Mr. A***** F******
Customer Relations
TV Licensing TM
www.tvlicensing.co.uk
Bristol
BS98 1TL
28 March 2007
Your ref: COM/224767
1. I intend to file suit against TV
Licensing TM
2. I shall pursue punitive damages
if I again receive a letter from TV Licensing TM of
the sort complained of below
3 Request for copies of all form
letters mailed by TV Licensing TM
Dear Mr. F******,
Thank you for your letter of 27 March.
On Monday I received yet another letter
from TV Licensing TM commencing as
follows:
THIS
ADDRESS IS UNLICENSED
YOUR
DETAILS ARE BEING PASSED
TO
OUR ENFORCEMENT OFFICERS
Despite being sent
previous reminders, you still have not purchased a new TV license.
etc. etc.
and this a full month if you please
after I had registered in the strongest possible terms my sense of
outrage and violation that these letters provoke in me.
I have decided to file suit against TV
Licensing TM in respect of these
letters. I shall investigate whether there is a case to be had for a
criminal prosecution. I am indeed presently busy but I expect to have
completed my current studies to such degree as I believe I can carry
them forward by the end of August and at that point I will start
proceeding against TV Licensing TM.
I shall do all this in the public
interest.
I am fascinated, enchanted is perhaps a
better word, by your advice: 'You are under no obligation to permit
the officer to enter your home, but we cannot stop our mailings
unless you do'.
Well I don't have the time presently
to adequately convey my feelings about this and I rather suspect that
TV Licensing TM is so far gone in its
sense of self-importance, or whatever it is that makes it act like
this, to make it pointless. Suffice it to say that I never imagined
that I would be expected to invite TV Licensing TM's
officer into my home. I expected a door-step interview in public view
of my neighbours while TV Licensing TM's
spooks pointed antennas at my home from within their very
conspicuously marked van (I noticed one the other day) and filled my
home with their sophisticated investigative and, for all I know,
possibly harmful microwaves. The idea that I cannot stop TV Licensing TM sending me these injurious letters
until I permit one of their officers to enter and snoop around my
home is absolutely fantastic.
In this most recent letter to me TV
Licensing TM claim that they catch
1,000 license evaders daily, the benefit in recovered license fees
presumably therefore accruing to the BBC at the rate of 135,500 pounds sterling
a day. If I again receive a letter from TV Licensing TM
of the sort quoted above I shall press for punitive damages in my
suit at the rate of 135,500 pounds sterling a day from the day of my once
again receiving such a letter until the day my suit is judged.
I shan't respond to your letter in
detail right now. It is not that I do not want to but I have still
not finally concluded my reflections on these matters and my other
(mathematical) reflections take overriding precedence at a time like
this. Indeed I would normally have abandoned the present dispute with
TV Licensing TM were it not that I feel
it so overwhelmingly my clear public duty to pursue it.
In the first place let me merely record
how disappointed I am that you cannot provide me with a copy of the
letter that finally provoked me into identifying myself to TV
Licensing TM or face criminal
investigation [inserted: I had mislaid this letter]. I was left in no doubt by the contents of this letter
that that was the situation. I frankly disbelieve TV Licensing TM
cannot provide me with a copy and I believe that they are rather in
reality trying to evade an issue about which they are fully aware
they are in the wrong.
However the remedy is straightforward:
they can provide me with copies of all the form letters they send out
so that I may identify the letter in question.
I cannot agree (with what you say you
feel sure I will agree) that there is a fine line between getting
your message across (I take it you mean TV Licensing TM
making their legitimate demands) and being offensive. There is
nothing fine about that line except perhaps in (or so I expect) what
it is that TV Licensing TM's legal
advisers tell them they can get away with in cajoling and bullying
the people they send these letters to. Rather everything that TV
Licensing TM does in respect of these
letters is coarse and offensive and an affront to personal dignity,
and how else could it be otherwise when the whole process is so
transparently automated and so plainly out of TV Licensing TM's
control?
But more interesting is the implication
of the stress you make, presumably on behalf of TV Licensing TM,
that what is at stake here is merely a question of being offensive.
That is not why I plan to file suit
against TV Licensing TM.
Rather what is at stake here is our
common liberty to enjoy the Queen's peace and that is why I propose
to bring TV Licensing TM before Her
Majesty's courts. Nor is this common liberty merely some overblown
interpretation of a European conception of human rights but rather it
concerns a conception of our civil liberty that long preceded it and
is at the heart of everything it is to be a citizen of the United
Kingdom.
TV Licensing TM will
find me a determined advocate and I shall win and they will lose and
I shall win because I am right and they are wrong.
In my letter of around 10 March to your
colleague Mrs. H***** representing TV Licensing TM I
said that I flat-out insisted on receiving some informations which in
particular included whether TV Licensing TM ever
registered the fact that I had returned their letters on the each
occasion I had received them with the information that no TV was held
at this address.
I do not see how TV Licensing TM can
plausibly represent that they never received these letters I returned
and I flat-out insist on knowing exactly how they responded to
this information. At a later date I shall concern myself with the
statutuory rights granted to TV Licensing TM in its mandate to administer and enforce the licensing system and how
it represents those rights in its letters.
I shall charge 60,000 pounds sterling for this
letter bringing the current bill for my time to 75,250 pounds sterling.
I ask you to note that the first line
of my address is '2 Y Glyn' and not 'Flat 2 Y Glen'.
Yours sincerely,
William Boyd
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