Non-payment of BBC licence fee accounts for 10% of prosecutions
The BBC is responsible for more than one in 10 criminal prosecutions. Culture Secretary Sajid Javid reports that 10% of magistrate court cases are for non-payment of the BBC licence fee. Non-payment is a criminal offence, punishable by a fine of up to £1,000. Every week about 3,000 people are fined for non-payment, and about one person a week is jailed for non-payment of the fine. Women make up about 70% of those prosecuted and convicted, and half of those jailed for not paying the fine. When people fail to pay other utilities, such as energy companies, they are guilty of a civil offence, not a criminal one, and they cannot be prosecuted and fined for falling behind with their payments. Civil action can be taken for recovery, but without fines and jail terms.
Several newspapers have had reporters visit magistrate's court to describe what goes on. They all tell harrowing stories of frightened, distressed people, mostly women, facing fines they cannot pay under threat of imprisonment if they do not. Many are single mothers, many on benefits. They have not paid the licence fee because they cannot afford to. The sum of £145.50 per year is huge for a young mother struggling to feed and clothe children. Many weep in court, unable to pay the fine for the same reason they couldn't afford the licence fee; they don't have the money.
Everyone with a TV, except the over 75s, has to pay, whether or not they watch BBC programmes. If people fail to pay for other services, such as a Sky subscription, for example, the service is withdrawn without them being taken to court and fined.
In 21st century Britain we should not be dragging helpless women through courts and fining them, or making their lives more wretched than they already are by putting them in jail for non-payment of those fines. It should be a civil, not a criminal offence, and should be dealt with by withdrawal of the service rather than by prosecution. The technology to do this is relatively simple.
The development of tiny transistor radios killed the radio licence in 1971. Now laptops, tablets and smartphones make the BBC licence fee increasingly difficult to sustain. Many watch TV on portable devices instead of TV sets. They watch programmes on Catch Up and iPlayer. Many do not watch BBC programmes at all. Clearly an alternative way of financing the BBC has to be found. That will take time, but before then non-payment of its licence should be a civil, not a criminal action, and we should stop letting the BBC hound helpless people through the courts.
We can identify George Monbiot's problem
It's not just that he's often factually incorrect, nor that he races off after the wrong rabbit all too often. It's that he's in the wrong society:
It just doesn’t compute. Almost every day the news is filled with stories that look to me like corruption. Yet on Transparency International’s corruption index Britain is ranked 14th out of 177 nations, suggesting that it’s one of the best-run nations on Earth. Either all but 13 countries are spectacularly corrupt or there’s something wrong with the index.
Yes, it’s the index. The definitions of corruption on which it draws are narrow and selective. Common practices in the rich nations that could reasonably be labelled corrupt are excluded; common practices in the poor nations are emphasised.
This is not so. We, collectively, here at the ASI have considerable experience of both life and business in other parts of the world. Including places where the first question about doing anything is "So, who do we bribe?". At least one of us has offered, as professional advice, the point that "If you don't know who to bribe in that country don't bother trying to do business in that country".
The truth is that the index is correct, not just that the terms and definitions being used favour us. Britain really is a remarkably uncorrupt country by the standards of the rest of the world. And that is where we think that Monbiot's basic problem comes in.
George desires to be a warrior for social justice. Heck, he is a warrior for social justice. He just happens to suffer from the problem of coming from a country that actually already possesses a modicum of social justice. There's therefore little in the way of social warrioring for him to do.
We do not claim, heavens above we don't, that Britain is perfect nor that there's not dodgy dealings in corners of it. but imagine how frustrating it must be to devote one's life to the theory that the entire structure must be overturned on the basis of that social justice and yet come from one of the few places that has actually managed to achieve a general level of that justice?
The problem with Owen Jones
Young Owen is telling us all that we only mock the more idiot lefties because such mockery obscures the very important message that said lefties are trying to get over. Presumably that one about the necessity of smashing capitalism and sticking it to the man. Sadly he doesn't quite make his case: for he's sadly bereft of a basic understanding of how the media works. Yes, it's entirely true that everyone's screaming with laughter while discussing two kitchens Ed. But this isn't because the capitalist media pig dogs are pushing the story:
It is Vine who initiated this latest assault on Ed’s character. The drab kitchen was apparently sufficient grounds to suggest he and his wife are like “aliens”; Justine is compared to “the late Mr Spock”. But then Ed’s ever helpful friend Jenni Russell revealed that it was in fact, just a “functional kitchenette ... for tea and quick snacks”. And so the kitchen – sink and all – was thrown at Ed, or “two kitchens” Miliband as he is now to be known.
