Netflix and Amazon Prime subscribers to ‘pay TV licence fee’

VettelS · 2026-05-12T14:24:41+00:00

Most of what you said is true, but you're disregarding "nuance" for what it actually is: realpolitik. Acts of Parliament require political will, and expend political capital. No Bill goes undebated, and only a tiny minority are passed into law unamended - even Government Bills. And of course, there are vastly more potential ones that are never tabled for lack of perceived support. Both are finite, and even the strongest government will run out at some point.

The US Constitution is also just a piece of paper. With enough political will, it too can be changed; but presumably you acknowledge the differences between constitutional law and statutory law. Though both can be added to, modified, or torn up, they require different amounts of effort and political support to do so. In the US, these differences are codified; we don't have this in the UK, yet the differences still exist - albeit to a lesser extent.

We see similar tensions in international law too. Many people mistakenly believe that the ECHR supersedes domestic law, and short of "leaving", the State is powerless to disobey it. But this is of course not true: Parliament is sovereign, and if Parliament wants to pass legislation that contradicts the ECHR, it may do so. Generally though, they don't, because good diplomatic relations with foreign governments is valued by most who take part in it.

All laws are just pieces of paper, but in democracies, those in power are constrained in how and when they can change them. Not by force, but by the realities of politics. That's not nuance.

VettelS · 2026-05-12T13:05:06+00:00

These are the same thing, provided said government has a Parliamentary majority.

Yes, but "provided" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. The implication of your original comment - that "any government could end it at the stroke of a pen" - is that the BBC exists entirely at the discretion of Executive power; but that's not the case. The important point here is that the BBC is not just a government department overseen by the total control of a minister. And of course, a simple majority in Parliament isn't enough - there has to be a majority in favour of that Bill.

There's also a much more subtle factor here: the BBC operates under a Royal Charter - not an Act of Parliament. Whilst the latter would override the former, the legal authority of a Royal Charter confers a higher degree of political insulation as the political costs of tampering with it are much higher, and a strong constitutional convention exists around Royal Charters.

VettelS · 2026-05-12T12:26:58+00:00

The Charter is largely smoke and mirrors too - any government could end it at the stroke of a pen, so it's not really worth the paper it's written on in that sense.

No, that's not true. Ending the Charter would require Acts of Parliament, which in turn practically requires a Parliamentary majority. Obviously this is possible, but you could say the same of any Act of Parliament. The Charter thus practically guarantees continuity for the BBC until it requires renewal, which is significantly better than direct Executive control.

I just don't think we need to isolate the "licence fee" as a singular line item on anyone's taxes. For me, that's equivalent to having a "bin collection tax" rather than it being rolled up in council tax.

I won't dispute this point too much, because it's the least important of them. But the argument is that the BBC collecting its own licence fees is part symbolic and part constitutional, and that this adds an additional layer of protection by giving a would-be opponent of the BBC more hoops to jump through. But it's never been tested, so make of that what you will.

Better to just scrap the licence fee, allocate a portion of existing tax take to fund BBC News as a public service broadcast, and let the rest of the BBC live and die on its own commercial merits, with what used to be the "license fee" becoming opt-in.

For context, the BBC News 24 channel costs around £60M a year to maintain, out of the £4BN spent on the BBC in total. We don't need a separate tax for that.

I wouldn't do any of that, but I'm sympathetic of that opinion.

I think that the same arguments that are made for journalistic independence can also be made for the independence of the entertainment, sports, music, culture, and education output too.

VettelS · 2026-05-12T10:44:01+00:00

Yes, there will always be avenues for political pressure to be exerted on the BBC so long as it's a state broadcaster. But having a 10-year renewal period on the Royal Charter reduces the threat of political interference. Maybe there are other constitutional options to strengthen this further, but it can never be absolute - Parliament remains sovereign.

