Oh no, it’s Ben Ramm again

This morning’s edition of BBC Radio 4’s Week in Westminster included an interview about Vince Cable with two Liberal Democrats, Nick Thornsby of Liberal Democrat Voice and Ben Ramm, billed as “former editor of The Liberal, regarded as being on the left of the party”.

What was not mentioned is that The Liberal magazine is defunct and has been for four years. During the six years it was published, it ran to only thirteen editions. Throughout that time, it had no influence or standing in the party but was merely a heavily-subsidised vanity project.

As Liberator’s Radical Bulletin column reported in this April’s edition:

Eccentric magazine The Liberal has not been heard of for some years. That hasn’t stopped lazier parts of the media continuing to invite the magazine’s last editor Ben Ramm to act as a respected pundit on party matters.

The Wikipedia page for The Liberal states that it “ran in print from 2004 to 2009 and online until 2012”. But its own website states that there is a “new website coming soon” and has a link to the old website, which touts for subscriptions to a magazine that no longer exists.

Even when The Liberal was in print, Ramm was never considered an authoritative spokesperson for the left of the party (or any other section of the party for that matter). If that is what the producers of the Week in Westminster wanted, they could have gone to the Social Liberal Forum or any one of many councillors or parliamentarians, or indeed to that august journal Liberator. Clearly the producers need to overhaul their outdated contacts list.

A question of priorities

Today’s second post is also about dumbing down and the BBC. It concerns this evening’s BBC News at Six on BBC1 TV. This was tonight’s running order:

• The leading news item was the conviction and imprisonment of TV presenter Stuart Hall for sexual abuse.
• Second on the bill was the G8 summit in Northern Ireland and the civil war in Syria.

Is Stuart Hall really of greater importance than Syria, by any measure?

The News at Six is the BBC news programme most obviously worried about ‘relevance’. This is evident in the programme’s tendency to pad out stories with meaningless voxpops, in the facile belief that its viewers can understand news only in anecdotal rather than conceptual terms.

Even so, this is the BBC, remember, not a salacious tabloid. And unlike the News at Six, on the BBC News website the G8 summit currently leads the Stuart Hall story.

So which of these two news stories is actually more important? You decide.

Dumbing down doesn’t liberate

Yesterday’s Observer included an entertaining dialogue with the art critic Brian Sewell, who contends that the BBC’s factual programmes are “an insult to the nation”.

Sewell may push his point too far but he still has a point. There seems an overwhelming anxiety at the BBC to make everything ‘relevant’ and ‘accessible’. In practice, this means a resort to demotic language and visual gimmicks. The effect is to trivialise important subjects.

This type of broadcasting may seem more democratic and less ‘elitist’ but it is actually the opposite. Dumbing down tells the audience to limit their aspirations. It makes less rigorous demands of them. It tells them that intelligent concepts are beyond their grasp. This does not open up opportunities but limits social mobility.

The BBC’s original remit was not to “give them what they want” but to give them what they never knew they might like. But in broadcasting as in politics, leadership has been replaced by followership. The tragedy in both politics and broadcasting is that decision-makers are mesmerised by numbers. As with politicians and opinion polls, when broadcasters slavishly follow the approval ratings, the result is not a growth in approval but a steady decline in the audience. In their desperation to please, they cannot understand why they continue to lose popular trust.

In the meantime, Sewell ended the discussion by declining to appear in Top Gear’s ‘Star in a Reasonably Priced Car’:

I don’t think that’s a good idea. I’d be terribly rude in the interview.

A pity. That is one bit of dumbed down television that would definitely be worth watching.

How to rescue the BBC

Every Saturday, I had a ritual. When I bought my copy of the Guardian, I would open the paper’s complementary Guide magazine and methodically go through the TV and radio listings with a red biro, marking all the programmes I wanted to watch or hear for the following week.

I no longer bother. Nearly everything I want to see or hear is on just three channels: BBC2, BBC4 and BBC Radio 4. There are also a few specialist music programmes on BBC Radios 2, 3 and 6. And if there’s nothing else on, there are always the repeats of BBC comedy programmes on Dave.

Despite the hundreds of channels available in the UK (even with the minimum offered on Freeview), when you already know that the only TV worth watching is on two channels, why bother scrutinising the other listings?

Yes, yes, I know these are the viewing habits of the liberal chattering classes. But since you are reading this blog, it is likely you share similar habits. Which means it is also likely you rely heavily on the BBC. Commercial TV and radio have little or nothing to offer (unless you are a sports fan forced to pay Murdoch’s Sky to feed your addiction).

