A letter published in The Scotsman newspaper today:
=====It is almost fifty years since the radio licence was scrapped as uneconomical and unenforceable. The scrapping of the TV licence part funding the BBC is long overdue. If the licence fee was unenforceable in an era of largely fictitious detector vans, the millions today claiming they only watch "catch-up" TV rather than "live" (a loophole deliberately put into the law to allow the wily cosmopolitan classes to avoid payment whilst the mug proles pay up) renders the current system a farce.
Toothless TV Licensing enforcement officers - with no legal right to enter property to prove that an unlicensed TV exists - are employed at great expense (and occasionally sued successfully for "trespass) to take over 10,000 (sic) annually to court - a quarter of all magistrates' cases in the UK - which they have no chance of winning unless the defendant (usually from a vulnerable group such as the elderly or mentally ill) is intimidated enough to plead guilty.
If general taxation is good enough for funding state radio, it's good enough for state TV earning millions selling high quality shows across the globe.
- Mark Boyle, Linn Park Gardens, Johnstone, Renfrewshire.
=====In 2018 almost 130,000 individuals were prosecuted for TV licence evasion, which far exceeds the 10,000 mentioned in the body of the letter.
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