The Telly Tax Is Coming for Your Phone, and the BBC Wants Your Money Forever
Oh, here we bloody go.
Just when you thought the BBC licence fee couldn't become any more ridiculous, along come the politicians with a rather clever little idea.
Why limit the BBC tax to people who actually watch television when we can attach it to the very thing most of us use every day?
Your phone.
Your broadband.
Your household.
Lovely.
The BBC gets its money and you get absolutely no say in whether you want the service you're paying for.
And now MPs are proposing that the BBC's Royal Charter should become permanent.
Permanent.
I don't know about you, but whenever politicians start using words like permanent about an organisation funded by the public, I become slightly nervous.
So here's my position, and I'm perfectly happy to say it plainly:
The BBC should be defunded.
Not because I hate television, not because I think everything the BBC produces is rubbish, and certainly not because I want British broadcasting to disappear.
I want the exact opposite.
I want British broadcasting to get better.
I want journalism that treats its audience like adults.
I want news that tells me what happened rather than subtly nudging me towards what I'm supposed to think happened.
I want political coverage that doesn't appear to have been written by somebody who decided who the good guys and bad guys were before the microphone was switched on.
And most of all, I want the BBC to stand on its own two feet.
No compulsory licence fee.
No household levy.
No sneaky charge attached to my broadband.
No BBC tax hiding inside my phone bill.
Let the BBC earn its money.
Perhaps then it might remember who its audience actually is.
Apparently the BBC needs saving
The current BBC Charter runs until the end of 2027, and the Government is deciding what happens next.
The Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee has recommended that the next Charter be made permanent, with no end date, although with periodic reviews of the BBC's role, purpose and funding.
The same committee admits the corporation has made errors in its news and current affairs and struggled to manage the resulting crises.
Meanwhile, the licence fee is £180 a year, and the committee wants it reformed so it is no longer tied to a television set, or to any particular device at all.
It also says the Government shouldn't have ruled out a household levy, where every home pays whether it watches the BBC or not.
And one influential think tank has proposed an £11-a-month charge on home broadband bills.
That's the bit I find particularly charming.
You don't need to watch the BBC.
You don't even need to like the BBC.
You could spend your entire life watching Netflix, YouTube and the football while listening to podcasts and reading independent websites.
Never mind.
You've got broadband.
Pay up.
What a magnificent business model.
Imagine if every newspaper operated this way.
The Guardian could announce that because you own a printer, you're now obliged to fund it.
The Telegraph could put a charge on your electricity bill.
The Daily Mail could take £15 from your bank account because you own a kettle.
I'd imagine we'd have a revolution by Tuesday.
Yet when it's the BBC, we're told this is somehow essential to democracy.
I'm not buying it.
Because we've got a problem, haven't we?
The BBC tells us it is impartial.
The BBC tells us it is trusted.
The BBC tells us it provides a unique public service.
And I look at the last few years and think: Really?
Panorama.
Gaza.
Glastonbury.
Question Time.
Editorial complaints, impartiality rows and senior executives heading for the exit.
And now a new BBC news chief appointed on a salary of around £400,000 a year.
Rachel Jupp has just been named the BBC's Director of News and Current Affairs, the job Deborah Turness left after the enormous row over Panorama's edit of Donald Trump's January 6 speech.
Four hundred thousand pounds, for the person running BBC News.
And I'm supposed to feel guilty because I don't want to hand over another £180?
You couldn't make it up.
Let's talk about Trump
This is perhaps the most spectacular example, because even the BBC couldn't simply wave it away.
Panorama broadcast a documentary about Donald Trump in which separate parts of his January 6, 2021 speech were spliced together.
The edit made it look as if Trump had told supporters to “fight like hell” in the same breath as walking down to the Capitol.
He hadn't.
In the real speech, those lines came more than 50 minutes apart.
The BBC faced enormous criticism.
The chairman acknowledged the corporation had been too slow to respond.
