I hate this fucking government so much. They take everything I care about, everything that I am proud to be part of my country, and destroy it. The only possible plus side to this is that there's...
I hate this fucking government so much. They take everything I care about, everything that I am proud to be part of my country, and destroy it.
The only possible plus side to this is that there's a general election due in a couple of years and the BBC have traditionally treated Conservative governments with some amount of... ...undue consideration due to their constant threats to do what they just did, but now that hand has been played. The BBC will get a better deal under a Labour government so perhaps some journalistic knives will come out which would have previously been left sheathed.
I'm angry, and I'm exhausted, and I don't know what to do when we're stuck in a country, a planet, with so many people who approve of this kind of naked partisanship and utterly destructive...
I'm angry, and I'm exhausted, and I don't know what to do when we're stuck in a country, a planet, with so many people who approve of this kind of naked partisanship and utterly destructive politics. Maybe I'm being melodramatic, or maybe this is just the straw that broke the camel's back, but I want to fucking give up and leave - I just don't know where to go that things will be any better.
I'm sorry you're having to deal with the same. Canada's on my radar too - some friends are even already there, they called time on the UK when the Brexit vote came in - although the distance of...
I'm sorry you're having to deal with the same. Canada's on my radar too - some friends are even already there, they called time on the UK when the Brexit vote came in - although the distance of being there seems bigger after the last two of years.
Realistically, I know I'm actually very fortunate; the UK is still safe and stable right now, Northern Europe is a viable option for me if necessary (albeit with language barriers and with their own ongoing fight with the exact same political forces), and the doom I'm predicting may not even come to pass. It's just hard to watch so many people cheer on that doom from pure spite, watching the cracks form and eagerly asking for more.
Maybe Scotland goes independent... They'll be another ray of slight hope, if their current internal politics is anything to go by.
Most of my family live in Scotland. It has a number of political advantages (from my perspective) over England. Apart from in the very middle of summer it is very cold and wet though, especially...
Most of my family live in Scotland. It has a number of political advantages (from my perspective) over England. Apart from in the very middle of summer it is very cold and wet though, especially compared to the part of England I live in. If they go independent I'll almost certainly qualify for a passport, which would be nice because one of the first things an independent Scottish government would do is apply to join the EU.
For British passport holders Ireland is a good bug-out location because the language barrier is low and the deals about visa-free working and such predate the EU and are still in place. Good luck getting a place to live in Dublin though, it's up there with SF and London for insane housing costs at the moment (because so much UK business is moving there - just like the brexiteers assured us wouldn't happen). Ireland will become the English-language gateway to the EU that the UK was, they are going to be rich as fuck as a result, and the government is fairly rapidly moving from conservative religious to pretty forward thinking and progressive. They're not perfect but nowhere is - but I'd move to Ireland if I could, and quite a few of my friends have done. It seems like a hopeful place which is getting better, not an increasingly hopeless one which is getting worse.
My experience of the west of Scotland is that it's cold, wet, mosquito-infested. It's also remote, so good luck with the poor internet speeds and landslides washing away the roads. There are a few...
My experience of the west of Scotland is that it's cold, wet, mosquito-infested. It's also remote, so good luck with the poor internet speeds and landslides washing away the roads. There are a few days out of the year when the glens look pretty as a painting, and some of the little towns like Inveraray have a real quaint charm to them...but you get the best of all that just from briefly holidaying there.
If you want more opportunities, I recommend the centre or east. It's windy out east with some frequency, but otherwise much nicer than living around the lochs.
And thankfully the ruling party seems to be largely resisting the odious culture war and TERFy soup that the southern Conservatives are bathing in.
Laura Kuennsberg was basically a Conservative plant that pushed so much anti-Corbyn bias during the last election that it was disgusting. She also leaked the result of the postal vote a day early,...
Part of me is relishing in the fact that the Tories are now ripping up the BBC. But there's also a part of me that's disgusted with our Conservative government.
The BBC licence fee will be abolished in 2027 and the broadcaster’s funding will be frozen for the next two years, the government has said, in an announcement that will force the corporation to close services and make further redundancies.
The culture secretary, Nadine Dorries, is expected to confirm that the cost of an annual licence, required to watch live television and access iPlayer services, will remain at £159 until 2024 before rising slightly for the following three years.
