Category — Politics
Nuclear Power You Can Trust?
Having been involved in the environmental movement in one way or another since the 1970s, I’ve always been in the “anti-nuclear” camp.
Indeed, I think I was the first person to create an English version of the famous “Atomkraft? Nein Danke” logo – for the cover of an edition of Undercurrents magazine – a magazine that was into renewables (mainly of the DIY variety) before a lot of people. (You can read some copies of it here.)
Of course there are plenty of reasons to be wary of nuclear power – of the current variety at least.
- There’s the question of energy security: Uranium doesn’t come from here, we have to import it, or reprocess other peoples’. So although I gather there might be deposits off the British coast, it doesn’t seem at this point to help decouple us from potential problems with dependence on overseas sources.
- There’s the problem of nuclear waste disposal, though some people (James Lovelock for example) are convinced that this can be done safely and permanently.
- Nuclear power as we currently do it is absurdly inefficient. What you do is you let radioactive decay heat some water and then pass it through turbines. It’s just like a conventional power station, except you heat the water differently. I can imagine the efficiency is significantly less than 50%. Whatever happened to innovative direct conversion technologies like MHD (MagnetoHydroDynamics), where, for example, you can run a plasma back and forth in a magnetic field and pull electricity directly off the plasma, in a kind of fluid dynamo? The Soviets had some pilot plants generating several megawatts. What happened?
- And there’s the risk of disastrous accidents, like Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and now Fukushima, which can potentially spread significant amounts of irradiated material over a wide area, with potential health effects like increased long-term cancer risk and other problems beyond the direct effects of radiation poisoning.
Counter to the last of these, there’s the fact that remarkably few people have actually been affected by radiation from nuclear power plants. Many, many fewer than have been killed or injured by coal-mining accidents and other fossil-fuel-related disasters. If Germany was as sensitive to risks to life from bacteria as it is from nuclear power, it would have closed down the organic food industry by now. But instead, it’s closing down its nuclear plants, which, as far as I know, have not caused any deaths at all, unlike the contaminated beansprouts.
But of course, it’s never as simple as that.
The fact is that right now we need low-carbon energy sources, and quickly, to combat the threat of anthropogenic (human-created) global warming (AGW). There is no doubt about the threat of AGW, and I’m not going to entertain discussion about it here. Sorry.
Much as I am in favour of renewables, and much as I like the sight of elegant, virtually silent wind turbines dotting the landscape (and I would as happily have some in the field behind my house as James Lovelock would have a nuclear waste storage facility behind his), the fact is that renewables are almost certainly not enough, and we need something more to replace our ageing and horrifyingly destructive carbon-spewing fossil-fuel powered generating stations. Nuclear is the obvious option, so after years of taking an anti-nuclear stance, I am changing my mind. And in doing so find myself aligned with people like George Monbiot and Professor Lovelock.
In my opinion, even if we did no better in the international nuclear power industry than we have done to date, any threat to human life from nuclear power, past, present and future, is as nothing compared to the billions whose lives are threatened by AGW and will be over the 50–100 years ahead.
I will be a little controversial and say that in my personal view (and I am not a nuclear power expert, so may be wrong), the current level of nuclear power technology is much safer than the chain that ends in a conventional fossil-fuel-driven power station. That, to me, is not the question.
Instead, the question is, can we trust anyone to build, maintain and operate nuclear power stations safely?
You could argue that by and large, the answer to that question is yes. Nuclear power as it is practised today is in fact extremely safe compared with fossil-fuel generation. But there is a bit of a knife edge here. Fundamentally, however intrinsically safe the current technology is, the fact is that I do not trust for-profit corporations to do the job properly. I am not even sure I trust governments. They will always be looking to cut corners and save money, time or whatever else, and the result will be a greatly increased risk. Take a look at this:
This is the segment on nuclear power from Adam Curtis’s Pandora’s Box series on some misuses of scientific research. I’m a big fan of Curtis’s work (although I have some issues with his latest series, All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace) and I think the above is spot on.
So, I think the technology of current nuclear power is fine in theory, but we are going to screw it up in practice. How can we have our cake and eat it? What we need is a method of nuclear power generation that you can’t screw up [very easily].
The answer just might be hinted at in this article from, of all places The Mail On Sunday, a paper I would never have thought I’d find myself recommending in, er, a month of Sundays. It’s also recommended by the climate-sceptic Global Warming Policy Foundation. Talk about strange bedfellows….
