The elderly should be in no rush to pay the BBC
Over-75-year-olds are worried now that, from the first of this month, payment for their television licences has fallen due. They should not be, says the TV Licensing website: they will be “supported through the changes”. “TV Licensing will write to all licence holders aged over 75 with clear guidance about how to pay,” says the BBC, which is a polite way of saying, “We know where you live.”
But do they? If I were in the “at risk” category, I would not – Heaven forfend – advocate non-payment, but I might lie low. After all, the freelicence privilege has existed for 20 years, so the BBC’S database must itself be pretty elderly. Since the corporation has not been demanding money of over-75-year-olds since the year 2000, it presumably has no accurate way of telling whether the people it has sent free licences to are still alive.
You are supposed to say on voter registration forms if you are over 75, but it would surely be an abuse of data privacy if this information were transferred to the BBC. If you are dead, even the BBC cannot get £157.50 out of you.
In my flat in London, where I do not have a television, I receive a steady stream of letters in brown envelopes from TV Licensing. My current pile adds up to 76 of them. They often carry threats on the envelope (“Investigation has started in your area”), but I refuse to answer or even open them, since I do not see why I should be compelled to inform anyone that I do not have a television.
Despite the threats, nothing ever happens to me. TV Licensing has no legal right – contrary to what it implies – to enter your property. I wonder how, in the era of Covid-19, the BBC proposes to chase over-75s whom it suspects of evasion. Will it dare get a warrant to knock down the front doors of 90-year-olds wearing masks, and then drag them to the magistrates’ courts? Surely not.
Old people can scarcely be blamed if they sit tight and wait for the corporation to fulfil that promise to “help them through the changes”.
A new report from Policy
Exchange, Academic Freedom in the UK, makes clear that such freedom is not secure. Its survey finds that only 20 per cent of British-based academics vote for “right-wing” parties (ie the Conservatives and further right), whereas 75 per cent vote Labour, Liberal Democrats or Green. The disproportion between Leavers and Remainers is similar.
Worse, intellectually, is the “self-censorship” that many feel they must practise in order to keep their jobs. The point of the “cancel culture”, after all, is to destroy certain individuals.
It is nothing new that universities are more left-wing than the general population – though it does seem that the lack of diversity of opinion is greater than ever. As the excellent Canadian satirist, Ryan Long, puts it in his woke Youtube persona, “When I learned that diversity meant hiring a bunch of different colours of people who agree with me, I was all in.”
But this goes deeper than disagreement. In the doctrines that lie behind organisations such as Black Lives Matter, Extinction Rebellion and their campus equivalents, the very idea of disagreement evaporates. There is no such thing as the other person’s point of view. That is just a smokescreen put up, they say, by the white supremacists who have dominated Western culture up until now. Traditional ideas of history or literature are automatically “colonial”.
There can be no discussion about this, they go on, because that would be to collude with the structures of oppression. Instead there is the idea of “hurt”. If you feel that a professor or his views are “offensive”, you are considered unarguably right, certainly if he is white and male. If such attitudes rule universities, the very idea of a university vanishes.
A couple of weeks ago, I
mentioned how the exciting appearance of a solitary bearded vulture in the Peak District had been grabbed by animal-rights zealots to pursue their obsessions, helped by credulous media.
Tim Birch, an Extinction Rebellion supporter and employee of the Derbyshire Wildlife Trust, declared that the vulture was threatened by grouse shooters when the season opens on August 12.
This column pointed out that even the wickedest gamekeeper would have no interest in killing the vulture, since it preys only on dead birds.
Now Mr Birch has switched the focus of his attack. Last week, on the BBC’S PM programme, Mr Birch was given space to air his theory that the vulture was in peril from “stink pits”, where gamekeepers drop dead animals such as foxes. No expert was given air time to counter Mr Birch’s theory.
So it seems worth saying that stink pits (more often known as middens) are not used at this time of year, and indeed have become very rare. Besides, they are almost always covered, so no vulture could get in. Mr Birch fears that poor Beardy might get lead poisoning if he ate, say, a crow that had been shot. This is scarcely more likely than Mr Birch suffering the same fate were he to eat pigeon pie in his Derbyshire local.
The only news fact in the bearded vulture story is its rare presence in this country (it comes from Switzerland). Its role as victim is fiction.