Airwaves tax
Sir: Posterity will be surprised, not only that we jailed hundreds of impecunious mothers for failing to buy television licences (`Britain's most dangerous women?', 20 May), but that successive British governments got away with charg- ing for the use of the so-called 'ether' in the first place. We who, as boys in the 1920s, made our own 'rag and bone' crys- tal sets found that we were required to fork out ten shillings to use them, our first taste of the tyranny of the executive. How could they charge us for listening to Paris, Hilversum or the Hague? But they did. Lord Beaverbrook's papers demanded to know by what right the postmaster-gener- al taxed a facility of nature which he did not own and did nothing to service or replenish; why did he not also charge us for the air we breathed? Then, suddenly, Lord Beaverbrook lost interest.
With some difficulty, the public were per- suaded that a compulsory levy to fund a monopoly was better than the American free-for-all system. Even when the BBC monopoly was broken by ITV the power to charge people for receiving wireless tele- graphy signals was retained. Can we really justify banging up mothers to support the present BBC?
E.S. Turner
21 Woburn Court, Stanmore Road, Surrrey
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