Labour will regret extending the BBC licence fee

The BBC licence fee is dying as millions of Britons realise that they do not need a television; they can get all the entertainment and news they want on the internet. But don’t assume that it will go quietly. On the contrary, we could end up with something even worse. Bloomberg is reporting today that the government is considering extending the requirement to buy a TV licence to people who use streaming services. In other words, download a film from Netflix and you would have to pay the BBC.

Lisa Nandy, the culture secretary, apparently denies that the idea is under ‘active consideration’, along with the idea of funding the BBC through general taxation, but her department has also said that the BBC’s charter review, soon to be published, will include a range of options. That sounds like plausible deniability: we are not considering extending the licence fee at the present time, but we may well do once the charter is published.    

There is a large lobby – not restricted to the BBC itself – which seems to think that the licence fee is the epitome of civilisation and that the world would fall in were it to be abolished.