[user104658]

Originally Posted by Livia

When you work out that it's the main entertainment of many people, especially those with not much money, it's cheap. And if you can afford a telly you can afford a licence. It's like driving a car and saying, I've bought a car, but I don't have much money so I won't bother taxing it.

Except that the two aren't really comparable; road tax is more like "road rent" as it pays for the upkeep of the roads and highways which, if you run a car, you will almost certainly be using. In fact if you're not - if you're only using your car on private land - then you DON'T need a tax disk.

The TV license is more akin to being forced to pay a £1 "milk tax" every time you go to the supermarket, whether you drink milk or not, so that everyone else can take their 2L milk bottle for free, because "most people drink milk".

I'm also unsire about your suggestion that "if you can afford a telly you can afford a license" - I could go on my local freecycling group right now and pick up 10 CRT televisions tomorrow for precisely £0.

The only people who should be paying for the BBC are the people who use the BBC and / or its broadcasting equipment. Period. If people don't want to pay a subscription charge for it - which should REALLY be less than £12 a month anyway - then there's no demand for the service and it simply shouldn't exist. And before people start bawling about Doctor Who - the intellectual rights to a show that successful would be snapped up by another network faster than you can say "fire-sale". The same goes for all successful BBC properties.

It's an outdated model. Broadcast television in general is on the way out in favour of on-demand services, and quite rightly. They're better. If the BBC was to switch to being an entirely on-demand, internet based service like Netflix tomorrow and charge a subscription fee, they would still make an absolute fortune.