Greentext

Do y’all brits actually pay for the license?

Licence. (Lisense is a verb in British English.)

Yes. It funds the BBC which is public service broadcasting, usually very high quality and has no advertisements. You aren't allowed to watch BBC or any live television whatsoever in the UK without a TV licence.

Can you be arrested for not paying it?

Not any more. It's now a civil rather than criminal offence. The conservatives didn't like that they even today tend to report facts alongside opinions, so they threatened to remove the licence fee. Instead they made of civil rather than criminal, so non payment is only punishable by a fine, which of course means it's only illegal for poor people who can't gamble the fine.

They used to send detector vans round to addresses that don't have a licence for enforcement. The ads said they could tell if you were watching telly. I suspect they detected aerials, but that was in the days of Cathode Ray Tubes, and maybe you can detect them being on, I don't know.

How does it work exactly?

They just send a bill to everyone in the post, warning of the consequences of non payment. You can pay by direct debit for less paperwork. Compliance is pretty high. It used to be higher before the conservatives started meddling.

The conservatives would love to get rid of the BBC and the NHS but they know it would be an absolute disaster for them politically because the people love them, flawed as they are, so they just underfund them badly and then complain about how bad they are.

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That strategy initially worked with the trains, which the conservatives privatised in the 1980s on the grounds that the reliability was poor and the rolling stock was badly out of date, but after a few decades of privatised rail, the promise of competition driving up quality and driving down prices has proven very hollow indeed, and now nationalisation is popular in every demographic group including conservative voters.

The East Coast Main Line went bust so many times that no commercial operators would touch it and the government was forced to step in. The civil servants were told to look for efficiency savings and make it more commercially viable, but when they did that it became the most reliable and punctual line in the UK with the best customer satisfaction, and cost far less in subsidies than the privatised lines. Who knew that extracting the most money possible for shareholders would drive down quality whilst driving up prices and government costs?

The current labour government is nationalising rail on the cheap by simply not renewing the franchises when they expire. Manchester's buses have come back under local authority regulatory control. Some things are getting better under labour, but some things are not and the prime minister seems to think that Biden is the best example to follow in many ways.