Far be it from a serial ballot spoiler to dish out advice on voting, but that’s what’s coming. For all would-be reformers out there, PR has never been an easy sell. But once the dust has settled on the Telegraph’s thrilling mini-series, that could change. Because here’s a slogan that might just catch the mood: PR gives you the power to remove your MP without voting for another party.
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So, the waiting’s over. The Select Committee Report on BBC Commercial Operations was published on Tuesday. And the verdict is clear: the kind of acquisition that the BBC purchase of Lonely Planet represents should never happen again (pdf, p. 10, para. 22):

There is clearly a balancing act between allowing Worldwide to expand and potentially generate greater returns for the BBC, and limiting its operations in order to ensure it upholds the BBC’s reputation and does not unfairly distort the market… We recommend that the commercial criteria and fair trading guidelines should be returned to the pre-2007 position, whereby all commercial activity must have a clear link with core BBC programming. continue reading… »

A year ago, I wrote a piece here about the great art of the Gothic and Renaissance periods, and how we owe its existence to the Dead Hand of the (Tuscan) State. But where should we look for actions of slightly more modern government working to enrich our lives? Certainly not in the unending flow of nutty, illiberal laws; nor in the insidious creep of compliance culture (subject of a memorable Stephen Fry podcast). So, here’s an idea: look to the British Library.

More specifically, their Turning the Pages project, 10 years in the developing, that put our national library in the very first rank of learning innovation worldwide. (See the video.) The project’s achievement has been to digitize 15 (so far) of the Library’s most valuable manuscripts, and deliver them inside an interactive online environment that re-creates the experience of handling them in the raw.
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Last November I wrote a piece outlining the worrying implications of the BBC’s acquisition of Lonely Planet for the Corporation’s non-commercial UK neutrality. I’m not the only travel journalist with these sorts of doubts. The BBC Royal Charter and Agreement, remember, is very clear on how the Beeb can and cannot interact with the UK media market:

The Agreement requires all commercial activities undertaken by the BBC to comply with four criteria. …

4. comply with BBC fair trading guidelines and in particular avoid distorting the market.

Of course, that begs a whole series of questions, but this much is plain: BBC Worldwide activities that distort a domestic market in which the corporation is a player are forbidden. This, essentially, was the basis for the decision to disallow BBC investment in ultra-local video last year. It’s the reason that the BBC’s acquisition (through BBC Worldwide) of Lonely Planet should be reversed at the first opportunity. continue reading… »

While doing some reading around with my travel journalism hat on last week, I allowed myself a muted chuckle at respected travel-tech blogger Alex Bainbridge asking:

[I]f we know that when we post something we risk causing brand damage, should we self censor and only post positive things?

It’s the kind of question they might chew over while they’re brandstorming for Derek Draper’s new BlogDominanceUnit. Of course, Alex “fully rejects” posting only good news. But party flacks aside, it’s also the kind of question no political blogger would even bother asking, isn’t it? Perhaps not. continue reading… »

It’s a commonplace on this site that one should “defend” the BBC from unceasing, unsubtle and rather tiresome attacks from trenchant right-wingers. Very little written about the organization by either the Daily Mail, or any of its apers on the Web, has any merit. That’s true. The Beeb is worth defending: there’s something enriching about our ad-free broadcaster. Something that serves the public, that stands above the commercial white noise of modern television. Of course, the organization isn’t entirely non-commercial: BBC Worldwide makes decent profits that, at least nominally, feed back into UK public service broadcasting. So far, so uncontroversial. However, BBC Worldwide’s 2007 acquisition of travel guidebook publisher Lonely Planet did raise objections, continue reading… »

It costs me about £25–30 in petrol to drive the 55 miles from my home in Hackney to Brighton, and the same 55 back again. First Capital Connect is asking north of £90 for a return ticket for our family this weekend, starting from London Bridge. So if there’s a traffic jam on the northbound M23 this Sunday evening (inevitable), you can blame me.

If I lived in Florence, a family return trip of similar length to Livorno (birthplace of the PCI, home of the cacciucco) comes to about €33. From Brussels, a weekend rail trip to Bruges, 90km away, would cost us just over €49. A slightly longer journey in France, from Lyon to Chambery and back, comes to €59. continue reading… »

The notion that sport and politics should never mix is a curious, and also deeply political, one. Sport, after all, is just the waging of international politics by other means. Ask the East Germans.

Rarely has the mix been quite as fruity as this weekend’s end to the Italian football season continue reading… »

Not long after I moved to Hackney, I witnessed an armed robbery. From a range of about three feet, the fact that the robber was a crackhead was as obvious as the hammer and kitchen knife he was waving about.

