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Iain Martin at the Telegraph has made point worth quoting at some length, particularly as readers from outside the UK may be not be able to read the entire article. He writes,
For weeks, print journalists of all kinds – from tabloids to broadsheet – have been trying to explain that the press cannot be free if the state, or parliament, wields power over it. At times it has been as though we are talking a different language from parts of the rest of the population, such has been the bafflement. What could there possibly be to worry about if politicians – even at one remove, through a quango they appoint – essentially authorise, underpin or license press regulation? It would be “independent”, wouldn’t it? Politicians and their increasingly large staffs of spinners, strategists and assorted hangers-on would not dream of using this as a chance to apply pressure, bully, cajole or generally lord it any more than they already do over journalists trying to write uncomfortable stories that involve said politicians.
Step forward Joanna Hindley, Mrs Miller’s special adviser, who has unwittingly just performed the press and her country a great act of service by the way she dealt with a Daily Telegraph reporter who was making perfectly fair enquiries about the rather eye-boggling expenses of the Culture Secretary.
As the Telegraph reports:
“When a reporter approached Mrs Miller’s office last Thursday, her special adviser, Joanna Hindley, pointed out that the Editor of The Telegraph was involved in meetings with the Prime Minister and the Culture Secretary over implementing the recommendations made by Lord Justice Leveson.
“Maria has obviously been having quite a lot of editors’ meetings around Leveson at the moment. So I am just going to kind of flag up that connection for you to think about,” said Miss Hindley.
Miss Hindley also said the reporter should discuss the issue with “people a little higher up your organisation”.
It’s the NHS first got me thinking how the power of the narrative distorts so much of how organisations & ideas are viewed. This one starts; “Staffed by dedicated doctors & caring nurses the British National Health Service is the envy of the world…”
It runs for a couple of paragraphs, was first written the day before its inception & has been repeated so many times it’s probably encoded somewhere down in our DNA by now. It’s not just that the public believe it. Almost everyone connected to the NHS do as well. Doctors, nurses, administrators, politicians. Even most of the media. It makes it impossible for any of them to view it with a clear eye.
The incidents quoted above… others much worse we’ve heard about in the last few years… they should be part of the narrative as well but it just rewrites itself over them. Edits them away so the next time comes as exactly the same shock as the one before & the one before that. No-one actually learns any lessons or does anything because the narrative reassures them it’s not necessary. They’re just aberrations. Momentary & inexplicable blips in an otherwise perfect system. Or just signs that even more money needs tipping into it. That the engine that’s coughing & banging & spewing out smoke & broken parts would be running as sweet as a sewing machine with just a little more fuel.
– Commenter ‘Bloke in Spain’
Last night I attended the Adam Smith Institute Christmas Party.
Here are ASI President Madsen Pirie and the speaker for the evening, Allister Heath, editor of City A.M., kindly taking the time to pose together for me:
So, there didn’t seem to be any problem about me taking photos. But actually, it rather seemed as if there was. Try as I might, I don’t seem to be able to get away from this theme, in my bloggage of this week.
The most famous personage present was a very recognisable Member of Parliament. And in quite a few of my crowd shots, he is to be seen glaring rather angrily, sideways, at my camera, rather than in the direction he ought to be have been looking, so to speak, as if to say: I didn’t come here to be photoed. I came here to get away from all that crap and to be among friends. Fair enough, no pictures of or naming of him.
Besides which, the public point made by such gatherings, insofar as there is one, and aside from the matter of everyone having a fine old time and fine old natter, catch-up, etc., was not so much the quality of those present, qualitative though it definitely was, as the quantity of that quality. These people were not merely rather impressive. There were a lot of them:
That’s Heath holding forth, and that’s the front of his audience. This is the back of his audience:
Spot the join. Unless my eyes are seriously deceiving me, you can’t. I am pretty sure there is no join to spot, and that there were further people present, to the right of those at the front, and to the left of those at the back. My camera has a gratifyingly wide angle of vision, but was not nearly wide enough in its vision for this gathering, given where I was standing.
