Crime never pays – except when the BBC is newly flush with telly-taxpayers cash.

Just a day after the BBC’s telly tax was renewed for another ten years, allegedly in exchange for improvements to their public service programming, we learn that the BBC’s idea of public service includes paying career criminal Brendon Fearon £4,000 (£4,500 according to some reports) for a documentary appearance.

Fearon, who has been in and out of jail many, many times, is the burglar who was shot, along with two accomplices, one of whom who was killed, by Norfolk farmer Tony Martin, whilst attempting to rob Mr. Martin in the middle of the night at his remote farm house.

Given Fearon’s long record of criminal activity and his evident difficulty with telling the truth, it is ridiculous for the BBC to argue that they must pay telly-taxpayers hard-earned cash to this parasite on society ‘for the purpose of balance’.

I have no objection to Fearon appearing on the programme to give, and be robustly challenged on, his version of events, but the idea of this scumbag profiting so handsomely out of his criminal activities, especially from public money, is deeply, deeply offensive.

Perhaps now, with the imposition of a new ten-year sentence of BBC bias, it is finally time for an organised campaign of telly tax civil disobedience for those who conscientiously object to funding the unaccountable BBC. As with fox hunting, there will come a point where it’s just not politically practical to enforce the law, and that will be the end of the left-leaning navel-gazing institutionally biased BBC as we know and loathe it – hopefully to be replaced or transformed into a popularly funded British broadcaster that truly reflects and represents our great nation.

Update: According to The Sun, Fearon has thirty-five convictions, stretched over twenty years, which presumably represent the tip of this particular offending iceberg. The BBC told The Sun “It is important the public hears the fullest account of what happened. We believe Mr Fearon will make a contribution” – as of course will the BBC, to Fearon, with over 35 tellytaxes worth of our cash. Sickening.

One final note: Even though this is a major story that broke late last night, it has, strangely enough, already been relegated from News Online’s home page to a couple of quiet slots on the UK and Entertainment pages. Unlike this story, Labour trio’s ‘vote-rig factory’, which didn’t, as far as I am aware, even make it onto the News Online home page. Funny how all those Lib Dem election bribes promises hang around among News Online’s headlines for so long though, isn’t it…