ILLOGICAL CRAP FROM THE POLITICOS EN MASSE

The politicos are joined at the hip on tax and spend.  On December 15th last, The Times reported that the Cameroons are “considering a plan to end the BBC’s sole claim on the £3.2 billion licence fee and parcel it out to other broadcasters”.

On 18th January The Times reported that James Purnell (as the Labour Government’s Anti-culture Secretary, but now promoted to fill the gap left by the priceless Peter Hain)  suggested that the £3.4 billion licence fee (wow, 6% inflation per month!) could be carved up in future between the BBC and commercial broadcasters committed to making “quality public-service programmes”.

Naturally, the Chairman of the BBC Trust, Sir Michael Lyons, lost no time in protesting that this “could threaten its (the Beeb’s) ability to deliver public-service programmes and prompt a viewers’ revolt”.  In contrast the Chairman of the broadcasting Policy Group said that the proposal “may be a sensible first step to protecting the key objective of preserving plurality of supply”.

Meanwhile the Beeb’s Chief Executive Mark Thompson is pursuing an uncosted venture to provide political analysis for every schoolchild arguing that “the BBC was the right body to bring politics to children”.  Ugh!  (Note the singular “the” despite the BBC’s well known bias and corruption.)

As if this weren’t enough, a letter to The Times, correctly describing the current situation “it is as if anyone who wished to read The Times had to take out a year’s subscription to the Guardian…” quite illogically welcomes the Tory proposal!  (So anyone not wishing to take out a subscription to either The Times or the Guardian – or the BBC – must do so for all three!).

This is exactly how the politicos build up their empire, picking off an activity or organisation to nationalise or subsidise (in line with a lobby group’s plea on the basis of “public service” or other such tarradiddle) and later on when the injustice is plain to see, embracing all the competition too.  If the BBC had (sensibly) never existed, who would now be clamouring that all broadcasters – and other media, including The Times and the Guardian – should be funded partially by taxes?  And does anybody think that the overall subsidy would then remain at £3.4 billion? (In France President Zarkozy seems to do what he wants without clamour; he has just decreed that the five channels that make up France Télévisons, where he has some friends of course, will be financed entirely by taxpayers.)

None of this could be sustained without politicos in the media, where the Fourth Estate long since gave up its role as guardian of us the sheeple against the rapacity of government. The Times is a good example on this very issue; David Aaronovitch falls headlong into the same trap as the letter above (see my book Chapter 6) and Tim Hames became a fully paid-up member of the carve-up brigade on Jan 28th.  Government now assumes all wealth is its own, to “parcel out” to those who created it – and those who didn’t, whenever it pleases.

To use a popular word to which I shall return in due course, government is “colonising” all our private areas, possessions, and rights. The Internet, and organisations like The Taxpayers Alliance, are freedom’s only hope.

In the last paragraph of my previous entry (Mad as a Hattersley  (Jan 24th) I referred to a book by Lawrence White, published by “Blackwell”. In fact the publisher was The Institute of Economic Affairs; Blackwell published another, related, book by the same author. Apologies for any confusion.