The decision, confirmed by government sources, was briefed to the media as part of a range of measures designed to shore up public support for Boris Johnson after he has faced calls to resign as prime minister.
I'm genuinely confused as to who this is supposed to please. Most people I know like the BBC, or at least the content it creates. Almost everyone I know often checks the BBC news website or the...
I'm genuinely confused as to who this is supposed to please. Most people I know like the BBC, or at least the content it creates. Almost everyone I know often checks the BBC news website or the older generation tune in to BBC news at 10 every evening... And I live in an overwhelmingly Conservative area. Sure, theres plently of people who complain about the BBC from both sides of the spectrum, but overall in my experiance its well liked, at the very least tolerated. I dont understand this move then. Who is this targeted at? Won't this just backfire and make people even angrier?
The licence fee model is antiquated and should be replaced with something else. It made sense back when you needed a TV to watch BBC, and you couldn't use that TV for much else. We did away with...
The licence fee model is antiquated and should be replaced with something else. It made sense back when you needed a TV to watch BBC, and you couldn't use that TV for much else. We did away with the licence fee for our national broadcaster NRK here in Norway back in 2020.
Until the start of 2020, about 94% of NRK's funding came from a mandatory annual licence fee payable by anyone who owns or uses a TV or device capable of receiving TV broadcasts. The remainder came from commercial activities such as programme and DVD sales, spin-off products, and certain types of sponsorships. NRK's license income in 2012 was more than 5 billion NOK. In the autumn of 2015, the government announced that it planned to change the way NRK is financed. This was in part a reaction to the decline of TV ownership in Norway. From the start of 2020, NRK funding is an item in the national budget and the costs are covered through taxation for each individual liable for income taxes in Norway.
I'm of the opinion that a license fee is actually a pretty bad option, but still in favour of keeping it as the least bad available to achieve the ends of genuine public service content. That...
I'm of the opinion that a license fee is actually a pretty bad option, but still in favour of keeping it as the least bad available to achieve the ends of genuine public service content. That said, I'd be very open to a good faith national discussion of the pros and cons, and of alternative options.
That's not what's happening here, at all. This is a government who have been openly hostile to the institution, already stacked the board with their own donors, and still feel hard done by because they're so catastrophically inept that they're making terrible headlines anyway. Whether it's a move they think will actually be popular because they can frame it as "putting money back in the pockets of our hardworking families" or whether it's a dead cat, they're willingly sacrificing an enormous public good in exchange for some quick political distraction.
[Edit] Oh, and for those outside the UK: the reason they need a distraction this time around is because it turns out a number of political figures, almost definitely including the prime minister himself, were having parties behind closed doors during lockdown. Many people, particularly those who couldn't even have a last conversation with their dying relatives during this time, are understandably upset at this revelation.
Less bad options exist. I'm American, so my view of the subject is pretty limited, but we have similar "usage based" taxes here, and they also suck. Things like toll roads, automobile...
I'm of the opinion that a license fee is actually a pretty bad option, but still in favour of keeping it as the least bad available to achieve the ends of genuine public service content. That said, I'd be very open to a good faith national discussion of the pros and cons, and of alternative options.
Less bad options exist. I'm American, so my view of the subject is pretty limited, but we have similar "usage based" taxes here, and they also suck. Things like toll roads, automobile registration, national park admission, etc. In theory after a cursory musing, they're fair and simple; you use something, you pay for it. The issue is that these things are ostensibly public services that are available to citizens because they're overall positive things for society, not really a service you're paying for from a company.
These services tend to be things that the public agree are wholesome and a overall good influence on society; note how we're not funding things like bars or superhero movies publicly; things that people view as fun, but overall either neutral or negative on society.
So we're positioning these things as available to residents of our county because we think it's good for them to partake in them, however, that's directly at odds with charging a fee to use it. It's not a business transaction, it's a public service. That's not even the main issue though. These types of usage taxes disproportionally affect the poor. Rich people in the UK, I'm sure, watch the BBC at least as much as poor people do, but they pay the same amount per year for that access. To someone who makes £50,000,000 a year, that's like .0003% of your monthly wage. For someone who makes £15,000, it's 13% of their monthly income. The level of impact between those two is massive.
