The BBC has a penchant for staging debates on the decriminalisation of medicine. I ought to know as a result of I'm usually drafted in because the
The BBC has a penchant for staging debates on the decriminalisation of medicine. I ought to know as a result of I’m usually drafted in because the right-wing loon to offer a little bit of stability to the enlightened medicine knowledgeable placing the extra trendy view. These debates all the time go the identical manner. I argue that if a substance is harmful sufficient to be banned then it’s good to punish the customers in addition to the suppliers as a result of it’s they who’re creating the market. With out these shoppers, the drug-pushers would don’t have anything to promote. The enlightened knowledgeable is then invited to say how damaging it’s to drug-users to be given a prison report which can damage their probabilities in life and forestall them from looking for assist.
However there may be one topic on which the BBC appears relatively much less eager on decriminalisation. Tradition secretary Woman Morgan this morning launched a session on whether or not the failure to purchase a TV licence ought to proceed to be a prison offence. The BBC is adamant that it ought to – on the grounds that downgrading licence price evasion would price it an estimated £200 million a yr. What in regards to the argument that offenders might be burdened with a prison report that would forestall them from getting a job, a house, a mortgage or a mortgage? It appears to not apply on this case.
TV licence fee-evaders are evil-doers who’re failing to contribute to Gary Lineker’s £1.75 million wage they usually deserve the total weight of the legislation descending upon their heads (though to be honest to Lineker he has not too long ago diverged from his employers and said he thinks the licence price ought to be voluntary).
One other topic that preoccupies the BBC is gender inequality. The merest trace of a statistical imbalance between female and male illustration within the favour of males and entire BBC programmes might be dedicated to the difficulty, hinting at some form of underhand discrimination at work. Besides, that’s, in a single specific occasion: that of prosecutions for TV licensing evasion, 72 per cent of that are against girls. On this, the BBC likes to cover behind a report commissioned by the federal government from David Perry QC, who concluded that there was ‘no proof to recommend that enforcement exercise is unfairly and deliberately focused at girls’. That’s okay then – although by some means I believe that such an evidence wouldn’t be accepted for every other imbalance.
Girls find yourself being prosecuted as a result of they’re those at house through the daytime when the TV licence enforcement individuals name. They’re tender targets. They get snared as a result of they’re poor and battle to maintain up with all types of home payments. The distinction is that with every other invoice – be it fuel, electrical energy, hire-purchase scheme or no matter, they’ll first obtain a number of warning letters and solely then will the debt-collectors be set on them. Fail – and even simply neglect – to pay your TV license, however, and you might be straight on the incorrect finish of a prison prosecution.
To have TV licence evasion as a prison offence is an anomaly, and one which ends in a really giant variety of low-income individuals ending up with a prison report – one in ten cases within the magistrates’ courts are TV licence-evasion, with 140,000 prosecutions. That’s the reason it must be decriminalised – earlier than, hopefully, the anachronism that’s the TV licence is abolished altogether. The BBC’s imaginative and prescient of a Britain the place middle-class coke-snorters go free whereas low-income teams are rounded up and given prison information is just not one I discover interesting.