Die „erschreckende“ Strafverfolgung einer behinderten Mutter wegen Nichtzahlung der Fernsehlizenz

500,000 people stopped paying it last year. I haven’t paid it for more than eight years. It’s extremely easy to cancel it and not get prosecuted.

1. Cancel it
2. Tell the goons they send to your door to fuck off and never come back

I sympathise with her, it looks like she wasn’t even in charge of the finances at the time the payments stopped, and she’s vulnerable. Inevitably, that’s who gets caught out, elderly and vulnerable people. The BBC has been shit for years, it’s not worth what they charge. If it were a streaming subscription service, it would be dead already, hardly anyone would buy it. It’s only alive because they scare people into paying with prosecution threats.

They’re just bullies, plain and simple. They sent letters through my door that made it sound like they were police, which I clearly know they’re not.

But if you’re old, vulnerable or just naive, you could mistake it for a serious threat and panic.

This system of funding is ridiculous and has to change. TV licences must go and the BBC should be funded out of general taxation. The government of the day already has political control over the BBC’s output and it simply isn’t the highly influential organisation it once was. The media landscape has changed beyond recognition, yet we’re still living with a funding model from 1923.