Are you receiving violent, abusive, arrogant, threatening letters from the BBC licensing administration when you decide to dispose of your television?
Shall we take our tv sets to their headquarters so that they can see we have thrown them out?
Do you think this will make them leave us alone and stop sending cruel and frightening envelopes of visciousness to tinkers, tailors, soldiers, sailors, rich men, poor men, beggar men and thieves?
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10 comments:
There's been a long-running saga about this in Charles Moore's column in the Spectator.
I have just replied to this on the previous thread.
Suggest recipients of these letters should just scribble on the bottom in best Chinese: "Ah! No got lah!" and send it back without a stamp.
What a good idea! I just took the tv round to my ex's! Not missed it at all and it's been 4 months.
The letters are nasty. My mum says they have left her alone since she wrote "When I say I have no television I expect to be believed." They have slowed down on me, told me to ignore any more letters (Ha!) and say they will be around to check if I am lying.
I can't find the nastiest letter so far, I think I might have sent it back to them instead of making a copy.
I found this
http://www.derbygripe.co.uk/tvdetect.htm
which suggests you do not have to let them in without a warrant.
I hadn't seen that, S, but perhaps every little helps. Angels doesn't read the Spectator usually, we are moving on to participation.
L, you are braver than me; I accumulate nasty-looking envelopes and then hand them. Sometimes I listen to the expletives and sighs through Mr HG's door as he copes with the sheer rudeness of 'British' officialdom.
We can do very fine signatures for one another, though I still have to turn the paper upside down and copy it, whereas he could have me signing my own death warrant with a smoothness of action learned long ago in the Liceo Classico where various offences have to be signed-off by a parent.
Its about 15 years since we discontinued watching TV, and took what was then something like a £80 pa cost saver.
At that time TV Licensing was still really part of the civil service (through the Post Office). Even then they were incredulous that one could live in this country and not watch the TV. We appear to come up for investigation every two or three years. From recollection (I don't file them) the letters have been getting stronger over the years. Once upon a time, written confirmation of the absence of a TV in use for receiving broadcasts would resolve the matter for however long the procedures said they had to leave you alone. But since then they have been privatised (Crapita), and their enforcement agents are on commission. So now of course they write back acknowledging your letter and telling that they don't believe you and they will be round to check. Don't put the kettle on straight away, they don't mean it.
Seriously through, what they should do, once the switch to digital is completed, is to encrypt the freeview signal. Then, just like BSkyB they can kick off anyone who is not up to date with their subscription/licence/tax payments. Control signals are sent embedded in the broadcast signal to which the set top box responds. Easy really, and the rest of us can live in peace from attack by Crapita operatives. So it won't get done; there has got to be a more intrusive, less efficient way of doing things. Why else does this government exist?
Refusing to own a tv and receive regime broadcasts will soon be grounds for DNA-ing, finger printing,and special surveillance by Party representatives. Households registered as 'unhelpful' will find that any children will have been registered in their schools as failing to meet cultural norms, and deprived of appropriate stimulus. This will be reflected in national testing and will exclude them automatically from consideration for entry into Russell Group (ie Regime) universities.
Listening on crystal sets to broadcasts from Luxembourg (or radio, free with a piece of damp string, from Brookman's Park) will lead to the confiscation of goods to the value of an attributed share of the cost of running the BBC.
Persistent withdrawal fom multicultural contribution to our society's needs will be met with 42 days anonymous detention while enquiries ae made and the household resettled in a 'heartland' zone - north east England, Glasgow, deindustrialised Wales, where re-education can take place providing, inter alia, regime employment for hard-working client families and redundant 'employees' of Northern Rock.
SEE!!!!! You are still at it.....
[Word ver: hgvmphs - have you joined the Dept of Transport without telling us??]
No, not the department of Transport Nomad. In a next life parliamentary draughtsman might suit.
I wonder about parliamentary draughtsmen; they acknowledge that it is their job to suggest aspects of legislation, to clarify political intention, to assimilate similar acts from other places - (at the moment other times are popular too, say 30s Italy) in general to organise and formulate regime aims.
Some of them are clever lawyers with real, ethically functioning thought systems. What do they say to themselves as they get home from work? Just doing their jobs as they assist so very directly in abolishing habeas corpus, creating enabling acts with universal powers they know will be used to conform with our dead rules but, in truth, will provide for more efficient authoritarianism as regulations slide through Parliament undebated and uncontrolled.
All the senior civil servants need to be examining their consciences.
You're not just doing a job you know. You're collaborating.
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