My TV broke down last week. I didn’t watch a lot as I am busy and the service is pretty dire. I mainly watched DVDs but I bitterly resent having to pay for a licence in order to watch my own films, so I am not going to bother replacing it. I have just cancelled my tv licence standing order and have written to them telling them this.
Now the fun begins.
We have an anachronistic system here in the UK where there is a law that requires that we must have a licence to own a tv and a separate law that allocates all the money to the BBC (though not to any other broadcaster). In effect it is a tax on tv ownership and in the greater scheme of things it is a rather minor tax: about £140 per year per household. A fraction of total revenues. However the government devotes an incredible amount of time and energy to collecting this small amount. It’s medium is a QUANGO called the TV Licencing Authority. It has a simple operating model: It simply assumes that every household in the country must have a television therefore any address that doesn’t have a licence, must be avoiding paying.
In fact about 2% of households don’t have televisions and its a sad truth that the TV licencing Authority operates a policy of continuous harassment on these people. I have some personal experience of this some years back when I sent a rental tv back and went without the box for about six months. I got a steady stream of increasingly “heavy” letters from them despite the fact that I answered each one explaining that I had not tv.
So have cancelled this current licence in full expectation of a bit of a fight and did a bit of websearching to see if anyone else has had similar experiences. The answer is OH YES. Here is the weblog http://www.marmalade.net/lime/ of someone who has been harassed for over eight years.
There are two things that are so objectionable:
The laziness and arrogance in simply assuming that because you don’t have a licence you must be breaking the law which is counter to the fundamental principle that innocence is presupposed and the onus of proof is on the accuser.
The second is the agressive tone that they adopt. And one of the reasons I am posting this is the generally aggressive tone that is becoming the norm in a number of official communications for example the car tax television campaign that focuses entirely on the penalties incurred by not paying car tax. Or a letter from the Local council regarding Council Tax whose first words are the penalties incurred if I fail to do some minor thing. It is the state version of a teacher walking around all day with a cane.
