TV Licensing: violent and illegitimate

How blackmail is standard business practise in the UK — with state sanction

The doorbell buzzes, and a man in a uniform comes to the door, showing an ID badge.

“Hello, is this the home of Mr Martin Geddes Esquire?”

“I am Martin, a flesh and blood person, but if you insist… yes, I am an agent for the legal entity you refer to.”

“I am an Enforcement Officer for Tesco’s fruit and vegetable division. May I ask you a few questions?”

“A salad ingredient enforcer!?! Whatever…”

“Well, as you may well know, Mr Geddes, the government takes public health very seriously, and recently passed legislation to make ‘five a day’ mandatory".”

“You mean the government is using the full power of the state to compel people to have five portions of fruit and vegetables, every single day?”

“We cannot force you to eat your vegetables, Mr Geddes. That would be absurd and intrusive. But we are required to check your property for sufficient stocks of broccoli.”

“You mean you want to enter my home to search for brassicas?”

“Only broccoli, Mr Geddes, not brassicas in general. You are in our supermarket catchment area, and our records show you have failed to purchase any broccoli recently, which is a cause for public health concern.”

“But I don’t like broccoli! It’s nearly as disgusting as Brussels sprouts!”

“We have reasonable grounds to suspect that you are not in compliance with the law, Sir… now, back to those questions… when did you last eat broccoli, Mr Geddes…”

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Actually, I quite like broccoli, so it’s not really an accurate piece of satire. For that matter, I haven’t (so far!) had a Tesco broccoli enforcement team come to break down my door and gather evidence of my lack of support for the local market gardening economy. But if you live in the UK, you are likely to recognise this type of encounter as being a parody of the cruel business methods of TV Licensing.

My audience is mostly American, and Americans are typically unaware that in the UK (as well as Ireland) there is a system of taxation of televisions, ostensibly to fund public service broadcasting. In a post-Covid world, we can now see how you are being charged for the propaganda that sends you to your death via depopulation injection. Given that you’re also being taxed for the pharmacidal “whackcine” that kills you, and its administration via “deathcare”, TV Licensing is from the same standard Satanic playbook.

I personally desire a television in the same way as I desire leprosy, i.e. not at all. I literally never watch TV — I find the medium unbearable. It plays no part in my life, other than to take hostage friends and family and brainwash them into submission to collectivist ideology. As for watching or listening to the output of the BBC, I would need to wear a hazmat suit, and be paid handsomely on a per minute basis, including danger money and psychic decontamination fees.

The standard business method of TV Licensing is harassment and intimidation. They send endless guilt-inducing notices that have the look and feel of being part of a legal process, but are nothing more than sales pitches. Now remember, this is a corporation working as an outsourcer for the government. They are not public sector employees. I have no contract with TV Licensing, no more than I do with Tesco. If I don’t want to shop at Tesco, I don’t have to justify my decision, not even if they have a government healthcare contract.

Regardless of whether you feel that a television tax is a justifiable thing or not (it’s not), I don’t own a television, and never will. There is no reason for anyone to come to my door demanding to inspect my house, listen for television-like noises, or insist I explain myself — be it TVs or broccoli. These letters are menacing and cause anxiety; it is a form of assault. For some reason the public have accepted this as “normal”, when they would immediately reject it for any other business services supplier.

Notionally you can tell TV Licensing that you don’t own a TV and they will (in theory) leave you alone for two years. I refuse to participate in this process: it falsely acknowledges that they have any legitimacy writing to me demanding money with menaces. There is no reason to presume that anyone who hasn’t bought a TV License is breaking the law. Even if non-compliance is common, I personally am not breaking the law, and the laxity of others doesn’t justify doing wrong to me.

In a way it is quite funny, as they send endless silly invented “status codes” and “investigation” updates. There are many websites out there dedicated to dissecting the TV Licensing scam and scandal. But here is what you need to pay attention to.

Firstly, there is no such thing as a “Legal Occupier”. This is not a letter to me; it’s a letter to nobody. It has no standing in law, and I am under no obligation to open or respond to it. (Also a windowed envelope technically has NO address on it — in law, this is a BLANK piece of folded paper put through my letterbox. But it has a social and psychological effect on the person who gets it — “we know where you live” vibes. But that is of lesser importance.)

Secondly, these intimidatory tactics are fully sanctioned by government, even though they trample established rights of privacy. This tells you all you need to know about government and the court system that facilitates it. They are telling you that they have the power to coerce and control you, and you are not in a position to get remedy or remove this wrongful imposition on your peace. Consider this definition from the Theft Act 1968 of blackmail:

A person is guilty of blackmail if, with a view to gain for himself or another or with intent to cause loss to another, he makes any unwarranted demand with menaces; and for this purpose a demand with menaces is unwarranted unless the person making it does so in the belief— (a)that he has reasonable grounds for making the demand; and (b)that the use of the menaces is a proper means of reinforcing the demand.

I assert that these letters from TV Licensing fit this definition exactly. They are blackmailers; there is no reasonable belief that I have an unlicensed TV. No doubt some people will have paid up just to end the harassment. This alone should be enough to put people at TV Licensing behind bars. The question this then begs is why the state is willing to make this obvious overreach of its powers and commit criminal acts against its own population.

That’s the “aha!” moment: EVERYTHING that the state is doing is based on identity fraud (“Legal Occupier”), misrepresentation, intimidation, impersonation, harassment, and blackmail. It is ALL “TV Licensing”, just done in a less kafkaesque way to gain compliance. The corrupt Bar Association, the Cestui que Vie Act 1666, fake “administrative” courts, police who enforce policy and not law, conflation of legislation and law, secret societies whose oaths conflict with public service, substitution of admiralty or commercial law to strip us of common law rights, contingent “human rights” as privileges, language tricks to get you to contract… it goes on an on.

The broadcast media covers for the criminal state and its henchmen, paid for using the same illegitimate methods. It is almost as if TV Licensing exists as a deliberately comical entity, operating outside of the normal accepted boundaries, in order to convince us that the rest — especially HMRC (the UK’s IRS) — are “the real deal” and an official thing we MUST comply with despite NO contract or consent. We owe the state nothing as living breathing beings, and taxation of personal property is just legalised theft. No, you cannot tax my toaster, whether already bought, or just “income” waiting to be spent on toasting.

These bodies have no more right to your goods and money than Tesco do, no matter what their “company policies”, or how they might conduct a “public survey” as a vote to ask if it’s OK to remove your possessions. They cannot make you do anything, whether to eat broccoli, or earn money to pay a tax to simply exist. The dividing line is between those who believe we have unalienable rights, including to security of our home and its contents, and those who believe our bodies and assets are subject to the whims of the “general good” (like funding public service broadcasting).

The time has come not just to reject TV Licensing, but the entire violent and parasitic “Human Life Licensing” gangster state. Although as a special exception I might not object to a punitive Brussels sprout tax. With menacing inspectors checking for infringement. Just can’t quite see Tesco stepping into that socially valuable role.

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