The piece is about the “Electron Model of Many Applications”, or EMMA. Here’s the article. Research into this technology is going on in Cheshire and it might just provide the key to one method of using Thorium in a reactor to generate electricity – assuming the UK government continues funding the research properly, which I doubt. Here’s the beginning of the piece:
“Imagine a safe, clean nuclear reactor that used a fuel that was hugely abundant, produced only minute quantities of radioactive waste and was almost impossible to adapt to make weapons. It sounds too good to be true, but this isn’t science fiction. This is what lies in store if we harness the power of a silvery metal found in river sands, soil and granite rock the world over: thorium.
One ton of thorium can produce as much energy as 200 tons of uranium, or 3.5 million tons of coal, and the thorium deposits that have already been identified would meet the entire world’s energy needs for at least 10,000 years. Unlike uranium, it’s easy and cheap to refine, and it’s far less toxic. Happily, it produces energy without producing any carbon dioxide: so an economy that ran on thorium power would have virtually no carbon footprint.
Better still, a thorium reactor would be incapable of having a meltdown, and would generate only 0.6 per cent of the radioactive waste of a conventional nuclear plant. It could even be adapted to ‘burn’ existing, stockpiled uranium waste in its core, thus enormously reducing its radioactive half-life and toxicity.…”
It seems to me that this technology could answer many, if not all, of the environmental concerns about the acceptability of nuclear power. Of course I want to read the full report that is apparently soon to be published, and no technology comes without drawbacks (or unintended consequences for that matter), but preliminary accounts, like the one above, seem to offer promise.
For more on other possible uses of Thorium for power generations, see this Wikipedia article. You’ll see it’s not entirely problem-free – but then nothing is.
*Header image from MensPulpMags.com
June 21, 2011 Comments Off on Nuclear Power You Can Trust?
UK Local Elections 2011: Goodbye Compromise
Why did the Lib Dems do so badly yesterday? The short answer is “probably not what you think.”
The commonest evaluation that seems to be floating around currently, the day after the election took place and now the results have become clear, is that, exactly a year after the General Election that brought the Lib Dem/ Tory coalition, the voting population expressed the view that it didn’t like the cuts and other disastrous policies proposed by the coalition. As a result the Labour vote rose; but in addition, the Liberal Democrats took a particular beating while the Conservatives got off more or less scot free (with a slight increase in seats in fact). There seems to be some mystery in many minds as to why the Lib Dems should have borne the brunt of the nation’s displeasure while the Tories remained unscathed.
In my mind, there’s no mystery at all. Imagine a conscientious Labour voter on the Left, perhaps quite far to the Left, who over the period since 1997 (actually before that in fact), saw the party drifting significantly rightwards until it was more centrist than anything else. That was a cause for concern, but even more disturbing was the behaviour of Blair, over Iraq and the imaginary Weapons of Mass Destruction which never were, and of course that many believe he knew all along never were.
The only significant party to oppose the Iraq involvement was the Liberal Democrats. And as time went by, and Labour never repealed the excesses of Thatcherism (just as Clinton never reversed Reagan and Bush senior, incidentally*) never reined in the financial institutions (that were to bring ruin upon us as an inevitable result of the combined efforts of Reagan and Thatcher), never in fact took any moves to the left at all to any great extent while at the same time increasingly threatening civil liberties, kow-towing to big media companies over internet use, media ownership and behaviour, the Lib Dems came to look more and more attractive.
Trouble was, the Lib Dems were by and large from two backgrounds. There were those who were originally Liberals, many of whom were of course quite remarkable and progressive people — my particular favourite being Beveridge, who conceived a model of the Welfare State before the end of the Second World War which, implemented as much as was practical by the 1945 Labour government, worked pretty well on the whole until Thatcher started attacking it.
But the others were formerly members of the Social Democratic Party, a spinoff of what was essentially the right wing of the Labour Party when the latter was rather closer to being (though not actually being) a Socialist party than it was today. They were certainly to the Right of the Labour Party at the time of the Gang of Four, but where they stood with respect to “New Labour’ was possibly a different matter.
