Mr Brown goes to Washington

This pieceby Stryker McGuire in The Independent is brilliant.

The stuff about how the Oscars etc are covered in the UK is spot on.

In some ways the demeaning relationship between British politicians and the US is mirrored by the Scottish cringe in relation to the UK.

Scottish achievement or failure it seems can rarely be celebrated or derided on its own merit  – it’s how we are viewed or measure up to the rest of the UK that is presented as the most important thing.

Where does that lack of self-confidence come from?

anti-Scottish ranting – why?

Gordon Brown and Jeremy Clarkson actually have a fair bit in common – they both for their own purposes like to wrap themselves firmly in the Union Jack.

Brown’s motivation is clearly political – a rather lame attempt to disguise his, well, Scottishness, and Clarkson’s is presumably commercial – there’s a market apparently in having a go at the French,  Germans etc.

I don’t know if Clarkson is the kind of person the Prime Minister has in mind when he talks about the “British genius” but I’m guessing after today probably not.

On their own,  I can’t actually take the The Top Gear’s latest moronic comments seriously - citing Brown’s disability and nationality and branding him an idiot (when no matter what you think of him he clearly is not) is just not worth bothering about.

But it’s interesting that it’s now ok to use Scottish and Scotland as terms of abuse. Read some of the comments on the above link and that’s clear.

Simon Heffer, in the Telegraph,  has recently essentially compared Scots in public life to dogs that need training. We used  know how to behave apparently, but sadly not now.  I should let this kind of stuff go, but a serious newspaper should be ashamed to allow this bile to appear in print.

The remarkable thing of course is that no TV presenter in Scotland or serious political commentator here would ever describe the English in these terms. (If they did we would be subjected to acres of newspaper coverage beating ourselves up over our dreadful anti-Englishness.)

But the reality is that such ingorant prejudice  just wouldn’t take place.

Journalist doing his job outrage

Why are MPs wasting their (valuable?) time interrogating the BBC’s business editor, Robert Peston, about his many scoops.

If I have got this right, then Peston is a journalist. His job is to break stories. And, er, that’s what he’s doing.

He’s not an arm of UK economic policy.  He may or may not have caused some discomfort to the government or to the City. But that’s part and parcel of being a good reporter.

Instead of holding pointless inquiries, perhaps these MPs might spend their time thinking about how they could become as good at their jobs as Peston is at his.

This is no time for politics but….

THANK God for financial meltdown.

That sentiment basically sums up the attitude of many in the Scottish establishment who have watched in horror over the past 18 months as the SNP have surged in popularity. So what if the Royal Bank of Scotland is to be nationalised, if the Bank of Scotland is to be reduced to a shell and if the country is to enter a prolonged recession? At least, and at last, the nationalists are finally stuffed. Hallelujah!

Jenny Hjul, Angus Macleod etc can barely contain their glee at the troubles faced by Ireland, Iceland and other small countries caught up in the global economic crisis.

The fact that two iconic Scottish  businesses are in trouble and have had a massive injection of tax-payers money just tops it all off. 

Most sickening of all was Winston Brown calling in BBC Scotland yesterday to say this was no time to make political points – except that he summoned David Porter for no other purpose than to make,  err, political points – something the BBC may just have mentioned.

Winston, of course, has spent the last ten years helping to create the credit-fuelled conditions that have allowed the current crisis to take hold.  But that’s bad form to mention apparently as we all have to pull together.

In truth, there is no doubt that as Tony Blair might say, the kaleidoscope of the politics of Independence has been shaken. But the pieces may not fall quite where the Unionist die-hards are predicting.

Before the crash, there were signs that Labour was changing the nature of its argument against the SNP. For election after election Gordon Brown had dictated the basic message – that Independence for Scotland would be a catastrophe and prompt massive cuts in public spending as the country faced up to a huge deficit without the benefit of subsidies from tax-payers south of the border. 

Recently that argument has faced two major problems. Firstly, as the last Holyrood elections showed, people in Scotland no longer believed it – or at least did not see it as a barrier to voting for the SNP. Secondly, it was proving uncomfortable for Brown himself, the Chancellor and other leading Scottish politicians at Westminster, as their repeated (and false) claims that Scotland was heavily dependent on Treasury hand-outs caused some in England to argue that in that case Scottish Independence seemed a reasonable idea after all.