And eventually Director-General Tim Davie and BBC News CEO Deborah Turness both resigned.
This wasn't some bloke on X typing “BBC BAD.”
This was an editorial crisis serious enough to bring down the two most senior people running the organisation.
So when people like me say, “I don't trust the BBC's political reporting,” don't tell me it's all in my head.
There is evidence.
Lots of it.
And this is one of the biggest examples.
Then came Gaza
The BBC's Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone documentary became another enormous embarrassment.
Its 13-year-old narrator was the son of a Hamas official, and that connection wasn't disclosed when the programme went out.
The BBC's own review concluded that its editorial guidelines on accuracy had been breached.
It said the production company carried most of the responsibility, but that the BBC should have exercised stronger oversight.
The programme was pulled from iPlayer.
Again, I'm not asking anyone to accept my interpretation.
Read the review.
Look at what happened.
Then ask yourself whether an organisation that is supposed to be the gold standard for impartial journalism should keep finding itself apologising for basic editorial failures on politically explosive stories.
And then tell me I should be delighted to keep paying for it.
And then there was Glastonbury
Oh, this one was extraordinary.
Bob Vylan performed at Glastonbury and led a crowd in chants including “death, death to the IDF”.
The BBC broadcast the performance live, and later admitted it should have pulled the stream.
Ofcom said the BBC had questions to answer.
The band had been deemed high risk before the festival, yet editorial staff decided the risks could be managed with on-screen warnings rather than cutting the feed.
They couldn't.
And here's the bit that makes me laugh in the most British way possible.
The BBC had 550 staff at Glastonbury.
Staff with the authority to stop the broadcast were there, and the BBC later confirmed that cutting the feed was an option open to those on the ground.
And yet it carried on.
The BBC's own complaints unit later partly upheld complaints, finding the broadcast breached its editorial guidelines on harm and offence.
So once again we're back to the same bloody question:
Why am I being compelled to fund an organisation that repeatedly shows it cannot meet the standards it demands of everyone else?
And don't get me started on Question Time
This one goes to something much deeper than one dodgy edit.
The Question Time audience isn't some random collection of people dragged in off the street.
Applicants are quizzed about how they voted and how they intend to vote, and the BBC says the audience is picked to “broadly reflect the electoral map”.
There is selection.
There is methodology.
There is editorial judgement.
And editorial judgement shapes what viewers see.
Now, the argument is that this makes the audience representative.
Fine.
But it raises another question.
Representative of what?
Just last weekend, the Mail on Sunday quoted a source claiming Fiona Bruce had privately shrugged: “It's not our fault if people lie and say they're Reform supporters to get themselves into the audience.”
The BBC says it does “not recognise this characterisation at all”.
Of course it doesn't.
Because if you control the questions, the panellists, the audience and the framing, you have enormous influence over how a political conversation feels.
You don't need to tell viewers what to think.
Sometimes you simply need to decide who gets to speak.
That's a much more subtle form of influence, and it's exactly why I don't buy the argument that BBC bias has to involve some sinister bloke in a basement writing anti-Tory propaganda.
Bias can be cultural.
It can be institutional.
It can be unconscious.
It can live in who gets invited, who gets challenged, what gets emphasised, what gets ignored and which assumptions are treated as normal.
That's why this matters.
Debased. Debunked. And frankly, finished.
I've reached the point where I regard the BBC as biased, debased and debunked, and, as far as I'm concerned, corrupt in the way only an institution that never has to earn its money can be.
There are hundreds of examples, if you care to look.
Too many apologies.
Too many editorial failures.
Too many “lessons will be learned”.
Too many senior people telling us how seriously they're taking it after the horse has already bolted.
And somehow the answer is: give them a permanent Charter.
No.
Absolutely not.
If anything, this is the moment to ask the opposite question.
Why shouldn't the BBC have to prove its worth?
Why shouldn't its funding be subject to genuine public choice?
Why shouldn't it compete?