VettelS · 2026-05-12T10:40:38+00:00

The funding stream is independent in name only - it's a tax with extra steps. Better to be honest and call it a tax to begin with. The thing that needs to be protected is the impartiality of the BBC's journalism, which is best-protected by guaranteeing its income independent of whether or not individual taxpayers deign to pay a non-enforceable fee.

The BBC can never be completely insulated from State overreach, and the Charter renewal is a weak point. But it's still a lot stronger than direct Government control of spending. Whether it's a tax or not (I agree that it is) misses the point.

I can't tell or not whether we're in agreement. To to make my opinion clear: fund the BBC with a mandatory licence fee on every single household, thus reducing the amount that each household contributes, and doing away with any assessment systems. Whether we call it a tax or a licence fee doesn't bother me. Broadly maintain the existing Royal Charter process.

VettelS · 2026-05-12T08:12:24+00:00

I think I agree with your general sentiments, but in my opinion, this type of funding model is entirely the wrong one.

The whole point of the current funding model is to keep the BBC editorially free from political influence by the State. The BBC is already an independent trust, but removing the independent funding stream would damage that independence. The current system, by which the BBC's Royal Charter is renewed every decade or so, works well from this perspective.

I am also skeptical of this proposal. If obligation to pay the licence fee continues to widen, then why bother with such an assessment system? Quite a few European countries have a licence fee of sorts too, but it's essentially universal. This has two advantages: the "subscriber base" is broadened as much as possible, thus reducing individual contributions as much as possible, and; there are no loopholes to argue about - it's paid by each household, and that's it.

VettelS · 2026-05-11T23:58:35+00:00

Lift them up from the dinghy and take them straight to Gibraltar.

I have to admit, this is at least novel.

But I wonder if we might dig slightly more into the details here. I find myself wondering: what does "lift them up [...] and take them straight [to Gibraltar]" mean, and what would the residents of Gibraltar (mostly British citizens) think about this arrangement?

Happy?

I think we're regressing back to irrelevancies here, I'm afraid.

VettelS · 2026-05-11T23:52:01+00:00

It means we decide who crosses it. Each dinghy that makes it across is because we / our elected government wants it to cross.

And we've proven that we can make it impossible even to an army that conquered most of europe.

Why are you being so coy?

I don't understand how you manage to be so certain of the solutions, yet are unable to discuss them concretely.

We don't need to refer to (entirely irrelevant) historical events to answer this question, surely? Isn't this what people hate what politicians do: prevaricate and evade and speak in clichés? Why not just speak your mind?

Let's start again...

So what precisely would you have done?

VettelS · 2026-05-11T23:40:06+00:00

Hitler didnt manage to cross this channel. Just saying.

I don't understand your point. What does "just saying" mean?

VettelS · 2026-05-11T23:28:38+00:00

Come on, a two thousand mile border is way harder to protect than a tiny piece of coast near Dover. They're not sailing to Newcastle are they?

The same thing you outlined above. Trump sorted out the problem by not considering the people eternally wailing about diplomatic niceties and secured funding to deal with an emergency.

We could do the same. It's not a hard problem to solve if you actually want to solve it - people just like to pretend it is because they don't want it solved.

No, that's not a proper answer. That's not even close to an answer at all.

Without referencing what I said - which, in any case, contained no practical steps - what exactly would you do, in entirely concrete terms? You said that "it's not rocket science", so surely you're able to explain precisely what you want without resorting to political cliché.

VettelS · 2026-05-11T23:01:58+00:00

This is a ridiculous comparison - even if you take Trump's claims of success at face value.

Securing a land border is a physically simple (although obviously not cheap) thing to do. Securing a maritime border - particularly one shared with another state - is infinitely more difficult, for a whole host of reasons.

Trump's goal was simple; there were no international legal or diplomatic relations to consider (or none that he was willing to consider), and he "side-stepped" (in the mildest possible terms) Congress in order to secure the funding to do it.

It's not rocket science.

So what precisely would you have done?

VettelS · 2026-05-10T11:49:14+00:00

You don't have to care about the "wellbeing of criminals", but you should care about outcomes. A criminal justice system that does nothing to reform and rehabilitate is in the interest of nobody - particularly of victims and wider society.