Those of us firmly on the Left, dissatisfied and betrayed by the Christian Democrat-style New Labour edifice (whose policies, using techniques learned from Clinton, had been crafted by focus group and market research and not by fervent belief in the need for representation of working people; and who were funded, like the Tories, by big business and others inimical to their needs) wanted somewhere to go. Somewhere where we might actually have a chance of the party we voted for actually winning some seats (ie not Respect or some other fringe Leftist party). The Lib Dems said enough of the right things for us to be interested in supporting them, especially when everyone else in the country seemed to be on the right.
Unfortunately, of course, the Lib Dems were on the right too — or at least part of them was. Many of us were dismayed last year that the Lib Dems formed a coalition with the Tories, even if we knew full well that a partnership with Labour would not have been workable. However we consoled ourselves with the thought that at least “our lads” were making the Tories less toxic than they would otherwise have been. With hindsight, this seems debatable.
What has happened in the past year is that we have seen threats from the Government to many things we hold dear, from Council services to the NHS to the BBC, and cuts that are very evidently ideological rather than fiscally necessary. It’s Thatcherism in a skin. In the meantime the Labour Party under Miliband has sought to distance itself somewhat from New Labour and even appear to move leftwards a little and behave a little more at least like a Social Democrat, rather than a Christian Democrat, party. No doubt many of us would like it to move further to the Left, but we’re also conscious that a right-wing press would persuade the majority that a hard Left party was unelectable and dangerous. It will take a lot of effort to depose the influence of the Right in the media, and modern technology is only part of the answer — one of the most popular web sites in the UK is, I gather, that of the Daily Mail, for example. That’s one reason why the unbiased nature of the BBC , though we may complain about it from time to time, is so important.
So what we did yesterday is we went back home. Tory voters remained Tory voters – and why shouldn’t they. We bolstered the Labour vote, even in areas where only the Tories were in with a chance — like where I live in the East of England. Here, there hasn’t been a Liberal (let alone a Labour) MP for 60 years, and if I wasn’t voting Conservative it didn’t matter one little bit who I voted for, thanks to First Past the Post (which we are now stuck with indefinitely… I wonder if we could propose the Scottish system of FPTP plus Lists to ensure proportionality?). Last time I looked, my vote here was actually worth 0.01 votes in terms of how likely it was to change things. So I voted Labour, and I hope the pundits look at the popular vote, something that was always ignored before the Information Age, and note the numbers well.
We post-Socialists and friends of like enough mind withdrew our support from the Lib Dems, and without us, their vote went, in most places, back to much earlier, primaevally low levels.
We withdrew our support because we disagreed with the statement that “compromise is not betrayal”; because we don’t believe the compromises should be being made. You cannot make acceptable compromises with the Right when the correct answers are to the Left of both your positions — something I wish Obama had grasped in the US, incidentally.
And because we suddenly realised that of those two wings of the Liberal Democrat party, the Centre Right one was very much in control. And we did not come all this way to vote for yet another party of the Right. We had already made our compromises by supporting a party with a known right-leaning tendency, which hitherto had been ameliorated by a small number of Lib Dem figures who shared our views, for example, on the environment.
We didn’t like discovering that we had been supporting a party of the Right for some time. So we went home.
So what happens now? Well, the atrocious behaviour of Cameron with regard to the antics of the No to AV mob – about which I am absolutely certain that absolutely nothing will be done – will no doubt sour relations in the Cabinet. But Blair and Brown hated each other for years and managed to run the country. So there is no reason the coalition should fall apart for that reason. And falling apart now is anyway too soon.
The important thing in my view is to ensure that Tory policies are stopped. My expectation is that as time goes by, Labour support will continue to rise. It’s already jumped in a year: as the cuts bite and public sector workers are turned out of their jobs across the country, that can only increase. At a point in the future, a stand by Lib Dem MPs on some issue they feel passionately about would bring about a vote of no confidence in the Government, or some other route to a collapse of the coalition, and we’ll have a General Election – one that Labour will win.
OK, the Labour Party still needs to demonstrate that it really is a party of the Left, for example a manifesto commitment to re-nationalising the rail network and undoing some of the ravages of Thatcher might be a good start, but hey, we are so used to voting for the “least worst” we can probably live with that as long as it keeps a slide back to Thatcherism off the table.
Image courtesy of secretlondon123 via WikiMedia Commons
May 6, 2011 Comments Off on UK Local Elections 2011: Goodbye Compromise
Time to change the voting system
On 5 May in the UK, we’ll have a choice, via a referendum: whether to keep the “First Past The Post” voting system – where the person who gets the most votes in an election wins, even if under half those who cast a vote actually voted for them – or instead opt for the fairer “Alternative Vote” (AV) system, where you rank candidates in order of preference.
