DISCLAIMER this isn't new, interesting or in any way innovative. It hasn't even got anything to do with silence, except that the BBC can't really fight back.
I'm in BOLD and RED from now on. How exciting.
The statist, defeatist and biased BBC is on the wrong wavelength
Ho. Ho. Ho. See, "wavelength". Like TV. And Radio. What a clever man he must be.
What is needed is a Tory at the top to help Britain rediscover its spirit of enterprise, writes Boris Johnson.
Because that's worked so well for the rest of the country already.
OK, I lied, there's going to be a lot of bias in this as well. Bite me. I promise I won't comment on every single sentence though.
'So what do you think, eh?” I turned to the BBC’s art critic, the brilliant, bulging Professor Branestawm lookalike Will Gompertz. We were standing on the top of the ArcelorMittal Orbit in Stratford; London was spread beneath us like a land of dreams – was that France I could see in the distance?(No.)–and yet I was nervous. This sculpture is a masterpiece, far better and more rewarding up close than it appears at a distance. The steel loops are an arterial red, writhing and shifting against each other beneath the blue sky. Anish Kapoor already has many fans, but he has excelled himself with this vast fallopian ampersand, this enigmatic hubble bubble, this proud vertical invitation to London 2012. OK, I lied, there's going to be a lot of bias in this as well. Bite me. I promise I won't comment on every single sentence though.
So far, so Pseud's Corner.
The Orbit is a decisive assertion of the city’s status as the world capital of culture and the arts. That’s my view, anyway, and I am sticking to it, though I am conscious that not everyone agrees. There are plenty of people who absolutely hate the thing, just as most Parisians initially despised the Eiffel Tower (and didn’t Charles Dickens campaign against the building of Big Ben and the Palace of Westminster?). I have heard it compared to a catastrophic collision between two cranes, a mutant helter-skelter, a mangled trombone, and worse. So of course I waited with bated breath for the verdict of the BBC.
Did Gompertz like it as much as I did? My friends, he did not. Or at least, he liked it, but he had two complaints. “It’s not big enough,” he said, “and surely it should be free.” Not big enough! Free! There you have everything that is wrong with the BBC and with this country. The thing is already colossal – about twice the height of Nelson’s column. If we went much higher we would have to re-route the planes out of City airport. And yes, it costs something to go up – though less than it costs to go up the London Eye – but what is the alternative? The alternative is that the whole operation would have to be subsidised by the taxpayer when it is one of the (many) saving graces of this structure that it has been very largely financed by private sponsorship.
Ah, yes, the famous culture of entitlement. A man as rich as Boris wouldn't know anything about that now, because he's had to pay for everything himself all his life. Blah Blah biting satire silver spoon blah.
Except, I'm confused. The (let's not forget to plug our friend Lakshmi) ArcelorMittal Orbit was paid for by sponsorship, so say BoJo and its clunky corporate tag. If so, then why should it not be free? It's already been paid for. Unless, of course, it hasn't, in which case Boris is telling porkies.
WIKIPEDIA TO THE RESCUE! Turns out it has been paid for. Oh, and publicly funded too, since the country's richest man apparently didn't have sufficient loose change down the back of his sofa. And what's this? They're going to hire it out as a corporate venue? Fantastic, that way, the general public can enjoy it for free and only those who want to hire the whole thing need pay! Except of course that that isn't happening. Sigh. On with the show.
In his criticisms, Gompertz was revealing not the instincts of an art critic – but the mentality of the BBC man. Unlike the zany eccentric ArcelorMittal Orbit, the zany eccentric Gompertz is almost entirely publicly funded. It is up to you whether or not to go up the Orbit – though I thoroughly recommend it. You have no choice about funding Gompertz. Everyone who possesses a TV has to pay more than £145 to put him on air. The BBC is unlike any other media organisation in the free world, in that it levies billions from British households whether they want to watch it or not. No wonder its employees have an innocent belief that everything in life should be “free”. No wonder – and I speak as one who has just fought a campaign in which I sometimes felt that my chief opponent was the local BBC news – the prevailing view of Beeb newsrooms is, with honourable exceptions, statist, corporatist, defeatist, anti-business, Europhile and, above all, overwhelmingly biased to the Left.
Except, I'm confused. The (let's not forget to plug our friend Lakshmi) ArcelorMittal Orbit was paid for by sponsorship, so say BoJo and its clunky corporate tag. If so, then why should it not be free? It's already been paid for. Unless, of course, it hasn't, in which case Boris is telling porkies.