Why shouldn't it have to persuade people that its journalism is worth paying for?
Let the BBC survive without the Telly Tax
Here's my proposal.
End the licence fee.
Don't replace it with another compulsory charge.
Don't shove it onto broadband.
Don't stick it on mobile phones.
Don't rename it a household contribution.
Stop taking the money.
Let the BBC stand on its own feet: subscription, commercial revenue, advertising if it chooses, international sales, BBC Studios, donations, or a mixture of all of them.
Work it out.
You're the BBC.
You're supposed to be clever.
If millions of British people think your news is indispensable, they'll pay.
If they think your documentaries are brilliant, they'll subscribe.
If they love Doctor Who, they'll keep watching.
If they want David Attenborough, they'll find a way to get David Attenborough.
If they think your journalism is the best in the world, you'll have no shortage of customers.
And if they don't?
Maybe that's worth knowing.
Because the BBC represents a fraction of the country
This is where I'm going to be deliberately blunt.
In my view, the BBC represents roughly 30% of Britain.
It speaks to a particular cultural and political worldview far more comfortably than it speaks to the rest of us.
Before somebody starts screaming at me about statistics, that's my judgement, not a census, though one poll last November found just 28% trust BBC News to give them high-quality, impartial coverage.
I'm telling you what it feels like when you watch the organisation cover politics, culture, immigration, Brexit, Trump, Israel, Gaza, gender, climate policy and a dozen other subjects.
There is a worldview there.
You can feel it.
And millions of people don't recognise themselves in it.
Yet they're expected to fund it.
That's the part that really sticks in my throat.
The BBC doesn't need saving from us
It needs freeing from us.
Freeing from the assumption that British taxpayers owe it a living.
Freeing from political arguments about licence-fee settlements.
Freeing from the cosy knowledge that the money keeps arriving.
Freeing from the complacency that comes with compulsory funding.
Forcing it to compete for our attention and our money might do something rather remarkable.
It might make the BBC listen.
It might make it reconsider its assumptions.
It might make it realise that half the country isn't stupid, racist, thick, backward or somehow in need of being educated by Broadcasting House.
It might discover that millions of British people simply want something remarkably old-fashioned from their news.
The truth.
Not “the truth as interpreted by the BBC”.
Not “the truth according to the approved consensus”.
Not “the truth after the producer has decided which bits are suitable”.
Just: What happened?
Who said it?
What evidence do we have?
What don't we know?
And what does the other side say?
That's journalism.
So here's the deal
If the BBC wants to be permanent, fine, let it be permanent.
If it wants to be Britain's great national broadcaster, fantastic.
If it believes it provides something nobody else can, brilliant.
Prove it.
Don't send me a bill.
Don't put the charge on my broadband.
Don't sneak it into my phone bill.
Don't tell me that because I happen to live in Britain I have a moral obligation to fund an organisation whose editorial decisions I increasingly find objectionable.
Stand on your own bloody feet.
Go out there and win the public: win our subscriptions, win our trust, win our attention.
And if you genuinely believe your journalism is better than everyone else's, you should relish the challenge.
Because perhaps competition is exactly what the BBC needs.
Perhaps having to earn its money would finally encourage it to earn its reputation too, and to start covering the news from a genuinely neutral position.
Britain doesn't owe the BBC a living.
The BBC owes Britain better journalism.
And after Panorama, Gaza, Glastonbury, the endless rows over impartiality and the increasingly obvious questions about how political programming is constructed, I've had enough of being told the answer is simply to pay up and shut up.
No.
My money is mine.
Your money is yours.
And the BBC?
Let them earn it.
Defund the licence fee.
Defund the compulsory BBC.
Let the broadcaster stand alone.
And then let's see what happens when the people at Broadcasting House discover the terrifying truth about capitalism:
We might actually have to want what they're selling.
And Remember:
Trust no Single Source
Trust Your Gut
and Stay Curious
Sally Joe
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