Those realities prompted a re-think: it was accepted that post-Independence, Scotland would no longer be an economic basket-case.

That new thinking has now gone the way of banking stocks. The old messages are now being wheeled out, only much harder. No-one in Scotland should be left in any doubt – vote for Independence if you want. But when disaster strikes, you’re on your own.

Although it appears attractive now, I believe the return of the old religion, will in the longer term hasten, rather than halt, the likelihood that the British political state will come to an end. It’s been argued elsewhere that despite appearing to be in his element, the current crash will prove to be as disastrous for Gordon Brown as the ERM was for the Tories and John Major. When weekend news bulletins are no longer dominated by Robert Peston and international crisis talks, the reputation of Mr Brown and Labour for economic competence will be essentially shot. 

Economists may be predicting that in Ireland the economy could contract by as much as two per cent this year, and three per cent in 2009, but some forecasts for the UK are just as gloomy. Take away the extreme case of Iceland (which after all has a population about six per cent of Scotland’s) there is little to suggest that small countries will somehow permanently reverse their impressive growth rates which in many cases pre-dated property and financial services booms. Consider the fortunes of small Sweden and large Japan to previous banking crises.

In those circumstances, having led the UK and Scotland into a recession and having racked up an enormous public debt, attempting to scare Scots away from Independence because of the foolish decisions of a few bankers in Reykjavik and Edinburgh, will not look quite so clever.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fathers and neocons

The fine blogger and political journalist Fraser Nelson makes a bizarre claim in his review of Barack Obama’s Mile High speech today.

Fraser, now of The Spectator and formerly of The Scotsman, was particularly struck by Obama’s views on the family.  ”He emphasised …. how government can never replace a role of a father (a point first made by the godfather of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, in the 1970s).”

So the idea that Dads can never be replaced by a government was first made by a neoconservative in the US in the 1970s. Really? Apart from Pol Pot and his ilk I can think of few people, ever, who have suggested that the State is better equipped to take on a parental role than a father.

The real issue is that too many of those on the right – usually living in comfortable circumstances and often with ”help” - seem to think it is somehow morally wrong for the government to support families with real challenges in life.  But there is a world of difference between that kind of assistance and the ludicrous notion of replacing fathers.

BBC response to Trust report

They just don’t get it do they? On the BBC’s Editors blog (a great innovation by the way) Mark Byford, the corporation’s Head of Journalism, reveals how they’re going to deal with the Trust’s finding that Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are virtually ignored by network news programmes.

Here are the answers:

 (1) ”better labelling of stories to explain how they may apply differently across the UK to improve overall accuracy”. But the Trust criticised the fact that health and education stories are covered only if they apply just to England. ”Better labelling” – ie  emphasising more often that the stories do not apply at all to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, may improve accuracy but rather misses the point of what the Trust was getting at. The idea, Mark, is to cover more stories in , you know, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

(2) ”more case examples of the differences and devolved decision-making to inform all UK audiences more fully.”  Fine – but why not run a Scottish story and then explain the different situation in England rather than the other way around.

(3) “better planning between the UK-wide news operation and our news teams across the UK.” Er, but you sacked people whose jobs were precisely that (see the letter in today’s Herald from Phil Taylor, ex BBC staffer).

(4) “increased training.” Are you joking? Are you seriously suggesting there are people in senior editorial positions at the BBC unaware of the policy impact of devolution?

Instead of all those, how about trying this: understand that you are broadcasting to the whole of the UK and cover all the nations equally. If you don’t want to do this, please stop taking our licence-fee.  

 

BBC ignores Scotland shock

The conclusions of the investigation by the BBC Trust into the corporation’s coverage, or rather non-coverage, of Scotland and Wales fall into the “no sh** Sherlock” category. Anyone who watches the BBC network news will not be surprised that in the words of Sir Michael Lyons, the Trust chairman:    “the resounding message from this review is the BBC is falling short of its own high standards and is not meeting properly its core purpose of helping to inform democracy.”

