The BBC is quick to air grievances expressed about groups lobbying politicians…say the food industry or energy companies…but it seems they aren’t immune to a bit of arm twisting as they go nuclear to defend their gravy train license fee…..as Douglas Carswell points out in The Empire Strikes Back:
The magnificent Andrew Bridgen MP has tabled an amendment to the Deregulation Bill to make non-payment of the BBC license fee a civil, rather than a criminal offence. And quite right, too.
Now the £3.6 billion a year BBC empire has struck back.
In an unintentionally funny “briefing note” sent to naughty MPs minded to back the amendment, the BBC complains that “the BBC cannot turn off services for those who do not pay the licence fee”.
A ‘briefing note’ to MPs?
Perhaps, just like Prince Charle’s letters as demanded by the Guardian, we should be allowed to see all BBC ‘briefing notes’ to politicians….independent? My backside.
Somebody should put the BBC out of it’s misery. It is the humane thing to do. If ever an organisation has lost it’s way and raison d’etre it is the BBC.
Sentimental references to Auntie don’t cut it anymore.
BBC – “We don’t have the power to switch people off who don’t pay”
Obvious remedy – scrap the licence fee, change to subscription.
Sky, BT, etc seem to manage ok?
But if the BBC was funded by subscription it could turn off services to those that chose not to take its output! So why doesn’t the BBC want to produce programmes and comment only for those who actually want it? Surely if the subscription remained at £145 pa and they cut their cloth to those who actually wanted to pay for their output they could still run a decent service for those who believe in a liberal left Utopia. The rest of use could spend the money on something we wanted rather than what the BBC thought we should have.
On the media programme (or whatever it’s called) on Radio 4 the other day Purnell – he of the luxuriant 60s sideburns and photoshopped presence at a hospital meeting he was supposed to attend but didn’t
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1564465/James-Purnell-in-fake-photo-row.html
– finally made it onto the airwaves because, presumably, he now feels it safe enough to put his head above the parapet as we’ve all ‘moved on’ since his slick £300k political insertion into the real corridors of power.
One of his main arguments against subscription was that it would cost £500 million to introduce a Sky-type system for switching off viewers transmissions if they stopped paying. Fortunately (for Purnell) there was no challenge to this assumption – not even a whimsical ‘couldn’t you form a strategic partnership with someone like Sky’ – so he got away with it.
It’s very simple to fiund out any topic on net as
compared to books, as I found this piece of writing at this
website.
Looks like the Bbc, is frightened by the thought, of a bit of competition!