A few years later, my partner and baby daughter were abducted outside my house. continue reading… »

So, it’s the weekend after the week before, and an alliance of gameshow fans, 4×4 drivers, suburban curtain-twitchers, BNP second-preferences, Labourphobes and the thoroughly fed-up, mostly from places that don’t even count as London, have foisted a Thatcherite mayor on our generally left-leaning city. continue reading… »

Back in the day, when I were a lad in a grimy northern town, &c. &c. we used to give stuff up for Lent. Or, any road, we talked about it. I don’t recall actually giving much up personally, apart from Ferraris. continue reading… »

A letter dropped on the doormat yesterday. If you live on an estate (that’s council, not country), you may have had something similar.

RE: Proposed Removal of Recycling Bins on [road]

I am writing to inform you that we have received several complaints regarding the misuse of recycling bins on [estate]; due to the area round the bins becoming an eyesore. Currently we have placed this area on our weekend hot spot list and therefore a lorry removes all items round the bins on a Saturday morning. During the week the cleaner also has been instructed to ensure this area is tidy. Despite these efforts users of the recycling bins are constantly leaving recycling items outside the bins causing an eyesore.

We would like to offer an opportunity for residents who live near where the bins are situated to voice their opinion on this issue of whether they will be in favour of the bins being removed.

Yours faithfully

I live about 5 houses away, less than fifty yards. Overleaf there’s a few lines of space for me to fill in my views (and it would appear that I may not continue on a separate sheet…). It would be a waste of space, I guess, to use them to comment on the death of the comma in local govermnent communications. So,

I am not in favour of their removal. My 4-year-old puts her rubbish in the bin. Are we now outsourcing recycling policy in Hackney to a few slobs who can’t even manage that?

But maybe I’m just an old idealist. Can you come up with something better? You’ve got 2 sentences, 3 short ones tops, and an impeccably left-liberal brief.  I may even nick yours; the posting deadline is Monday.

This piece was first published two years ago at The Sharpener and in an edited form in this book (as “Talk amongst yourselves, we couldn’t possibly comment”). It’s main hope – that Westminster politicians stop ducking the abortion issue – has come to pass. That is a development I welcome; and I stand by (most of) what I wrote then (some of it now in lost, much missed links). The piece also tries to define “what’s so special” about 24 weeks, though perhaps less elegantly than Unity. So now’s a good time for a re-run. It does seem, alas, that what we’re about to get elsewhere is tabloid drivel (via) rather than proper debate. I guess that’s what happens when professional politicos get involved.

One word absolutely not on the lips of political hacks, not even Tory political hacks, is… Abortion. Not this week, not any week. It’s impolite conversation inside the beltway.

But a post here last year (picked apart here) attracted over 250 comments. Just publishing the word is pure Google-juice. Everyone in the real world has an opinion, so why does nobody in political Britain want to discuss abortion in public? It can’t be that 186,274 (2001 data; pdf) annual terminations don’t warrant justification or inquiry. continue reading… »

So, who wants to hear a joke?

Q: What’s the difference between libertarianism and anarchism?

A: Under anarchism, the poor people get to shoot back.

Boom, boom. I guess that’s more a caricature than a joke, as such. Anyway, I’m not here for the standup. What I want to address is the arts, partly by way of reply to Chris’s post here last week, specifically the estimable libertarian objection to arts funding. In libertopia, arts funding is for private individuals. “There is no such thing as society” (some of them really write stuff like that, non-ironically), so spending on the collective is wasted. Immoral. Theft. In any case, the Dead Hand of the State (10,300 Google hits for a phrase I’ve never heard anyone actually speak) can only have a pernicious impact on private interaction, and what could be more private than art?

Let’s look at some evidence. continue reading… »

A trip to the postbox to return the execrable Black Dahlia to LoveFilm reminded me why marketizing public services will always fail. It’s that little slot on there that tells me when the next pickup’s due. Today it read SAT. Those Next Collection signs are very useful. It wasn’t so long ago that they were trustworthy. Not any more: they’re often days out of date at my local box.

The reason’s simple: whoever changes the signs doesn’t have the incentive to bother. Nobody’s checking every little detail of his job – nobody could. And these little extras – what we used to call public service – aren’t Big Picture stuff. (You could have said the same about clean hospital toilets until a couple of years back.) By turning my postman from a public servant into a rational economic actor, we’ve destroyed the small parts of his job that used to connect him with our lives in all their complexity. Marketization can only put incentives (targets, bonuses, competition) in place for a proportion of what he does, or did. The rest is deemed worthless, history. Or it’s left up to his own integrity, which we still expect him to display in his new daily life being pushed around by capitalists.

Now I’m not saying that I oppose the market running public goods; nor do I know whether this ‘public servant’ ever really existed, or even if s/he did, whether we could re-energize the corpse. But deciding where markets can be successful needs to be an empirical judgement: they appear to be better at running airlines than train networks; better at holiday camps than prisons.

And marketization isn’t a process we should be celebrating. When markets need to take over, it’s a sign of human failure, a necessary second-best option, not something anyone should be proud of, Left or Right. Smith, like Worstall on a good day, teaches us that self-interest can be useful, not admirable.