WIKIPEDIA TO THE RESCUE! Turns out it has been paid for. Oh, and publicly funded too, since the country's richest man apparently didn't have sufficient loose change down the back of his sofa. And what's this? They're going to hire it out as a corporate venue? Fantastic, that way, the general public can enjoy it for free and only those who want to hire the whole thing need pay! Except of course that that isn't happening. Sigh. On with the show.
Two things. The BBC is not the only publicly funded media organisation in the free world, nor is it the only one funded by licence fee. Denmark, that noted bastion of tyranny and repression, charges a licence fee to anyone with a radio, TV, internet connection or even a mobile capable of accessing state content. Germany has the most expensive public broadcasting system in the world, and again charges anyone who can even a little bit view state content their licence fee, be it radio, internet or mobile. Australia's is funded by (gasp) TAX that you have to pay EVEN IF YOU DON'T HAVE A TV. How ghastly.
Hang on though, I'm being unfair, he's right. The BBC is indeed the only media organisation in the world that levies billions from British households. Silly mistake. Move along, nothing to see here.
Secondly, the BBC is not biased to the left. I am biased to the left. Boris is biased to the right. The BBC, however, is biased right down the middle. Perhaps he just doesn't like getting caught out.
Of course they are: the whole lot of them are funded by the taxpayer. Eurosceptic views are still treated as if they were vaguely mad and unpleasant, even though the Eurosceptic analysis has been proved overwhelmingly right. In all its lavish coverage of Murdoch, hacking and BSkyB, the BBC never properly explains the reasons why other media organisations – including the BBC – want to shaft a free-market competitor (and this basic dishonesty is spotted by the electorate; it’s one of the reasons real people are so apathetic about the Leveson business).
Hang on though, I'm being unfair, he's right. The BBC is indeed the only media organisation in the world that levies billions from British households. Silly mistake. Move along, nothing to see here.
Secondly, the BBC is not biased to the left. I am biased to the left. Boris is biased to the right. The BBC, however, is biased right down the middle. Perhaps he just doesn't like getting caught out.
Oh I get it. Covering the Leveson inquiry is biased. Got you. Right. I mean, yes, Murdoch's competitors probably do want to give him a good shafting, but that's not really what Leveson is about. Leveson began as a press investigation, and quickly uncovered dodgy practices at the highest levels. And a horse. Reporting on Leveson is not biased. In fact, not reporting on Leveson is not only biased but bloody strange.
The non-Murdoch media have their guns trained on Murdoch, while the Beeb continues to destroy the business case of its private sector rivals with taxpayer-funded websites and electronic media of all kinds. None of this might matter, if we were not going through a crucial and difficult economic period. The broad history of the past 30 years in the UK is that the Thatcher government took us out of an economic death-spiral of Seventies complacency. Spending was tackled, the unions were contained, the City was unleashed, and a series of important supply-side reforms helped to deliver a long boom; and when the exhausted and fractious Tories were eventually chucked out in 1997, it was Labour that profited – politically – from those reforms.
The boom continued, in spite of everything Blair and Brown did to choke it. They over-regulated; they spent more than the country could afford; they massively expanded the public sector; they did nothing to reform health or education or the distortions of the welfare state.And so when the bust finally came, in 2008, this country was in no position to cope. We now have the twin problems of dealing with the debt, and recovering competitiveness – and neither of those is easy when the BBC is the chief mirror in which we view ourselves. If you are funded by the taxpayer, you are more likely to see the taxpayer as the solution to every economic ill. If you are funded by the taxpayer, you are less likely to understand and sympathise with the difficulties of business; you are less likely to celebrate enterprise. I have sometimes wondered why BBC London never carries stories about dynamic start-ups or amazing London exports – and then concluded gloomily that it just not in the nature of that show. It’s not in their DNA. Fully 75 per cent of the London economy is private sector – and yet it is almost completely ignored by our state broadcaster.
Yep, that is one way of looking at the last thirty years. Something of a cack-eyed one to say the least, but one nonetheless. But let's assume, and this is one hell of a large assumption, that up until 1997, everything Boris says about history is correct. Boris is basically some kind of real life pensieve, filled with exact memories of everything until that point. Otherwise I'm going to have to get very opinionated very quickly. Then we get the sentence "The boom continued... welfare state." which is just totally self-contradictory. Spending does not choke a boom. Far from it, government spending is actually a component of GDP, which is the thing that grows when growth happens, and borrowing will only exacerbate this effect. Without getting into a row about whether we should tax more/spend less/whose fault is the Credit Crunch, this one sentence demonstrates that either Boris' knowledge of economics is roughly zilch, or he's lying through his teeth. Either way, what he claims is problematic.
