Douglas Carswell in the Telegraph suggests that:
The BBC’s mid-twentieth century TV poll tax should be consigned to the history books
Carswell thinks a subscription service might work…Mark Thompson thought not…or rather put the case for keeping the license fee/poll tax:
We want to build a digital world based on universal access, open standards and unencryption.
Encryption, subscription and other forms of digital exclusion lead to widespread welfare losses.
They may well have a role within the total broadcasting ecology, but the idea that they can successfully replace free-to-air public service broadcasting, we believe, flies in the face both of economic theory and our real-world experience.
There might be a case for keeping news and sport free to air but when the BBC is prosecuting thousands of people for not paying their license fee, and presumably they will be mainly the poorest people, Thompson’s claim that there will be ‘widespread welfare losses’ looks to be disengenuous….if you don’t pay the BBC’s license you don’t get the service now….officially anyway.
Do they watch the BBC’s socially and morally uplifting programmes anyway? Thompson knows full well most people aren’t interested, life’s too short and they won’t pay for them….and yet they still get charged for them now.
The trouble is that the BBC always feel free to rewrite those history books.
In Dreaming the Impossible: Unbuilt Britain – 2. Making Connections the BBC indulges in its usual trick of loading a programme about engineering with political and social messages…in this case about immigration and the dreadful people that oppose it.
In the first 5 minutes there were a couple of veiled references to what was to come and a couple of blatantly obvious markers for how the programme was going to lay judgement upon the British.
Olivia Horsfall Turner, architectural historian, tells us that one of the men who wanted to build a Channel tunnel had a ‘belief in a better world’…unlike those who opposed the tunnel who were full of intrigue and beset by xenophobia….those thinking of building the tunnel brought out the worst kind of rabid xenophobia in its opponents.
Never mind that this was originally at the time of the Napoleonic Wars…remember them? When the French were trying to take over the world…marching onto the gates of Moscow and the Pyramids in Egypt…never mind that the French had helped the Rebels in the Americas to defeat the British…or that Napoleon had plans to invade Britain.
It was just out and out xenophobia, racism by some very nasty people..
So the Channel tunnel was more than a spectacular feat of engineering it was a social and political experiment, a statement that broke down borders and prejudiced attitudes….as immigrants flooded in through it.
Douglas Carswell says that he had a Tweet from a Lefty saying that the BBC was needed because it ‘fulfils a social role’
The BBC fulfils a social role?…maybe, but how do you define that ‘role’ and what are its limits?
Its role was to educate, inform and entertain…..it has gone far beyond that…taking upon itself to not only tell us what is going on in the world but how to live our lives and to berate and pillory us when we don’t profess the same values and correct social attitudes that they desire us to have.
Mark Thompson claimed that: ‘The BBC is not a campaigning organisation and can’t be‘…unfortunately he also said:
The BBC was no longer just a broadcaster, the corporation was to be a social force in the land, he said. The corporation was an “important builder of social capital, seeking to increase social cohesion and tolerance”, which in future would try to “foster audience understanding of differences of ethnicity, faith, gender, sexuality, age and ability or disability“…
Really?
The Telegraph asked: Caring and sharing – is this what the BBC is really for?
Strangely when I’m watching a programme about engineering or how to dance strictly I don’t want messages, subliminal or otherwise, inserted into my consciousness telling me that a gay man, or even a French man, can make a brilliant engineer, or that everytime I drive my socially inappropriate 4×4 to buy the Sunday Newpapers I’m killing at least 3 Ethiopians and blighting the lives of many more as the climate changes, famine, plague and swarms of locusts scourge the land.
Its broadcasting has become value laden….it doesn’t just reveal the world to us but passes judgement on what is good, what is bad, directing us on what to think, policing our thoughts.
Anyone who steps out of line can expect a visit from the BBC and exposure in the BBC’s very own court for a public show trial intended to shame the blasphemous heretic and to terrify anyone else who thinks the same into keeping quiet.
A final word from the BBC:
“The BBC doesn’t make judgments – what it does is to provide a forum for debate.”