As to the content of Heath’s remarks, well, anyone who knows their City A.M. will know that he is in a pretty gloomy state of mind about the immediate prospects of the British economy. There was a copy of City A.M. in the lobby, and I took notes (with my camera) of stories with headlines like UK is facing a lost decade for growth and More Yuletide misery for the City as well as Allister’s own editorial of that morning, entitled Politicians need to stop moralising – and reform our taxes. His editorial today is entitled A case of lies, damn lies and our rocketing national debt.
And as if to match that mood, most of us were dressed in “office attire”, meaning dark and funerial. Even I broke the habits of a decade and dressed funerially. It neither looked nor felt like a Christmas Party. The only thing Allister Heath could think of to cheer us up was to say that for all the governmental mismanagement of our country’s finances, at least technology continues to advance, although no thanks to us. He mentioned, in particular, Google’s robot cars, which is a story that I have been attending to myself for quite some time, and which I intend to blog about here Real Soon Now.
The end of Heath’s talk was hijacked by this guy:
Yes it’s Andrew Ian Dodge, presenting some Andrew Ian Dodge for Senator propaganda to Eamonn Butler, so that Eamonn Butler can exhibit it, somewhere. Now there‘s a man who has no problem about being photographed.
Councillor Harry Phibbs, top right, is not impressed by this pushy American.
This guy, on the other hand, preferred to hide his face behind his iPad:
Well, no not really. He was taking a photo, of me.
“And may I say that the exaggerated outrage over the “phone hacking” scandal is particularly hypocritical given the culture of pervasive surveillance of citizens that the British government — ahead even of our own — has established over the past decade or two. Those criticizing the press here are in no position to complain about invasions of privacy.”
Glenn Reynolds weighs in on the the Leveson Report’s recommendation to regulate the UK media. Being a good American living in a land that has a First Amendment – not always well observed – Reynolds is distinctly unimpressed by Leveson. And we Brits should well remember how, if the UK media – or bits of it – are subjected to control, how this will lend some encouragement to authortarians the world over. (This is a fact that some members of the present government, such as William Hague, the foreign secretary, have grasped).
I am not often found defending the BBC or its offshoots, but this is just out of order.
The Welsh Government (for so the lads with the office on the fifth floor of Tŷ Hywel have styled themselves since May 2011 – there’s posh for you) demanded that the Welsh-language TV station S4C give the government a right of reply and refrain from ever repeating an episode of the soap opera Pobol y Cwm because a fictional character said the Welsh government “doesn’t have the backbone” to cull badgers.
Quite rightly, S4C repeated the programme as scheduled.
Like anyone else, the Welsh government has the right to complain if it believes that the BBC has failed in its statutory duty of impartiality as a tax-funded broadcaster, and that includes complaining about fiction. I did so to the point of exhaustion here. But what gave the Welsh Government the impression that it could try to impose impartiality right down to the level of re-writing the script for a particular actress in a soap opera?
The Leveson Report, probably.
Yesterday, as earlier reported, I attended an event about road pricing. It was typical IEA. Men in suits and ties with irreconcilable beliefs took it in turns to be irreconcilably polite about everything, while other men in suits and ties listened with equal politeness:
There are some of the men in suits and ties waiting their turn to be polite. And look, one man in a suit and a tie is even straightening his tie, James Bond style, although there the resemblance ends. That’s Oliver Knipping, co-author, together with Richard Wellings (the man in a suit and a tie on the right whose face is blocked out by the video camera) of a recent IEA publication entitled Which Road Ahead – Government or Market? Do you see what they did there? Which road, as in policy, metaphorically speaking, for dealing with roads, as in roads, literally.
I am being much too rude. It was actually pretty interesting if you like that sort of thing, which I only somewhat do, hence my rudeness. I went because I knew that although I would be rather bored during the event, I would afterwards be glad that I had attended, and so it has proved. I got a copy of Which Road Ahead for only a fiver, and better yet, I met a man with a blog, called Road Pricing.
I like road pricing, for the same reasons I think that governments shouldn’t give away train tickets to everyone just because the train system is government owned and/or government controlled and people have already paid for it that way. What if some people don’t like trains and never use them? It’s not fair. Without journey pricing, the trains will get even more impossibly crowded. Privacy? That argument was won and lost when they introduced number plates, I reckon. A man called Gabriel Roth was quoted as saying that the road systems of the world are the last bastions of Soviet style central planning. Which isn’t true. What about central banking? But I like the sentiment. This is a product for which people queue for the product on top of the product thereby destroying the product. That can’t be the right road ahead, now can it?