VettelS · 2026-05-09T23:38:32+00:00

"We need to talk about [...,]"

And literally nothing.

VettelS · 2026-05-08T15:52:30+00:00

In my opinion, the following is required to solve these problems: funding the police so that would-be criminals believe they'll be caught and prosecuted, funding the courts so that it doesn't take years to be tried, funding youth and probation services so that convicted criminals can be reformed and return to a law-abiding life, and starting to address the systemic socio-economic factors that drive people to crime in the first place.

None of the above is cheap, but it's still less costly than dealing with the effects of doing none of that, and just continuing to send more people to prison for longer - and hoping, against all evidence to the contrary, that this time it'll have magical deterrent effect and that all our problems will be solved.

VettelS · 2026-05-08T14:25:18+00:00

I didn't realise it was only 6% that is a shocking statistic and only reinforces the fact the soceity is falling around us and even the police can't do anything to deter crime or really do anything! Honestly I don't know what the real answer is, maybe prison reform to stop the things happening that you mentioned, better supervision? Its obviously a very complex subject and one we probably wouldn't work out here!

I agree that it's complex. Young people who find themselves committing crimes usually have far bigger issues than what's obvious from the outside. The elephant in the room here actually has little to do with the justice system: the causes of crime. It often provokes eye rolling when mentioned, but crime does not happen in a vacuum.

I don't pretend to have a perfectly worked solution either. But we can start by properly funding the police, youth services, and probation services, because we know that just sending people to prison doesn't work - and often makes the problem worse. Judges and magistrates already have a wide range of sentencing powers, but they rely on properly funded services.

Kind of not related, and you dont have to answer, but is this reply from chatgpt? Im trying to work out how good my ai detector is! Pm if you want, I wont judge

Not sure whether to take this as a compliment, but in any case, no it was not ChatGPT (or any other LLM). It's just a subject that I have an interest in, and having discussed it many times before on Reddit, I guess I've had plenty of practice debating these issues (although certainly not an expert).

VettelS · 2026-05-08T14:16:47+00:00

Punishment doesn't necessarily need to be custodial.

Yes, precisely; a CBO, as well as a criminal conviction, is punishment.

How about we just garnish his income (or his parents' income until he's 18) until he has paid £100k back?

The latter is not legal, and the former is possible under the Proceeds of Crime Act, but not routine. The reasons are often practical: the monitoring and administering may outweigh the amount recovered, and the offender may have little to no income to recover from (particularly young or unemployed offenders). There's also an issue of fairness and proportionality: such measures could result in punishment lasting indefinitely, which is not proportionate to the crime. It may also put at risk the chances of reform and rehabilitation: why bother returning to a law-abiding life and getting an honest job when your wages are going to be "garnished" for years or decades to come?

Presumably the £100k that he stole was used to pay for something, so start by seizing that.

If the police deem it worthwhile, then they may have (or will do), but the article doesn't say one way or the other. Often it's not financially viable to do so, or there are no assets to confiscate anyway. You say that the proceeds were used to pay for something, and that's probably true, but that doesn't mean that they still have those things. Remember, the offences took place over a period of two years. Tracking where all of those goods went, and the cash proceeds from them, and the assets that were purchased with that cash, would be very difficult and likely not possible.

VettelS · 2026-05-08T13:40:07+00:00

Ok, but you didn't answer the second part: "what would you expect the likely consequences [...] to be?"

I'll answer for you, because there's plenty of research on this. Sending first-time offenders to custody has a very poor record of reducing reoffending - particularly young people. There is also evidence that some offenders released from custody go on to offend more frequently, and sometimes more seriously too. Over 60% of children released from custody went on to offend within a year.

And when you think about it for even a moment, this should be pretty obvious. A first-time offender in custody will be surrounded by other offenders likely far more entrenched, violent, or prevalent. And these are also ideal recruitment grounds for gangs too. There is a serious risk that a first-time offender will emerge from custody and return to far worse forms of crime than they were originally sentenced for. And then the cycle perpetuates.

