BBC licence fee to be abolished in 2027 and funding frozen

You are giving this Conservative government far to much credit. Their entire track record in government is full of poorly thought out sweeping changes. (See the entire Brexit process)

Have you not encountered the UK Conservative Party before? This is absolutely their modus operandi.

This is not the first occurrence of a scandal from this government; and it's not the first time that they have thrown out as many back-burner ideas as possible in the rush to replace the headlines with something more palatable.

In a notable previous instance, the prime minister's wife announced her pregnancy in the hours following a scandal breaking. Months later, they announced the birth of the child shortly after another scandal broke out.

Hence this fairly amusing parody tweet:

https://twitter.com/BorisJohnson_MP/status/14808339950216929...

This change is more likely a threat to the BBC at a time when they furiously engaged in damage control.

It can be rolled back if they "behave".

Theyve been making variations of this threat for decades.

That's what multiple newspapers including The Times are reporting, yes.

Since Boris' job is on the line, he's apparently panicking and due to roll out a series of popularist policies next week.

This is relatively normal standard operating procedure for this Government.

Throw out loads of policies at the exact moment something bad for the cabinet is starting to gain traction.

It's a perfect example of a "dead cat on the table."[1]

Also, > Are you saying they created the entire plan in a few weeks?

They frequently toss out new "plans" in response to news events, anger in the base, scandals, etc. which have -clearly- been thought up in a hurry as a distraction and will be silently forgotten / dumped when no longer needed as a news-based base-fury-whip.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_cat_strategy

> Do you have any evidence for your extraordinary claims?

Anyone who has ever interacted with politicians knows that “The Thick Of It” is a documentary, not a comedy. These are not extraordinary claims at all. Wouldn’t surprise me if Priti wrote the tweet on the toilet with an aide firing suggestions through the door before one stuck.

Plan?

> •Freeze the BBC licence fee for two years to help the cost of living.

Hilarious. Even a 10% License Fee increase would cost about £8 per adult per year

Meanwhile the tax rise they're implementing next month will cost an average £300 per adult per year, and increase costs on employers by the same amount.

What I don't get is why the conservatives were so draconian over covid. Your partner is dying, you can't see them. Folks couldn't walk around outside. Some guy driving to walk around outside was like national news.

I mean, if you go to this extreme, and then are throwing parties. (Rules for thee, not for me) it would make me furious as well. Let me go sit on the beach with sunshine and fresh air instead of having to cram into a grocery store or whatever.

In the US DeSantis or whatever right wing politico could easily go to a public event, not because its a good idea, but because they haven't banned others from going to activities.

Depends on what you compare. State control of television given things like the Catalonian crisis probably swing the bar.

Poland? Poland pales in comparison with Brazil, where there's a R$5.7 billion (about 1 billion US$) 'Electoral Fund' used for political campaings by the thirty something registered political parties. All paid for by the taxpayers. And let's not forget that there's also a 'Political Party Fund'. And I just love the reason for the creation of the 'Electoral Fund', but that's another story.

This is not feasible. In the UK we have Freeview [1], a free-to-access television platform which manages ~all terrestrial output.

The BBC administrates this system along with the other major broadcasters (ITV, C4, ...).

If the BBC did not put out its own output under Freeview, not only would Freeview collapse but the BBC would effectively be wiped off the face of British television.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeview_(UK)

How does this work with radio?

No they can't, their remit is set by the government.

> both public and private TV channels are at the service of the government

I have a different take. Private channels support parties that align with their interests. But private channels will criticize there government non-stop if they do not like the current ruling party. So, it's way more complex that everybody works for the government, that seems to be true in China, thou.

It works by setting a license fee by law and making it hard enough / take long enough to change to make it impossible to punish or reward journalists for their work.

This could mean requiring 2/3 majorities for anything but a default adjustment for inflation. Or a 10-year lag for any budget changes, etc.

Their coverage is well within the range of opinion of every political party except far-right AfD. As such, it represents >90% of the voters in last year‘s election. They are not neutral when it comes to values such as democracy itself, and expecting them to be is silly.