Apart from that, usage fees are hugely inefficient to collect. Each time you enact a different fee, you need to build infrastructure from the ground up solely to collect it. If you make a toll road, you need toll booths, and sometimes toll both operators, and police to enforce people paying the tolls. National parks require someone collecting cash and making change and issuing passes. TV License fees require officers to enforce it, creepy tv scanning vans, ads trying to guilt people into paying the fee, etc.
All of this would be so much easier if we all just rolled this stuff into the mechanism we already have to collect the bulk of our taxes: income taxes. Things that the public thinks are within the public good are paid for by everyone, it has a progressive tax curve, we already have collection mechanisms for it, and you don't have to bother having separate jobs and infrastructure solely to enforce it.
I always get the feeling that all of these fancy tax schemes are just ways to try to fool people into thinking they're not paying as much in tax as they are somehow.
Seems like a theoretical complaint? America spends about $400m on public broadcasting, approximately $1.35 per American per year. The BBC collects $5.1 billion in license fees, which is about $65...
Seems like a theoretical complaint?
America spends about $400m on public broadcasting, approximately $1.35 per American per year.
The BBC collects $5.1 billion in license fees, which is about $65 per British person per year.
Until recently, I would have said a separate license fee is superior, if the goal is quality public broadcasting.
First thing that's interesting here is that I wouldn't have thought of the license fee as usage based! It actually is, you're quite right, but from the late 1960s to ~2010 it was effectively...
First thing that's interesting here is that I wouldn't have thought of the license fee as usage based! It actually is, you're quite right, but from the late 1960s to ~2010 it was effectively universal because >95% of the country owned and used a TV for broadcast content. I haven't had anything hooked up for broadcast TV for the better part of a decade and I still pay, so for me "TV license" can be thought of as synonymous with "universal BBC levy for the public good". The enforcement infrastructure and the fact it was criminal rather than civil always seemed a bit absurd to me but both of those are implementation details rather than necessary features of a license model.
The impact to lower incomes is a very fair point, and I actually thought there were broader exemptions for those receiving government benefits, but it turns out that only applies to pension credit. So in my eyes a sensible license would be universal (as you say, enforcement is more hassle than it's worth) and have exemptions for those already needing government support.
With everything I've said above, why am I not just saying to fund it from income tax? Because for me, the nuance between publicly funded and government funded is important. Although the mandate is provided by the government, the transaction is between the BBC and the people - it's not a state mouthpiece, it's not beholden to the government, it doesn't need to beg them for funding, and that means a huge amount.
Reality, as always, is a problem. From a legal standpoint it actually has been classed as a tax since the 90s, and the funding does go into a government account at which point a minister authorises the exact same amount of funding to be taken out again and given to the BBC. The news we're discussing here shows that a sufficiently motivated government can make a bad-faith attack on the BBC as an institution.
I do still think the modelling as a license has secured them far more funding than they would have got if the BBC were competing within combined central government budgets all this time. I do still think it's given them a greater level of independence and impartiality than they otherwise would have been able to manage. But I also agree that these are unprovable hypotheticals to set against some very real disadvantages of the license model, so I can respect an argument that comes to the opposite conclusion.
I'm an American who loves BBC's programming. I very much appreciate that it exists outside the free market and is thereby liberated to produce thoughtful content that elevates, enlightens, and...
I'm an American who loves BBC's programming.
I very much appreciate that it exists outside the free market and is thereby liberated to produce thoughtful content that elevates, enlightens, and entertains. The free market, in contrast, seems locked in a race to the bottom of the barrel, producing mindless content and in turn contentless minds.
I hate this fucking government so much. They take everything I care about, everything that I am proud to be part of my country, and destroy it.
The only possible plus side to this is that there's a general election due in a couple of years and the BBC have traditionally treated Conservative governments with some amount of... ...undue consideration due to their constant threats to do what they just did, but now that hand has been played. The BBC will get a better deal under a Labour government so perhaps some journalistic knives will come out which would have previously been left sheathed.
I'm angry, and I'm exhausted, and I don't know what to do when we're stuck in a country, a planet, with so many people who approve of this kind of naked partisanship and utterly destructive politics. Maybe I'm being melodramatic, or maybe this is just the straw that broke the camel's back, but I want to fucking give up and leave - I just don't know where to go that things will be any better.