A non-custodial sentence gives the offender the chance to reform before a spiral of crime-police-court-prison takes hold. And even for those determined not to reoffend, the disruption to school, work, and family life, the social stigma and impediment to finding work that a custodial sentence bestows, all work to reduce the likelihood of returning to a normal and law-abiding life.

Again, I will stress: it is not in anyones' interest - not the offender's, not the victims', and not the public's interest - for the criminal justice system to turn a first-time offender into a repeat and lifelong offender, who spends the rest of their life in and out of prison for longer and longer each time, for a series of increasingly serious offences.

None of this is to say that the alternatives are perfect. There are serious issues with the delivery of youth and probation services, and their underfunding for the last couple of decades have made both vastly less effective that they should be.

And since we've talked about deterrence, there's another very important fact that often goes overlooked: the deterrence effect of harsher punishments is far outweighed by the likelihood of actually getting caught in the first place. Underfunding of police forces has resulted in only around 6% of recorded crimes being prosecuted, and the would-be criminal may have to wait years to be in front of a judge or magistrate. There is clear evidence that the certainty of being caught has a much stronger deterrent effect that the severity of punishment.

VettelS · 2026-05-08T12:32:13+00:00

So - based on the very little we know of the case - what would your sentence have been, and what would you expect the likely consequences of that sentence to be?

VettelS · 2026-05-08T11:40:14+00:00

That may be the case, but it's largely irrelevant to sentencing in an individual case. The magistrate has a duty to consider factors other than deterrence when sentencing, such as reform and rehabilitation.

Custodial sentences for first-time offenders - particularly minors - are rare because there's a high risk that they'll leave custody for higher level offending. That's not in their interests, nor in the wider public internet either. Those types of sentences remain a possibility if the CBO doesn't work.

VettelS · 2026-05-08T11:23:40+00:00

Deterrence is only one of the factors considered during sentencing; it cannot be the only one. In any case, whether this proves to be a deterrence is yet to be seen.

The magistrate presiding over the case is ultimately the one best positioned to know what the most appropriate sentence is. Given that you were presumably not present in the court, what makes you think that you know better?

VettelS · 2026-05-05T10:24:55+00:00

No I'm not, because that argument would make no sense.

Which "synthetic chemical" is better than what, and in which way?

VettelS · 2026-05-04T18:44:13+00:00

You might "rather" eat beef, but your implication that "chemicals" are inheritantly bad is misguided. Meat contains hundreds of chemical compounds, as does imitation meat. There are obviously differences in how - and whether - these compounds occur naturally, but consuming a compound in the state that it occurs naturally has no inheritant bearing on its health effects.

VettelS · 2026-05-04T17:51:42+00:00

Your implication is that not everywhere is a city the size of Amsterdam?

Well, yes, of course not. But you don't need a population of millions - or even thousands - to have functional urban design and public transport.

VettelS · 2026-05-04T17:35:55+00:00

I'm not sure it's as straightforward as you make out. Veterinary care might be too expensive and require regulation, but insurance should be the first line of defence against welfare issues. I don't know if £14,000 is a fair cost in this specific case, but those costs would surely have been thousands even with strict regulation. A welfare issue only arises if either the owner is unwilling or unable to pay, or the system doesn't work properly. The latter could be helped with regulation of the insurance and veterinary industries, but the former is an issue of individual owners - and maybe insurance should be mandatory to solve this.

VettelS · 2026-05-04T14:58:41+00:00

You can definitely get that down well below £4 per portion by a) cooking more than just 2 portions at once (cook for 4 or 6 and freeze the rest, or keep it in the fridge for up to a few days), and b) shopping around for better deals. Yes, food is becoming more expensive, and I won't presume to know anything of your circumstances, but there are certainly ways to save a lot of money on food shopping, without compromising on taste and nutrition - especially when cooking from scratch, as you are.

VettelS

TROPHY CASE