Nothing for something
Sir: Perhaps Paul Johnson (The press, 15 September) thinks, like Dr Goebbels, that if you must repeat something often enough people will believe it, which is why he reiterates that the BBC licence fee is a poll tax. It isn't. You don't have to pay it if you don't have a television, but when you do you get something for your money, rubbish most of it, but something.
Not so with the poll tax. When it was introduced in Scotland the Independent 'Can you give me something to stop me worrying about Prince Charles?' found someone living in a remote cottage without piped water, electricity, gas, sewerage or roads who still had to pay. Not exactly someone who, in Mr Johnson's words, 'enjoys local government services'. The poll tax is an unavoidable tax on being alive, something progressively unattractive in Mrs Thatcher's Britain.
Charles Fyffe
52 Holmdale Road, London NW6
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