Plans are afoot to decriminalize non-payment of the UK 's
Television Licence Fee. At the moment persistent failure to buy a TV Licence is
a criminal offence under legal statute and is punishable by a fine or even
imprisonment. The UK 's
TV Licence scheme was introduced in 1946 and is used to fund the BBC's new post-war
TV service. The BBC is a nationalized non-commercial broadcaster and is funded
completely through the Licence... so they tell us. This change in the law would
mean that although failure to buy a Licence would still be an offence it would
be regarded as a civil offence, an alleged harmful action by the individual
against society instead of a harmful action by one person against another. This
is how the Government are mitigating their proposal; however I suspect that the
real motivation is that TV Licence evasion is the most widespread
"crime" in the country and there were 155,000 prosecutions resulting
from it in 2013. This constitutes a full 10% of all the magistrate court cases
for that year. The Justice Secretary Chris Grayling has admitted that the
decriminalization is being done to ease the pressure on the legal system. I
don't think it's a coincidence that this issue has arisen just a year after the
Jimmy Savile scandal, see: http://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/jimmy-savile-in-hospital-satanic.html.
More and more people are rejecting the justification for having a state-funded
TV station that has betrayed its duty to the British viewers to such an excessive
level. The pathetic pleas of innocence from the Corporation are totally
implausible, and most Licence-payers know it; there is no way a major BBC
celebrity could have got away with what he did for as long as he did without a
massive network of institutional collaboration. Are we truly being asked to pay
for our own children to be sexually abused? This really is the final nail in
the coffin for something that is indefensible even without it. Are we truly being
asked to pay for out children to be mentally
abused? Not just our children, but we adults too. The BBC is still probably the
biggest Governmental propaganda machine ever created in the world; remember that
despite its name it operates internationally, not just in Britain ,
and it employs experts in psychological warfare to help design its output. Even
before the Savile affair people have been standing up to what is both immoral
and unlawful, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4GE5P4tMcE
and: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qI25JB4CCao.
We should welcome this as an example of people-power taking its toll; however
we should be on our guard, as a Facebook friend of mine pointed out. The
Government will not just give up on this and might try to sneak in new attacks
on the Common Law via the back door. Source:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-26682135.
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