Has Boris decided this election is in the bag? I ask because this afternoon he’s made just about the first bold policy announcement of the campaign. After a safety-first manifesto and little other announcements so as not to frighten the horses, he has stuck his neck out and suggested that the TV licence might be on borrowed time. Having said he was under pressure not to make up policy ‘on the hoof’ he went on, well, almost to make a policy on the hoof:
‘You have to ask yourself whether that kind of approach to funding a media organisation still make sense in the long term, given the way other organisations manage to fund themselves’.
How odd that it has taken a Prime Minister, or even a party leader, this long even to contemplate ending the TV licence. Whole tranches of the state have been privatised over the past 40 years, and yet still we have a state broadcasting service that is funded via a hypothecated tax – a system that dates from the days when the technology did not exist to charge for watching an individual TV channel and devised at a time when broadcasting was, in any case, a state monopoly.
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