If this is the case, why did the BBC vote 5 to 1 in favour of Remain[1], despite the Conservative party being down the middle on Brexit.

75% of comedians are explicitly left wing [2]

Anecdotally, the sidebar of BBC News UK edition is littered with articles attempting to argue that any inequality between sex or race of people in a unvaried analysis is indicative of system X-ism. Very rarely do people leave the BBC and join right-of-centre media - more often than not they join left wing private organisations.

[1] https://www.express.co.uk/comment/expresscomment/1549752/Abo...

[2] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9047049/Seventy-fiv...

Tim Davie has literally no editorial control though.

The BBC appeases the government of the day. They’re not the firebrand impartial service folks here make them out to be.

Their domestic political coverage over the last 5 years has really damaged their brand.

In the 70s and 80s there was little entertainment other than real time broadcast TV on the 3 (later 4) channels. The BBC was a cultural institution. 20 million people would tune in to watch absolute crap, because that was really the only option other than go to the pub or play cards.

Places like the BBC Television Centre were engrained in the public zeitgest, and thus newsworthy.

This clearly isn't the case any more, there's far more choice, and the generations that grew up with "Auntie" are getting older and older.

The "rage" was largely amplified by the Murdoch press who have been irked at having competition for decades.

A large contingent of the UK population can be reliably provoked into outrage when the necessity arises. This is largrly how unchecked power is wielded in British politics. Splitting the country down the middle in a fit of fury over Brexit and then sewing it back up was similarly provoked.

> Peak BBC is making a story about the BBC headline news on the BBC news website.

You missed a step. The story has to be about "TV Licencing", with the Beeb saying something to the effect of 'we asked TV Licensing to comment'.

The point being that "TV Licensing' is a brand of the BBC. So in effect 'we asked ourselves'.

> rather than responding to 'informed sources'.

They edited the story as it developed to later refer to 'sources' within the BBC. Publishing an anonymous leak from themselves given to themselves because they wouldn't comment themselves? It's a farce.

Reporting on yourself is the polar opposite of journalistic integrity.

Reporting on yourself but not even noting to the reader that you're reporting on yourself is worse yet.

Writing a named-author analysis piece about yourself, which they have here at the end of the article, is reaching insanity level.

The BBC shouldn't report on the BBC.

As long as it meets the BBCs "strict impartiality rules". Remember if facts annoy a certain group that supports the governments agenda the truth must be watered down to keep them happy.

Can't have Nadine Dorris* being offended can we?

*The closest thing the UK has to Marjorie Taylor Greene.

It is insane that this kind of bullshit is tolerated. I don't believe any other company would get away with frequent, regular threats and misrepresentation of their level of authority.

I'd be happy with upscaling but sure, can understand that may be difficult. I haven't renewed my license in a while but every-time I visit my parents they're watching the non-HD channels due to not getting the local news on HD.

To your last point: isn't it sort-of dangerous to rely on a TV news channel in case of serious events? Power to households may be off; people may not realize that they need to turn on their TV set.

Something like a network of alarm sirens that can also speak would be more resilient. We have such a system in Prague. Every 1st Wednesday of each month at noon, it is shortly tested. If Prague can afford it, most of the UK could surely as well.

> - anything tax-based is just asking for trouble aka a populist government extorting the public stations after critical coverage

Why a populist government? It seems that it's consistently Tory governments that do this, or even threaten it. If Tory politicians are populist, than the word has no meaning.

Channel 4 seems to work well. Publicly owned but not publicly funded (taxation, license fee, etc).

The corporation created which runs it has certain conditions placed on it to create programs in the interest of the general public that may not get created by a private corporation looking to only make profits for shareholders.

Of course the current UK government wants to sell it off...

'Wasting much of their time' though would likely result is someone justifying his/her job by going along with it. Much the same with HMRC (UK tax authority) there is no matter too trivial that they are not willing to spend limitless amounts of time and energy investigating - purely because they can.