I am personally in favour of a fully proportional system, but that’s not on the table. AV, however, is a step forward and I’d urge readers to vote in favour. To find out more, click here.
I’ve heard an enormous amount of rubbish about AV, mainly from the “no” camp, and I am rather surprised that there is no mechanism for holding them to account for a campaign of what, in my view, amounts to a lot of lies and distortion.
If you’d like to know which of the claims on both sides are fact, and which are fiction, check out Channel 4’s FactCheck blog.
My nasty suspicion is that the “no” camp will win as a result of deliberately misrepresenting what AV would mean. If you are also in favour of AV, I would appreciate it if you could do your best to stop that happening, and help people understand how it works.
There must be something in it, too, because it’s used for virtually every other type of UK election: electing Mayors, electing representatives to the Scottish and Welsh Parliaments, and choosing the Leader of not only the Labour Party but (via a close relative of AV) the Tories as well. It’s even used to elect hereditary peers in the House of Lords (honest!).
So forget the erroneous protestations of the nay-sayers and try this instead. The truth is, AV is really simple. When you go to the polls, you rank the candidates in order of preference until it doesn’t matter to you any more. That’s it. Or as someone rather more graphically put it, imagine all the candidates are trapped in a burning building. In what order would you prefer them to be rescued?
Dan Snow’s excellent video below clearly explains why AV is a good idea and how it works.
April 26, 2011 Comments Off on Time to change the voting system
Where will voters on the Left go?
I think there are quite a few closet Socialists in this country. They are people, whether they were alive or of voting age or not at the time, roundly endorsed the 1942 Report on Social Insurance and Allied Services by Liberal peer Lord Beveridge (shown above) that laid out the structure of the Welfare State, and the Labour government elected via landslide in 1945 that managed, despite incredible odds, to implement much of it in the succeeding years.
The view at the end of the Second World War was an optimistic one: that Britain needed a new approach in which the old ways of privilege were cast aside and in their place was built a new society in which everyone helped each other, ensuring that Beveridge’s “Five Giants” – Want, Disease, Squalor, Ignorance, and Idleness – were banished from the land. People had seen the way things worked during the war when things were largely centrally controlled, and they had become used to having to work together for the common good, and they wanted peacetime government to enshrine those same values.
The resulting “social consensus” lasted from that point through to the election of the government of Margaret Thatcher in 1979. Thatcher deliberately and carefully took advantage of arrogance on the part of some labour unions to dismember that consensus and throw Britain decisively to the Right, helped by the popular right-wing press.
Quite a few ordinary people did very well out of the Thatcher years, for example being able to buy their council houses at knock-down prices, a policy that only more recently has been shown to have a disastrous impact on social housing.
To appear capable of re-election once again, the Labour Party had to move to the right too. As a result “New Labour” abandoned traditional Socialist values and, under Blair, succeeded in getting back into power with the aid of press barons like Rupert Murdoch. It arguably sold its soul to focus groups and those who crafted policy based not on principle but on marketing. The result was a government that failed to redress the imbalance caused by Thatcher, refused to remove the regressive and repressive legislation that had been put in place over the previous twenty years, and ended up further to the Right than Edward Heath’s earlier Tory government.
“Socialism” had become a dirty word. But plenty of people still held to those old values. Where did those voters go? Some went to the various small Socialist parties that remained, like George Galloway’s Respect. But quite a few moved to the Liberal Democrats. The old Liberal Party, they believed, had come up with the idea of the Welfare State back in the days of Lloyd George, and then the Beveridge Report during the war. The Social Democrats had left the Labour Party and eventually joined forces with the Liberals to form the Lib Dems. The Lib Dems had problems, in that some in the party were quite conservative. But there was also a traditional Liberalism that was further to the Left – far enough to feel like home to many.
Today, we have a coalition government which is largely Tory with a hint of LibDem. Arguably it is more “Liberal” than it would have been if it was a Tory minority Government. But to a lot of people it is in many ways worse than the previous centre-Right “New Labour” administration. Quite a few of those left-wing Liberal Democrat supporters are dissatisfied. As a result, they are moving elsewhere. I think some votes we see today moving from LibDem to Labour are not so much “soft” votes as Left votes. If Labour really moves to the Left (highly unlikely in my view), then we will see more of this.
