Truly Massively Aggressively

It’s that time again. Charter Renewal.

It happens every ten years, but this time the government is openly hostile to the BBC.

So get ready for a blitz on the world’s greatest broadcaster in the coming months. It’s not going to be pretty.

BBC Charter

I want to call your attention to one line of attack in particular, because it is a crafty one.

This attack pretends to be generous. It pretends to be kind. It pretends to be a benevolent and noble defence of the poorest in society.

It does this by branding the licence fee as “regressive” – “regressive” because it is a fixed price which does not vary according to income (although it is free for over-75s, many of whom have small incomes, at a mean of below £15,000 in 2011).

This is an old criticism from the Conservative right wing, given new voice by the government’s man in charge of cultural stuff, the recently-appointed John Whittingdale. The Mail has nicknamed him “the minister for BBC-bashing” and he makes no bones about his aversion to the licence fee.

In the long term it is unsustainable… I don’t like the idea of a licence fee, I would prefer to link it perhaps to some other tax, and I think decriminalisation is almost certain to happen… Most people already accept that the licence fee as it is currently structured needs some tweaking… It doesn’t matter how poor you are you still have to pay £145.50 and go to prison if you don’t pay it and a lot of people go to prison every year….

Mr Whittingdale clearly wants us to think that “most people” already agree with him. He must have taken some pleasure in quoting his Labour opposite number in Parliament the other day: Chris Bryant, he reminded us, said in 2005 that elements of the fee were “regressive” because it “falls as a greater percentage of income on the poorest people”.

That quote was, of course, taken out of context – but it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter because the key message is that the licence fee is regressive. Even a Labour man said so.

Be in no doubt: the intention here is to toxify the idea of the licence fee, in your mind and mine.

That’ll be why Mr Whittingdale has also called the licence fee “a flat poll tax”. It doesn’t get more toxic than that.

Isn’t he right? What the hell are we doing? We’re landing the poor with a bill of £145.50, and threatening them with prison if they can’t pay. Aren’t those on the Conservative right entirely correct to call this regressive and draconian? What’s so crafty about that?

It’s crafty because branding the licence fee “regressive” makes it sound officially, intellectually, particularly unfair.

Indeed, it calls to mind the very language that people to the left of the Tories deploy when they complain about things like VAT hikes. These people on the left hate regressive taxes, and prefer, if taxes must be raised, the “progressive” variety – those which reflect income. Using the language of the left to outmanoeuvre and confuse opposition is a particular skill of modern Conservatism.

And it’s crafty because I doubt you’ll find many on the left who love the criminalisation of poor folk who can’t pay for their television licence.

But this adoption of the language and sympathy of the left is not just clever.

It is bogus.

First, anything with a set price – which stays the same regardless of your income – can be branded “regressive”. A pint of milk, for example. A loaf of bread. A postage stamp. Their prices do not vary according to your ability to pay. Therefore they are all easier on the pockets of the rich than they are on the poor. They’re all regressive.

Yet you won’t hear many tender-hearted Tories saying the price of milk is “regressive”. It would be meaningless. The price of milk is just the price of milk.

What’s critical is whether the pint of milk is fairly priced. It’s 49p these days, by the way.

And, while we’re there, a postage stamp will set you back 54p, even for second class. But a day’s enjoyment of first-class television and radio will cost you just 39p.

You can call that regressive; I call it great value.

Second, it is not quite true that you can go to prison for not paying the licence fee. You can only go to prison for non-payment of a fine imposed by a court for not having a licence. Prison is a long way down the line in the process. And nor is it true that ‘lots of people go to prison every year’ – there were 32 offenders in 2013 in England and Wales. Which, given the brevity of sentencing, probably means that at any moment in time, there will be just one person in prison for non-payment of licence-fee related fines in England and Wales.

But I’m nitpicking. The precise details of enforcement probably aren’t what matters most in this argument.

The fact that any flat fee can be branded “regressive” probably doesn’t matter much either.

What matters most is that this supposed sympathy for the poor is not, to put it politely, sincere.

It can’t be.

Because if you were a politician who worried sincerely about the incidence of a regressive tax on the poor, you could play no part in this government. A government capable (among other assaults on the poor) of inventing and implementing the bedroom tax, a policy which slashes the incomes of 471,000 housing tenants by an average of £14.92 per week.

These are people whose median income in 2012 was £8996. From whom the government is taking £14.92 per week, or £779 per year.

