Owning a television is subject to a tax, a poll tax. The explanation is in terms of funding public service broadcasting. The complaint is that:
the tax is regressive
the service is highly politicised to self-serving, and then authoritarian, ends resulting in an improper warping of neutral reporting into a ministry for regime propaganda
the ownership of a receiver does not mean any use of public service broadcasts that could readily be made free to air no longer.
So unpopular is the tax on ownership of a television that many choose to entertain themselves with their computers, and listen to the wireless. It's time the tax was transferred to the ownership of a computer; or perhaps charged additionally to the television tax, to raise much-needed revenue from many computer-users already suspected of libertarian tendencies and of an unhelpful attitude to paying taxes.
[This is the second in a small series of posts under the provisional title:
'This Is How They Are Thinking.'
The first: 'Managing Democratic Expectations in the Post-Democratic State.' was published on 25 June 2008]
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'I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free'
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July
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- Miliband is not the Man
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- No to TV Licences
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Fallen Angels
- David Cameron (for risking the disorderly dissolution of the Euro)
- Giorgio Napolitano (for stance on Budapest 1956: Prague 1968: Italy 2013)
- Mervyn King (for bailing-out Northern Rock)
- Nicholas Kaldor (for inventing VAT)
20 comments:
What a wonderful site Ms.Hatfield. I've just come over from Lilith's site to yours and it is is, indeed, very good.
I agree with all you say on your previous postings too. So succinctly put that I couldn't add any more.
Thankyou.
Di.
Nods happily; remembers to blush. Good to see you here Trubes.
HG: Please cease and desist from this series at once!
You are far cleverer that 99% of our MPs, so please don't go putting ideas like this into their heads. We have enough trouble as it is without you adding to our problems!
You mean it, don't you Nomad? Then I will stop. It was interesting picking up bits and pieces and fitting them into scenarios; particularly the especially disdainful and dishonest language they speak in and the marginal tertiary meanings they allocate to words.
1. Yes
2. Thank you
3. Phew!!
Ah the TV License. As we had stopped watching the box, and as the BBC is now the New Stasi mouthpiece, we got rid of it.
L wrote nicely to the TV Licensing people to note we had got rid of it. In true fashion, they wrote back threatening us (they really CAN NOT believe anyone can live without a TV), so L wrote back, noting that she is not used to being called a liar, and that whilst they will not enter the house, they can park their detector van outside it, and we'll give them tea and biscuits when they want.
What part, we wonder, of "We don't have a TV" is it that they don't understand?
Word verification - kykhr
Who? Harman?
I think it is everyones duty to pay tax - after all Mr Brown needs to keep his strength up with plenty of nice lunches and our MPs need new coffee tables and the like...
M the D, Nomad has filed a request for no irony. He thinks we will be taken at our word as we have better words than theirs. Tax was spectacularly treated in this morning's Telegraph by Mr Satchi. If it wasn't for copyright I'd have reprinted it in its entirety here, just so I could read it over more easily.
The Tv 'licence' is going to do for them yet Elby.
Nomad has a point but I wish you wouldn't stop.. perhaps we can all insert random irony and flag each post "irony" to put them off the scent?
Not for a while, though, I fear - I think most people, awash in cable, just see it as a TV tax, like car tax, and "unavoidable". But it stinks and will stink worse as time goes on
p.s. No no don't stop. I am reminded of a bygone era. As a prime babyboomer, I can still remember my father coming back from work, taking *his* chair by the fire. Slippers would be brought, by one of us three boys, and Mum would come in with a stiff Gin & French. Father would unfold the paper, and later in the evening, serious programmes on the TV or wireless would discuss matters such as this. The Brains Trust. A plethora of cardigans, and quite a lot of beards.
I am old, Father Time :-)
Funnily enough I've been in an exchange with BBC complaints for the past couple of weeks over bias.
It was started because Nick Robinson described Dave Davies as 'an adrenalin junkie'. I didn't like the ad hominem 'junkie' from which would be inferred 'mentally ill'.
The thread digressed on to soaps, crime thrillers, over representation of minorities ...
My intonation was the same as here though doubtless they have me down as a bigot and I've done more harm than good.
I think refusal to pay the BBC licence fee should be the first salvo in a revolt.
Any military strategist will tell you that you take out the propoganda machine first.