As Johann Hari has pointed out, the actual views of voters are on average significantly to the Left of all three main parties. Arguably, pressures, notably from the popular Press, however, have tended to keep those parties well to the Right of what used to be the Centre in the days before Thatcher.
A sizeable number of left-wing voters gravitated to the Lib Dems as a result, making the party, de facto, a rather broad church. That breadth is probably not sustainable in the longer term, especially if the LibDems are seen as supporting “ideological” rather than necessary Tory cuts, and if the leadership of the Labour Party moves its stance Leftwards.
Certainly a party with a commitment to traditional Liberal/Left co-operative values of the Beveridge/Labour 1945 variety would appeal to a great many voters who feel that British society, whichever main party is in power, favours the rich and privilege, that the gap between rich and poor is widening dramatically (the latter being an accurate assessment), and that this is a Bad Thing.
It’s a real question as to where those voters will go, especially if they feel the LibDems have let them down and the Labour Party remains centre-right. The Green Party will probably not be in a position to pick them up for various reasons. It may be that they will simply, ultimately, take to the streets. Indeed, they may already be doing so.
This is a process that current Government austerity measures, which many see as ideological and favouring the rich rather than being necessary and fairly applied, will encourage, and we may well see an increasing amount of civil unrest over the next few years unless the LibDems in Government can successfully ensure that cuts and other measures are imposed fairly. For example, many people want to see more emphasis placed on limiting tax evasion/avoidance than on benefit cuts. Such success, to me, seems unlikely.
Meanwhile, the Five Giants are returning. They have, indeed, been returning for thirty years.
• For a rather more positive view of the future for the Lib Dems, see this article in the Independent by Mary Ann Sieghart.
September 20, 2010 Comments Off on Where will voters on the Left go?
The Digital Economy Bill: an engineer/producer’s view
The Digital Economy Bill now being rushed through the UK Parliament is, in my view, a disaster area of lack of understanding of the issues.
Ordinary people risk disconnection from the Internet — accurately described recently as “the fourth utility”, as vital as gas or electricity to modern life — without due process; sites could be blocked for legitimate users because of alleged infringing content. These are just some of the likely effects of the Digital Economy Bill now being rushed through Parliament in advance of the election. And Swedish research indicates that measures of this type do nothing to reduce piracy.
Pirates will immediately use proxies and other anonymising methods to continue what they’re doing: only ordinary people will be affected. It’s quite likely that WiFi access points like those in hotels, libraries and coffee shops will close down because their owners will not want to be held responsible for any alleged infringement.
This bill will not solve any problems for the industry — in fact it’ll create them. Suppose you send a rough mix to a collaborator using a file transfer system like YouSendIt. It’s a music file, so packet sniffers your ISP will be obliged to operate will, while invading your privacy at the same time, encourage the assumption that it’s an infringement. And you may not be able to access YouSendIt in the first place because UK access has been blocked as a result of someone else’s alleged infringements.
Suppose you run an internet radio station. In the UK that requires two licenses, one from PRS (typically the Limited Online Exploitation Licence or LOEL), and the other a Webcasting licence from PPL. Part of what you pay for the PPL licence is a dubbing fee that allows you to copy commercial recordings to a common library. You might do that in “the cloud” so your DJs — who may be across the country or across the world — can playlist from it, using a service like DropBox. How will the authorities know that your music files are there legally? Do you seriously think they’ll check with PPL? Of course not. It’ll be seen as an infringement, and your internet access could be blocked first, and questions asked afterwards. You’re off the air and bang goes your business. Or you may have already lost access to your library because someone thinks someone else has posted infringing material to the same site.
Worst of all, the bill is being rushed through Parliament without the debate needed to get properly to grips with the issues.
The bill as it stands will threaten the growth of a co-creative digital economy.
The industry badly needs to review its position. We’ve known since the Warners Home Taping survey in the early 1980s that the people who buy music are the people who share music. In my view a business strategy that makes your customer the enemy is not a good one.
The population at large believes that a lot of the figures for illegal file transfer are conjured out of thin air — a recent report claimed that a quarter of a million UK jobs in creative industries would be lost as a result of piracy where in fact there are only 130,000 at present. This does not look good.
