BBC - TIME TO CALL TIME ON A NATIONAL SCANDAL

Grant Shapps is right to call time on the national

scandal that is the BBC. In the past year, some three

thousand people a week have come before the courts

for the non-payment of the TV licence fee. This can

result in a fine of up to £1,000 and possibly

imprisonment. Anyone looking at the TV schedules -

eighteen repeats in one day - may come to the

conclusion that the £3.5bn the BBC receives annually

from the licence fee represents increasingly poor value

for money.

 

The BBC has become a powerful metaphor for arrogance,

incompetence, profligacy and worse. Senior executives

found wanting are never dismissed, but merely moved to

more senior positions with seemingly meaningless titles.

Those who leave appear do so with extraordinarily

generous compensation.

The Corportion appears to have all but abandoned the

role Lord Reith intended an impartial public service

broadcaster, educating and enriching the fabric of our

society. Instead, it has become a number of

disfunctional and unaccountable feifdoms,

contemptuous of any criticism of how it spends

public money in competing with the commercial media.

Savile and other big names with ludicrously expensive

contracts illustrate the folly of needlessly seeking to

boost audience figures in the ratings' war.

The appointment of the former Labour cabinet minister,

James Purnell, as head of digital and strategy on a salary

of £295,000 - the post was never advertised - may add to

the BBC's admitted institutionl left-wing bias. The most

recent example was news coverage giving prominence to

an EU report suggesting that benefit tourism was not a

problem, while completely ignoring another report

indicating that there are 600,000 unemployed EU

citizens living here on benefit.

 

 

BBC - RE-DEFINING CULTURAL VALUES

 

The contemporary artist and cross-dresser,

Grayson Perry, has undoubtedly set new

standards in the first of his four offerings

in this year's BBC Reith lectures. In an

atmoshere of raucous buffoonery, he

invited his audience to accept his notion t

hat the subjective concept of beauty goes

beyond its being described as to no

complexion is confined, it is of all

colours and by none defined.

 According to Perry, our idea of beauty is

conditioned by Western civilisation's
cultural inheritance, which he seems to
suggest is a social construct, defined by
class and background.

 It comes as no surprise that Grayson

Perry should have been invited to give
the lectures, given the Corporation's
apparent mission of deconstructing
society's existing cultural values. In
their place the BBC whose original
raison d'etre was to act as an

unbiased public broadcaster, is

following a political agenda, which

is having a profound effect on the

nature of our society.

PRESS FREEDOM

The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. Nowhere

is this more pertinent than freedom of expression in

a free and democratic society. It is a right over which
the the deliberations of the Privy Council cast an

ominous shadow.

Freedom of expression is embedded in the First

Amendment of the US Constitution. The incredulity

of those in the United States and beyond will only

grow as what lies behind the Royal Charter, in

whatever form, is revealed.

The view that a Royal Charter would avoid the

illiberal pitfalls of statutory regulation is founded

more in hope than than expection. Even with the

supposed safeguards included in the somewhat

ambiguous aim of the Charter, that of not creating

a regulator, but instead establishing the body that

will oversee one, it is difficult not to be fearful that

this will curtail the ability of the press to expose

and hold to account.

At the Leveson Inquiry, Rupert Murdoch predicted

that in a digital age printed newspapers could

disappear within ten years. Lord Mandelson

suggested that the Inquiry's remit tended to have

an historical, rather than contemporary,

significance, with the printed media migrating

increasingly online, beyond the control of any

regulator.

The majority of the press was not involved in the

hacking scandal and those who were are or are

likely to be serving prison sentences. Driven by

the interests of the Hacked-Off lobby group, with

the press excluded from any negotiations, a

powerful marker has been put down which will

surely affect the ability of newspapers to do what

they have been doing since the abolition of the

Star Chamber in 1641.

Certain commentators have alluded to the

Jesuitical control of press freedom in

dictatorships. The enactment of the Royal Charter

would render the Government similarly responsible

for controlling freedom of expression by

extrapolating from particular instances of press

intrusion value judgements with regard to wider

press coverage, especially in investigative

journalism.These are features of a totalitarian

state.

Had the Royal Charter been in existence, it is

unlikely that press coverage of the illegal invasion

of Iraq, the unexplained death of Dr David Kelly,

extraordinary rendition and MPs' expenses would

ever have seen the light of day.

.

CAMERON SEES CLEAR BLUE WATER

David Cameron's speech at this week's
Tory Party Conference focused not so
much on having delivered the country
from near bankruptcy. Instead, its theme
was more the promised land of
opportunity for all if a Conservative
government were elected with a clear
working majority.

Such an outcome would unfetter David
Cameron, who has been constrained by
the Lib-Dems, from taking action in key
policy areas to address Labour's
catastrophic legacy. 

It  was against the background of Ed
Miliband's speech a week earlier. In it 
David Cameron created clear blue water
between Labour and the Conservatives.
Voters are now in no doubt that the
Labour Leader espouses his father's
Marxist ideology. The Tories,on the
other hand, see only one way out of 
the economic and social abyss: wealth
creation.

In his seventy-five minute offering,
learnt by heart, he abandoned the
political centre ground of Tony Blair's
New Labour. It was a lurch to the left,
in which he used the language of old 
Labour, of the command and control
economy. Price controls for energy and 
state confiscation of land from
developers, who fail to obey government
dictat, job guarantees, higher minimum
wage, yet more taxes on higher incomes
and an unworkable, so-called mansion tax. 

It was a move that obviously delighted
Len McClusky, militant  boss of trade
union UNITE, Labour's paymaster and
the one who orchestrated Ed Miliband's
appointment as Party leader, over his
more talented brother, David.

Miliband's puppet-master, course,
welcomed Labour's sharp change of
direction, back to its ideological roots
of the 1918 Clause 1V: common
ownership of the means of production,
exchange and distribution.

Miliband's dog-whistle appeal to
Labour's core supporters and the
left-leaning immigrant vote cleared the
crowded centre-ground of UK politics.
This has had the effect of defining
Labour and Conservatives at opposite
ends of the political spectrum, bringing
a new clarity to politics.

In doing so the Labour leader gave
David Cameron the kind of ideological
room for manoever that had not existed
since the time of Margaret Thatcher. It
was an unexpected gift which the Prime
Minister accepted with relish. 

He contrasted Labour's disastrous tax,
borrow and spend policies with those
of a future Tory-majority government.
The Tories' key objectives are to
achieve a budget surplus by 2020 and
create wealth by promoting business
in a free-market economy.  

This will only be possible if the UK
either leaves, or has a very different
relationship with the EU, as it moves
towards a federal state. Here, voters
remain uncertain whether David
Cameron will deliver on this most
fundamental of issues.