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The Spectator's Notes

Charles Moore

Wednesday, 10th September 2008

Charles Moore's reflections on the week

This column and its readers have just won our first battle in our long war. The BBC Trust has announced that it will investigate the way in which the television licence fee is collected. It wants to know, for example, whether the public think that the methods of enforcement are ‘reasonable and appropriate’. This column has been highlighting the predicament of those (including myself, in my London flat) who do not possess a television. We receive unreasonable and inappropriate letters from TV Licensing, often by the dozen, which assume our guilt for evasion without any evidence and threaten us with inspection and a criminal record. I notice that televisionless households — there are more than half a million of us — are not mentioned in the BBC Trust’s introduction to its consultation, but it is we who are the worst victims of the BBC’s insulting and intrusive methods. On Monday I appeared on the Jeremy Vine Show with a spokesman for the Trust, and another interesting point came up. When you get the threatening letters now, they say that ‘Authorisation has been granted [under what law it does not say] for Enforcement Officers to visit your property’ not only to search for a television, but for anything else on which television might be watched, e.g. a DVD, a digital box, a computer or laptop, or a mobile phone. This is almost a blanket permission to search private property for any form of transmitting equipment. Please google the BBC Trust website or write to TV Licence Collection Review, Inspection Review, BBC Trust, 35 Marylebone High Street, London W1U 4AA, and express your righteous anger.

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JohnAnt

September 14th, 2008 2:14am

But as a result of the BBC's (actually the government's) change of heart about the unpopular licence fee, those of us who are televisionless and have so far not paid a licence fee are now forced to pay a tax to finance the BBC, I for one will be less than enchanted.

A child of our time

From the economic and psychological bedlam of the global downturn has emerged a particularly dangerous false dichotomy: namely, that there is somehow a choice for ministers over the next few years between economic reconstruction and the repair of Britain’s broken society, and that the government (whether Labour or Conservative) must prioritise the former at the expense of the latter.

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The daughter and I spent the last few days before the American election in Arizona.

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Fraser Nelson

Fraser Nelson reviews the week in politics

The Spectator's Notes

Charles Moore

‘A money-financed tax cut is essentially equivalent to Milton Friedman’s famous “helicopter drop” of money.’ So said Ben Bernanke, now the chairman of the Fed, in a speech about how to ward off the ‘extremely small’ chance of deflation, which he delivered in 2002.