The industry has a history of taking the wrong position on new technology. Gramophone records would kill off sheet music sales and live performance. Airplay would stop people buying records (how wrong can you be?). And so on. The industry attitude to new technology seems to be “How do we stop it?” We should instead be asking “How do we use this technology to make money and serve our customers?”
The industry is changing. More and more recordings are being made by individuals in small studios collaborating across the world via the Internet. Sales are increasingly in the “Long Tail” and not in the form of smash hits from the majors. Instead of the vast majority of sales being made through a small number of distribution channels controlled by half-a-dozen big record companies, they’re increasingly being made via individual artists selling from their web sites and at gigs; small online record companies like Magnatune.com; and so on. It’s impossible to count all those tiny micro-outlets, and they are not even recorded as sales in many cases — making reported sales smaller, which is labelled the result of piracy when it’s in fact an inability to count — yet this is exactly where an increasing proportion of sales are coming from. I’ve seen some research from a few years ago even suggested that there was actually a continual year-on-year rise of around 7% in music sales and not a fall at all. And indeed the latest official figures from PRS for Music (of which I’m a member, incidentally) show that legal downloads are more than making up for the loss of packaged media sales — and bear in mind that these numbers may increasingly ignore the vast majority of those Long Tail outlets.
I don’t have all the answers to what we should be doing as an industry. It’s a time of change as fundamental as the introduction of the printing press. The scribes are out of a job — but the printers will do well once they get their act together. Right now we’re in between the old world and the new, and everything is in flux — we don’t know quite what is going to happen.
What I am sure of, however, is that making our customers the enemy is not the way to go. We have to find answers that use the new technology to advance our business and serve our customers, and not pretend that we can force the old ways to return, because if we do, we will all lose.
The Digital Economy Bill in its current form actually strangles the Digital Economy — something we need to help pull us out of recession — rather than supporting it. It stems from old-age thinking and lack of understanding of the technology and its opportunities. It should not be allowed to be rushed through Parliament. Instead it needs an enlightened re-write that acknowledges what is really going on in the world and how we can make it work for us.
If you agree with me, please write to your MP and join in the other popular opposition now taking place.
March 20, 2010 Comments Off on The Digital Economy Bill: an engineer/producer’s view
Time to start work to save the BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is in my view the best broadcaster in the world, and today it’s under attack from commercial rivals and politicians (primarily in the Conservative Party) backed by those same rivals (notably members of the Murdoch family). The BBC, in response, is proposing its own cutbacks in services. It’s the thin end of the wedge.
Unfortunately, the current Director General, Mark Thompson, who got the job in the wake of the Gilligan débâcle, and his colleagues at the top of the Corporation, have historically seemed to lack a backbone as far as standing up to critics of the Corporation is concerned. Instead of fighting back, in fact, the BBC and the BBC Trust seem to be taking the view that when threatened, you should throw in the towel and do what the opposition demands, however contradictory, ill-advised or short-sighted. The likely result, it seems to me, is the emasculation of the Corporation and the degrading of a magnificent institution, the envy of the world.
In addition, offering to make cuts is the thin end of the wedge. Just as the skimming off of the licence fee to fund digital switchover provided a precedent for skimming for other purposes, so a decision to make voluntary (or involuntary) cuts provides a precedent for more cuts. We already know the Tories want to dismember the BBC, and this is just starting their dirty work for them.
The Murdoch family, conscious that the world of newspapers is changing dramatically, want to try and halt the tide of change rather than going with it and seeing what new innovations they can come up with. It’s rather like the record companies trying to hold back change by making their customer the enemy. Both will fail. However, the Murdochs may cause extensive collateral damage before they realise this, and nowhere is this of more concern to me than in the case of the BBC.
Thus it is that today the BBC Trust has published a Strategy Review for public consultation. It recommends closing BBC Radio 6 Music and the BBC Asian Network, reducing the content of the BBC Web Site — one of the most popular in the world — by 25%, and other measures. You can find the actual review itself here. You can also read the commentary of the BBC Chairman, Michael Lyons, on the review.
We licence payers have the ability to comment on the proposals, and I recommend that you do so. This can be done via an online survey which asks a series of questions based on the proposals.
If you are concerned as I am about the proposals, I also urge you to sign the petition at avaaz.org. Petitions have swayed the BBC in the past. There is also a petition at 38 Degrees.
I thought I would include here my answers to the questions posed in the Online Consultation questionnaire. I hope you find them of interest. I’ve also written some additional comments on the situation in the Transdiffusion MediaBlog.
