Beginning of the end for TV licence?

OUR changing language. A cop involved in the daylight arrest of a drug dealer in Dudley said of the accused: "He clearly felt he bossed the streets."

IN REALITY, it's the cops that boss the streets. Or at least they would if we ever saw them.

WE MAY be seeing the beginning of the end of the TV licence, a relic from the 1920s which should have been scrapped years ago. The Commons culture, media and sport committee is holding "fundamental examination" of the future of the BBC and some big guns are demanding radical change. David Elstein, a former chief executive of Channel 5, points out that TV licence offences accounted for more than one in ten of all criminal prosecutions last year, with 180,000 people accused of watching television without the licence. At a time of bedroom taxes and food banks, is anybody surprised? I defy anyone to think of a nastier way of funding the state broadcaster than demanding a levy of £145.50 and then sending out detector vans to hunt down the non-payers.

IMAGINE the outrage among BBC journalists if the Government announced a blanket £145.50 surcharge on every household, rich or poor, to pay for a new road or power station. There would be howls of fury at the unfairness and endless interviews with hard-up families unable to pay. Yet BBC bosses are more than happy with the TV licence and warn that any change is a dire threat to Auntie Beeb's future. Don't believe them.

IF YOU need proof that we can cope without licences, consider angling. If you want to go fishing in England you need a bureaucratic and much-ignored rod licence issued by the Environment Agency. In Scotland, you don't. If the Scots can manage without a rod licence, so could we. And all of us could manage with a better system than the outdated, iniquitous TV licence.

I PEEK nervously from behind the lace curtains at Chateau Rhodes. The streets outside are not yet foaming with blood and goulash so I must assume the Bulgarians and Romanians are not yet overwhelming us. And why would they? Take away the seasonal fruit and veg pickers and there's only one place these newcomers want to be, and that is London, now the biggest city in the EU. London's population has soared from 6.8 million 30 years ago to about 8.5 million today and will hit 9 million by 2020.

WITH every passing year London becomes less like the rest of England, not so much our capital as a mighty, separate city-state like mediaeval Venice or Florence, with its own economy, culture and languages. In the 21st century the most important border in the UK is not the one at Dover nor the one with Scotland. It is the M25.

MEANWHILE, a reader takes me to task for suggesting that EU migration policy encourages the movement of "entire populations". He points to last week's Guardian report on how airline bookings from Romania to the UK for early 2014 are actually down on the same period in 2013. This may be an interesting snapshot but the bigger picture, from the Baltic to Hungary, is of massive losses of population as the more prosperous EU states lure the brightest and best away from their homelands. Lithuania's population has tumbled by 13.7 per cent since 2001 and Hungary's by 7 per cent since 1980. In some regions towns and villages have seen their youngsters head west and have become silent communities of the aged and infirm. The EU's much-vaunted "Free movement of labour" is a dream for some and a nightmare for others.

MORE on computer translation. A reader tells me the English proverb, "out of sight, out of mind' was translated by computer into Russian and back to English. It came back as: "Invisible, Insane."