Imagine the public outcry if we had a law making it a criminal offence to read the The Telegraph or any other paper without first having bought a subscription to the Guardian (a left-wing BBC loving newspaper).
Unthinkable, of course. Yet the extraordinary truth is we already have a very similar law in Britain, which makes it a crime to watch ITV or other channels without first handing £145.50 to the BBC.
Indeed, more than a tenth of criminal trials in Britain – 180,000 a year – are prosecutions for ‘evading’ the licence fee, punishable by a fine of up to £1,000 backed by prison for non-payment.
Now at last Justice Secretary Chris Grayling is attempting to inject a hint of sanity into this madness, with a plan to ease the pressure on magistrates’ courts by switching licence-fee evasion from a criminal to a civil offence.
Yet with their jaw-dropping sense of entitlement, BBC chiefs are resisting even this most modest measure, insisting it should remain a crime for any TV owner to fail to contribute to their bloated Corporation of 23,000 employees.
To decriminalise evasion would be a ‘huge risk’, says James Purnell, the former Labour minister now raking it in as the BBC’s director of strategy and digital. It could cost up to £200million a year, he says, perhaps forcing the closure of BBC4, CBBC and CBeebies (PR: Yes they used children to justify themselves, aren’t they big).
With no respect to Mr Purnell and his Labour sympathies, this is the least of the Corporation’s problems.
The fact is that countless young people already watch the BBC through online devices, thus sidestepping the fee.
Meanwhile, demands are growing for the increasingly attractive option of funding the whole enterprise by voluntary subscription – which would decimate BBC output even though the BBC have been telling us for years how everyone loves them.
Let us make our own position clear. Yes, we have often expressed our exasperation with the BBC’s relentless Leftish bias – bravely admitted on Monday by its own John Humphrys – on such subjects as mass immigration and EU integration.
But like most of our readers, we retain a strong affection for our national broadcaster (More PR Speak). What it does well, it often does very well indeed.
Yet who can deny that it has grown far too big? With its massive website, cornucopia of channels and 8,000 journalists – more than all Fleet Street put together – it crushes competition, stifling plurality and so impoverishing national debate.
Meanwhile, it churns out far too much trash, of a kind freely available on countless commercial channels.
With its charter coming up for renewal in 2016, it is time for the BBC to start thinking seriously about the purpose of public service broadcasting, trimming its output to the core of what it does best – and slashing the licence fee accordingly.
Indeed, we would be content to preserve BBC1, BBC2 and Radios 3 and 4, with the rest sold to the private sector.
The BBC has spent billions on buildings and modernising, its almost like they know the renewal is in the bg or its replacement, a BBC Internet Licence!
What is certain is that merely opposing every suggestion of reform can only encourage demands for the fee to be scrapped altogether (wishful thinking but we can only hope)
As for the us, we are happy for our readers to go on watching catchup thus not need a BBC TV Licence