The tough enforcers behind the smooth BBC

Following his electoral triumph, Boris Johnson has his eyes on the BBC licence fee. He would like to replace it eventually. His interim thought is to decriminalise nonpayment. This would certainly strike a blow for the most vulnerable in our society. Roughly 10 per cent of all prosecutions in magistrates’ courts are for licence fee non-payment. That is about 200,000 cases a year, a truly astonishing waste of time and money.

The human cost is worse. As I noticed when I was taken to court and fined £250 for refusing to pay my licence fee until the BBC sacked the obscene and cruel Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand, most people charged with this offence are poor women, often single mothers. The television is one of their few pleasures. They probably watch little or no BBC programming on it, but the law says they (and all of us) must pay the £154.50 a year poll tax before they can legally watch their television.

All those famous BBC presenters and powerful executives should spend an afternoon in court to get a snapshot of these unhappy people being punished for failing to furnish them with their six-figure salaries (sevenfigure in the case of Ross). There is a harshness in their situation to which the pen of Charles Dickens would do justice if he were still around this Christmas.

Behind all these court cases lies a massive apparatus of snooping, threat and pursuit. I have direct experience of this, too, because in my London flat – as opposed to my house in the country – I have no television. TV Licensing, the BBC’S fee-collection body, falsely assumes I am evading and writes me accusing letters demanding money. I have received 68 of them in the past five years. They contain messages saying things like “What to expect in court”, “Your property is now under investigation”, “Will you be in on 21 August?”. Sometimes these messages appear on the envelope to shame the recipient.

Lord Lloyd of Berwick, who is 90, recently sent me TV Licensing’s letter menacing him with a £1,000 fine for non-payment, although he has a licence which does not expire until the end of April next year. As a distinguished former Lord of Appeal, Lord Lloyd may be able to look after himself in matters of law. He says he has written the authority “a real stinker”. Now that the BBC has decided to resume fee collection from the over-75s, however, many elderly people will feel frightened by these warnings which mendaciously claim to have the force of law.

TV Licensing’s threats have no legal or moral force, so I invariably refuse to answer them. They illustrate the dark side of the BBC’S character, whose spokesmen sound so conciliatory but whose enforcers are so tough. Time to get tough back.

Fear of Jeremy Corbyn undoubtedly switched many votes to the Tories, but it is a strange thought that, if he had only stuck to the getting-brexit-done promise he made in the 2017 general election, he would have had a chance of winning.

It is Labour’s “moderate” wing that we must thank for causing such extreme disillusionment with the party. It was responsible for Labour’s Remain position and its democratically insolent “People’s Vote” idea. Having now been routed, the moderates have nothing left to stand for.

For this reason, the Remainer Sir Keir Starmer is an even less plausible leadership candidate than most of the semi-corbynites entering the ring. With his lawyer’s adroitness, he painted Labour neatly into a corner over Europe.

There is another reason why he is unsuitable. It was Sir Keir, when Director of Public Prosecutions, who promoted the question-begging doctrine, in sex abuse cases, that “All victims must be believed”. This had inevitable, monstrously unjust consequences, such as the police witch-hunt of Lords Bramall, Brittan, Janner and several others.

Of the two factions, the postblairites and the Corbynistas, the former have had the more precipitous fall. The latter simply talk the same atrocious rubbish they have been gabbling since the 1970s.

An aristocratic friend of mine was recently so incensed by the suggestion that working-class people could not be trusted to make up their own minds about Brexit that she composed a short letter which she addressed “to Cyberspace”. Luckily she copied me in too.

“Even though it is believed that a large portion of the vote is made up of working-class people who are supposedly ignorant and don’t know any better,” she writes, “they are actually among the most intelligent people I know. I happened to grow up with them, my parents being absent a lot of the time. I often lived in the simple homes of the cook, the gardener and my nanny. These people knew exactly what they wanted and why. It is not for nothing that my four-times-great-grandfather Earl Grey moved towards giving the working man the vote by introducing the Great Reform Bill in 1832, helped by my three-times-great-grandfather John George Lambton 1st Earl of Durham (admittedly, his son-in-law). That is partly why I feel so strongly that working people’s voices should be heard along with everyone else’s.”

Both my friend’s noble and reforming ancestors came from the north of England where, in the accent of the region, the word “classes” rhymes with “masses”. Boris seems to have got that rhyme going once more.

read more at telegraph.co.uk/opinion