BBC Strategy Review: My Response
The BBC’s strategic principles
Do you think these are the right principles?
The only thing I am concerned about is “Doing fewer things”. Why do fewer things? In particular the web site is a marvellous resource and worth every penny. The BBC should be doing unique things that nobody else can be bothered to do, and the web site is one such. Radio 6 Music is another.
The BBC needs to offer quality and originality, and the web site, Radio 6 Music and the Asian Network deliver these.
Should the BBC have any other strategic principles?
The fundamental Reithian principles of “Inform, Educate and Entertain” still work well in today’s environment. The BBC has a duty to deliver these to the public that pays for it. That means adopting new technologies and new delivery methods, and giving them the funding they need to do the job well.
The BBC is in a lose/lose situation in that if it produces popular programming, commercial rivals will moan that it stifles competition. If it produces high-quality and original programming that attracts relatively few viewers and listeners, people will say it’s wasting money.
Thus the BBC needs to unequivocally commit itself to quality and originality and make it clear that by making the programmes the commercial competitors will not make, it is bound to lose viewers and listeners, and that this is an inevitable consequence of such a strategy. Thus criticism of the size of viewing and listening audiences must be ruled as irrelevant and this must be made perfectly clear.
Proposed principle: Putting Quality First
Which BBC output do you think could be higher quality?
There are broad areas where a channel or station could offer “higher quality”, but primarily by dropping programming of a lowest common denominator nature. One could argue that general entertainment programming with very expensive celebrities, for example, or reality shows (were the BBC to consider doing them in the future), can be left to the commercial stations. That doesn’t mean that the output of the BBC in these areas is not of “high quality”, but that the types of programming themselves are not original or of high quality.
Offering you something special
Which areas should the BBC make more distinctive from other broadcasters and media?
Celebrity chat shows and reality TV are not distinctive. Anyone can do them.
Factual programming is a particular area where the BBC already is distinctive, and this can be improved by taking advantage of the fact, for example, that there are no commercial breaks, and thus no perceived need for incessant recaps. The audience can be treated as intelligent and given a well-paced story, without having to be reminded of past points all the time or taking three steps forward and two back on each subtopic.
The BBC Web site and its range of services is distinctive and unlike any other offering, with its broad spectrum of news, comment, information and blogs. This needs to be developed further and take full advantage of new technology.
Stations like Radio 6 music, Radio 3 and Radio 4 offer distinctive programming and music that cannot be heard elsewhere. Radio 3 is nothing like Classic FM, for example. There should be more specialist programming not less.
In general, the BBC is not being distinctive when it produces programming similar to that found on commercial stations and channels. The BBC’s strengths include factual and documentary programming, high quality modern and period drama, linking into new technology such as the web site and iPlayer, and music radio that escapes from the mainstream.
The Five Editorial Priorities
Do these priorities fit with your expectations of BBC TV, radio and online services?
Yes, they do.
Proposed principle: Doing fewer things and doing them better
We welcome your views on these areas.
Closing Radio 6 Music and the Asian Network are in direct conflict with the goal of “Offering something special”. While one might argue that ultimately there should be no need for an “Asian Network” as a separate entity, we are not there yet.
However in particular when considering Radio 6 Music, this kind of service — a service that a commercial broadcaster would not consider offering — is exactly the kind of thing the BBC should be doing and closing it runs contrary to previously-stated criteria.
In addition, radio is cheap — you could close BBC 3 and save a dozen specialist radio stations.
The BBC Web site is also fine as it is. I enjoy the breadth and depth of coverage, which is unmatched by other operators, not because the competition is stifled but because the competition simply cannot be bothered to do it this well.
I do not regard limiting the scope of the BBC web site as being in line with principles of excellence, originality or public service. We pay for the BBC and we have a right to the best possible service from it.
Arguably, nobody could do a web site better — it is one of the most popular in the entire world. Restricting its scope comes across as a knee-jerk response to criticism and not in line with stated strategic goals.
I would like to see BBC local radio remain locally generated as far as possible. There are plenty of people who would volunteer to produce and present locally-based programming outside drive time given access to BBC resources, for example.
I do not have particular views on other areas mentioned in this section.
Proposed principle: Guaranteeing access to BBC services
If you have particular views on how you expect BBC services to be available to you, please let us know.
I do not have any particular views on this section at present.