Also published here.

It’s common knowledge on the left that Christmas is a pernicious racist-imperialist construct, an unholy alliance of Catholicism, Coca Cola and capitalism whose only function is the exploitation and repression of the international working classes. Well, bollocks to that. Christmas is a right laugh, a time for family, friends and frolicking whether you do the God thing or not.

But if we want those doey-eyed little ones looking up at us to have a future free from acid rain, hurricanes and summer floods, it’s time for a festive fightback. No, I don’t mean making common cause with the fundies, but what better day than the feast of Santa Lucia to publish a cut-out-and-keep guide to an enlightened Winterval.

Here are fifteen ideas to get us started; feel free to add your own below.
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Consider this:

A kidney patient who travelled to the Philippines to search for a live donor has defended his decision to become a so-called “transplant tourist”.

Stories like this hit the bullseye of the inherent tension between ‘liberal’ and ‘left’ ways of looking at the world.

A liberal (even ‘libertarian’) solution would be simple: we should be allowed to sell a kidney. It’s our body, and we should be free to do what we want with it. The borders of the state must stop at the dermis. Liberty is that simple. Or simplistic.

A left analysis would first point out that the burdens of this ‘freedom’ would fall disproportionately on the poor. Should they need a kidney, they won’t be able to afford one. A rich person is unlikely to need to sell his; a poor person, the opposite. Kidney sellers will be poor; purchasers usually rich. A freedom isn’t a freedom unless its universal; it’s more like a privilege. Just like my freedom (or ‘right’) to buy a Porsche. In a system that relies on exploitation, what we call capitalism, words like ‘freedom’ are sometimes meaningless. (There’s an analogy here with smoking in pubs, but that’s another story.)

There’s really no ‘left-liberal’ solution to this, not in the philosophical sense anyhow. There’s also no place for supporting or condemning one man’s attempt to prolong his life. Perhaps the place to start is with common sense. Support for the BMA’s position on presumed consent is little more than acknowledging the existence of a market failure that can be corrected. Easily and liberally.

I’ve never been much of a joiner. Even though I’ve worked as a writer/journalist for a few years, I only sent my form off to the NUJ last month. The Union, the Tartan Army, the Tufty Club… and, er, that’s about it. Still, I have given recent thought to joining my local Green Party – so I read Dave Osler’s recent piece: Green Party: vehicle for the British left? (and there), with interest.

Like Dave, I doubt the Greens can build a systematic left-wing alternative to Labour, now properly classified as a ‘centre-right’ not a ‘left’ party. But I do believe the popularity of mainstream greenish politics offers something. A ‘moment’, perhaps, for slipping something with a progressive flavour in with the recycling. A reasonable place to look for inspiration is Sweden.

Sweden’s Green Party have just finished 8 years as junior coalition partners in a red-green government. Top of their list of achievements was the inauguration, in January 2005, of a so-called Alternation Leave policy. Under this scheme, 12,000 Swedes have the annual opportunity to take a government subsidized sabbatical from work (similar to parental leave, but without a baby). Three main conditions apply: employer consent is required; the vacancy may only be covered by recruiting from the pool of current unemployed; you may not work while on leave, except to start a new business.
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Still, on the plus side, another 25 million people have just realised that ID cards are what’s known in the trade as a Very Bad Idea.

Blackpool, Blackpool, everywhere, nor any drop to… This time, drinking over here, Hamish Howitt, pub landlord:

“I’m not pro-smoking just pro-freedom. “Having a pint and a cigarette in a pub is one of the last great enjoyments left for the working classes. “

You have to like the cut of his mainsail. It makes you wish he was right, but alas he’s 180 degrees wrong. Calls to liberty – working class or otherwise – are spurious on this one. As much as hard hats on a building site, or breathing apparatus down a mine, smoking legislation is about workplace safety. I suppose any staff who object to a pub pea souper could always work somewhere else. Your average Victorian mill owner would have agreed.

Tell that to the student working off his overdraft, or the single mum who needs employment that fits round school hours, or the 50-something asthmatic roadie who’s plain forgotten how to do anything else. Or any number of other constructs a hack-philosopher might invent. Can any of these make a meaningful choice, a free weighing of the alternatives, before selecting their place and conditions of work? That we don’t always have a real choice is a cornerstone of left thought; it’s all about the power, stupid. Asking: “Who has it; who doesn’t; how does that change things” is what separates liberals from the ‘I want, I want, it’s soooo unfair’ breed of prep-school ‘libertarians’. (That’s a misnomer, of course; these chaps are nowhere near as concerned about liberty as they are about property.)

In any case, there’s nothing special about private property that gets us off our obligations to each other. This is no more a case of liberty at threat than are the Control of Asbestos at Work Regulations 2002. You’re not allowed to poison your staff, not even minimum-wage workers. There’s an easy, costless way to internalize your externality: get off your backside, take three paces to the door and smoke outside. You could use the exercise.