I'm sorry you're having to deal with the same. Canada's on my radar too - some friends are even already there, they called time on the UK when the Brexit vote came in - although the distance of being there seems bigger after the last two of years.
Realistically, I know I'm actually very fortunate; the UK is still safe and stable right now, Northern Europe is a viable option for me if necessary (albeit with language barriers and with their own ongoing fight with the exact same political forces), and the doom I'm predicting may not even come to pass. It's just hard to watch so many people cheer on that doom from pure spite, watching the cracks form and eagerly asking for more.
Maybe Scotland goes independent... They'll be another ray of slight hope, if their current internal politics is anything to go by.
Most of my family live in Scotland. It has a number of political advantages (from my perspective) over England. Apart from in the very middle of summer it is very cold and wet though, especially compared to the part of England I live in. If they go independent I'll almost certainly qualify for a passport, which would be nice because one of the first things an independent Scottish government would do is apply to join the EU.
For British passport holders Ireland is a good bug-out location because the language barrier is low and the deals about visa-free working and such predate the EU and are still in place. Good luck getting a place to live in Dublin though, it's up there with SF and London for insane housing costs at the moment (because so much UK business is moving there - just like the brexiteers assured us wouldn't happen). Ireland will become the English-language gateway to the EU that the UK was, they are going to be rich as fuck as a result, and the government is fairly rapidly moving from conservative religious to pretty forward thinking and progressive. They're not perfect but nowhere is - but I'd move to Ireland if I could, and quite a few of my friends have done. It seems like a hopeful place which is getting better, not an increasingly hopeless one which is getting worse.
My experience of the west of Scotland is that it's cold, wet, mosquito-infested. It's also remote, so good luck with the poor internet speeds and landslides washing away the roads. There are a few days out of the year when the glens look pretty as a painting, and some of the little towns like Inveraray have a real quaint charm to them...but you get the best of all that just from briefly holidaying there.
If you want more opportunities, I recommend the centre or east. It's windy out east with some frequency, but otherwise much nicer than living around the lochs.
And thankfully the ruling party seems to be largely resisting the odious culture war and TERFy soup that the southern Conservatives are bathing in.
Laura Kuennsberg was basically a Conservative plant that pushed so much anti-Corbyn bias during the last election that it was disgusting. She also leaked the result of the postal vote a day early, which is a major no-no in terms of electoral law. Of course she didn't face any disciplinary action or criminal charges for doing so...
Part of me is relishing in the fact that the Tories are now ripping up the BBC. But there's also a part of me that's disgusted with our Conservative government.
I'm genuinely confused as to who this is supposed to please. Most people I know like the BBC, or at least the content it creates. Almost everyone I know often checks the BBC news website or the older generation tune in to BBC news at 10 every evening... And I live in an overwhelmingly Conservative area. Sure, theres plently of people who complain about the BBC from both sides of the spectrum, but overall in my experiance its well liked, at the very least tolerated. I dont understand this move then. Who is this targeted at? Won't this just backfire and make people even angrier?
The licence fee model is antiquated and should be replaced with something else. It made sense back when you needed a TV to watch BBC, and you couldn't use that TV for much else. We did away with the licence fee for our national broadcaster NRK here in Norway back in 2020.
Wikipedia: NRK
I'm of the opinion that a license fee is actually a pretty bad option, but still in favour of keeping it as the least bad available to achieve the ends of genuine public service content. That said, I'd be very open to a good faith national discussion of the pros and cons, and of alternative options.
That's not what's happening here, at all. This is a government who have been openly hostile to the institution, already stacked the board with their own donors, and still feel hard done by because they're so catastrophically inept that they're making terrible headlines anyway. Whether it's a move they think will actually be popular because they can frame it as "putting money back in the pockets of our hardworking families" or whether it's a dead cat, they're willingly sacrificing an enormous public good in exchange for some quick political distraction.
[Edit] Oh, and for those outside the UK: the reason they need a distraction this time around is because it turns out a number of political figures, almost definitely including the prime minister himself, were having parties behind closed doors during lockdown. Many people, particularly those who couldn't even have a last conversation with their dying relatives during this time, are understandably upset at this revelation.
