A letter published in The Scotsman newspaper today:
=====It is almost fifty years since the radio licence was scrapped as uneconomical and unenforceable. The scrapping of the TV licence part funding the BBC is long overdue. If the licence fee was unenforceable in an era of largely fictitious detector vans, the millions today claiming they only watch "catch-up" TV rather than "live" (a loophole deliberately put into the law to allow the wily cosmopolitan classes to avoid payment whilst the mug proles pay up) renders the current system a farce.
Toothless TV Licensing enforcement officers - with no legal right to enter property to prove that an unlicensed TV exists - are employed at great expense (and occasionally sued successfully for "trespass) to take over 10,000 (sic) annually to court - a quarter of all magistrates' cases in the UK - which they have no chance of winning unless the defendant (usually from a vulnerable group such as the elderly or mentally ill) is intimidated enough to plead guilty.
If general taxation is good enough for funding state radio, it's good enough for state TV earning millions selling high quality shows across the globe.
- Mark Boyle, Linn Park Gardens, Johnstone, Renfrewshire.
=====In 2018 almost 130,000 individuals were prosecuted for TV licence evasion, which far exceeds the 10,000 mentioned in the body of the letter.
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1 comment:
The letter only reiterates what I have been saying for years. The TV licence is unenforceable. They only way get sufficient evidence to support a prosecution is to catch someone in the act. How do you catch someone in the act of doing anything in their own living room without bringing in Big Brother.
Anyone who knows the law know this. Unfortunately TV Licensing rely on ignorance and fear to bamboozle people into paying for something they don't need or even worse, con them into signing a confession for something they haven't done.
I would love to know how many of those evasion convictions where the result of anything resembling a criminal trial where evidence is heard from both sides and a decision is made. But then TV Licensing does tend to halt prosecutions if someone has the temerity to plead not guilty.
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