If anyone needed further reason for ending the BBC’s carte blanche to do what it wants with our licence-fee money, it was supplied by way of this Daily Mail report.
The appointment of a Diversity Correspondent brings the BBC to a new low, and marks its latest full-blooded political campaign to change society in its own image. With its ‘progressive’ agenda on climate change, its pro-EU obeisance and head-in-the-sand denial of its overt and long-standing anti-eurosceptic, anti-Brexit bias, and its non-stop Remainiac fearmongering divisiveness, it might as well be renamed the Big Brother Corporation.
Even without these additional soupcons of BBC chicanery, 95 per cent of voters in our poll decided that this once-loved British institution is quite beyond redemption:
Is it time to end the BBC’s licence fee?
— The Conservative Woman (@TheConWom) July 19, 2018
We humbly apologise to those Twitter refuseniks amongst you – who can blame you? – but in our defence so far it is the only free way we have found to conduct a poll. We hope you’ll forgive us. Personally I was tempted by Starshiptrooper’s offer of a pad and paper to count you all in – bringing the total no doubt to 99 per cent in favour, but wiser TCW heads prevailed. We’d be accused of vote rigging.
There was little disagreement in the comments, from which here are some edited highlights.
‘It is relentlessly negative about the UK in a way that no other national broadcaster would ever dare to be. Everything that’s wrong in the world is either the fault of the British (or failing that, the Americans) and every vocal grievance-mongering minority must be headline news. At the moment that “minority” is women, who increasingly dominate news and comment.’
‘The stale, stifling awfulness that is the BBC/Graun collective consciousness forced on us all whether strong but especially if weak, young or feeble-minded. The shameless brainwashing of others, a result of projected guilt “at like actually being successful in life yah?” Those people! How dare they – with my money!’
‘The BBC’s faulty world view could be neatly deduced from Fran Unsworth’s claim that the BBC was considering an appeal against the Sir Cliff Richard finding ‘because it threatened freedom of speech’! Even a cursory look at the behaviour of its journalist Dan Johnson in stoking up the furore shows that he and the BBC are supremely conceited, dangerously arrogant and quite oblivious to the need for an ethical or just virtuous approach to news-gathering. The BBC is its own “deep state”.’
‘If the BBC didn’t exist, and were to be created today, how would it be funded? Can you imagine any political party supporting a model where it was by a compulsory £150 charge, levied on the rich and poor alike, where non-payment was enforced by an outsourced collection agency and could result in a criminal record and imprisonment? One where watching any free-to-air TV station breaks the law regardless of whether that station receives a share of the charge?
‘The funding model made sense in 1946 when TV ownership was still largely the preserve of the well-off and there was only one broadcaster but any justification of his has long since been eroded to the point where it no longer exists. Were this system to be proposed now, the Left and the Right would both take arms against it. We’re saddled with it now simply because it’s been in place for over 70 years. Nobody in their right mind could claim it’s an effective or fair way of funding a broadcasting station in the 21st century.’
‘The BBC is now beyond repair and not fit for purpose.’
Unfortunately the self-serving Leftie liberal political establishment, whose voice the BBC now solely is, won’t do the merciful thing and put it down.
