EDITORIAL: Scrapping the BBC licensing fee

OPINION:

Ronald Reagan once said that government programs and their attendant bureaucracies are “the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth.” As in many things, Reagan’s amiable wit disguised a disturbing truth: An awful lot of ways in which governments operate are due to inertia, or to deeply-entrenched interests which, over time, are impossible to dislodge, much less budge many inches.

Nor is this phenomenon confined to the United States. A case in point is the current conflict gathering strength in Britain over the Conservative government’s proposal — not yet in final form — to scrap the BBC licensing fee for owners of television sets.

In the United Kingdom, it is necessary for households (or businesses) to possess a government-issued license in order to receive live television broadcasts on their sets. And the cost is not trivial: About $195 a year for color television sets and $65 for black-and-white models. The Post Office, which administers the licenses, closely monitors houses and apartment blocks for people watching TV without a license, and there are stiff criminal penalties for evading the law.

Where does the money go? Well, the roughly $6.5 billion raised by license fees largely funds the British Broadcasting Corp. The BBC, which is owned and operated by the government, was founded in 1922 and, until the mid-1950s, held a monopoly on British radio and television broadcasting. In the lean postwar years, the licensing fee was introduced in order to raise revenue. And although Britain’s first commercial TV channel (ITV) was introduced some 65 years ago, and has been joined by innumerable others, the BBC licensing fee has survived, kept up with inflation and, even during the Thatcher years, defied all suggestions that it be scrapped.

There is a political angle, of course. While the BBC strove in its early decades to be relentlessly high-minded and strictly nonpartisan, it has long been a reliably left-wing cultural institution in ways which Americans will recognize, and BBC News is especially biased. Indeed, so infuriated was Prime Minister Boris Johnson by the BBC’s coverage of Brexit and, in particular, last December’s general election, that he is determined to decriminalize (and ultimately abolish) the fee and move the BBC to a subscription service.

As with our own rough equivalent PBS, the BBC does many good things that have nothing to do with politics. But as always, it is difficult to justify dunning taxpayers for political broadcasting that is offensive to them, or threatening citizens with criminal penalties for watching TV. The BBC will surely benefit from some competition, and a stiff fee first imposed during postwar austerity needs to be cancelled.