicating that service today. I highly recommend R M Ballantyne's excellent novel "Post Haste- A tale of Her Majesty's Mails".

    For the record I'm joking. Of course progress needs change. The novel is real though and a hilarious read. One of the female protagonists has a line saying "Oh do tell me more facts about the Post Office"
    A farmer I used to know posted (and probably still posts) game to people who buy it from him direct. He did use special packaging. Which must make a life a little bit nicer for the people driving the vans, sorting etc.

    Though they did need a rule change to stop people posting children, IIRC.
    Like many people of my generation I used to work for Royal Mail during the Christmas school holidays. I was always on parcels and a significant fraction of our trade was turkeys from Ireland - presumably going to relatives.
  • StockyStocky Posts: 9,653
    edited January 2022

    alex_ said:

    alex_ said:

    For those that missed it, we learned last night from the Telegraph that Plan B will NOT be rescinded in full, indeed the masking will stay on public transport and in shops.

    As I have said several times, that’s the problem with temporary restrictions. They recall Milton Friedman’s observation that there is nothing so permanent as a temporary government programme.

    Whilst I agree my immediate concern isn’t public transport and shops. It is wider “crowded spaces”. Which impacts on my social activity. What are they saying about that?
    Is that the rule currently? In which settings exactly? I actually didn’t know that.
    Anything inside, “crowded” (ie no social distancing and not defined as hospitality I believe.
    I didn’t actually know that! So conference centres etc? Crikey.

    I’m not sure this mask-continuation idea is widely known about in our political class. My sense was that everyone (Lab, Lib or Con) assumes Plan B will be dropped on Wednesday week.

    According to the Torygraph, it won’t be…
    I missed this. The whole of Plan B, inc mask-wearing and care home restrictions, will expire under the sunset clause 26 Jan.

    What is being suggested? That they get parliament to vote on a watered-down Plan B?

    Can't see it myself. I'm not expecting any of Plan B to be extended.

    They may give guidelines of course but any legal restrictions will be lifted I'm pretty sure.
  • DougSealDougSeal Posts: 11,059
    Stocky said:

    alex_ said:

    alex_ said:

    For those that missed it, we learned last night from the Telegraph that Plan B will NOT be rescinded in full, indeed the masking will stay on public transport and in shops.

    As I have said several times, that’s the problem with temporary restrictions. They recall Milton Friedman’s observation that there is nothing so permanent as a temporary government programme.

    Whilst I agree my immediate concern isn’t public transport and shops. It is wider “crowded spaces”. Which impacts on my social activity. What are they saying about that?
    Is that the rule currently? In which settings exactly? I actually didn’t know that.
    Anything inside, “crowded” (ie no social distancing and not defined as hospitality I believe.
    I didn’t actually know that! So conference centres etc? Crikey.

    I’m not sure this mask-continuation idea is widely known about in our political class. My sense was that everyone (Lab, Lib or Con) assumes Plan B will be dropped on Wednesday week.

    According to the Torygraph, it won’t be…
    I missed this. The whole of Plan B, inc mask-wearing and care home restrictions, will expire under the sunset clause 26 Jan.

    What is being suggested? That they get parliament to vote on a watered-down Plan B?

    Can't see it myself. I'm not expecting any of Plan B to be extended.

    They may give guidelines of course but any legal restrictions will be lifted I'm pretty sure.
    Yes. As drafted the face mask regulations expire on 26 January. The statutory instrument would have to be amended (again, they were initially supposed to expire on 20 Dec before amendment regs came in on 14 Dec) to extend them. Lots of coverage today suggesting it well happen but for that to happen the SoS will have to make and publish a statutory instrument and, presumably, given Johnson’s words before Christmas, it would have to go before Parliament too.
This discussion has been closed.