Then Boris goes one better, and claims "If you are funded by the taxpayer, you are more likely to see the taxpayer as the solution to every economic ill." With that claim, Boris just made the following people radical statist socialists: The entire Parliamentary Conservative Party, Jeremy Clarkson, the entire staff of the NHS, civil service, judicial system and police force, the entirety of the UK Armed Forces, every councillor up and down the land, all teachers (nothing new there, they're all Trots anyway) and all the employees of the Royal Bank of Scotland. Oh, and Boris Johnson.
Now I'm not actually that dim, I do realise the difference between "more likely to believe" and "definitely think", but that's not a connection Boris wants you to make. He wants you to think that because Auntie is state funded, all her little nieces, nephews and dirty old uncles think that tax and spend government is the solution to everything, and that therefore they "ignore" the private sector.
Short of advertising though, (perhaps the ArcelorMittal Ten O'Clock News, or Get Your Own Back, with gunge brought to you by Trafigura), I'm not sure what Boris actually wants the BBC to do. He says he wants more programmes about "dynamic start-ups or amazing London exports". Well as far as amazing London exports go, there've been a whole lot of programmes talking about collateralised debt obligations recently. As for start-ups, how about Dragon's Den? Or perhaps, this sort of thing posted, OOPS! two days before Johnson's bullshit article. The BBC doesn't ignore the private sector. The problem is that much of it just doesn't make very good telly. Where it does, the BBC supports it.
Well, folks, we have a potential solution. In a short while we must appoint a new director-general, to succeed Mark Thompson. If we are really going ahead with Lords reform (why?), then the Lib Dems should allow the Government to appoint someone to run the BBC who is free-market, pro-business and understands the depths of the problems this country faces. We need someone who knows about the work ethic, and cutting costs. We need a Tory, and no mucking around. If we can’t change the Beeb, we can’t change the country.
Then Boris goes one better, and claims "If you are funded by the taxpayer, you are more likely to see the taxpayer as the solution to every economic ill." With that claim, Boris just made the following people radical statist socialists: The entire Parliamentary Conservative Party, Jeremy Clarkson, the entire staff of the NHS, civil service, judicial system and police force, the entirety of the UK Armed Forces, every councillor up and down the land, all teachers (nothing new there, they're all Trots anyway) and all the employees of the Royal Bank of Scotland. Oh, and Boris Johnson.
Now I'm not actually that dim, I do realise the difference between "more likely to believe" and "definitely think", but that's not a connection Boris wants you to make. He wants you to think that because Auntie is state funded, all her little nieces, nephews and dirty old uncles think that tax and spend government is the solution to everything, and that therefore they "ignore" the private sector.
Short of advertising though, (perhaps the ArcelorMittal Ten O'Clock News, or Get Your Own Back, with gunge brought to you by Trafigura), I'm not sure what Boris actually wants the BBC to do. He says he wants more programmes about "dynamic start-ups or amazing London exports". Well as far as amazing London exports go, there've been a whole lot of programmes talking about collateralised debt obligations recently. As for start-ups, how about Dragon's Den? Or perhaps, this sort of thing posted, OOPS! two days before Johnson's bullshit article. The BBC doesn't ignore the private sector. The problem is that much of it just doesn't make very good telly. Where it does, the BBC supports it.
The BBC is not free market. That's sort of the point. It's there to correct the failure that markets would provide in television. Independent news reporting. Niche programming. The safety cushion to fail every once in a while. NO ADVERTS. It isn't perfect, but then neither are any other broadcasters. I vividly recall being sermonised to at a debate about the utility or otherwise of the BBC by a man who worked for The Times. He argued that the BBC was a waste of money because if you turned it on during the daytime then they were broadcasting tripe. Heads nodded vigorously. He entirely failed to mention that Sky (whom he was eulogising for its quality broadcasting at the time) also broadcasts rubbish in the day time. So do ITV, Channel 4, and Channel 5 is basically rubbish all the time. This is because a) there isn't enough good TV to fill the schedules, b) nobody watches telly in the daytime anyway, and c) the few that do actually seem to like the fatuous crap that gets broadcast then. The BBC's job is not to be the best all the time for everyone. That's impossible. The BBC's job is to be better than the others, on average, at what it's for: news, niche, occasional blow-me-away serial. Which it does well, and for much less than, say, Sky, which for the most basic package will cost you £240 per year (£100 more than a license fee), and if you want HD (free with a license fee) you'll have to shell out another tenner per month.
So stop it Boris. Stop lying to get the BBC out of the way so that ever more money can be squeezed into the pockets of your already wealthy friends. It's not clever and it's not funny, which is a shame, because generally they're you're redeeming features.
So stop it Boris. Stop lying to get the BBC out of the way so that ever more money can be squeezed into the pockets of your already wealthy friends. It's not clever and it's not funny, which is a shame, because generally they're you're redeeming features.