Anyway - my TV works perfectly well without the BBC, and yours ?
Elby the Beserk:
They will enter the house.
They are amongst the hundreds (now maybe thousands) of state functionaries to whom El Gordo has given the right of entry without a warrant.
Resist at your peril.
But what you can do, is let them in politely, waste as much of their time as you can, and send them on their way with a little gentle and deniably sarcasm. It's all we dare do now, against the might of the State.
I used to be a committed radio 4 listener, and dutifully used to pay a tax for owning a tv. It was exactly as you describe Elby when they were told 'no tv, cancelled standing order'. The letters were a wake-up call that the regime is fascistic and violent. And not just one, or at most two: a steady stream of abuse and imputation as to my honesty and financial status and threats about attacking credit status. They are still spitting venom in a filthy corner of their horrid world somewhere.
I wonder, E-K if we might deliver our tv sets to Television Centre too. Then the 'service' providers will have a huge pile of tv sets in front of their building, just so they can accept we aren't lying when we say we don't have one.
After all, it works with pig manure on the steps of French town halls. Do you think we could actually bury Shepherds Bush in televisions? ( Sorry Nomad, I know I promised,but they're encouraging me).
PS Does anyone have one of those violent and abusive letters? I would like to put it up verbatim.
Oh I'm with you here Hats - sorry to be tardy...
The BBC is concentrating on mouthing Nulabyrinthine mantras at every opportunity now.
The ridiculous Declan Kelly is their 'face' of commercial enterprise in the morning, and while I'm sure he's a very nice chap and all that, while proper concerns are brushed aside each day by such antics, the real world really suffers.
The glee which is a pre-requisite to each doom laden announcement, both by him, and most of the the other announcers, is presumably reason to berate anyone who would dare remove their funding( I.E. Dave Cameroon), and redistribute it to other worthy stations. (Why do these stations have to be right/centre anyway, I'm sure there's a little group of techies somewhere in Bloomsbury, who would love to put up a show-ette of all things pertaining to Nulab's ideas about the new poor).
And please don't get me organised on stupid programmes like the new one they call 'Bonekickers'!
I often need to know what the weather's doing in the morning however, so that makes up for it...
"Let's put the kettle on dear; make us a nice cuppa tea..."
"All right dear; then we can watch 'Meet the Smuggits'"!
HG and fellow contributors: OK, I give up, but it was worth a try! Just don’t blame me when the price of computers goes up by six hundred quid a year! Fairy Nuff…
On the topic of TV licences, many years ago, in the early 1990s, I returned to the UK for a brief three month sojourn in my then flat, which contained little furniture and certainly no television.
To my utter astonishment, not one week later a snotty blue coloured letter arrived on my doormat instructing me to pay my tv licence or else. It was undoubtedly one of the most impertinent, and probably libellous, letters I have ever received – and I took great delight in returning the compliment in spades when replying to the overblown empty headed prat who signed it, to the effect that he should without delay go forth and ..er.. jump in the lake.
What bothered me then, and still does to a certain extent today, even though I am well out of their clutches, is not the tone or content of that letter, but just how the hell did they know/find out that I had flown in the previous weekend?
En passant, in our daily lives we drive about all over the country. On the way we encounter police cars, ambulances, fire engines, steamrollers, AA patrol vans, breakdown lorries, and even the odd RSPCA van etc..
But has anyboody ever seen one of these ubiquitous "detector vans" anywhere? I certainly haven't. They seem to be as thin on the ground as green-eyed sheep from Neptune. Do these vehicles actually exist or are they a figment of somebody's imagination?
Knowing is what they're all about Nomad. I showed my identity card (5 euros, photo of me looking startled, and that was the thid attempt - the others were much worse, plus the mayor's signature by rubber stamp) and Mr Nastyman at the end of Schengen and the beginning of Brown's Britain demanded how had I obtained another nationality while he stared and tapped at his screen.
Whether it had come up that I am also one of the heavenly host I couldn't see.
Scroblene, throw it away. Install a cinema at home and watch everything that could possibly interest you that has ever appeared on television, free.
Also, should you need to watch a television we could reinstate the neighbourly, friendly thing and pop round to someone else's house. As a small child I was terrified regularly further up the Close, watching Quatermass.
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