no one is going to prison for not paying the license fee. the article brings up prison, but only as a way to sneakily associate it with non-license fee payment in a way that clearly worked on you

And yet many people (mainly women) go to prison for, in essence, not paying the licence fee. The fact that they technically go to prison for not complying with a court order is merely splitting hairs.

I cancelled my license in the wake of the Saville scandal when it was finally admitted what was common knowledge inside the BBC: that they had been covering up a sex offender on their payroll for years. Obviously 'lessons were learned' so when Huw Edwards came along they repeated all the same mistakes.

is it splitting hairs though? they're going to prison for refusing to engage with the justice system, which is a very normal thing to go to prison for the world over. what the original offence was isn't really relevant

> is it splitting hairs though? they're going to prison for refusing to engage with the justice system, which is a very normal thing to go to prison for the world over. what the original offence was isn't really relevant

It is relevant, though. If someone who wouldn't otherwise have been dragged into the receiving end of the justice system gets dragged into it, and then has to comply with all its bureaucracy, it matters whether or not that person should have been dragged into it. ("Should" in both a legal sense and a sense of morality or equity.)

my perspective is that we shouldn't be shaping our laws based on whether the least competent 0.001% of society can deal with the administrative implications. if you're so incompetent that you can't handle any of the many many stages between paying your license fee and going to prison, then you've got bigger issues and perhaps you should be in care or still in school

on the other hand if they're deliberately not engaging with those stages, then it's hard to really feel much sympathy

For the most part it's just because they're poor and can't budget either a one off or monthly payment for the fee.

They don't need to - the court will take it out of their wages or be edits before they receive them.

You have to actively try to defraud the court by lying about your earnings to face prison.

if it goes all the way to going the stage of going to prison, then there are clearly bigger issues than this

You keep mentioning the "mainly women" bit. Does that really matter that much? If mainly men were the ones impacted, would that change how good or bad the policy is?

It matters under the UK's equality laws. If something like this affects one class more than another then there's an obligation to learn why that is, as the answer may lead to a court finding the, in this case enforcement process, to be unlawful.