Cancelling the TV License

Here in the UK, most people pay a separate subscription to support the BBC; it’s called a TV License, and I have always seen it as being like a voluntary but proper tax. For generations, the BBC has provided a remarkably fair and nourishing media service to the world. When I was small, I remember listening to the World Service on a shortwave; and I still carried a small shortwave with me to Guatemala and Nepal when I started my fieldwork. Growing up in California, the possibility of an ad-free radio network that broadcast intelligent programmes was almost utopian. When I moved to Oxford 25 years ago, Radio 4 was a staple of sanity that helped me adjust to an often intolerant place. Radio Scotland gave me access to music and culture even when I wasn’t there, and the World Service was still a venerable institution—though there were fewer and fewer of those incredible experts scattered around the world, and the reporting was soon outdone by information networks accessible through FidoNet and then the world wide web.

I just cancelled our TV License. 

I’ve lived in Scotland for fifteen years now. In that time, I’ve learned to listen to the BBC differently. I can hear the constant condescension. The BBC in Scotland functions to represent a pliant, colonised Scotland to the people who live here. I was asked, around the time of the 2014 Referendum, to become a regular contributor to Thought for the Day, and I just couldn’t. I didn’t want my voice, let alone our Buddhism, legitimating that platform. Since then we’ve seen increasingly prejudiced coverage of Brexit, the Scottish independence movement, the SNP and the Scottish Greens. Even my children can hear the lies.

So with no small regret — especially because the BBC carefully cross-checks to make sure children who want CBBC belong to a Subscribing Household — the propaganda now outweighs the value. I’ve sent an email and cancelled the direct debit.

There are a number of interesting efforts around Scotland to build a genuinely Scottish media landscape, and I would love to help with that — given the extraordinary links between Scotland and Indigenous communities all around the world, for example, I think there could be some amazing programming for a Scottish Postcolonial Wireless Service.  If anyone reading wants to work on high culture radio for a future Scotland, count me in!