Why do I bother. Why do any of us bother. Try saying “political debate in Britain” without sniggering. It’s not about issues or people and their needs. It’s a mixture of the privileged scapegoating the largely voiceless – immigrants, people in poverty generally – and puerile character assassination.
The modus operandi of the right is to target anyone vaguely leftish and make the debate about them, rather than what they believe. I’ve written this before, but if you believe in social justice, they will find any reason to trash you. If you’re too poor, they’ll accuse you of envy; too rich, of hypocrisy; too young, of naivety; too old, of being a dinosaur. Above all, the right obsessively hunts anything that can be twisted into hypocrisy. If you think poverty is basically a bad thing and something needs to be done about it, then you have to live in a shed and forage for berries, otherwise you are a hypocritical champagne socialist.
In a market economy (no, this is nothing at all to do with capitalism or any other form of ism) an organisation prospers by delivering what its customers want. They therefore spend quite a lot of time and effort trying to divine what said customers want: so that they can offer it, of course. And with newspapers and the media more generally what people want (sa numerous academic studies have confirmed) is to have their extant prejudices stroked.
Purely hypothetically, if the working class of this country were possessed of some robustly conservative views on sex, gender and immigration, just as examples you understand, then the newspaper (s) that attempted to appeal to the working class of the country would have robustly conservative views on sex, gender and immigration. The newspaper do not form such views, they chase them.
And one of the things that we British do truly hate is hypocrisy. Thus the newspapers point to and urge us to laugh at examples of it, for we enjoy doing so. This isn't a right/left issue: it's just how a market works.
Which is why the newspapers are making hay with two kitchens Ed. Because we care very little about "the issues or people and their needs" and hugely about mocking the would be ruling class. And if you don't in fact know this about the media, that they chase prejudices not form them, then it really might be a good idea not to write about this subject that one is ill informed upon.
The Good Old Days are right now
You can't make people happy by law. If you said to a bunch of average people two hundred years ago "Would you be happy in a world where medical care is widely available, houses are clean, the world's music and sights and foods can be brought into your home at small cost, travelling even 100 miles is easy, childbirth is generally not fatal to mother or child, you don't have to die of dental abcesses and you don't have to do what the squire tells you" they'd think you were talking about the New Jerusalem and say 'yes'.
Sir Terry Pratchett. 1948-2015.
If you doubt this in the slightest manner then download the historical GDP per capita figures from Angus Maddison. Note that the numbers are in modern currency (well, 1990s currency) and marvel at how poor the past was. The average Englishman in 1600 had perhaps $3 a day of modern money to live on all told. The average Congolese has that today.
The end of local authority libraries
Local-authority-run public libraries are going the way of launderettes and video stores. Technology has swamped them, and they haven't responded to the changing pattern of demand. We still have 4,145 public libraries in the UK, about fifteen times as many as we had in the 1920s, despite the fact that more and more of us access our reading material (and even our phone books, newspapers, dictionaries and encyclopaedias) in digital form, that over 84% of households have internet access (76% of us access the web every day) and pretty much all schools have and use the internet.
Bookshops have responded to these changes, bringing in cafe-style environments and organising events and book clubs that bring people into the shop, where they might just browse around and buy something. Libraries like to say they are doing this sort of thing, but it is half-hearted. Birmingham says its new library will only do events that are self-funding, for example: no concept of using events to bring more people in. That dearth of thinking is why Birmingham has discovered that the £10m-a-year cost of running its £188m spanking-new library (which of course won lots of architecture prizes) is unaffordable, given all the other urgent demands on the city's budget.
It will always be like this. Local authorities have to provide life-saving services, social care, transport, roads, schools, you name it – libraries are always going to be something of a luxury, particularly when 70% of the borrowings are fiction, and much of the rest are about cookery, DIY and cars. Local authorities know this is not a debate about 'public education' but about free entertainment for largely elderly and middle-class users.
LSSI, a company founded by librarians, which works with 78 communities in the US, reckons it can cut the UK libraries budget by 35%, increase opening hours, raise the number of library users, and still spend ten times more on books. Frankly, it is about time we put libraries out to commercial tender. Let us specify what they are actually there for – not something that up to now there has been any public debate about – and the outputs we want, and then invite private, voluntary and charitable groups to make an offer. You can be sure of two things. Firstly, they would not build £188m white elephants, but would create libraries near to shops, schools and other places that people find local and convenient. And secondly, that the entire business would be revolutionised in short order, leading to everything that libraries are supposed to be there for being do cheaper and better.
