We already know that Prime Minister Boris Johnson, AKA BoJo, is promising British citizens a hard Brexit in 2020.  That's the primary wish he'll fulfill for voters anxious to return to a sovereign Britain, one that's no longer a vassal of the micromanaging European Union.

But there's another dream dear to the hearts of well over 50% of British citizens.  They want relief from the £154.50 ($202.14) they're required to pay the British government annually for the privilege of owning a television set.

The fee is used to pay for the BBC, a station that has lost all of its former cachet, whether as a purveyor of highbrow fare to the masses or as the innovative station that introduced the world to Monty Python.  The BBC is now just a reliable outlet for hard-left worldviews on every subject.

According to a YouGov poll, only 27% of people in Britain want to maintain the status quo.  The largest number — 50% — want the BBC to compete in the free market like everyone else, either via advertising or subscriptions (à la Netflix or Hulu subscriptions).  A mere 7% are open to the possibility of a general tax, rather than a fee; 2% had ideas too offbeat to mention; and a surprising 14% neither know nor care.  (The last mentioned group probably gets all its news from the internet.)

British discontent with having to pay a hefty fee for the "privilege" of watching television is nothing new.  Already in 2015, the Telegraph, a conservative-leaning paper, published a short video explaining to the Brits, and everyone else, just how far-reaching the demand for a license is, as well as the limited options available for avoiding that license:

Tommy Robinson, the working-class Brit who became a target of the British establishment, including the BBC, for calling out the way in which the establishment was working Muslims and sharia principles deep into the fiber of British life, prepared a whole video explaining citizens' rights when it comes to television licensing.  His basic principle is that people should not have to pay for government propaganda aimed at destroying their political and social interests, not to mention their reputations.

For BoJo, then, ending the license scheme is a winning issue, and he's promised to investigate its feasibility:

The news [that the majority of British citizens hate paying a TV license] comes weeks after Boris Johnson — while on the General Election campaign trail — said the BBC licence fee is outdated and could be axed. 

He said he was looking at whether it made long-term sense to impose a £154.50 annual levy on all homes with TV sets — and criticised the current enforcement regime which allows the corporation to prosecute non-payers.

[snip]

The Prime Minister made his unscheduled announcement about the BBC during a visit to a haulage firm in Washington, Tyne and Wear, deep in Labour's heartlands on December 9.

Asked by a worker whether he would axe the BBC levy, he replied: 'How long can you justify a system whereby everybody who has a TV has to pay to fund a particular set of TV and radio channels? That is the question.

'At this stage, we are not planning to get rid of all TV licence fees, although I am certainly looking at it.

'What I will say is that — I am under pressure not to extemporise policy on the hoof – but you have to ask yourself whether that kind of approach to funding a TV, a media organisation, still makes sense in the long term, given the way other organisations manage to fund themselves.

'That is all I will say. I think the system of funding by what is effectively a general tax, isn't it, everybody has a TV, it bears reflection, let me put it that way.'

The BBC is fighting back, promising reform.  But when you're an entrenched, taxpayer-funded, elitist institution, somehow that reform is always more of the same.  BoJo would be wise to listen to British citizens rather than to the BBC itself.