Farage should call for a boycott of the license fee
And George Monbiot, the only thinking leftist
If there is one thing that unites serious people on the right it is that they recognise that the BBC has to be scrapped. Not ‘reformed’, that old canard which was floated about the EU, later the ECHR; but destroyed in its entirety. In 2004, Dominic Cummings wrote as much in a now deleted blog, setting out three structural changes that the right needed to aim towards regarding the communications environment:
“…the undermining of the BBC’s credibility; 2) the creation of a Fox News equivalent / talk radio shows / bloggers etc to shift the centre of gravity; 3) the end of the ban on TV political advertising.”
Note that Donald Trump has used his executive powers to destroy America’s equivalents to the BBC, NPR and PBS. This is bread and butter populist politics, and it has much more moral force in Britain, where the BBC is more hegemonic and funded by the archaic ‘license fee’ on threat of legal punishment.
The contrarian ‘state capacity’ argument in favour of retaining the BBC but making it more right-wing fails swiftly upon examination. The BBC employs around 22,000 people. If Reform is already up to its tits trying to find 2,000 reasonably well put together people to stand as MPs, serve as political appointees and stuff the House of Lords it has no capacity to create 22,000 individuals with right-wing broadcasting experience to staff a based BBC within a Parliamentary term. Reform without replacing the staff is impossible. There was plenty of ‘soul-searching’ about the BBC’s protection of pedophiles after the Savile affair in the early 2010s, promises to do better, often in bulletins presented on the ten o’clock news by none other than Huw Edwards.
Existing institutions on the right already struggle to fill their much smaller officers with ideologically aligned young people (many of whom detest the Editorial direction). Attempting to ‘reform’ the BBC is a project which could take thirty years, whilst removing the license fee and de-establishing its various privileges could be done in a single Act of Parliament. The country is going to the dogs and we do not have time for meditation about the hypothetical best outcome.
This morning we found out that Reform would be pulling out from a BBC documentary about the party because of the broadcaster’s nastiness toward Donald Trump.
This is a good start but Farage could and should go much further. He should call for Reform members to cease paying the license fee with the stated provision that they should refrain from using the BBCs services and watching Live TV, instead broadcasting Great British News from their Smart TVs, or iPads or what have you. This would mean that he is not technically calling for people to explicitly break the law – although in practice many of his followers inevitably will.
Nothing will send the Wokerati into howls of outrage more than ripping apart this vestige of Old Corruption. This act of passive resistance will galvanise millions of pissed off small-business owners up and down the country. People will post their impotent letters demanding payments on Facebook, alongside Ring doorbell footage of beige men at their doorsteps in hi-vis jackets being told to f--- off, to thousands of laughing/angry reactions. The Lion ROARS.
Reform must constantly remind these people that they represent a genuine alternative to recapture the spirit of Brexit in 2029. There is no more direct way to strike against the heart of Britain’s rotten Establishment.
At the end of last month, George Monbiot proved that he is the only member of the Left commentariat with a functioning mind, after he penned a piece for the Guardian with the following title: ‘We must act now: without a written constitution, Reform UK will have carte blanche to toxify our nation’.
Monbiot seems to be the only Wokeist who has grasped the enormity of what a Reform majority would mean for the reactionary political project he has spent his life furthering, given the massive power of the executive within the British Parliamentary system, or as he puts it ‘What Parliamentary sovereignty means is that parliament can do whatever the hell it likes to us, as long as a majority is achieved’.
The article proposes using Starmer’s majority to limit the ‘damage’ that Farage and his mates could do to the country, arguing that ‘in a true democracy…the people are sovereign, with fundamental rights that cannot be cancelled’. He calls therefore for a citizens’ constitutional convention which would presumably establish a set of rights which Reform’s barmy army would be unable to undo. The inalienable Hooman Right for Refugees to Roam outside school-gates. This would ‘feed in’ to a Parliamentary process on drawing up a formal constitution, the ‘very least’ Starmer owes ‘us’ after adopting the rhetoric of Nigel Farage an opening the door to Populism.
Monbiot is a risible, anti-democratic hypocrite - even if I completely agree with his arguments on farmers and wilderness - but the essence of what he is proposing is intelligent if evil. Reviving the original Sue Gray/Gordon Brown project of constitutional changes is the most plausible survival strategy for the social-democratic consensus in Britain. Constitutional changes were brought in by Tony Blair at the behest of leftish intellectuals and academics after Thatcher mangled the post-war consensus in the 1980s.
What Monbiot is proposing, further reductions in the power of the executive using the majority that Starmer was gifted by One-Nation Tories in 2024, before a popular programme of mass deportations and crime crackdowns can be implemented, is clearly strategically sound. For the moment, we can only hope that his voice continues to howl unheard in the wilderness.