Who should pay for BBC TV programmes? Should it be
those who watch them or everybody who owns a TV? I can remember when there were
only three channels. If you owned a TV in Britain, you almost certainly watched
quite a lot of BBC programmes or at least listened to the radio. The number of
people who only watched ITV must have been small. So, there was no particular
injustice in taxing TV ownership. Some people might have preferred that the BBC
was also funded by advertising, but it was also possible to reasonably argue
the case for public service broadcasting funded by taxation. The BBC when I was
young was genuinely different from ITV. That
distinctiveness was worth paying taxes for. But the BBC now is just ITV without
commercials.
It would be possible to fund the BBC out of general taxation
in the same way that we fund the NHS or the Army. This would be a bit unfair on
those who don’t watch TV, but this is no different in principle from those who
don’t have children to send to school or those who don’t get sick and need to
see a doctor. Around 95% of the British public owns a TV. Wouldn’t it be
simpler just to fund the BBC from taxation rather than go to the bother of
taxing TV ownership with all of the difficulties involved in collecting that
tax?
There might have been a case for this when there were
only two or three channels, but since the introduction of subscription TV in
Britain we have been able to pay for what we want to watch. Why shouldn’t this model apply to the BBC
too? It is here that we need to think about taxation.
To use an analogy:
Conservatism is the idea that if a group of us go to a
restaurant we each pay for the food.
Socialism is the idea that we all pay taxes so the
state can give us free restaurants.
The BBC likewise wants those who don't eat in the
restaurant to pay for those who do.
It would be possible to fund free restaurants out of
taxation, but if you do that you might as well fund shops from taxation too. In
that case each of us would take what we wanted from the supermarket, but not pay
anything. This would abolish money. It would also require rationing, because if
everything were free it would be necessary to stop people stripping the shelves
of free food and drink. Free healthcare for this reason has waiting lists. If
you open a pub paid for by taxation with free beer, it too will have to ration
the beer or else run out. You will only get immediate access to the beer if you
have to pay for it. This is the problem with the socialist model of healthcare and
indeed the socialist model of anything.
The capitalist or Conservative model of taxation is
that we each pay for what we want to buy and that government only funds areas
that cannot be reasonably funded privately. The socialist or Labour model is to
extend government and public spending so that taxation funds not merely the
police, schools and hospitals, but also areas that we might have been left to
pay for ourselves such as free eye tests free prescriptions and free public
transport.
Take the example of the bridge to Skye. Previously to
there being a bridge everybody who wanted to go to Skye had to pay to go on the
ferry. After the bridge was built some residents of Skye complained about
having to pay a toll. What they wanted was for everybody to pay for the cost of
the bridge, rather than merely those who used it. This is essentially the BBC
argument.
I was pleased when I drove to Skye that I didn’t have
to queue to pay a toll, but at most I might cross this bridge once a year.
Someone who lives on Skye might cross it every day. Society might decide that
it is reasonable to fund bridges out of general taxation. But there is clearly
a limit to what we should fund from general taxation otherwise we will end up
with free shops, free restaurants and the abolition of money.
Where you draw this line ought to be the argument
between the Conservatives and Labour.
The Conservative argument is that lowering taxation
and lowering public spending increases economic growth and allows market
efficiencies to make services better and cheaper. You get better healthcare
with no waiting.
The Labour argument is that increasing government
spending and raising taxation allows greater equality, because government can
then redistribute wealth from the richest to the poorest.
The Conservative argument is that this will make
everyone poorer, because inequality is the reason why people work hard in order
to make themselves better off. It provides an incentive. Labour will make us
more equal, but at the expense of making us on average poorer.
Hardly anyone would expect a trip to the cinema to be
paid for from taxation, let alone a trip to the pub. We don’t expect people who
never go to the cinema to pay for those who do. But this is the model of
funding that the BBC expects to continue even when there are now hundreds of
channels paid for either by subscription or advertising.
But what of poor people who might not be able to
afford a subscription? What about radio? We could not easily subscribe to Radio
4. There are also BBC channels which must have very low view viewing figures
like BBC Parliament and BBC Alba. How could these be funded by subscription as
they would attract few if any subscribers. This would require a political
decision. Even if much of the BBC were to be funded by subscription a core
public service channel might be available for free either funded by that
subscription or by general taxation.
In some countries the public sector broadcaster has
adverts between programmes. This would be no worse than at present where the
BBC has endless adverts for its own programmes and services.
The BBC is stuck with a funding model which is
obsolete. It is not the public service broadcaster that it was. There are very
few genuinely intellectual programmes on TV compared to in the 1960s and 1970s.
Much of the output is popular and dumbed down. There is too much woke
propaganda.
If the BBC were funded by subscription it would have
to change. It could no longer afford enormous salaries for those who don’t
merit them. It would have to become more efficient and it would have to go into
the world market place to compete with the likes of Netflix and Amazon Prime.
But it is just this that is necessary if the BBC is once more to be the world
leader that it once was. The licence fee traps it in public ownership just as
much as British Leyland.
So long as the BBC relies on handouts it will remain
lying in bed, getting up unshaved at 11 strolling to the foodbank and then on
to the corner shop for some beers and a packet of fags. It may think that there
is no other way of living, but it is in fact trapped by the handouts, which
prevent it from fulfilling its potential. It is a dole scrounger with detector
vans.
Who should pay for the BBC? Those who watch it. If you don’t go to the restaurant, you shouldn’t be expected to pay for those that do.
