Adverts between sets at Wimbledon? Whatever next!

I was watching the ladies singles final yesterday, where Serena won her "calendar" Grand Slam (don't mention it to her, whatever you do, she doesn't want to be jinxed, or something) when at the end of the first set the BBC chose to put a promotional ad for the Great British Bakeoff, I think it was.

I could be wrong, but I think this is the first time this has ever happened on the BBC. I also think that if I know anything about the average British tennis fan, the beeb will have received a slew of complaints about this unprecedented incursion into one of the most sacred of all TV cows- a Wimbledon final. We await 2 pm coming round to see if they do the same thing with the Men's final.

But what we may be looking at here is the first response to the government decision to make the BBC foot the bill for exempting the over 75s from paying their TV licence fee- a bill which I understand
will come in at over £700 million. And this in turn is a precursor to the government withdrawing the licence fee altogether, rendering the BBC just another commercial channel. This is what happens when you vote in a party that is never happier than when it is cutting public expenditure.

As someone who is well off, I find myself in the slightly embarrassing position of benefiting from George Osborne's ideological approach to the nation's economy, one that would fit well into the credo of the conservatives of the mid-19th century, when capital ruled everything and there were few if any benefits offered to the disadvantaged beyond the prospect of a life in the workhouse. It's where we're headed right now. My mum's house is worth nearly 300 grand, and her liquid reserves are also healthy, and we would have had to pay several thousand pounds in inheritance taxes upon her death- but not now, after Wednesday's budget. But this was money my brother and I could have afforded to pay fairly easily, taking away only a small fraction of the large bequest we will both enjoy. For some reason, Mr Osborne wishes to make our progress through life easier, rather than people at the bottom of the wages pyramid. Odd, that...

At this moment people in Cardiff are running a campaign to save our local libraries- another ideological target of the Tories. Where's the profit in libraries? they ask. And so councils, stricken by the cuts they are being forced to make, have perhaps understandably gone after the libraries, which are only bleeding money and offering no hope of any financial return. Unfortunately, this ignores the subtler benefits of libraries, like the fact that they are heavily used by immigrant populations who in them find their only access to the internet or indeed any opportunity to get a grip on the English language and culture, which is something I thought politicians of all parties would wish to encourage. It would seem that I am wrong about that, and that the Tories in particular don't really care about that at all.