It is why you are prepared to forgive the inanity of BBC1’s Total Wipeout and Winter Wipeout or the sheer tedium of all the daytime TV antiques shows and property porn. Even on the cherished Radio 4, you will put up with yet another unfunny sitcom or dreary afternoon play or shouty interview on the Today programme. Because life without the BBC is unimaginable.

Unfortunately, the BBC has blundered in ways rather more serious than giving airtime to Dale Winton. The Jimmy Savile scandal has delivered another hard knock to the corporation’s reputation. And this has to be set against a background of a general decline in popular trust for all the country’s major institutions.

So the BBC has to stop the rot and restore its reputation, and its supporters must recognise that there are other audiences that never listen to Radio 4.

It is with this in mind that Peter Kellner of YouGov has written an open letter to Tony Hall, the BBC’s new director general, in Prospect magazine. Prospect commissioned YouGov to survey public opinion about how trust in the BBC might be restored and Kellner’s conclusions are well worth reading.

Woman’s Hour gets it wrong

Who are the 100 most powerful women in Britain? This morning, BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour finally unveiled it’s ‘Power List’, defined as “the 100 most powerful women in the UK at the start of 2013”.

Like any good Liberal Democrat, I studied the list to see whether there were any party members included. There is one person with a particularly good claim, Sharon Bowles MEP. She chairs the European Parliament’s Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee, the parliament’s most powerful committee. That makes her arguably the second most powerful woman in European politics after Angela Merkel.

Sharon Bowles is not on the list at all. And neither is Lynne Featherstone, who has played a key role in advancing women’s rights in the coalition government.

But look who has been included. The Queen occupies the no.1 spot, even though she has no real power. The list also includes pop singer Adele, comedians Dawn French and Sarah Millican, and Victoria Beckham.

Who chose this list? The readers of Take a Break? No, it turns out to have been a panel comprising Eve Pollard, Jill Burridge, Oona King, Val McDermid, Dawn O’Porter and Priti Patel, assisted by some unnamed ‘expert witnesses’.

Admittedly, the list takes a broad definition of the term ‘power’, going beyond politics and business to encompass society and culture. Even so, there is a difference between power and fame. To suggest that Victoria Beckham is more powerful than Sharon Bowles is frankly ridiculous.

Politics and the English Language

Everyone involved in politics should read George Orwell’s essay Politics and English Language (see Wikipedia’s summary and the full original text). It was written in 1946, in an era when fascists and communists had abused language with somewhat more serious consequences than the efforts of today’s spin doctors. But it remains just as relevant.

The essay articulates Orwell’s philosophy of good writing. His enemy was unclear prose, which hides the truth rather than expresses it. He argued that, when language is not clear, it usually indicates there is no clear thought behind it. He advocated using plain English and set out six rules to avoid poor writing. Print these rules and stick them next to your computer screen.

Having read Orwell’s essay, do listen to this morning’s edition of BBC Radio 4’s Start the Week (part of a series of special programmes on Radio 4 commemorating Orwell). It was a thoroughly entertaining and intelligent debate about political writing and the legacy of Orwell’s essay. Amongst other things, we learned why today’s politicians feel compelled to use hackneyed phrases that would make Orwell shudder, such as ‘squeezed middle’ and ‘hard-working families’.

Why the British can’t do Borgen

Last week, Nick Thornsby posed an interesting question on Liberal Democrat Voice: “Where is the British Borgen?” (echoing the “Where is the British West Wing?” questions we used to hear).

Meanwhile, James Graham asked a related question on his blog – “Borgen: how realistic is it?” – but ended up tackling Nick Thornsby’s question.

Borgen, as you probably know if you’re the sort of person who reads political blogs, is a Danish TV drama series set in the world of Danish politics. The second series is currently being broadcast in the UK on BBC4. It is well-written, well-acted and realistic without lapsing into documentary style.

Borgen’s strength is the blending of the political and the personal. The characters are rounded and shown as fallible human beings, wrestling with both the competing demands of their political and personal lives and the competing demands of their ideals and realpolitik.

Despite (or perhaps because of) their human failings, the characters retain our sympathy and, with one or two exceptions, are a good advertisement for the virtues of public service. Politics is not viewed through rose-tinted spectacles, though – far from it. It is shown as a messy business, which chews up people and spits them out. But the characters are mostly decent people struggling to do their best, and in that sense Borgen is a positive depiction of politics.

So where is the British Borgen? Before we go any further, we need a sense of proportion. Borgen’s UK audience is about 800,000. For a drama series about politics, broadcast on BBC4 in the original Danish with English subtitles, that’s pretty good going. But it’s not the sort of audience to give Simon Cowell sleepless nights. A British Borgen, no matter how good, would probably have limited appeal even if it starred Tess Daly and Keith Lemon.