Ending the BBC licence fee
Why should households pay a levy to support broadcasters, even if they have no television? Or even if they have a television but rarely use it? It's a broadcasting poll tax, which will impose the biggest burden on the poorest households, like the one-parent families who, already, account for the bulk of the prosecutions for non-payment.
And what's the logic of it anyway? That we need broadcasters, and the licence fee is no longer a realistic way to pay for them? Firstly, you can question the extent to which we need broadcasters. Many of us live quite happily without needing daily doses of Call the Midwife, Death in Paradise, Casualty or for that matter Premier League football: why should we subsidise those who can't? Politicians might reckon that Question Time and Newsnight are essential 'public service broadcasting', but precious few of the rest of us would mourn their passing.
Broadcasters are by no means the only people to argue that they are producing a product essential to our lives or culture, but for which it is hard to get people to pay. Newspapers are saying exactly the same: they feed us news, analysis and opinion, but we are buying fewer and fewer of their dead-tree products, picking it all up free online instead. Should we have a levy on households so that Rupert Murdoch can continue to serve us up his vital product? No, definitely not. It is up to those industries to find market ways to charge for what they produce – through advertising, for example, or through subscription mechanisms.
The BBC should do the same. Technology is pretty nifty these days, in ways it wasn't when the BBC was created in the 1930s. For folk who pride themselves on their creativity, developing a subscription service, from which non-payers can be excluded, should not be too far beyond their wit. Or even using advertising and sponsorship, as so many other perfectly reputable broadcasters do.
If the BBC did not exist, we certainly would not invent it. Today it looks rather like a bloated fixed-line network monopoly in an age of mobile phones. A lumbering dinosaur in an age of fleet-footed niche producers. So why force households to keep subsidising this sad throwback?
The marvellous consistency of John Harris
John Harris has one of his, as usual, excellently done pieces detailing the economic wasteland that is a town where Tesco has decided not to arrive. Bit of vox pop, bit of background information, the underlying tale being that of course the capitalist bastards are ripping the heart out of good honest working class communities by not arriving. It's very well done:
Throughout the 1990s and all the way up to the crash of 2008 and beyond, this was how whole swaths of Britain were rebuilt, and Tesco led the charge, to the point that it sometimes seemed to be a wing of government, and some people began to fear the dystopia crystallised in the title of Andrew Simms’s best-selling book Tescopoly. Now, though, Tesco is in retreat, and its sudden withdrawal from scores of places has left behind resentment, anger and what feels like a strange state of shock.
It's just that this was the same John Harris who only 5 years ago was not only complaining about Tesco coming to town but actively campaigning against it doing so:
This is the kind of nightmare many Frome locals fear: the dullest, most oppressive kind of arrival, thoroughly out of sync with a creative, imaginative local atmosphere. Put another way, it'll be another small step closer to the kind of future long since mapped out in middle America, in which banal convenience will conquer all – and this being Britain, forgetfulness will come at 24 cans for a tenner.
The underlying tale being that of course the capitalist bastards are ripping the heart out of good honest working class communities by arriving.
Our assumption is not that if you're a Guardian columnist then you've got to find something to complain about. Nor even that to be a lefty you must have some whinge, whatever it is. It's that in order to be properly bien pensant you must be whining about something. What is whined about does not matter, the logical consistency of successive whines is unimportant, to be a Very Serious Person discussing the state of the world has moved on from EM Forster and ended in "Only whine".
The best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley
There's an interesting reason why politics, the creation of laws and regulations, just isn't very good as a way of doing things. That being that the world's a complicated place. And so it is with this idea that every child should be safe from the terrors of pornography on the internet. The powers that be demanded that all such possible access be filtered out unless responsible adults deliberately asked for access to be possible. And lo! the regulations were made and:
“But it’s very simplistic: URLs with Sussex or Essex in them, for example, are blocked."
Rather less amusingly the websites of many charities and educational sites are also blocked. If all "porn" is blocked then so will be places that discuss how to escape the porn industry, what to do about an addiction to porn and, a memory so glorious that perhaps we should build a statue to it, the website of the MP who campaigned for there to be an internet porn filter.
The point being that this world of ours is a complicated place. Enough of us now understand Hayek's point about economic planning, that we can't for the only thing that we have that is capable of calculating the economy is the economy itself. It's not possible to run a model and then direct it: what happens is emergent from the very method of calculation. What is less well understood is that this applies to all these other areas of life as well. It's not possible for us to just gaily insist "porn filters for all!" and for that to be actually implemented.
Therefore, logically, we should stop trying to micromanage life in this manner and go off and do something more useful with our energies. And given that doing pretty much anything would be a more useful use of our energies that leaves us all with a great deal of choice over what to do.
