Is this an official order to self-declare yourself as being on the wrong side of the law? If only the Police had time to investigate, arrest, bang you to rights and then fine you or the Crown Prosecution Service choose to send you to Court (or perhaps issue a Lammyesque Jury-free automatic sentence)? Presumably it cuts out the middleman, or middleperson, if you agree to dob yourself in.
Heave a sigh of relief all undiscovered burglars, illegal immigrants, wife beaters, paedophiles, Islamophobes and finger-happy hate-crime social media commentators. (NB numerous other crimes are also committable.) For a country formerly known worldwide as a democracy, but of late run by a gang of Socialist morons; surely only the UK is contemptuous enough to send its bona fide citizens letters warning them they need to declare that they are not doing something that they don’t actually need to do, or probably don’t even want to do anyway, and with the added threat that even if they aren’t doing it they can still expect a visit from an Officer just to make sure they aren’t lying and doing it in secret? Don’t blame Labour however, the Conservatives and LibDems (surely almost the same thing?) also did this and will again if anyone is daft enough to vote them back into office.
Yes TNC readers you guessed right – it’s the enemies of free speech, purveyors of poor quality biased journalism and pushers of woke ‘entertainment’, the British Broadcasting Corporation and their retained protection racketeers, TV Licencing, who simply cannot (and will not) believe that you aren’t a consumer of their awful offerings, either live through the gogglebox or on any other device. To the TV Licencing hoodlums it matters not whether you don’t have the physical kit to receive live drivel, or even whether you don’t have a TV or other device, an aerial or dish or cable or internet connection to facilitate, at your own expense, their armchair indoctrination. They simply cannot believe that you possess the free-thinking temerity to choose not to want to watch or record any live TV, because you’ve decided it’s now all substandard or propaganda or often both. (And you prefer instead to watch your own box set DVDs of ‘Allo ‘Allo, Love Thy Neighbour and ‘Till Death Do Us Part.) Maybe you get all your no-frills real news FREE from The Mighty Memo via its entirely free thrice weekly emails that give news without any comment, spin or interpretation for genuine adults to make up their own minds. ADVERT – do subscribe to www.mightymemo.co.uk you’ll thank me for this advice.
Ten years ago I moved to Hull into a house that physically cannot accommodate either antenna or dish aerials to successfully receive live TV and so decided it was time to ditch the TV and also BBC iPlayer altogether and save on the cost of a TV Licence. It was a wise decision and just ahead of its time. Instead opting to watch only things on DVD, generally bingewatching pre-woke quality stuff (even older BBC productions!) and donating DVDs to the charity shop if the promise of entertainment fails to deliver in the first fifteen minutes, often through simply being unwatchable – particularly productions that flood the Georgian and Victorian eras (and indeed generally anything pre-1970s) with pretend multicultural inhabitants or push ‘the latest thing’ in unsubtle ways.
I admit that initially, until last December, whenever asked by email to confirm and periodically re-confirm that I did not watch live TV I did so and ergo did not require a TV Licence. This time though I thought ‘sod it’. Why should I waste my time telling TV Licencing yet again that I don’t need a Licence? I ignored their late 2025 email and its follow up reminder, so today received a letter. (How much must they spend on paper, ink and postage? How much do their Customer Service Managers get paid for sending these rude and misleading letters?) Just like the J.B. Priestley play, I’m now expecting an Inspector to call as I’m damned if I’m going to tell TV Licencing every few years, until I finally kick the bucket or oh happy day! the BBC is defunded, that I don’t need a TV Licence. And by the way, now even returning a No Licence Needed Claim the letter informs may result in a visit to confirm this, so what is the point in telling them anyway?
Martin Rispin has had a career in many different sectors, most lately in the fields of English Tourism and Heritage based Urban Regeneration. He now lives, retired, in Kingston upon Hull.
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(Photograph: New Broadcasting House by Keith Edkins, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)
I wouldn’t watch anything that requires a TV Licence if I were paid to…Now there is a rumour that the BBC will be granted its wish to licence-control reception of the parts of YouTube which have thus far been denied it…
I’d also flag up that Council Tax bills are headed COUNCIL TAX DEMAND, not exactly a consumer friendly way to even pretend that the saps are being billed for the things that many don’t actually want.