But the sheer scale of the London-centric news agenda, revealed by the report,  is still staggering. One statistic in particular should mean an instant rebate on the licence fee for everyone living in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland: ”the study found that of 136 stories about health and education, all 136 dealt with England alone. ” Not one, single story about health and education outside England was broadcast to a UK audience – totally unacceptable from news editors whose wage packets are paid for by people across the UK.

 

   

 

Modern political reporting

The piece by the excellent Rachel Sylvester in today’s Times is both a great read and a brilliant example of the questionable conventions of modern day UK political reporting. 

Rachel clearly has a real insight into the thinking of the Parliamentary Labour Party and a range of fine contacts. That degree of access to senior figures is what makes good political correspondents so valuable and distinguishes them from some, but not all, political bloggers.  But in some respects this article uses the same techniques, albeit in a more elegant fashion, as those deployed by bloggers and for which they are criticised; in particular the use of anonymous sources and rumour.

In her column – an analysis of Gordon Brown’s desire to lock up terrorist suspects for six weeks without charge - she quotes at least 3 anonymous ministers, “some insiders”, “the Prime Minister’s allies” and an anonymous “MP close to the Prime Minister”. She also repeats what she admits is a rumour: that Labour tried to silence the Director of Liberty with the offer of a peerage.  In a previous  column for the Telegraph,  she famously “revealed” another rumour – that Jack Staw had threatened to punch Ed Balls.

I don’t doubt the veracity of her sources. Unattributable comments are clearly a way of explaining what’s really going on inside a political party. Rumours are entertaining. But the extent of the use of these techniques in contemporary UK political journalism is worrying.  Who really knows who is saying what and to what purpose? When I was running the Leader’s Office at the SNP the Scottish media gorged themselves on unattributed briefings and conveyed a false impression of the way the party as a whole felt about the then leader.

I can’t help feeling that for most people this obsession with anonymous sources also leaves the impression that politics is really a private conversation between the political classes - little more than a game from which most voters are excluded.

 

 

    

The new Scottish Six orthodoxy

Today’s report by Douglas Fraser of The Herald (one of a handful of political journalists in Scotland with something interesting to say) for the IPPR sets out some arguments about the role of the media in post-devolution Britain.

As part of the report, Douglas looks at the issue of the Scottish Six and suggests, in line with other recent comment, that the debate over a Scottish produced news bulletin to replace the UK-wide six o’clock news is essentially an analogue argument in a digital age.  Viewers, so the argument goes, can get their news from a variety of sources – such as the internet  – without having to rely on the BBC’s main early evening news bulletin. Moreover there will soon be a range of Scottish digital channels, producing Scottish news, so Scottish viewers, if they want to, will be able to opt-out of the UK bulletin and into the tartan version. In short, the old 1990s debate about the influence of the BBC’s main bulletins is dead.

Except – it’s not. And all this talk about new technology ignores the realities. First of all – the internet.  The BBC last week ran a series of items asking viewers: “How slow is your broadband connection?” For the 68 per cent of households in Glasgow who, according to Ofcom, do not have broadband, that question would have seemed rather redundant.  But the presumption from those immersed in the media is that of course everyone has broadband - nobody only watches the TV anymore, stupid.   

Secondly the idea that a Scottish digital channel funded by the licence-fee payer is the answer, is well wide of the mark. The last time I looked there was no proposal for such a channel. Even if there was, this entirely misses the point. Under-resourced opt-outs are BBC Scotland’s speciality. Talented journalists are used to working on badly-funded programmes with an editorial remit which forbids producers to venture further than the Tweed. Indeed such weak programmes play into the hands of the Scottish middle-class cringe-mongers by allowing them say we must never, ever watch anything not produced by London.

The answer now, as it was in the 1990s, is in fact a well-funded national news programme, produced in Scotland covering Scottish and international news; the kind of news programme every other country in the world enjoys. This would mean an end to the nonsense of Scottish viewers hearing more about the English health, education and criminal justice systems than their own. It would mean the Scottish electorate being properly informed about their country by the BBC.  That is not a parochial aspiration. It’s what a state funded broadcaster, is supposed to do.