We then need to ask whether the question of a British Borgen is a fair one. Some have claimed that there already are many British Borgens. In the past decade, we’ve had The Amazing Mrs Pritchard and Party Animals. Both series took a view of politics comparable to Borgen but both were ratings failures and are largely forgotten. Then there are series such as Edge of Darkness, GBH, House of Cards, Our Friends in the North and State of Play – all top-notch TV dramas but all were about political corruption or interference in politics by the military or security services. None had anything positive to say about politics.

For a true view of how the British merge politics and entertainment, one has to look instead at comedy – the sitcoms Yes Minister/Yes Prime Minister, The New Statesman and The Thick of It, and the panel games Have I Got News For You and Mock the Week. In isolation, each of these shows is quality entertainment, but together they promote a thoroughly cynical view of politics. In fact, they are more than cynical; they are nihilistic, suggesting that the whole business of politics is risible and that no one in public life is trustworthy or competent. The problem isn’t that these programmes satirise individual politicians or specific types of behaviour but that they imply the whole enterprise is doomed.

Antony Jay, co-writer of Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister, admitted in an interview that he had a political agenda. He was an advocate of public choice theory, which holds that politicians and civil servants are motivated primarily by self-interest. Subsequent writers were probably not so high-minded but simply out for cheap laughs.

An anti-political attitude now prevails but where does it come from? It is tempting to blame the recent behaviour of corrupt politicians, but corruption is as old as the hills. The parliamentary expenses scandal of 2009/10 and the cash-for-questions affair of the 1990s were tame by historical standards and served only to reinforce existing popular attitudes.

Perhaps, then, the cause is Britain’s cynical culture? It is the most commonly cited reason for anti-political attitudes. While Britain has long been noted for its ironic humour, the other side of that coin is a corrosive cynicism. But that didn’t stop Britain making political TV dramas such as Bill Brand as late as the mid-1970s.

The key cultural change seems to have occurred during the 1970s, when cynicism became much more powerful. I strongly suspect it was when the culture of ‘cool’ moved from the counter-culture to the mainstream (a trend fully explored in the excellent book Cool Rules).

Precisely what is ‘cool’ changes continually, but a constant thread is an attitude of ironic detachment. Since ‘cool’ is about cynicism rather than doing anything positive, it follows that concepts such as a sense of public duty or caring passionately about a cause must be stigmatised as ‘uncool’. As these concepts are vital to political action, politics can never be ‘cool’.

We should also not forget that, in Britain, the TV industry, including most of the commissioning editors and TV critics, is based in London. Here, the culture of ‘cool’ is more intense, particularly in the incestuous world of the media. Imagine proposing an uncynical drama series about politics to a TV executive inhabiting that world. You would be on the receiving end of the most supercilious sneer in Hoxton.

The ‘uncool’ concepts of a sense of public duty and of caring passionately about a cause are central to Borgen. Despite this, Borgen was still shown on British TV, partly on the strength of the Danish detective series The Killing and also because Borgen is foreign and subtitled, so an art house aesthetic kicks in. This would have overcome any qualms about a positive depiction of politics, which ordinarily would have offended cool rules.

This culture isn’t going to change any time soon so, for now, we will have to carry on outsourcing serious political drama to foreign TV companies. At home, meanwhile, we will continue amusing ourselves to death.

The worst claim of 2012

Admit it. You always thought Jimmy Savile was a bit of a perv. You weren’t surprised when the allegations became public. You’d known all along.

Except that you didn’t know. Nobody knew, apart from Savile’s victims and a few people who worked closely with him who were too scared to talk.

Saturday’s Guardian ‘Weekend’ magazine perpetuates the myth that everybody knew, in an article by Oliver Burkeman ironically titled “Worst ideas of 2012: ignoring reality”:

Savile wasn’t a man who concealed his creepiness behind a respectable facade. Creepiness was his brand; looking back now, it’s as if he was daring the world to point out that he seemed so much like a sex offender.

This is utter bollocks. Savile was a genuinely trusted figure. That is why he was chosen to front advertising campaigns for British Rail (“This is the age of the train”) and road safety (“Clunk click every trip”). The advertising agencies that planned those campaigns knew what they were doing. In their search for the ideal front man, they would have been looking for a face that people trusted, and their audience research would have told them that Savile fitted the bill.

In the highly unlikely event that you actually knew Savile was a sex offender, you will by now have presented your evidence to the police. Otherwise, your claims that you ‘knew’ are a fantasy.

