Election 2019: BBC licence could be scrapped, Boris Johnson hints
Boris Johnson has hinted he may scrap the licence fee that funds the BBC, during an unscripted question and answer session while visiting the North East of England.
Asked if he would consider scrapping the licence fee as a whole, Johnson said he was “under pressure not to extemporise policy on the hoof” but admitted it was something he was looking at.
Speaking in Sunderland, he added: “You have to ask yourself whether that kind of approach towards funding a TV, a media organisation, makes sense in the long term, given the way other organisations manage to fund themselves.”
Going on to describe the licence fee as “effectively a general tax”, Johnson said: “How long can you justify a system whereby everyone who has a TV has to pay to fund a particular set of TV and radio channels?”
Johnson also fended off further questions about a four-year-old boy with suspected pneumonia, who was pictured having to sleep on the floor of a hospital. The Prime Minister had taken a journalist’s phone and pocketed it, rather than look at the picture, while stressing a Conservative government would invest further in the NHS after Brexit.
This morning Johnson raised questions over the expansion of Heathrow and the HS2 high speed rail link between London and Birmingham. He told LBC while he wasn’t “temperamentally hostile” to big infrastructure projects, he had concerns about both of them.
Having pledged to lie down in front of bulldozers rather than allow a third runway at Heathrow, Johnson said he “would have to find some way of honouring that promise”.
Previously in the campaign, Johnson has inadvertently revealed a Tory government would raise the threshold for National Insurance contributions, a policy which was to be launched as part of the Conservatives manifesto, ahead of time.
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