They are pro-government, pro-union - but the point is BBC news should be non-partisan

Some comedian said that the left think the BBC is right wing and the right think the BBC is left wing and that means it's doing the right thing.

Generally pro government, as in wanting more of it, but anti government of the day.

Yeah i signed up to britbox on the £10 for 3 month deal - its not bad with a mix of BBC, ITV and Channel 4. Lots of content you cant get elsewhere

The nostalgic viewing makes it easy to watch

BBC and ITV shared coverage of the Euros last year and their streaming offerings couldn’t have been more different.

The BBC were airing matches in 4K HDR and their service ran without a hitch.

ITV, on the other hand, a private company, had a site which crumbled under load. When it did eventually work, it was so poor as to be laughable. It probably wouldn’t even be considered HD and the frame rate couldn’t keep up.

It became a running joke on social media.

As much as I dislike the license fee, I do appreciate the services and content it funds. Non-partisan, non-commercial news is particularly valuable. I’m glad our TV news hasn’t descended into US style garbage yet.

Most journalists have degrees and are aged between 20 and 50. That demographic is certainly "left leaning". The tory base is

* Old people who don't work

* People with little education, who aren't skilled enough to work as a journalist

https://lordashcroftpolls.com/2019/12/how-britain-voted-and-...

You (or whoever is downvoting) might not like that, but the fact is that in the UK context the country is left leaning, but elects the tories because of the split in the left

State TVs don't necessarily represent the current party. I've seen plenty of examples of state TVs siding with the opposition in various countries.

Media and journalists mostly have a left bias and when there is a right government they won't side with the government, unless the government is a de facto dictatorship and you can't go against it for safety concerns (Russia comes to mind).

Not that I justify state TVs at all - I'm against all forms of taxation - but bias is not one of the issues imho.

Is there any irony is his surname?

That's obviously pissing off the government right now, but honestly it's the least of the problems with their Covid-19 news coverage. They kept on pushing both false and misleading claims about the UK doing worse at stuff than other countries, in at least one case that I know of for a month in an article linked from the BBC news front page after they became aware it was false. (The government made a big deal about reaching 100,000 Covid tests in a day and the BBC wrongly claimed Germany had done this a month earlier. In reality they'd mistaken Germany's stat for their lab capacity to process Covid tests - which was basically irrelevant because everything else, from the ability to swap people to the availiabily of consumables to even just returning test results, was more of a bottleneck there - for actual Covid testing done, and Germany wouldn't hit this until like a month later. Then when people complained they took it down for a day, supposedly discussed the complaints with senior staff, and then decided to reinstate it and kept it for a month whilst using Covid as an excuse to not respond to complaints. They then quietly memory-holed it from the article and used that as an excuse for not publishing a correction. A previous version of the article also did a similar thing by wrongly comparing the UK's daily stat to France's weekly one - that did get a correction, which was quietly memory-holed too after a few days. Obviously this played right into all the usual narratives about our lying Brexit-supporting leaders.)

There's also obviously a lot of decisions during the pandemic where all options had downsides, and the BBC News coverage was very biased towards the downsides of whatever the government did - this became particularly clear when the government changed their mind and suddenly they flipped to going after the thing they were cheerleading before. One that HN is likely familiar with is the NHS contact tracing app using Bluetooth on mobile phones. Initially that didn't use Google and Apple's framework and the BBC coverage pushed the downsides of that heavily, making it sound like there was no good reason to do it and the claim that Google and Apple's framework made results less accurate was just something the government was pushing. Literally the day the new app using that framework launched, they started downplaying the downsides of the old app and found a experts to claim the new app was less accurate and excluded a bunch of people on earlier Android versions - again, these were inherent downsides of choosing that option. Everything was like this, from lockdowns to vaccinations. Even when the government picked some kind of middle ground option, the Beeb ran articles with some groups attacking the government for not doing less, then with others attacking them for not doing more, and both were always set against the government rather than against each others' demands. Often they'd even rewrite an article on their website and flip it from pushing heavily for one to pushing hard for the other after it'd been published, which is just weird.

