A license to own a television?

Simon Heffer, writing in The Telegraph:

There has been much competition for the most appalling story of the week, but one contender is the case of Hannah Humphris, a 69-year-old from Neath, who was persecuted by the Gestapo who enforce television licensing despite her not having owned a set since 1978. The last letter was headed “Official Warning” and threatened her with an interview under caution were she caught watching television. That was bad enough; then, when publicly humiliated for harassing Miss Humphris, TV Licensing said it would stop writing to her but added that she may receive a visit from an inquiry officer to verify she has no set. That is the outrage. What right does such a person have to enter her home? If you don’t drive, you don’t need a driving licence. Will the authorities soon start entering the homes of people without a driving licence looking for car keys? It is not compulsory to have a television and if a man turns up on Miss Humphris’s doorstep demanding she prove she has none, I hope she will call the police.

Okay, so Hannah does not have a TV license. But nefarious 69-year-old British women are often known to be up to something illicit, and the dastardly Hannah might have obtained a black-market TV, which she watches surreptitiously, with the curtains drawn and the sound so low that she has to sit right next to it to hear, lest the neighbors overhear.

However, the bureaucrats heading the television Gestapo licensing office note that Hannah has no TV license. Now, if you yourself happen to be in the TV-license-issuing (that is, tax collecting) business, then surely you are already angry about this license-less Hannah yourself by now. Perhaps 20 years in the Tower will teach her to pay her TV tax, no matter whether she owns a TV or not.

But you're probably saying, "Now wait a dadgum minnit! You mean that ya gots ta have a tax stamp in Britain just to watch The Simpsons?" Why, yes, yes you do:

You must be covered by a valid TV Licence if you watch or record television programmes as they're being shown on TV. It makes no difference what equipment you use - whether it’s a laptop, PC, mobile phone, digital box, DVD recorder or a TV set - you still need a licence.

"There'll always be an England," though increasingly we across the Big Pond are wondering how (and why).