Next comes the Ministry of Silly Walks

A reader living in England writes:

Did you know that you need to get a licence from the government to own a TV set in this country? It cracks me up to just tell you this. I haven’t even heard of such a thing in another country. It isn’t just absurd. It is absolutely hilarious. When I try to get the absurdity of this point across to the British, they are utterly bemused and don’t know what to say. They can’t see anything unusual about it, to say nothing of its absurdity.

Obviously trying to police every home in the country for possession of a valid TV licence is a huge task. So they’ve created a body called the “TV Licensing Authority” that does only this. And this leads to some absolutely bizarre situations. Licensing “Inspectors” peeping through the windows of people’s houses to check if they have a TV in the house because their database shows that they don’t have a licence. So if they have a TV but no licence, they get fined £1000 (US$1800). The actual licence costs £10(US$18) every month. That sounds like nothing. But if you add up the amount of money each man and woman in this country pay over a LIFETIME to the government just to watch TV, it really begins to add up.

And here is a list of some truly bizarre situations when the “Inspectors” come knocking on people’s doors to check if they aren’t hiding a TV in their bedrooms:

And what is this money used for?

To fund the BBC.

However, there is another side to this issue. A reader writes:

Having lived many years in the UK, I don’t see what is so ridiculous about TV licenses. If you have a huge, government-funded network such as the BBC, it seems perfectly fair to make people who watch TV bear the costs. And since there are only 4 or 5 channels (depending on where you live), and two of them are BBC, it is reasonable to assume that most TV owners do watch the BBC channels.

If they just taxed everyone in the country to fund the BBC, I think people without televisions would greatly resent having to pay for other people’s home entertainment. They already pay for other people’s gallbladder operations and university education; why make them foot the bill for the Teletubbies as well?

It is one thing to argue that the government should drop the BBC and make it fund itself through advertising. It is quite another to talk as if television programming were some natural substance that should just float into our homes free of charge. Silliness.

The first reader replies:

It is amazing that your reader doesn’t seem to have grasped the silliness of creating this authority that goes around the whole country combing through people’s houses looking for “offenders” who may be watching TV clandestinely. In a free society, doesn’t this stick out as a sore thumb? It is nothing short of idiotic. But even more so, the UK Government should actually look at the cost of chasing people constantly for licence money and then subtract that from licence fee revenue. It cannot be cheap to spend all that money on snooping on people to look for offending TVs, sending people streams of threatening letters etc.

In a country where vast amounts of money are wasted on all kinds of “public services” (none of which actually function with any degree of reliability), it is a rather silly argument and utterly out of proportion to suggest that people who don’t watch TV should not be made to pay for people who do watch TV. Well, people who don’t want to pay for rotting schools, hospitals, trains and all kinds of infrastructure that is falling apart all the time pay for it through their noses with Income Tax and VAT. Although Government waste in the UK is probably not quite the level of France or Germany or Scandinavia, it would be pretty high. The press is awash with stories of these all the time including the hundreds of millions of pounds that are wasted in providing healthcare and all kinds of other goodies to asylum seekers who are in this country completely illegally.

To put it into perspective the Government soaks up 21 percent of GDP in Britain. That’s $320 Billion. Where does an extra $900 million fit into that?

So considering the disadvantages: snooping on people in the most ridiculous way, the invasion of people’s privacy that this involves and the cost of collecting this fee, it is an archaic and stupid way of funding the BBC.

And the argument has an additional flaw. If I have cable TV and only watch SKY and other Cable channels but never watch the BBC, I still have to pay the licence fee. Where is the justice in that? And my guess is that most people who have Cable channels (they are actually quite expensive – a good cable package costs £40 (US$72) or more per month, most people who watch cable hardly ever watch BBC anyway. But they do pay for it.

So why not turn the BBC also into a pay channel available only to those who want to watch it? Let them pay for it. No licence fee, no silliness about invading people’s houses to check for clandestine TVs. And then let people own TVs without the nonsense of getting a “licence” from the Government.

The second reader replies:

Your other reader is right about the system being flawed and probably extremely wasteful. My main point was that it’s not ridiculous to have to pay to receive TV programs, but there are indeed better ways of securing payment. Making the BBC a pay channel would make more sense. Although I do take issue with the “the government already takes tons of money from us to fund lame public services, why shouldn’t it take a little more?” argument. I’m always happy to find I’m not paying for something, no matter how small.

With regard to the police-state aspect of all this, I know someone who didn’t have a TV and was desperate to see a certain football match, so he borrowed a set from a friend. The whole time the match was on he was nagged by fears that the license inspectors were going to drive down his street on that particular day and detect the signal in his house. Every time he got up for a snack or whatever, he turned the TV off for a few minutes to increase his chance of not getting caught. At one point the doorbell rang and he saw, to his horror, two men in dark suits standing in front of his door looking like they meant business. He turned the TV off, threw a tablecloth over it, and opened the door with trembling hand, whereupon one of the men said, “Good afternoon, we’d like to talk to you about Jesus Christ.” He threw up his hands and cried, “OH, THANK GOD!!!!!!” Those Mormons must have been really pleased.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 11, 2006 01:30 AM | Send