ONCE again, our government does not understand. It doesn’t seem to matter whether it is the Labour Party or the Conservative Party in power: neither has managed to grasp the utter failure of the BBC to remain relevant or popular in the UK.
After all, if the BBC was still a competent, respected and well-run organisation it would not be constantly begging for more money.
In their millions, the British public have rejected the BBC. The Corporation’s licence fee income has fallen off a cliff – by 30 per cent, the Government admits. A full half million people cancelled their licences last year alone.
This ‘BBC-exit’ is not all down to competition from streaming services, as the Government and the ever-supportive Guardian would have us believe. In fact if you don’t have a BBC licence you are already banned from watching live sports or any other live streaming whatever channel (terrestrial or on-demand service like Netflix) it is on. As ever the Government is being less than honest. The main reason for the unpopularity of the licence fee is the unpopularity of the BBC – its unrelenting woke, left-progressive worldview, its repeated insistence on trying to defend the reputation of sexual predators, its ideological agendas from trans and DEI to unfounded climate scaremongering, all reflected in its plummeting editorial standards which deny informed debate and limit its journalistic impartiality and investigation. This is what has driven viewers away in their multitudes.
What then of the response of this Labour government to the question of the BBC’s funding crisis and future? Is it to embrace the free market and accept that the BBC’s failings are responsible for the mess it is in, and let the public speak? Is it to acknowledge that turning it into a subscription service would be the best way to reflect its value and popularity in the fragmented market that they claim is its undoing?
No, of course not. Rather its reponse is to double down with further licence fee constraints on a public that may not want to watch the BBC at all, to ignore what already makes the licence fee unpopular, which first and foremost is the iniquity of its being the prerequisite for watching any other terrestrial channel or any other live TV on any other service. Their latest outrageous idea is to force households that only use on-demand services such as Netflix or Disney+ to be made to pay the licence fee too, even though these channels, for which they already pay subscriptions, are all they watch.
What sort of message does this send? Well, it’s another example of the Labour government’s refusal to accept people’s free choice. It’s another example of the Labour Party and the state overreach, this time dictating to the public the terms on which they can access any of the entertainment and information they choose – and making them pay for it via a licence fee for the privilege on top of their subscriptions of choice. It would be daylight robbery. Why on earth should you pay for something you don’t use?
Too few people understand this – that if you opt out of the licence fee you are ‘not allowed’ to watch any other live channel and if you do you risk of having TV Licensing monitors on your back and taking legal action against you.
Before now, it was hard to see how the BBC and its licence fee could get more unpopular, but this would do it. If you ever wanted implicit government acceptance of the failure of the BBC, here it is. The BBC is failing, so we must force those not using it to pay for it.
What comes next? How far will this government go in its strangulation of choice to desperately save the BBC? Will we see the licence fee extended to videos on YouTube? Podcasts on Spotify? Maybe scrolling on X will require paying the licence fee.
Extending the licence fee will not solve anything. It will just fuel the ever-growing discontent with the BBC.
