Why do butchers sell cooked food 286

I have heard this argument, and it is something we need to be cautious about. We would need checks and balances to ensure that BBC funding was properly allocated. We have an independent judiciary, a free press, the Internet, an election every so often - people aren't stupid, and there are plenty of ways to protest if the government start trying to turn the BBC into a puppet.

Meanwhile, we have mothers in prison, whose only crime is to risk watching TV without a licence because they cannot afford one (and subsequently they cannot afford the fine). Most would agree that they should never have been required to pay such a large amount to fund the BBC anyway, so it is a non-crime. I can't see that any amount of woolly argument about the independence of the BBC can justify the injustice of the current system.

The problem is that simplistic rebates often create more unfairnesses and anomalies than they solve. If we try to fine tune the rebates to make them fair, then the rules will become very complex. The TVLA would need to know lots of personal information about us to calculate what we owe. There would be more opportunity for fraud by lying about your situation.

We would be creating a mini income tax (perhaps with completely different criteria), and to collect an average of just over £100 per household it isn't worth it. We should just use the existing tax system. The benefits of not having to collect-enforce the licence system would result in considerable cost savings.

In any case, the TV Licence is not going to last much longer, because the concept of a TV receiver will become blurred. It is going to become increasingly common to watch TV content on multi-purpose devices, using multi-purpose communications - mobile phones, broadband connected PC's or game consoles etc.

If the BBC do not provide content via these channels, then people will start to vote with their feet and ditch their TV's and Licences. If the BBC do provide content (as ultimately they must), they are unlikely to be able to charge a computer licence fee or an XBox licence fee.

The natural outcome of this is that the BBC would be funded either by adverts or subscription - either case would be a disaster. We should make sure that the BBC is funded by general taxation before this happens.

------------------------------------------- Scrap the TV Licence