or How the Children’s BBC Website Channels the Anti-Globalisation Lobby. Inspired by a comments debate here I typed in the word “trade” into the search box of the Children’s BBC Newsround site and took a look at what I got. Some of the results referred to illegal trade in animals or animal skins. I excluded these from consideration – perhaps prematurely.
My first significant result was “How fair is international trade?” – a lesson plan on the CBBC website provided by Christian Aid.
That’s three issues for debate before we even start. A lesson plan from Christian Aid on the BBC. A right little tranzi love-nest. Excuse me, why are the BBC doing lesson plans anyway? I must have missed the widespread public consultation that preceded the decision that a portion of your license fee was best spent giving a state-subsidised body market share in the lesson plan business. Tough luck on anyone in the private sector who thought that there might be an honest penny to be made providing resources for teachers. Never mind, anyone who wants to make a profit from education is obviously evil and best kept far from our little ones. Why, they might start saying “on the other hand” and contumaciously adding counter-arguments to the lesson plans that Christian Aid provides. At least we can trust the BBC not to do that. I’ll come to what changes the BBC does make to Christian Aid material later. For now, just bear in mind that the lesson plan includes this sentence:
Such companies can provide work and enrich a country’s economy – or they can exploit the workers with low pay and destroy the environment.
OK, so what else does this Christian Aid lesson stamped with the BBC imprimatur plan actually teach? It starts with an “icebreaker”:
Ask the class:
What do we know about the fairness of rules?
What are the risks if powerful people make up the rules for trade? Prompt: Rig them in their own favour, they behave unfairly.
How can we make sure the rules of trade are fair? Prompt: Let everyone get involved in making them, have a referee.
An exceptionally independent-minded child might wonder if the “powerful people” who rig the rules in their own favour might include governments or the referees their club appoints – but as any observer of playground dynamics knows, most children are not independent minded.
On to the next one. Fair Trade chocolate. It’s OK: an account of a cocoa-growers’ association. Two and a quarter centuries of economic theory make the reference in the opening sentence to a “fair price” controversial. Maybe one day the BBC will hire someone who is aware of this.
Could trade replace aid? Another lesson plan, this time from the Fairtrade foundation. I don’t have any blanket opposition to people using that wonderful capitalist spur to ethical behaviour, the brand name, to enable bodies like the Fairtrade foundation to get advantageous terms for producers and let consumers buy a feelgood factor with their coffee. But is there any good reason why the BBC always publishes (or perhaps commissions?) lesson plans written by bodies like the Fairtrade foundation and never by free-market think tanks, or indeed multi-national companies?
This plan is basically the same format as the Christian Aid one: get the little bleeders to prepare for a career as bureaucrats by writing some Rules. Do not get them to discuss why they or anyone else should assume the right to write Rules governing voluntary exchange between other people. After a diversion into Marx’s Labour Theory of Value (“The producers will get a price that reflects their effort”) the plan goes on to finish with that old teacher’s standby, the quotable number. We are told that someone from CAFOD says “Poor countries currently lose £500bn a year in unfair trade.” I was amused by the care taken to source the unimportant part of the quote (which fellow-tranzi said it to whom) compared to the blithe unconcern about the important part (how the figure was calculated and whether it is true).
My next result was “How Fair is International Trade?” Good heavens, a lesson plan from Christian Aid! So good they named it twice. The one I mentioned earlier dates from March 2005. This one carries the date September 2004. My energy ran out before I could establish whether there were any minor changes of wording but I can confirm that the background is white rather than blue and the incomprehensible picture of papier maché puppets is placed at the top rather than to the right.
What is Fair Trade? This tells you what its supporters think fair trade is and says famous people like it.
“Make Trade Fair has celebrity supporters such as Coldplay’s Chris Martin and U2’s Bono.”
Or, as the Daily Ablution described him, “the philosophe and future Nobel Laureate” Chris Martin. Why the BBC failed to mention the “theologian/ethicist Thom Yorke of Radiohead” is a matter between the Board of Governors and Mr Yorke’s publicist.
This article also features external links to Fairtrade and Make Trade Fair. Naturally there are no external links to any group failing to toe the party line. Internal links take you to the other BBC articles in the series, called “What is the World Trade Organisation?”, “What are transnational corporations?” etc. I had a go at them in my earlier Fair Trade 4 Kidz post. Back then I raged that in all the four articles I linked to there was literally half a sentence (from the transnational corporations one) saying that trade might be a good thing, and that was instantly quashed in the closing clause. The sentence I was referring to was:
Such companies can provide work and enrich a country’s economy – or some say they can exploit the workers with low pay and destroy the environment.
Yes, that’s right. It’s exactly the same wording as the sentence from the Christian Aid lesson plan except that the BBC, stern upholder of impartiality, added the words “some say.” I would like to know who copied whom. Did Christian Aid copy the Beeb, as the dates suggest? Or did the BBC lift a standard Approved Phrase from the Christian Aid website? Either way, the BBC is too close to a political organisation.