If you were genuinely worried about the impact of a bill of £145.50 on the poorest households, you would never allow your own government to take £779 from those same people, would you?

Instead, you’d be fighting day and night for that policy to be reversed, repealed and consigned to the dustbin of shameful history – along with the poll tax.

After all, a £779 hit equates to more than five licence fees. With, trust me, none of the entertainment value.

And the burden of this tax falls not just “as a greater percentage of income” on the poorest.

It falls only on the poorest.

It targets them, it humiliates them, it devastates them.

It confronts them with eviction, food banks and debt.

So if you want to champion the poor by reforming taxes, start there, with a tax that really is regressive.

Truly, massively, aggressively regressive.

And if you want to attack the BBC, don’t dress up your arguments as kindness. Try a different tack.

Or better still, take a little pride in a great British achievement – the envy of the world – and don’t attack it at all.
Bedroom Tax
P.S. There’s a pattern in this use of disingenuous arguments. A similar strategy is being deployed to attack the Human Rights Act – see my take here.


Further reading:

Rowntree Foundation Report on Welfare Reform (the Bedroom Tax)

A Strong BBC… by Jean Seaton for Prospect Magazine

Culture Secretary says licence fee hits the poorest hardest – The Telegraph

Whittingdale on the licence fee – Guardian

Five Myths About TV Licences – Recombu

Recent Tragic Misrepresentation of the Human Rights Act

Our legal system is broken. It’s been messed up by those meddlesome Europeans and do-gooders who want to give rights to criminals, instead of punishing them.  Our system needs the Tories to knock some sense back into it, by sending Europe, and its silly conventions, back where they came from.

NickyMorganMP

So they want us to believe.

But is there some truth to it?

Well if the case quoted today is the best example of the failings of the Human Rights Act, I guess not.

Nicky Morgan MP, Secretary of State for Education, graduate in Jurisprudence of St Hugh’s College, Oxford and former corporate lawyer, discussed the issue on Radio 4’s “World at One” this lunchtime.

Asked if she supported leaving the European Convention on Human Rights, she answered as follows:

Well, I support getting some sense back into the way that the human rights legislation is applied in this country. An example that was given today… people who have committed terrible crimes… I think we’ve seen the coverage of a recent tragic case where a young girl was knocked down and then because it took so long to come to court, at that point the man was able to plead “right to family life”.
Well what about the right to the family life of the parents who lost their young daughter? And that’s the sort of thing that I think people want to see – we’ve made a clear manifesto commitment….”

She didn’t mention names, but the only case I can find which fits her description is the one of Aso Mohammed Ibrahim, an immigrant who ran down a girl, Amy Houston, while driving illegally in 2003. Not exactly ‘recent’, but there you go.

More here.

It is an appalling story. Ibrahim ran away from the scene, leaving Amy for dead under his car. She died later in hospital. Your heart has to go out to Amy and her family.

But Ibrahim didn’t get away with it. It didn’t “take so long to come to court”.

Ibrahim was prosecuted and served a prison term for his crimes. (It wasn’t a particularly long term, but that’s good old home-grown British law for you; no one is suggesting the HRA had any bearing on his punishment.)

He was prosecuted, he was convicted, he was punished.

But the father of Amy Houston campaigned for Ibrahim to be deported. Here the HRA did make a difference: it helped Ibrahim fight deportation under Article 8 (the ‘family life’ bit) because he had two children in the UK. But he had already been tried, punished and served his sentence. Deportation was not part of his punishment. The HRA had no bearing on his punishment.

But if you heard Nicky Morgan on the radio today, telling her story unchallenged, you’d think otherwise.

You’d think this was a recent case.

You’d think Ibrahim got off scot-free, all because of the Human Rights Act.

You’d think he was never prosecuted, or found guilty, or punished.

You would want the HRA taken out and shot.

Your blood would be boiling in exactly the way Tory scaremongers like Nicky Morgan want it to boil.

And let’s be candid: you’d be believing a bogus story about the Human Rights Act, told by a lawyer and Secretary of State.

A story so bogus as to be little short of a lie.

 

UK residents: you can hear the BBC interview here, at 17 minutes in.

P.S.
There’s a pattern in the way politicians are using phoney “commonsense arguments” to try to undermine things they don’t like, whilst covering up their genuine reasons and intent. A similar strategy is being deployed in the current attack on the BBC’s licence fee – see my take here.