It's RIDICULOUS that we're FORCED to pay the BBC a fortune to fund woke nonsense we don't even watch, says MICHAEL HEAVER
The BBC licence fee is increasing to £169.50-a-year
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In just a few months the annual cost of a standard colour TV licence will rise to £169.50.
Put another way, Gary Lineker's ongoing employment by the national broadcaster - at a cost of £1.35m per year - means the equivalent of 8,000 households in this country are - effectively - each paying a £170 'Lineker tax'. Absurd? Absolutely.
The insane April increase - more than a tenner extra, per household, per year - means once again the BBC literally has a licence to print money to fund its increasingly out-of-touch, elitist, left-wing programmes.
Against this backdrop you would have thought a tax-cutting Conservative Government would be reducing - or at the very least continuing to freeze - such ludicrous costs.
Instead the BBC, which 60% of the population now considers a waste of money, will get another huge funding boost.
Instead of another funding round, what we should be having is a serious debate about whether the BBC should exist, at least in its current form.
Yes, I know that Twitter-obsessed lefties living in a metropolitan bubble simply can't contemplate life without the BBC.
Which in many ways shows how far to the left the BBC has now drifted. You'll notice few Brexiteers now defend the licence fee compared to Labour or Liberal Democrat-supporting Remainers who scoff at any suggestion that the tax should be scrapped.
But there is substantial evidence now that the mainstream view is that the compulsory licence fee should be ditched.
Redfield and Wilton's research revealed only 18% of Brits believe the BBC should continue to be licence fee-funded, with 15% believing it should be funded directly by tax revenue.
But much more popular than either of those options was the BBC being paid for by voluntary subscription and advertising, backed by a whopping 50% of the public.
In a day and age when people can easily avoid using the BBC - with the emergence of GB News and a range of other online platforms - you would have thought ending this TV tax would have been prominent on a Conservative Government's agenda.
Instead, we're going to see another BBC funding increase and yet more cost to ordinary folk many of whom are not interested in watching, listening to or reading anything at all from the increasingly outdated corporation.
What a sad and depressing addition to the long list of messes the high-tax, high-spend Tories have utterly failed to address.
We now face up to a decade of Labour in power.
And just imagine how much the BBC licence fee will cost - and how little it will be worth - by 2034.