Culture Secretary Lucy Frazer has strongly opposed the suggested £15 hike in the BBC licence fee, deeming it “absolutely” excessive and a further strain on the cost of living. Here’s an excerpt from the BBC’s report:
The licence fee has been frozen for the last two years at £159 but is due to rise in April in line with inflation.
It’s currently expected to increase to £173.30 a year, but Ms. Frazer said she was looking at which measure of inflation to use to calculate the rise.
Asked by BBC Breakfast whether the Government was looking at whether £15 would be too much of an increase, Ms. Frazer replied: “Absolutely. I think that is quite a significant rise, so that is exactly what we are looking at.”
She added: “We froze the licence fee for two years to help households with their daily payments. That freeze has come to an end and the licence fee is due to rise with inflation but we’re looking at ways to make sure that is sustainable for families across the country.”
The Sunday Times reported that Ms. Frazer is considering using September’s consumer price index (CPI) rate of inflation, rather than the higher 12-month average, to calculate how much the cost of the licence fee should rise by.
Using September’s inflation rate of 6.7%, the licence fee would be expected to rise by £10.65 to £169.65 per year.
The Culture Secretary confirmed she would make the final decision on what the fee should be soon.
Ms. Frazer also said she was also looking at how “we fund the BBC going forward”.
“It’s unsustainable because 400,000 people did not renew their licence fee over the last year. The media landscape is changing. We’re not consuming the BBC like we used to consume it, so I’m also looking at a broader review,” she said. …
Members of the public have been sharing their opinions on the planned increase to the licence fee on BBC Radio 5 Live.
Craig from Oxford told broadcast Nicky Campbell he does not watch enough BBC content to justify the cost of the licence fee and would “much rather pay less to stream just what I want, it’s about offering people choice”.
Janey from Northampton agreed, and added “to take away people’s choice is not how we should be running the law of the land”, saying the licence fee is not value for money as she does not watch any BBC programmes on the TV.
Worth reading in full.
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Tailor made militant angry activist who has conveniently Parted company with the indigenous mother of his child as he rises to the top of another stinking pile of shit ! We know someone in Scotland just like that ! Strange isn’t it – NOT !
I’ve said for a long time that there’s one way to sort this issue. Separate a vast tract of land in the Americas or Africa and allow all these SJWs to create their own country with all their laws that they believe are fair. Let them establish their ultimate wet dream ‘anti-racist’, ‘anti-fascist’, ‘progressive’, virtue signalling, ‘anti-transphobic’, green, SJW state and give people who want to live in that state a grant to let them move there. Let them go. Let them be a beacon of ‘kindness’ in the world and let the rest of us stay here and be the squalid, ‘fascist’, ‘racist’, ‘intolerant’, ‘micro-aggression’-orientated hellholes they claim we are.
Some sort of diaspora is the only way we can solve this problem. These people are nihilists and misanthropes who want to corrupt our children, intellectually and sexually. Let them have their own country, let all the teachers, the activists and politicians and members of the public who think that way have a nice sunny, warm country to live in and try to achieve their idea of perfection and let the people left behind sort out the education system for ourselves. The Guardian can move there as the state newspaper, the unions can close in the UK and set up shop there, virtue-signalling corporations that don’t mind vast green taxes can set up shop there, the British police constabularies can head over there. Everyone can wear masks to show how ‘kind’ they are.
It’s going to have to be this way sooner or later – national divorces – or there’s going to be civil war. And I wish that were hyperbole. As we’ve seen with motorists dishing it out to eco-loons, the public aren’t going to tolerate much more.
They would fail abysmally. Insisting that things are as you wish them to be rather than as they actually are will lead to disaster and misery.
Exactly. But it’ll be their problem, not ours. They can sit there and blame each other and us. Ultimately, their utopia will be the same sort of totalitarian hellhole all the others have been. But they won’t be buggering up our lives!
It’s a lovely thought.
Would also like to see Saint Greta go and live with the Amish, see how she likes Hard Work. Then again, I admire the Amish so perhaps it’s unkind to wish her upon them.
Definitely. With the arrival of smart technology, I’m increasingly liking the Amish. As long as I can get my books printed and I have a gas lamp to read them by at night, I’d be very happy to get away from the modern world!
I’ve never understood the beard-but-no-moustache look: you still need to shave.
And that’s just the wives
They can have Liberia. Established so that former slaves from the US would face better chances for freedom and prosperity in Africa than in the United States. They are currently around 180th on the list of nations wealth, and suffering from civil war, corruption and a level of sexual violence that would make your hair curl. Life expectancy is around 64 years, which puts them in the bottom 50 globally. But, you know…white folks, etc etc.
It’s about installing a Labour government – nothing else.
Unquestionably. Militant union leaders have been pushing for national strikes for years. We were naive enough to think that by the end of the 1980s the unions had been put back in their box. The only route is to outlaw the public sector unions. The only place unions have a right to exist is the private sector, with private companies being given the right to recognise them or not!
The current round of public sector strikes have nothing to do with changing the name of the nominal party of government. We now are most definitely living in a one party state and whichever lickspittles make up the executive they rank only as middle managers at best within the Davos Deviants hierarchy.
The only difference a change of Downing Street incumbents will make to this country is in the immediate degree of suffering the people are forced to tolerate.
The public sector leeches will suffer less.
Close down state education and use the money saved to reduce taxes on the working less-well-off.
Most of the big Union leaders have been bought by the Davos Deviants. I have been making this point for months.
These strikes from big public unions are not really about money they are about disrupting society which is just what the DD’s want. The government has a part to play of course so they string the game along and this will probably continue until public pressure means the government gives way a little.
