{"id":6214,"date":"2017-12-20T13:14:06","date_gmt":"2017-12-20T12:14:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/?p=6214"},"modified":"2017-12-20T13:17:45","modified_gmt":"2017-12-20T12:17:45","slug":"immigration-and-the-tv-licence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/6214\/","title":{"rendered":"Immigration and the TV Licence"},"content":{"rendered":"

From The Sun<\/em><\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

OVER the past four years, almost 3.5million British citizens have decided not to pay a penny more to the BBC \u2013 the world\u2019s oldest broadcasting organisation.<\/p>\n

Until not so long ago, the Beeb was unquestionably a national treasure.\u00a0So why have they stopped paying for it?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There are several reasons I expect, but the article overlooks the most obvious one – immigration. It’s pretty much an open secret now that payment of the TV licence fee is unenforceable. Despite all the bullying from the TV licence people – a private company that pretends it has police powers – it is quite easy to just tell them to sod off when they show up on your doorstep. Detector vans, even taking the charitable assumption<\/a> that there is such a thing and they work, number around a dozen at most. The TV licence authority has no powers of entry and the best they can do is trick you into inviting them in or confessing to watching a TV with no licence. This is why the vast majority of those actually prosecuted for non-payment are women<\/a>, many of them poor, single mothers, i.e those who are easily bullied by a couple of men on the front doorstep. Oddly, you don’t hear feminists complaining about this<\/em> deployment of Patriarchal muscle.<\/p>\n

What the BBC have relied upon up to now is the average Brit being law-abiding, not wanting to be a freeloader, and feeling some sort of connection between their citizenship and national institutions. Most Brits like the BBC and many love it, believing it a national treasure offering superb value for money. Britain was, until recently, a high-trust society requiring little active policing because the population could, by and large, be relied upon to cooperate. So strong was the TV licence in the national psyche that I think even the professional welfare-bludgers used to buy one: it’s simply what everyone did, almost without thinking. I’ve rubbed shoulders with some dodgy bastards in my time, and of all the things they used to boast about when bucking the system – including driving without a licence – I never heard anyone say they’d ducked the TV licence. The TV licencing laws weren’t ever properly enforced simply because they didn’t need to be.<\/p>\n

But times have changed. A greater percentage of the population now comes from low-trust societies where freeloading is a duty and nothing to be ashamed of (indeed, if you’re paying for something you don’t have to it marks you out as stupid). These people have no affection for British institutions and the BBC is just two or three TV channels out of thousands, and they don’t fear the law in the same way native Brits do. Hell, even Americans think our TV licencing laws are scandalous, and they’re more civilised than most who show up on our shores. Besides, are the TV licencing people really going to be banging on doors in terraces and tower blocks filled with immigrants demanding to know if there’s a TV in the place? I doubt it. Easier to go and intimidate the single mother or little old lady with bad eyesight who’s late husband used to take care of all that.<\/p>\n

There is of course the other elephant in the room, which is the BBC’s completely outdated funding model which is no longer justifiable in the age of subscription TV and the internet. With there now being dozens of websites and forums discussing how to easily avoid paying for a TV licence, even otherwise law-abiding Brits are deciding they’re not going to do so on principle alone. It’s perhaps unsurprising that the immigrant issue never gets brought up in relation to people not paying the TV licence, though. After all, the BBC has been a staunch supporter of mass immigration and the New Labour government that opened the floodgates. How ironic, eh?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From The Sun: OVER the past four years, almost 3.5million British citizens have decided not to pay a penny more to the BBC \u2013 the world\u2019s oldest broadcasting organisation. Until not so long ago, the Beeb was unquestionably a national … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[60,42],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6214"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6214"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6214\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6217,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6214\/revisions\/6217"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6214"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6214"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6214"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}