Scott Wilson, the Road Pricing blogger, agrees. But you won’t read many arguments at his blog about why road pricing is good. What you will read is reports about how road pricing is being done in various parts of the world, well or badly, and criticisms of places where it is being done badly, like, surprise surprise, the UK. In that posting there is a picture of people being charged to get across the Thames which makes you think, not road pricing, but: crossing a national frontier, of the sort that is taken seriously.
I ought to have known about this blog two years ago, when it started. But no matter, now I do. This is the kind of thing that you learn if you go to rather boring meetings instead of just staying home glued to a computer, the way I am now. Besides which, a blog is merely a blog. If you actually meet the man who runs it, see his suit and his tie, and hear him talking, quite intelligently, that makes you actually want to pay attention to his blog.
One thought that occurred to me when thinking about reaction to the Leveson Report – which calls for statutory regulation of the UK press – is that those journalists frightened of such regulation, and concerned – rightly – about the dangerous consequences have had a very sharp lesson in the problems of regulation. (Here is the official Leveson website for those who have the stamina).
Consider the following: After the recent financial crisis of 2008, almost the entire media, political world and associated industry put up a chorus that what the world needed or still needs is “more regulation”. The fact that the banking industry already is subject to the laws against fraud and force, that it operates under rules about capital (the Basel system), has to lend to certain groups (US legislation to help minorities), or that central banks set interest rates like Soviet planners, seemed not to matter one jot to those arguing that we need even more rules. And rules enforced by such paragons of wisdom and omniscience as the Financial Services Authority or Bank of England.
Yet this time, when the media itself is in the cross-hairs, we see journalists from across the spectrum arguing about the dangers of quangos, of unelected boards of governors running the show, of the dangers of moral hazard, of the problems of losing freedom of action. It is as if George Monbiot had morphed into FA Hayek.
As I say in the title, maybe this is a teachable moment for the British media. Of course, the state-supported BBC and, for that matter, the partly state-subsidised Guardian (all those public sector ads) might be more amenable to state controls, although in the case of the Guardian, even those guys might understand the dangers. (Would, for example, the Guardian be able to use the likes of Wikileaks in future under a statutory regime?).
I might be optimistic here, but when people find their own livelihoods and freedoms come under attack, it can make them understand the value of liberty and rule of law more generally. Let’s hope that the next time a journalist writes an article which calls for more regulation of X or Y, that they see the irony, and think again.
The Spectator have made it clear that regardless of what state regulation parliament imposes upon the press…
They will not not cooperate.
We say in our leading article that we would happily sign up to any new form of self-regulation which the industry proposes, no matter how onerous. But we would have no part in any regulatory structure mandated by the state. That is to say: we would not attend its meetings, pay its fines nor heed its menaces. To do so would simply betray everything that The Spectator has stood for since 1828.
To say this is ‘admirable’ would be to damn it with faint praise. It is magnificent.
I am glad that Adrian Smith has won his case against his employer, Trafford Housing Trust. These links give the story:
– Christian wins case against employers over gay marriage comments (The Guardian)
– Social media, employment, religious views and freedom of speech (Law & Religion UK, a specialist blog.) This link makes that point that although Mr Smith’s Facebook page did identify him as an employee of the Trafford Housing Trust, no reasonable observer would suppose that Mr Smith’s opinions represented the Trust’s opinions.
– Facebook gay wedding comment man wins demotion case (BBC)
Adrian Smith lost his managerial position, had his salary cut by 40%, and was given a final written warning by Trafford Housing Trust (THT) after posting in February last year that gay weddings in churches were “an equality too far”.
The comments were not visible to the general public, and were posted outside work time, but the trust said he broke its code of conduct by expressing religious or political views which might upset co-workers.
Given that “might upset co-workers” could apply to just about any conceivable opinion, and that his actual words were almost comically mild, I am not surprised that there was a widespread sense that Trafford Housing Trust could not be allowed to set a precedent. In the end the judge went so far as to regret in public that for technical legal reasons he could not award Mr Smith any more than a token sum on top of his old job back.
