Author Archives: Laban

"As a biased broadcaster …"

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Nick Cohen in Standpoint Magazine :

A while ago, a BBC producer phoned to tell me I had written a “controversial” book. I knew that already, and gathered from the teeth-sucking sound coming down the line that she did not approve.

“So,” she continued, “we’ve lined up four guests to argue against you.”

I told her to go away — maybe I used a stronger term — and then thought about her predicament. As a biased broadcaster, she wanted to hear my book denounced, but she could not risk organising a one-on-one debate. Maybe I would have come out on top. More probably, some listeners would have agreed with me, others with my opponent, as is the normal way of things. By arranging her show to make it four against one, however, she could maintain the illusion of impartiality while creating the impression in listeners’ mind that the consensus was overwhelmingly against arguments she found uncomfortable. In the interests of “balance” and of letting “everyone have their say”, she would fill 80 per cent of the airtime with advocates of her own political position. I have watched out for rigged debates ever since. They are the surest signal the BBC dares send that an idea does not deserve a hearing in polite society.

I’m a bit busy today, and haven’t time to give chapter and verse from the B-BBC archives. Let Mr Cohen give us the latest example :

Ophelia Benson did not quite get the four-on-one treatment when she appeared on Radio 3’s cultural talk show Nightwaves to discuss a “controversial” book she has co-authored with Jeremy Stangroom. They gave her a mere two opponents, and the presenter tried to be fair. Still, when one adversary stopped disparaging her, the other started, as the BBC flashed warning signs to listeners to ignore her.

(The book, called “Does God Hate Women ?”, is ‘controversial’ in that it does not restrict its targets to Bible-bashing rednecks in the United States. Had it done so, I’d probably be hearing readings on ‘Woman Sour‘ this morning !)

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Mr Pot, May I Introduce Madame Kettle ?

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It’s rarely you’ll read a defence of the BBC on this blog, and you’re not going to read one now.

But James Murdoch’s McTaggart lecture should be read in the sure and certain knowledge that his objection is not so much to a leviathan ‘with more money than the rest of the sector put together and 50% of the market‘, but that said leviathan is not News Corporation.

Capitalism is a wonderful thing. To paraphrase Adam Smith, it is not from the benevolence of the Murdoch family that we expect our live Premiership action, but from their regard to their own self-interest.

But the ideal world of every individual capitalist is one of monopoly, and where that is impossible a dominant market position. Because then you can charge more, or in Mr Smith’s words ‘the price of monopoly is upon every occasion the highest which can be got‘. To mangle the words of Mr Murdoch, the ‘only reliable, durable, and perpetual guarantor of profit‘ is monopoly or oligopoly. The purchase of a hefty stake in ITV, or the recent London freesheet wars, look more like actions designed to hurt competitors than anything else.

The traditional news media, aka the ‘dead tree press’, are losing money hand over fist as consumers turn to the Internet for their news and comment. Only this week it was announced that the venerable Birmingham Post daily was to move to a weekly format. And it has to be said that the majority of bloggers who comment on news and current affairs are parasitic (as I am) on these free news feeds, provided among others by the BBC and News Corporation.

This is probably not a sustainable long term situation for the traditional news media. While wonderful for consumers of news , it cannot last. But outside of specialist providers like the Financial Times, attempts (like those of the Independent newspaper) to charge for Web access have so far proved ignominious failures.

News Corporation have announced their intention to switch their news websites to a charging model. This is going to be difficult to pull off. Could the Times, Sun, Guardian, Indie, Mail, Telegraph and Mirror execs meet together and decide to simultaneously charge for news, in a great ‘conspiracy against the public’, it might be possible, but there are laws against that sort of thing. The conventional wisdom is that the first to move will simply lose all their online readers to other sites – as happened to the Indie – without any corresponding increase in paper sales. So they have a problem – a real difficulty – to which I am not unsympathetic, and which would become somewhat simpler were there not a great free news leviathan called the BBC.

It is in the light of these issues that this year’s McTaggart lecture – which contains many cogent and accurate criticisms of the BBC, should be read. And you can read it, including “would we welcome a world in which The Times was told by the government how much religious coverage it had to carry? ” on no fewer than 12 pages of the Times website, where the editor has, doubtless exercising his independent editorial judgement, put up the entire lecture.

(As readers will know, B-BBC is an anarcho-syndicalist commune aka a broad church, and some of my fellow contributors – like David, above – are firmly of the opinion that the Corporation should be abolished and ‘the market decide’. I don’t attempt to judge these issues here. But I think some background to this particular story is in order)

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Get Evan Davies Off Drugs !

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The subject, that is. Susan and I listened with mounting incredulity as Evan Davies of the Today programme came out with these gems while interviewing an anaesthetist on the subject of the abuse of prescription drugs and painkillers :

“Do you – (pause) – if you were – (pause) – if you had a – (pause) – teenage – (pause) – son, and you were trying to advise this – (pause) – person what sort of drugs to take and what sort of drugs to avoid – are the illegal drugs safer ? – less safe ? than the painkiller type ?”

Followed later by :

“And among your colleagues, and even your friends, do they abuse the drugs that are commonplace in your profession ?”

