UK TV License Resistance

This woman laughs as you are squeezed until the pips pop out. She reputedly gets £500k pa for reading from an autocue. This is what happens when the BBC is not subject to competition and can afford lavish waste here there and everywhere at YOUR expense - namely the immoral and as we shall see the illegal TV Licence.

If you are rich read the site for enlightenment only - the path of resistance will cost you rather than them, so much it will override your principles. If you are poor (definition, income of £75 per week or less, or otherwise living on means tested benefits) this site will help you successfully resist the bastards (definition, you avoid buying a licence for years, but if they prosecute you you inflict £5,000 loss on them in return for paying £600 in £4 per week installments from which you deduct the unpaid licenses). It will make you feel bloody good, they will screw their faces up in pain, and if enough poor people fight they will collectively make enforcement against the poor economically impossible. So far I have resisted them for 3 years, so I know the truth of the claim.

I do not pretend to have fought perfectly. I made the mistake of letting them into my house. But then they made the mistake of prosecuting me. Here you can learn from my experience, that'll help you do better, if they do prosecute you will know what is coming in advance and how to fight in the trenches with them. From this site you will get model briefs from my researches during my case. Some of the stuff is critical but I found it too late to make best use of it, you can use it modified for your circumstances straight away. So don't slavishly follow this site, use it as a resource, but make sure you can talk for yourself in court so do not present anything you are not comfortable debateing in court.

The chief immorality of the TV Licence is that there is no relief from it for the poor. If you have a choice between having a TV Licence or eating then you must go without food. It is calculated that 30,000 elderly people die unnecessarily of the cold in the winter, if they could skip the licence fee that might keep them alive on the coldest nights. Though it is granted that above 72 years old they at last grant an age-related rather than income-related release. For the younger groups in society, it is estimated that as many as 30 per cent of households suffer from fuel poverty in the winter, not so severe as to kill outright, but cold and damp in the winter lead to ill-health. Besides the human misery, these illnesses cost taxes for their treatment, making the harsh TV tax regime stupid, but stupidity never deterred a bureaucrat. Indeed, the BBC is a Soviet Union style institution.

The enforcement is also Soviet style. Do not go into a battle over the licence expecting to get justice because you will not. You will be enmeshed in a 'system', where investigator, prosecutor, and court are all in league. Their joint object is to keep the BBC alive by making sure the licence fee can be collected with some sort of efficiency, this means cutting corners and sacrificing you. You will get an unlawful investigation followed by an unlawful prosecution and conviction. The only law they want you to know about is the one that says you must have a TV licence, but there are a bunch of general laws that regulate conduct of those three parties, but if they obeyed those laws then collection costs would be prohibitive. The conflict is resolved by systemic illegal conduct by those three parties, but that gives you points of attack. The final weapon in their armoury is the show trial. This is where the outcome is decided by the judge before the trial starts, and it is just a matter then of putting on a show, the judge as ringmaster trying to force through the desired result. Law is not about justice, it is generally about coercion of the little guy to the benefit of the big guy. In this saga YOU are the little guy and the BBC is the big guy. Got the drift?

The TV Licence is a fuedal duty. In a properly functioning political democracy with a market economy, there is no requirement for such a fuedal / soviet bureaucratic state propoganda machine. They don't have it in the USA. If the BBC is performing a service that the people want, well, let that show by the people giving their custom voluntarily - thats the test all other privately owned commercial media companies have to meet - thats economic democracy of the purest kind in action.

Kwicksave is a poor persons's retail store chain. It sells colour TV sets for as little as £90. A TV will last 8 years, but even at 5 years you get a per anum cost of £18. The TV license per annum as of writing (December 2005) is £124! You cannot watch your TV at all without a license, not even ITV (which is funded by advertisers). This juxtaposition is sheer madness. The BBC charter requires it to 'educate and inform', and it is suppossed to be a moral force for good, but it acts to squeeze the poorest people in society so that they cannot be educated or informed by anybody! It is a human right to receive and impart information, but the BBC requires you to pay to it a fee to excercise that right and if you are poor you will have to do without the right. Whatever the legalities, it is a morally unjust suppression of human rights. It is morally correct for you to fight back, and the rest of the site proves the law is on your side too even though judges say 'screw the law' whenever they don't like where it leads.

UK TV License Resistance - Introduction.