All in all this was one instance where a probing attack by the Creatures from the Dungeon Dimensions was overconfident and was repulsed. I think it likely that the same will prove true of the UKIP fostering case mentioned in Johnathan’s post from Sunday.
Nonetheless, I feel obliged to note that in a free society employers would have the right to make their offer of a job conditional upon an employee shutting up utterly about his personal opinions, or vowing slavish adherence to the opinions of his employers however stupid, or wearing a pink carnation up his nose, or being black, homosexual, Muslim, Nazi or all of the above. Not that I would believe such demands would be at all common. Most people, naturally, would elect to work for a less controlling employer – and in a free society we would not be in the position that so many jobs were in the gift of the government or its proxies. The Trafford Housing Trust is one of these deniable chimeras that have spawned under every rock lately; half “charity”, half government.
There are two phrases that we rarely hear these days: “it’s a free country” and “there ought to be a law against it”. We do not hear these any more for the simple reason that we are no longer a free country, and more often than not there is a law about it.
– Nigel Farage
(link is to the Daily Telegraph so some overseas readers may issues accessing it)
Look, I want you to know that if I thought there was the slightest chance that it was really going to happen my first reaction to this story would probably not have been to say “Cool”.
Lord Gilbert Suggests Dropping A Neutron Bomb On Pakistan-Afghanistan Border
Even cooler: he is a former Labour defence minister.
Responding for the government Lord Wallace said the coalition did not share the “rumbustious views” of Gilbert.
Quite.
The last few days have been full of the story of how, in Rotherham, a northern UK town in a historically strong Labour area, a couple have had their adopted children taken away because the couple are members of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP). According to the social services department, membership of a party that, among other things, wants Britain to leave the EU and enforce certain immigration controls means that the couple are “racists”. Yes, do not adjust your computer.
While I am sure there might be UKIP members who are racists, just as there are bigots who join other parties, I suspect the vast majority are concerned about multi-culturalism not because of race but of concerns about culture. This distinction cannot be overstated or repeated often enough.
Furthermore, there is nothing from the reports I have read to suggest that the couple – they are not being named – are anything other than decent people who provide children with a stable and loving home background. So as a result of the cultural Marxism of the Rotherham social services department, children are to spend time in a foster home, away from a mum and a dad.
I am not a fan of conspiracy theories, but you have wonder whether the boss of social services is in fact a secret supporter of UKIP, given that in a by-election shortly to take place in the town, the issue is bound to drive up UKIP’s share of the vote.
When I talk of “cultural Marxism”, what I mean is that the people taking such decisions want to impose a totalitarian political and cultural order on this country. They hate families; indeed they fear families. As explained superbly by Ferdinand Mount many years ago, collectivists of different hues have resented families and done everything in their power to destroy this institution. Unless parents hold “correct” views on certain subjects, then it appears they cannot be allowed to care for children.
It is a tragedy that the happy family life of three youngsters has been damaged, but if any good comes out of this sorry affair, it is that when we talk about the “cultural Marxism” of parts of the public sector, this is not some smart-alec phrase or mad phobia. It is a real issue and I hope that Michael Gove, the Education Secretary who is one of the few impressive members of the coalition cabinet, takes a blowtorch to the social services department and the decision-makers there. (He was adopted himself, and therefore has very strong views on the benefits of adoption).
Ironically, the behaviour of this social services department is a gift to to the far right and those who want whip up racial hatreds. (Maybe that is also a sort of conspiracy theory. Discuss.)
We also need to start learning a few tactics from the left, such as picketing the establishments where these people work, naming and in some cases, shaming those who take such decisions and keeping their profile high in public view. A problem with those not on the hard left or far right is that we are “civilised”; but people such as this idiot in charge of Rotherham social services are not nice, at all. We have had a useful reminder of just how far they are prepared to go.
Guido Fawkes also writes of the war on the family, with reference to the sort of Fabian socialism of George Bernard Shaw (decent playright, terrible man).
Final thought: is this an isolated incident, or have there been other cases where the real or alleged political views of parents have barred them from raising children? I would be willing to bet that this has happened before, and may even happening as I write.
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