Saturday, 22 March 2014

TV licence- Change in the Law

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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