Men are not 'over', women are not discriminated against
In what seems to me slightly contradictory, two popular modern memes hold that, firstly, we are experiencing 'the end of men', who are steadily being eclipsed by women in many levels of academia, areas of the economy and so on; and secondly that women are discriminated against in the labour market, which is why they only earn around three quarters as much as men on average per hour. A 2013 paper by Kingsley Browne in the Boston University Law Review challenges both of these claims, arguing that the dominance women enjoy in many areas of society refutes the idea they are discriminated against, but their relative scarcity in other areas shows how men are still not 'over'. He explains this discrepancy between sectors to differences in preferences and characteristics between the sexes, differences he believes are biologically caused.
Common examples of perceived workplace inequality – the “glass ceiling,” the “gender gap” in compensation, and occupational segregation, among others – cannot be well understood if the explanation proffered for their existence is limited exclusively to social causes such as discrimination and sexist socialization.
Males and females have, on average, different sets of talents, tastes, and interests, which cause them to select somewhat different occupations and exhibit somewhat different workplace behaviors. Some of these sex differences have biological roots. Temperamental sex differences are found in competitiveness, dominance seeking, risk taking, and nurturance, with females tending to be more “person oriented” and males more “thing oriented.”
The sexes also differ in a variety of cognitive traits, including various spatial, verbal, mathematical, and mechanical abilities. Although social influences can be important, these social influences operate on (and were in fact created by) sexually dimorphic minds.
As I have written before, even if the very substantial work-related differences between men and women are socially constructed, satisfying their preferences as they are, rather than as an egalitarian might want them to be, makes men and women best off. I have also written how the gender wage gap isn't evidence for firm discrimination between the genders, because it is entirely explained by women's decisions (to take safer, more satisfying jobs, to work lower hours and to take substantial time out of the workforce).
He points out that women have recently come to dominate many high status fields and that most of the gender wage gap is between, not within, professions. Taken together, he argues there is no general 'glass ceiling', although of course there are many individual instances of discrimination.
In many respects, however, women have made breathtaking advances in the past several decades. Professions such as law and medicine are reaching parity among new entrants, and women represent over 60% of newly enrolled pharmacy students and over 75% of new veterinarians.
Even within fields in which men predominate generally, such as science, technology and engineering, there are interesting variations: women are underrepresented in metallurgical and mechanical engineering but much closer to parity in biomedicine and bioengineering.
And he gives strong evidence for differences between men and women in: competitiveness, which are not easily explained by 'stereotype threat' given that they start very early and only appear in specific sorts of high pressure competition; risk-taking (boys and men take more risk); interest in children (girls and women show more of it); spatial reasoning ability (men excel); verbal ability (women excel); and occupational interests.
Whether these are biological or social they massively affect the fields that women want to enter and the ones they can do well in. And this is OK! It makes people happier to do jobs (including work in the home) they want to do and jobs they are good at. It's OK for our labour markets to reflect this—it makes us better off overall.
Plus ca change, c'est la meme chose
A little bit of interesting history. We used to have, here in the UK, an official of the Royal Household who determined what might be shown to us proles on the stage. The Lord Chamberlain's office included the responsibility to:
so that he could only prohibit the performance of plays where he was of the opinion that "it is fitting for the preservation of good manners, decorum or of the public peace so to do".
Of course we did away with all that fuddy duddy nonsense with the Theatres Act of 1968. The Earl Peel now has no such responsibility or power.
Yes, of course we did away with all of that fuddy duddy stuff, there's no one able to limit what the proles may see upon the stage or screen:
Seventies comedies would not be allowed on television screens today because they were so racist and offensive, the outgoing head of Ofcom has said.
Ed Richards, who stands down as chief executive of the media watchdog at the end of this month, said programmes from a previous generation were no longer suitable for today’s more enlightened audiences.
What it is that we proles may be shown seems to have changed a little, the August Personage who gets to decide it seems to have changed, but it does still seem to be that the bien pensants of the day get to decide what may or may not be shown to the populace.
Haven't we all had such a radical expansion in freedom and liberty, in cultural expression?
Not that we're in favour of racism, sexism or whatever, particularly. It's just that we can't help thinking that an actual free market in these things would work rather better. If people didn't like what was being shown then they wouldn't watch it and it would quickly fail and be taken off the air. And at least in the Lord Chamberlain's day they were very clear about this: you may not show these things because people would like them too much. The modern censorship is making the opposite argument: you may not show them because no one would like them. But if that is so then we don't need the censorship, do we, because something that no one likes won't survive. We thus suspect that the censorship survives precisely because those censoring know that the populace does not share their views.
How very liberal, eh?