Blog 10th June 2019 – Ditching the BBC As with social media, both my wife and I have been pondering the wisdom of funding the BBC. My main gripe being the content. Extraordinarily left leaning... more like propaganda, less like objective reporting, coupled with an ever increasing licence fee and law forcing us to fund an extravagant, exceptionally wasteful organisation - all makes for an unpleasant pill to swallow each year. I've long harboured reservations about BBC impartiality, but these reservations have significantly hardened over the past decade or so. These days, the lack of objectivity on a vast range of issues is so extreme that it simply isn't possible to ignore... and so we finally said enough is enough and voted with our feet. Regardless of what you might have been told, ditching the BBC licence these days is extremely easy. Simply stop watching live TV on any device and email the TV licence folks to let them know that you no longer require a licence and then cancel your direct debit. I have first hand experience of dealing with the BBC licence enforcement company (the BBC subcontract this to a third party) when I lived down in London a lifetime ago and can say they were as unpleasant as they were aggressive. Tenacity prevailed in the end, but dear God it was a fight, with a hateful and wilfully dumb organisation before apologies were forthcoming... ...but all of that was way back in the glory days, before the BBC were haemorrhaging close to a million licence payers every year...
Ditch BBC
Freedom of information (FOI) requests reveal that the BBC lost 700,000 licence payers two years ago and 850,000 last year. This year, it will be in the low millions and possibly higher if the BBC goes ahead with the planned termination of the over 75 free licence concession, an announcement that resulted in an understandable backlash (I couldn't help but admire the pensioner who observed that at least non-payment of the licence would result in a nice comfy stay in prison, complete with three squares a day, lighting, heating, medical cover and... free TV). Perhaps the rather odd lefty mindset of the BBC may in part result from always having their cash handed to them on a silver plate... which as it happens, is a really quite large silver plate. All told, the BBC received an eye watering £5.063 billion public money last year (2017-18) with the licence fee covering around three quarters of that amount (£3.83 billion). In terms of BBC spending, it's reveaing to note that there are more than one hundred "non talent" staff on their books all earning greater than 150,000 PA and their director general earns four times the wage of our PM (550,000)... which would take a staggering 3600 TV licences to pay. This year while the BBC is busy withdrawing free licence concessions for the elderly, they are increasing spending on what they call "on air" talent by an astonishing 10 million pounds (157,000,000 up from 147,600,000 the year before). Partially that comes down to the gender pay gap, a problem very much of their own making but it also comes down to having little or no accountability... to anyone.
Given this level of profligacy, a large financial hit will be the only way to change hearts and minds in an organisation determined to avoid introspection, much less change. It's a pity really, given the BBC’s historic legacy of truth and impartiality... qualities that have stood our nation in good stead during some very dark times... but this honourable legacy has been squandered by what passes for BBC management these days and I can all too easily imagine those who wrote the original charter obligations, spinning like tops at what the BBC has become. Our decision to refuse to pay for a licence serves two purposes. First it excludes a very large chunk of the main stream media from our lives and second it terminates our obligation to pay for content that we neither like, nor want... ...and that's just fine with us.
Ditch BBC
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