Conservative dogma in a nutshell

BBC & NHS: Is there a link?

Former Tory MP and minister Steve Norris asks whether there is a link between the problems of the BBC and NHS.

His answer is not what you might expect.

The curious question of Tory patriotism

The global affairs magazine Monocle recently published its annual Soft Power Survey and the results make interesting reading. The United Kingdom has taken the No.1 spot from the USA.

When a nation’s power is measured, it is usually in terms of ‘hard power’, which is power as conventionally understood: military, industrial and financial. ‘Soft power’ is less tangible but no less influential, and includes such things as politics, diplomacy, business, culture, media, sport and education.

When it comes to soft power, Britain starts with an enormous advantage, as the home of the English language. But this year, the London Olympics and the Jubilee celebrations have added to a continuing string of international successes in pop music, acting and sport.

Britain retains some hard power but any lingering status as a global superpower was definitively shattered by the Suez Crisis in 1956. There is no reason to suppose that Britain will regain such status in our lifetimes.

Yet here we are, 56 years after Suez, and most of the Conservative Party (along with UKIP) continues under the delusion that Britain is still a superpower. It is expressed in terms of a go-it-alone braggadocio, with a corresponding disdain for Johnny Foreigner.

It is the politics of the gut, not the brain. And it is completely and utterly counter-productive.

Nowhere is this more evident than the current posturing over the European Union budget. There is an argument against increasing the budget but it cannot be won by any single EU member state acting alone. There are 27 member states, so there must be patient diplomacy and the building of alliances. Unfortunately, the Conservative Party left the mainstream centre-right EPP group in 2009 and its only allies now are a few cranks from the far-right fringe.

But the Conservatives probably don’t really care, since their whole strategy towards Europe is governed by an overriding need to play to the gallery at home. Indeed, stage-managing disputes of this sort aids this strategy since it mollifies increasingly Eurosceptic Tory backbenchers, plays well in the Tory press and helps fend off the threat from UKIP.

No one mentions that this strategy diminishes British influence and makes a bigger EU budget more likely.

Then there is the Conservatives’ increasing contempt for the BBC and a desire for it to be broken up and flogged off, because it is seen as a nest of bearded lefty liberal cosmopolitan intellectuals; because its news coverage is ‘biased’ (i.e. not Tory); because it offends some abstract principle of market fundamentalism; or just to please Rupert Murdoch.

So we get swingeing cuts to the BBC World Service, one of the most effective and certainly the most cost-effective means of soft power Britain has.

Then there are the big cuts to cultural subsidies, likely to lead to the death of repertory theatre in provincial Britain, and a consequent drying-up of the main source of acting talent that impresses the world so much. Likewise, many school playing fields are being flogged off and local sporting facilities closed down, making it harder for Britain to ensure a supply of sporting stars and medal winners for the future.

Then there are the indiscriminate cuts to immigration, which hobble British businesses, and cuts to the numbers of foreign students admitted, which means universities lose income and in the longer run that Britain loses valuable foreign friends and ambassadors.

Still, no one wants the smell of curry in their street, do they?

The more you look at it, the more you realise that, in practical terms, this Tory/UKIP posturing is thoroughly unpatriotic, since it diminishes British power (both hard and soft). Frankly, it makes us look ridiculous.

Still, at least it gets good headlines in the Daily Express, and that’s the main thing.

Why Gaza matters more than Jimmy Savile

The Jimmy Savile affair has caused some people to extrapolate bizarre conclusions about the BBC. The scandal revealed weaknesses in BBC news management but is no basis for an overarching critique of public broadcasting.

The BBC’s reporting of the conflict in Gaza is no basis for destroying public broadcasting either. As this piece on the Electronic Intifada makes clear, however, the BBC’s obligation to provide ‘balanced’ reporting can lead to distortions when this obligation is interpreted as a requirement to present Gaza and Israel as equal protagonists. And the goal of balance is not served by a failure to provide context.

This isn’t a question of siding with either Israel or the Palestinians, but providing news that gives us an accurate understanding of the situation.

News reporting of this region is never easy when every media outlet is put under intense pressure by the pro-Israel lobby, and anyone who doesn’t toe the line is automatically accused of anti-semitism (a threadbare technique of intimidation that is overdue for retirement). The BBC should be able to stand up to such bullying.

I have no interest in hearing Israeli propaganda (or Hamas propaganda for that matter). I also have no interest in the conflict being reduced to a meaningless sequence of whoosh-bang explosions. The current conflict deserves more thorough scrutiny than it is getting.