Not all teachers support this and I have two neices in the industry who refuse to strike but many have had almost a two year holiday on full pay and obviously enjoyed themselves and are quite happy for this to continue.
Public sector disruptions will continue for at least the next two years if not longer. In the case of teachers once this pantomime is over things will appear to calm down for a while until the DD’s issue a new set of orders to the leadership – pensions or working conditions, whatever; anything to spark another round of disruption. And where teachers are concerned it doesn’t take much for this left-wing blob to find a new grievance to raise their “out brothers out,” placards. Whoops, sisters too.
All so blatant and obvious.
Reminds me of Jack Harper from On The Buses: “Brothers…”
Incidentally, what exactly does the “Labour” party think of working class English men in the private sector these days? Was Emily Thornberry’s white van man tweet from Strood a warning sign or a mere “slip of the tongue”? We wonders…
You can see how the Liebour party thinks of all the people by looking at the devolved administration in Wales. Sometime ago they decided to experiment on children by giving them bugs and insects to eat at school.
More recently they decided to force ‘sex education’ (really perversion) on children; when a group of parents tried to stop it, Drakefords gang forced them to raise substantial sums of money to go to Court. (Does anyone know what the outcome of that is?)
Now they have said that they will give £1500 a month to any and all the asylum seekers in Wales to help with their living expenses asylum applications!!
Complete contempt and disdain for the people of Wales. The Liebour Party (i.e. Starmer) has done NOTHING to stop any of these policies THEREFORE they should be considered as Liebour policy, so no-one should cast their vote for Liebour in the comming local elections. No-one!
I’m no fan of woke indoctrinators, but why is it unreasonable to want your salary to keep up with government-created inflation?
I’ve been putting up my charges to my clients by what I estimate inflation to be.
A perfectly reasonable desire of course, and likewise reasonable to want interest rates to be above inflation, and have a prospect of a return on your savings. What was unreasonable was for teaching unions to demand lockdowns and related restrictions, and then demand that others pay for the cost of this – if these people maintain their standard of living, it will be at the expense of others given that overall we are all poorer as a result of policies they supported – the cost of lockdown crisis.
Thank you for putting this so nicely into words. There’s obviously nothing wrong with wanting one’s salary to keep up with inflation, however, for the vast majority of people, that’s not an option and inflation also devalues their savings. What the teaching unions want is a Get Out of Corona Free! card to be paid for by the people who don’t have the slighest bit of a chance of getting inflation-matching pay rises.
Further, they also want to government to increase the money supply yet more, potentially driving inflation even higher. There’s a possible positive feedback loop here:
1) Inflation becomes higher.
2) Therefore, public sector unions demand more pay.
3) Public sector works get union demanded payrises, which increases the money supply.
4) goto 1
Is that how you get hyperinflation?
Actually, I was reading about this the other day in a book called The Great Deception (2021 edition, revised). Apparently in Germany’s case, as I recall, a French army of some 70,000 (stuffed with colonials) invaded Germany’s industrial heartland in 1923, committed a lot of human rights abuses (“a large number of colonial troops who were allowed to run amok”), buggered up production (“deliberate wrecking of Germany’s infrastructure”) – with disastrous consequences: “collapse of industrial output”, “mass unemployment”. The German government then “guaranteed the wages of dispossessed workers”, triggering hyperinflation. Apparently, for some reason not a lot is said about this episode in modern history textbooks. Plus ca change? One of the most worrying developments in recent times is Germany conceding to measures which will inevitably stoke inflation.
That’s the so-called Ruhrkampf (fight on the Ruhr). French troops occupied the Ruhr area because it was conjectured that Germany didn’t do as much to pay war tributes (reparations) to France as it could. The idea was they could extract more of what they had awarded to themselves by direct management under military occupation. The German reaction to that was the so-called passiver Widerstand (passive resistance), essentially a general strike paid for by the unoccupied parts of Germany, which eventually collapsed/ was eventually abandoned because of inflation.
But there’s also a more shady aspect to this: The Reich was heavily indebted to its own citiziens because of a series of war loans they had financed. Hyperinflation, which eventually lead to the collapse of the original German currency (the 1871 Mark), enabled the ‘democratic’ authorities to get comfortably rid of all this debt by swindling their creditors, ie paying the loans back with worthless pieces of paper printed for this purpose. I’m not aware of any history books mentioning this, it just happened.
5 out of 3 maths teachers can’t do fractions.
You are undoubtedly working in the private sector, where your fees are solely a matter between you and your clients. If you increase your fees beyond the value of your services then your clients will not stay with you and choose one of your competitors instead. Public sector employees are paid by us dumb taxpayers and are monopoly suppliers. The teaching unions were a major driver of school closures, while of course their members were still being paid, so their increased salary demands are the exact opposite of “reasonable”. It’s blackmail, pure and simple.
There’s another aspect to that: Pay rises in the private sector must come from somewhere. If pay is supposed to rise, either, profits must fall or economically valuable output must be increased. This is not the case in the public sector and especially not here, where the unions specifically demand that the government must increase its spending to finance the sought-after pay rises. The government could do that by raising taxes but this tends to be very unpopular. The government could also do that by simply increasing the amount of money in circulation, the method already used to pay for all of Corona so far. The teaching unions basically demand that this warm rain of freshly-minted pound coins must continue even in absence of a so-called pandemic.
Public sector leeches get what the private sector tax-payer can afford. If inflation goes up, their remuneration should go down, as I now have less to spend.
God forbid the teechers should ever go back to skool and teech
All these lefties would argue vehemently against the evils of monopolies in the economy but funnily enough a monopoly in their union dominated profession is perfectly acceptable. Hypocritical bar stewards.
To deprive children of proper education and disrupt working families.
Sun Tzu, rule 1: understand your enemy.