Does he always come out with this kind of penetrating questioning, or is it just this subject ?

Thank heavens he didn’t get given the following ‘legal highs’ piece !

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"Why Have Prisons ?" Redux

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An afterthought to (and some additional information on) the Today programme’s three-item (one, two, three) ‘don’t lock them up’ fest of last Thursday, noted by David here :

Two points. One is the BBC double-whammy reporting – that not only do Barnardo’s think that too many young criminals are being locked up, but the Parliamentary Justice Committee think the same thing – which was reported as a separate item on Radio 5 news that day.

Alas, the BBC failed to tell us who’s at the top of the list giving evidence to the Parliamentary Justice Committee. You wouldn’t be too surprised to know that it’s – wait for it – Barnardo’s.

In fact the list of organisations giving evidence to the committee (mostly ‘fake charities’, the bulk of whose income comes from the taxpayer – Barnardo’s for example closed its last children’s home in 1989) is one to warm a social worker’s heart, and the evidence presented (here) by the assorted pointy-heads deeply depressing. It’s worth a read if you want to know why crime is so high in the UK.

But I digress. The thrust of the evidence presented by Barnardos, and through them by the Justice Committee, is that too many young criminals are being jailed. Why too many ? Because – wait for it – the judges are too harsh. There are government guidelines – which the judges ignore and go their own punitive way. Were they to keep to the guidelines fewer young criminals would be in jail (according to the evidence presented over 97% of young criminals appearing in court are NOT sent down – I cannot find the figures, but I would be very surprised if the majority of young criminals ever got as far as an actual court appearance).

A small thought experiment. Imagine – even if you live in Islington – that you go out onto the streets of your neighbourhood and ask, say, a hundred people at random if they think judges are too harsh on young criminals. How many do you think would agree that they were ? Perhaps the BBC should have headed their story :

“Judges too tough, say charities and MPs”

Even the Today programme might have trouble with that spin, but the BBC are happy to present (albeit obliquely) this thesis with a straight face.

A small quote may be in order here, from the first chapter of Steven Pinker’s excellent work The Blank Slate.

“The problem is not just that these claims are preposterous but that they did not acknowledge they were saying things that common sense might call into question. This is the mentality of a cult, in which fantastical beliefs are flaunted as a proof of one’s piety. That mentality cannot coexist with an esteem for the truth …”

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It’s All About No Oil …

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Just giving the garage its summer clean and sort, when the following idiocy was aired on the PM program about ten minutes ago. They were discussing the Burmese sentence on the noble Aung San Suu Kyi.

I paraphrase :

“… and we’ve just had a mail come in on the subject of Burma, which says ‘Isn’t it a tragedy that Burma hasn’t got any oil ? Otherwise the resolutions would soon be passed and the invasion forces built up …'”

Now there are a lot of ignorant people in the UK, and this chap may not have heard, say, of a company called Burmah Oil, despite the fact that Denis Thatcher once decorated its board. Any idiot can mail the BBC.

But for the editor to consider this a serious point worth broadcasting – well, perhaps someone who is unaware that Burma is an oil and gas producer shouldn’t be in charge of what purports to be a current affairs program.

We all know why it was chosen, of course. It fits the BBC narrative. Why ruin a perfectly good anti-American sneer for the want of a few facts ?

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Only On The BBC …

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There’s concern about the number of prisoners released early from prison on license who go on to kill or commit serious crime while still under ‘supervision’ :

Criminals on probation committed more than 1,000 serious crimes over the last two years, including nearly one murder a week in England and Wales.

The government figures give details of the 1,167 offences committed by people being supervised by probation officers.

The total included 94 murders, 105 rapes and 43 arson attacks.

Only a BBC producer could decide that the best person to interview on the topic is someone who believes the problem to be, not that criminals are being released early from prison, but that they were sent there in the first place.

As I’ve pointed out before, Frances Crook of the Howard League For The Abolition of Punishment must be able to find her way to the Today studios blindfold by now.

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"we don’t often talk directly about demographics…in the UK"

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Evan Davis was being a bit economical with the actualite the other day when he said that ‘we don’t often talk directly about demographics‘. The BBC is quite happy to discuss them – not only that, but to discuss them in a context of conflict or civil disorder – as long as they’re a long way away.

Here’s Jim Muir’s famous ‘I saw it coming all along‘ Iraq piece.

Iraq is a patchwork country, an ethnic and confessional cocktail, of Arabs and Kurds, Turkomans and Chaldaeans, Sunnis and Shiites.

Such countries are usually held together by a strong centralised dictatorship, which could be benign or tyrannical.

I don’t understand. Why isn’t he celebrating the diversity ?

Same with the troubles in Urumchi – about as far away at the back of Central Asia as one can get.

The violence in Xinjiang has not occurred completely out of the blue.