The BBC archive
Please tell us if you have views on this area.
The BBC is the greatest broadcaster in the world and it has a history of programming stretching back to the 1920s. In the past dreadful sacrifices have been made in the name of cost-effectiveness that have resulted in priceless coverage of international events, unique drama and other programming being irretrievably lost. Much of BBC coverage of the Apollo XI mission was taped over for example.
Maintaining a comprehensive BBC Archive is vital going forward and the mistakes of the past, resulting in irretrievable loss of our cultural heritage, must not be repeated in the future. We need to save the unique programming and output for ourselves and for future generations.
In addition to being archived, programming should be available to the public online and/or via viewing/listening environments like those offered by the BFI.
Proposed principle: Making the licence fee work harder
If you are concerned about the BBC’s value for money, please tell us why.
I have no specific views on this beyond suggesting that as far as salaries, expenses and similar areas of expenditure are concerned, I expect the Corporation always to be aware of cost and to negotiate the best possible deal. I expect contracts and expenses, for example, to be at levels generally regarded as standard in the industry.
Proposed principle: Setting new boundaries for the BBC
Do you think that the BBC should limit its activities in these areas?
No.
Just because your commercial competitors say you should or shouldn’t be doing something doesn’t mean that you should listen to them or that they are talking sense.
Closing 6 Music reduces the output of unique original programming and runs counter to other strategic goals. It also saves only a tiny bit of money in real terms.
Reducing purchases of overseas dramas is not a valid decision if you are intent on offering audiences the best. There are some areas of drama where no UK production can match the quality of programming made overseas, notably in the USA. Denying BBC viewers high quality content simply because it wasn’t made here is absurd.
Equally, there are areas where the BBC is second to none, and I am sure the Corporation does its best to sell these shows overseas and thus facilitate additional services without requiring an increase in the licence fee.
Reducing the scope of the BBC website makes no sense at all in terms of quality of service criteria. The web site as it stands offers a unique service that is unparalleled, not because competition is stifled but because nobody can be bothered to try. It is a unique service, just like, say, the Guardian’s online offerings. In different ways, I am happy to pay for both.
The BBC sets the standards here and in many other areas. Because the BBC had an original, brilliant idea doesn’t mean to say that they have to give it up because the commercial boys didn’t think of it themselves or see how they could make money from it.
I see no reason why the BBC should restrict or reduce its local offerings. Nobody else is going to do it, whatever they say. There is little or no money to be made there but there is a service that can be provided. Public service is part of the BBC’s remit. I do not have views on other proposals in this section.
Should any other areas be on this list?
I would seriously consider whether BBC 3 meets criteria for quality and originality. The few original programmes would be entirely appropriate on BBC 2 or perhaps BBC 4 for example.
My fundamental view is that there are no areas of service that the BBC provides that I am not happy to pay for. However if you are intent on making cuts, then closing BBC3 would save quite a number of radio stations.
March 2, 2010 Comments Off on Time to start work to save the BBC
Standing for Election at a Critical Time
Cambridgeshire County Council ‑4 June, 2009
I am standing for public office to make a statement about standing for what one believes: politics needs to be transformed into efforts on behalf of the benefit of all the people - not a means of power where a few people make profits on behalf of themselves and a small minority of family, friends and colleagues, using a public office to make profits at public expense by ‘flipping’ or overcharging for any number of spurious reasons.
I am standing on behalf of the Liberal Democrats for Cambridgeshire County Council because the Liberal Democrat Party stands for a high percentage of what I believe in.
What do I believe in? Once upon a time I called myself a Socialist — and once upon a time, an Old Labour Party might have covered my aims, but that time has long passed. The Lib Dems are my best bet — and yours too, if you want fairness and justice and reform in the political sphere.
The Tories are hiding their true elistist colours behind the green façade of their youngish leader; Labour has foundered under endless years of would-be Thatcherism. UKIP is a divisive and dangerous sidetrack. Let’s bring back the true face of Liberalism.
I was born in Canada but have lived in the UK (Scotland and England) for well nigh 30 years — and have been married to an inveterate (but adorable) Englishman for over twenty years. Once upon a time I ran for the Greens (1992 General Elections) and in Canada I support the New Democrats. I want to bring light and air — maybe transparency is the buzz word — into politics; but above all, we need government accountable to the people. Right on, eh ?
May 19, 2009 Comments Off on Standing for Election at a Critical Time