Johnson now hinting he might cancel the licence fee, Boris you are such a tease if only I believed you.

I suspect that the Tories if they win will use this threat to force the BBC to fund the over 75 pensioners, the BBC will agree reluctantly and the threat goes away. The government may also decriminalise non payment of the license fee some 25% of local court time is taken up with this.

To be honest the BBC's position has been underminded by their own actions. Their basic argument is that they are an independent public broadcaster and should not carry advertising or subscription as this will jeopardise their neutrality / independence.

So having put forward their need to remain above the nasty commercial world the BBC then happily allows advertising on it's website outside of the UK, adverts on its TV services outside the UK and a subscription service for BBC America. Plus it has a commercial arm selling programs etc around the world.

And now the BBC has launched Britbox in the UK which is a commercial subscription service selling the poor old punter old TV shows which we have already seen and paid for.

Now you could argue that the BBC is simply preparing itself for the inevitable but it does undermine their basic arguement.

The big money in advertising is from global corporations. If you don't want to accept adverts from the Costapacket Coffee Corporation in the UK because you are running an investigation into their dodgy practices why do you accept them outside of the UK.

However the BBC wants to run with the fox and the hounds a bad strategy and one which will eventually come unstuck.

Edited by Badger11 (10 Dec 2019 8.26am)

It's definatly election day,
BBC News - Karen Gillan: 'I got rejected for the local panto'
[Link]

wouldn't it be lovely if Boris stuck the dagger into the BBC ? now that his majority in the Commons is strong.

The BBC has made a few unwelcome changes. Firstly it is doing away with it's teletext type service on the red button which is very annoying as I use it to catch up with news and sports headlines if I miss News At Ten and secondly they seem to have done away with the customisation of their website so that instead of picking and choosing which sections are of interest to you and hiding the rest we now have to plough through the whole lot.

Is this progress?