There was also the incident where one of their high-up reporters retweeted a particularly partisan tweet pushing the idea Boris was literally a criminal murderer who should go to jail over the UK's handling of Covid, which rather hinted at why their coverage was like this.

The BBC traditionally isn't "State Run" any more than PBS is "State Run"

Good points. However, on-demand streaming has changed people expectations around content availability. A weekly show on linear TV makes sense when it's topical (e.g. Countryfile or news-related), if it's a reality contest with a finale (e.g. Love Island, The Apprentice) or a prestigious drama with cliff-hanger ending.

Even the idea of TV channels makes little sense today unless those channels reflect a genre or theme (e.g. The Arts Channel or the Horror channel). I suspect most people in the UK would struggle to describe the purpose or differences between BBC channels. Streaming services (including iPlayer) reflect what probably makes sense to most people - the genre or theme of the programme. BBC linear channels are increasingly irrelevant.

Great to here that this works in the UK.

The Swiss equivalent has simply declared that "any device capable of using the internet" can also receive television programs, and thus isn't exempt.

So no one with a computer or smartphone is exempt.

(At least this "solves" the apparent problem that UK residents can't watch some UK TV content online for free, while the rest of the world can)

I have the exact same position here in France. I don't have to pay the TV license because I don't have a TV, but I still do because I consume so much content made by public media organisations (Franceinfo, Arte, Radio France, etc.).

I'm in the same position as you (don't watch license-requiring content, but appreciate other BBC content such as their website) but I refuse to pay the license out of principle as to not encourage/support their bullshit approach at enforcement.

I disagree with the idea of generating insane amounts of paper waste (and sometimes sending crooks in-person) to threaten less scam-savvy people into paying for a license they don't need, especially when said people might be lower-income that can't afford paying for a license "out of charity" if they aren't required to by law.

The declaration only lasts for a year or so, not to mention that out of principle there is no reason for us to help them save money on not sending their letters/goons especially considering they started the whole thing to begin with. Let them reap what they sowed.

They still might have a telly, just never watch the Beeb.

Just about everyone uses roads, hospitals, and enjoys the security provided by armed forces (for example, the OP apparently has a computer or smart phone, which I'm betting traveled on a road for some part of its journey from the factory to him, and which I'm betting relied on the implicit security provided by military forces to prevent it being hijacked on the way).

Broadcast television is at an entirely different level of the Maslow hierarchy. It's quite possible to lead a productive and enjoyable life without consuming broadcast television at all, much less one particular channel of broadcast television.

At least roads get groceries to the local mart, military keeps the barbarians (and civilized, but irksome french) out, and the hospitals are there, for when you need your jabs to travel to the Isle of Mann.

Roads can't easily bill for usage and a vast majority of people relies on them, thus the easiest & most efficient way is to make everyone pay for them through taxes, though you do pay more if you own a car via extra taxes on car registrations & fuel.

Hospitals can technically be billed per-use but the US is a real life example of why the system doesn't work in practice. You could also argue it's a necessity for life and everyone should have the right to medical treatment.

Armed forces? We're gonna disagree big time on that one but that would be off-topic.

But the BBC? It's something that's not necessary to life, affordable and trivial technical solutions exist to make it paid per-use (pay TV existed for decades and streaming platforms have solved the "online paid subscription TV" problem) instead of threatening people into paying and producing a significant amount of paper waste as a side-effect.

Careful, it is actually possible they want to fully privatise roads and hospitals.

I always find it funny when people come out with "but that would mean X!" and the target answers "yes, that would be great".

My dad has a TV licence despite watching 100% via streaming services. No matter what I tell him, he insists he has to have a licence. This is a widely held view with people of a similar age.

Maybe the BBC could do an information campaign to educate them otherwise? I won't hold my breath though.

If the BBC is the only thing stopping the UK from becoming a failed state then God help us. Or, we could simply carry on without it and not really notice.

I'm going with the latter.