Less bad options exist. I'm American, so my view of the subject is pretty limited, but we have similar "usage based" taxes here, and they also suck. Things like toll roads, automobile registration, national park admission, etc. In theory after a cursory musing, they're fair and simple; you use something, you pay for it. The issue is that these things are ostensibly public services that are available to citizens because they're overall positive things for society, not really a service you're paying for from a company.
These services tend to be things that the public agree are wholesome and a overall good influence on society; note how we're not funding things like bars or superhero movies publicly; things that people view as fun, but overall either neutral or negative on society.
So we're positioning these things as available to residents of our county because we think it's good for them to partake in them, however, that's directly at odds with charging a fee to use it. It's not a business transaction, it's a public service. That's not even the main issue though. These types of usage taxes disproportionally affect the poor. Rich people in the UK, I'm sure, watch the BBC at least as much as poor people do, but they pay the same amount per year for that access. To someone who makes £50,000,000 a year, that's like .0003% of your monthly wage. For someone who makes £15,000, it's 13% of their monthly income. The level of impact between those two is massive.
Apart from that, usage fees are hugely inefficient to collect. Each time you enact a different fee, you need to build infrastructure from the ground up solely to collect it. If you make a toll road, you need toll booths, and sometimes toll both operators, and police to enforce people paying the tolls. National parks require someone collecting cash and making change and issuing passes. TV License fees require officers to enforce it, creepy tv scanning vans, ads trying to guilt people into paying the fee, etc.
All of this would be so much easier if we all just rolled this stuff into the mechanism we already have to collect the bulk of our taxes: income taxes. Things that the public thinks are within the public good are paid for by everyone, it has a progressive tax curve, we already have collection mechanisms for it, and you don't have to bother having separate jobs and infrastructure solely to enforce it.
I always get the feeling that all of these fancy tax schemes are just ways to try to fool people into thinking they're not paying as much in tax as they are somehow.
Seems like a theoretical complaint?
America spends about $400m on public broadcasting, approximately $1.35 per American per year.
The BBC collects $5.1 billion in license fees, which is about $65 per British person per year.
Until recently, I would have said a separate license fee is superior, if the goal is quality public broadcasting.
First thing that's interesting here is that I wouldn't have thought of the license fee as usage based! It actually is, you're quite right, but from the late 1960s to ~2010 it was effectively universal because >95% of the country owned and used a TV for broadcast content. I haven't had anything hooked up for broadcast TV for the better part of a decade and I still pay, so for me "TV license" can be thought of as synonymous with "universal BBC levy for the public good". The enforcement infrastructure and the fact it was criminal rather than civil always seemed a bit absurd to me but both of those are implementation details rather than necessary features of a license model.
The impact to lower incomes is a very fair point, and I actually thought there were broader exemptions for those receiving government benefits, but it turns out that only applies to pension credit. So in my eyes a sensible license would be universal (as you say, enforcement is more hassle than it's worth) and have exemptions for those already needing government support.
With everything I've said above, why am I not just saying to fund it from income tax? Because for me, the nuance between publicly funded and government funded is important. Although the mandate is provided by the government, the transaction is between the BBC and the people - it's not a state mouthpiece, it's not beholden to the government, it doesn't need to beg them for funding, and that means a huge amount.
Reality, as always, is a problem. From a legal standpoint it actually has been classed as a tax since the 90s, and the funding does go into a government account at which point a minister authorises the exact same amount of funding to be taken out again and given to the BBC. The news we're discussing here shows that a sufficiently motivated government can make a bad-faith attack on the BBC as an institution.
I do still think the modelling as a license has secured them far more funding than they would have got if the BBC were competing within combined central government budgets all this time. I do still think it's given them a greater level of independence and impartiality than they otherwise would have been able to manage. But I also agree that these are unprovable hypotheticals to set against some very real disadvantages of the license model, so I can respect an argument that comes to the opposite conclusion.
I'm an American who loves BBC's programming.
I very much appreciate that it exists outside the free market and is thereby liberated to produce thoughtful content that elevates, enlightens, and entertains. The free market, in contrast, seems locked in a race to the bottom of the barrel, producing mindless content and in turn contentless minds.
It should simply not be acceptable to use the word "free" here.