Its root cause is ethnic tension between the Turkic Muslim Uighurs and the Han Chinese. It can be traced back for decades …

Uighurs are ethnically Turkic Muslims
They make up about 45% of the region’s population. 40% are Han Chinese
China re-established control in 1949 after crushing short-lived state of East Turkestan
Since then, large-scale immigration of Han Chinese
Uighurs fear erosion of traditional culture

Large scale immigration into the capital, ethnic tension, fears of erosion of culture ? These Uighurs sound like terrible racists, ill at ease, failing to come to terms with their new multicultural capital and harking back to some Golden Age that never was. I’m surprised the BBC are publicising their scare-mongering and myths when they should be refuting them. Certainly not the kind of thing you’d find the BBC reporting, about, say, London.

UPDATE – it’s also interesting to compare the Chinese state media coverage of the rioting in Urumchi (admittedly far more destructive of human life than anything here) with the British state media coverage of rioting in the UK.

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"we don’t often talk directly about demographics…"

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… says Evan Davies on the Today programme, treading delicately on eggshells as he interviews Richard Ehrman, author of ‘The Power of Numbers’ . Funny that.

“Partly, perhaps, because it all tends to change rather slowly, and partly perhaps because we have an aversion to any kind of population control”

I wonder who the ‘we’ is ? And aversion to population control ? You wouldn’t get that impression from the BBC. Evan’s back on the eggshells again …

“We very much .. um .. (unintelligible) relied, either explicitly, you know, deliberately, or by default – on rising immigration, if you like, to keep the labour force growing, haven’t we”

We may well have done – but the BBC certainly didn’t tell us that. You’d be better off reading Charles Moore if you want to know what the problem is. He doesn’t agree that the changes are slow, either :

Each day, a small number of people walk up from the station and past our house on their way to work. It is quite a long walk – perhaps a mile and a half – but I imagine they walk because they do not earn enough to own cars. They are virtually all foreign. They are on their way to serve as carers and nurses in an old people’s home, whose inmates are virtually all British…

…the change is not marginal, but drastic. In 1960, OECD countries had a fertility rate of 3.2 children. Today, they have one of 1.6, well below the “replacement rate” of 2.1. So the rate has halved in my lifetime, moving from fast increase to steady decline. We in the West are collectively deciding not to bestow on others the gift which we most value for ourselves – life.

… the welfare state as we know it is essentially the creation of the post-war baby boom, and cannot survive a baby bust. In 1950, there were 5.5 million people in Britain aged over 65. There are 10.5 million today. If I am still alive in 2035, I shall be one of 15.25 million pensioners, while the number of those working, and therefore paying for me and the other 15,249,999, will have fallen steeply.

The problem for the BBC is that the factors which have caused the demographic collapse – the Pill, the sexual revolution, easily available abortion (one baby in four – six million plus since 1967) , women putting career before children, the glorification of extended adolescence – are part of the cultural revolution in which the BBC played a supporting role and which the BBC celebrate to this day. Alas, in those days of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll no one mentioned pensions or the care of the elderly. No one told us ideas had unintended consequences. The writer Lionel Shriver describes the mindset with great insight and honesty in this Guardian piece.

The timebomb is serious, and makes the Government’s current credit crunch deficit look like small change. You can see a ‘population pyramid’ here – note the immediate post-war ‘blip’ of babies, then the great bulge born in the 50s and 60s. As that bulge moves into retirement over the next 25 years, the ratio of taxpayers to tax consumers (elderly people need more care and particularly more medical care) will fall. Where will the money come from to pay for their care ?

There’s another issue too. Public sector pensions – which are funded, not by investments squirreled away, but by current tax receipts. A larger number of pensioners plus a smaller number of taxpayers is not a sustainable situation – unless the government either raises taxes significantly, cuts public spending significantly, or prints money.

A private pension provider who paid existing pensioners out of current receipts, and who therefore needed a continual inflow of new clients to pay the existing ones, would be guilty of a criminal offence.

There’s a word for financial schemes which take in money, promising a good return in the future, and use the new money coming in to pay existing investors. They’re called Ponzi schemes. A characteristic is that they need to recruit more and more new investors to pay the outgoings to the current investors. When the supply of new investors dries up, the scheme cannot continue to pay out and collapses.

For ‘new investors’ in the Ponzi scheme, read ‘new taxpayers’ paying for some old chap’s pension and NHS treatment, or for some quangocrat’s inflation-proofed pension – maybe even a BBC one. You can see why they haven’t given the subject much coverage.

(A nasty thought occurs to me. I hope the BBC’s continual plugging of euthanasia isn’t softening us up for the inevitable tax-saving cull of the aged and infirm. We wouldn’t want to be a burden on the state, would we now ?)

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"a serious suggestion for the BBC"

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The Magistrate on BBC expenses :

Of course there is a proportion of people who just don’t like paying any bill, but let’s put this into perspective.

The licence fee is more than two weeks of Jobseeker’s Allowance, and about a day-and-a-half’s worth of the average wage. The £2000 spent on flying the boss’s family back because Sir had to sort out the Ross/Brand fiasco represents more than 33 weeks’ worth of JSA for the poorest licence payers. So come and have a look at JPs fining the unlicensed in – note – a criminal court.

Then, next time you want to charge up a £200 lunch at the Ivy for two people who are already well-off you will have a better idea of where the money comes from. I’ll be happy to arrange it, and I might even come along myself.

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