The BBC is finally being punished!

[longfingernails]

Apparently there is a great plan to shift the cost of free TV licenses from the taxpayer to the BBC - with no increase in the license fee to compensate!

That amounts to about a 20% cut in the BBC budget. I am over the moon at this news.

It's incredibly progressive too! It shifts the burden from poor taxpayers to overpaid BBC staff, who will probably have to take a 25% pay cut! I am sure the newsreader who revealed she was paid £92k will be distraught. I can't even begin to imagine how much luvvies like Robert Peston and Andrew Marr are paid.

Maybe the next time the BBC says that "public spending cuts take money out of the economy" on the news, it might like to reflect on why Tories are so cock-a-hoop tonight.

They are in the middle of a "Cuts watch" series of programmes, I understand. Funnily enough, they never seemed to get round to a "Deficit watch" or "Tax watch" series during the Labour years. Strange, really - I wonder why?

Probably rubbing his hands together and salivating.

Yes, well done, Mathanxiety.

WRT the role of private companies, no publicly quoted company can be exempt from public responsibilities qhile it has shareholders, especially if any of those shareholders are large pension funds. We are all in this together and it makes no sense at all to be divisive.

Larrygrylls - The US Medical system is hugely wasteful, over intrusive and expensive.

As an example, consultant led maternity care and elective c-sections are the norm in the US, both of which are hugely costly and take up a lot of resources, yet their maternal and neonatal death rates are among the worst in the western world.

Math - your post was wonderful. [admiring emoticon]

Larrygrylls.

It's actually very hard to produce a respected brand with the government's money - Network Rail, Ofsted, GTC, DCFS... I could go on.

This situation has no parallel with centralist control of Soviet Russia. Soviet Russia largely worked through the setting of targets. No targets have been set, to my mind, neither are any targets that have been set that I'm unaware of backed up with the threat of execution or internal exile (unless you count the move to Manchester).

The government doesn't produce any of the quality TV that you're concerned about. The BBC does it - an independent body funded by the license fee.

Your real concern is that reporters on the BBC sometimes report views that you do not agree with, and it really annoys you that your money goes to pay for it.