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The BBC's licence fee is a poll tax - pull the plugImagine for a moment that you went to your local
newsagent to buy your preferred newspaper.
You might need it for its superior television listings, or its
comprehensive stock prices, or its peerless weather forecasts. Then imagine
being told that the Government had decreed that you could only buy your
newspaper if you also paid for the Daily Mirror, the Sun and Hello!
You would think that ridiculous, unjust and probably illegal. But that,
essentially, is how the BBC's licence fee works - as a mandatory financial
barrier to a viewer's right to choose other television stations. Even if you
have already paid separately by subscription, you cannot watch live Premiership
football on Sky, or the latest episode of Friends on C4, unless you pay
your poll tax to Broadcasting House.
I hold no particular grudge against the BBC. Many
readers of this newspaper believe the BBC to be monstrously biased in favour of
Labour. I gather that some members of the Countryside Alliance - and they are
likely to be Daily Telegraph reader - are so incensed by the BBC's
dismissive coverage of the Liberty and Livelihood March that they are
contemplating a mass boycott of the licence fee to punish the BBC for its
anti-hunting bias. They are right up to a point: the BBC is culturally
biased towards New Labour, and is hopelessly undermined in defending itself from
this charge by the clear political affiliations of its chairman and its director
general, Gavyn Davies and Greg Dyke. I experience this bias first-hand during occasional
outings on the Nicky Campbell Show on Radio 5 Live, when I am expected to
play the role of pro-American, Right-wing nutter simply because I work for The
Daily Telegraph. The format tends to go like this: Mr. Campbell reads out
something from the Independent, and then invites callers to lay into the
man from the Telegraph. It's perfectly harmless, it keeps one on one's
toes, and I confess I rather enjoy it. Let us be fair and acknowledge that much of the BBC's
output is excellent, particularly on the radio. I listen to Today even as
I grind my teeth at Jim Naughtie's unctuous deference to Labour ministers. I
cannot abide the whining entitlement assumptions of You and Yours. But
there is a lot of outstanding output during the day: I have special respect for
the peerless World at One on Radio 4, the best current affairs programme
I have encountered anywhere in the world. It is not the BBC's bias that is so repugnant, so much
as the crassness of much of the output, and my rage is compounded by the
illiberalism of the licence fee. I don't get angry about an article that I don't
like in the Guardian or the Daily Mail - because I don't have to
pay for it - but I am forced to pay for the BBC, which doesn't even have Match
of the Day any more. I am also paying for a raft of digital television channels
that I cannot receive, plus the burgeoning website that, though apparently
popular in China, is of no interest to me.
When we launched our Free Country campaign last summer, we
were astonished by our readers' anger at the tactics of the inspectors who work
for TV Licensing, the paramilitary wing of the BBC. These are the people who
send menacing literature through the post, warning people like your mother that
there is no place to hide when BBC inspectors come to call. Scores of readers
who do not own a television set wrote to complain about inspectors' assumption
that, if you had no licence, you must be a criminal. For those who do have televisions but no licence, there
might eventually be an appointment in a magistrates' court. On conviction, they
typically face a £l00 fine, plus £45 costs. Most of these defendants tend to
be poor people on housing, estates, and thus far the BBC has been curiously shy
of taking on more formidable targets. But now it may have a real battle on its hands, for a
journalist called Jonathan Miller has publicly declared his refusal to buy a
licence, and invited the BBC to take him to court.
His defence is ingenious, and could conceivably render the debate about
the extension of the licence fee beyond its current renewal date of 2006
redundant. Mr. Miller has scoured the Human Rights Act of 1998
and, in article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, found a clause
that might well force a fundamental change in the BBC's funding regime:
"Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include
freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without
interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers." This would seem to be an unambiguous prohibition on governments that might seek to restrict an individual's right to receive broadcast information. And it is perfectly logical: after all, how would the Foreign Office react if Robert Mugabe, say, imposed a tax on Zimbabweans tuning in to the BBC World Service? We might think that a rather bad thing. The BBC has hired a leading silk, Lord Lester of Herne
Hill, for advice on the case, but Mr. Miller says that, after taking legal
advice, he has reason to be confident he will prevail. The BBC is right to be
concerned, for already there is insurrectionary talk on the internet about a
boycott of the licence fee, and leaflets are circulating around housing estates
advising people how to stand up to the inspectors.
I find myself confused, because there is so much that
is good about the BBC. But the current funding arrangement is illiberal and, in
the end, Auntie will lose the argument. The trick in the meantime is for the BBC
to come up with a better plan for funding itself and not waste its - Stephen
Robinson. From the Daily
Telegraph Oct 23 2002
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