"..what is clearly a government rip-off like the TV tax."

The BBC isn't the government. It's a corporation with its own management and board of governors. The licence fee is a flat fee that pays for all BBC broadcasts (including the World Service -- much valued in countries whose own broadcasters actually are arms of government). It isn't a tax in the sense of money that goes into general govt expenditure -- it pays solely for BBC output.

Of course if someone's ideologically anti-taxation it's a waste of time arguing, since anything other than point-of-sale payment is anathema to them.

Another point (directed at anti-licence agitators generally): If you don't own a TV, you don't have to pay for BBC output (and you can still listen to radio broadcasts). However, whether you own a TV or not, you still have to pay for advert-funded TV, since advertisers recoup their promotional expenditure by passing on the cost to the people who buy their products (do I really have to explain such an obvious fact?). So such TV isn't "free" at all, and you don't have any way of knowing how much you're paying, do you?

There are plenty of (privately-owned) media people who dislike the BBC licence, and the BBC in general, because they see its size, range and popularity as a threat to their own money-making plans (Rupert Murdoch regularly uses his Brit newspapers to attack the BBC), and I can't help wondering if such an agenda has found a voice here.