Fisking Boris, or The Arse-lorMittal Orbit Story

Uhoh, Boris is talking shit again, about the BBC. I like the BBC. But then obviously that's because I'm a raging commie with delusions of relevance. Anyway, even ignoring the political biases, there's such a number of arrant falsehoods in what he says that I wanted to go through it, piece by piece.
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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

Oh it's Question Time alright!

Yes indeed, first post, why not go for the big fish. Question Time. From the 8th December 2011. I'd link to it, but it'll be gone soon, and I'll bet you two haddock that this post will remain relevant for as long as the internet continues to work. In this episode a lot of things got discussed that I could potentially talk about, but I'm going to go for the biggy: unemployment, with a side order of benefits.

Well apparently, 55% of the British public, the stingy buggers, think that the benefits system in this country is too generous. This then puts people off going to work. Now this is a very complex double-whammy of value-judgements and economics that *should* be going into this decision, and I suspect that in both cases most people, say, around 55% have it wrong.

First off, assessing how generous our benefits system ought to be should really have very little to do with economics and a large amount to do with basic human dignity. Do we give people who are unemployed sufficient cash to feed, clothe and house themselves? And, perhaps, to lead a decent, reasonably fulfilled but probably far from perfect life. To ask any other question is to declare yourself either a poor economist or an exceptional cock-end, or possibly both, because the one thing that politicians, the media and most of the public engaged in debates about unemployment and benefits never ever mention is something that is a commonplace to ALL theories of free market, competitive capitalism, the system upon which our economy is based. And I'm happier believing that they're all exceptional cock-ends than that they're all poor economists. Even if (Probably libellous statement about George Osborne censored here)

That thing is structural unemployment, and it comes in two forms. One, which probably accounts for a very small percentage of unemployment, is in fact necessary to the market economy. This is because markets rely on the idea of flexibility. If people suddenly want more model aeroplanes, then you need a pool of unemployed people from which to recruit more model aeroplane-builders. You can't just take them from the company that loses out when people stop buying dolls to buy model aeroplanes, because unemployment has a lag, and companies don't just fire people on a whim, and the type of people who make dolls for a living may well be different to the type who make model aeroplanes. Obviously this is a vastly simplified model of the economy as a whole. We don't just make dolls and model aeroplanes, we in fact make the square root of fuck all because the Chinese will do it for less. But still, it's an example. And it shows that some unemployment is actually necessary to the functioning of the economy and thus those unemployed by this mechanism should be treated like useful members of society too and not dirty little scroungers as they so often are.

The second form of structural unemployment, however, is vastly more important, and more ignored, than that first, and in my opinion is probably accounts for the majority of unemployment in the UK today. You might also call it "industrial unemployment", and it goes something like this: even as we want more and more stuff, and more and more people are added to the global population, the amount of work needed to make a certain amount of stuff is decreasing, the structure of the economy changes. While total demand for goods is rising, demand for labour is actually falling as a result largely of mechanisation, automation and computerisation. If you want an example, think of your local supermarket. It probably put dozens of shopowners out of business when it first arrived. But that was ok, because it gave us cheap stuff and the shopowner could always get a job stacking shelves, cleaning the floors or announcing the Deal of the Day on Co-Tesburisson's Radio. Or on the tills. But now, the self-checkout has arrived, and its efficiency is undeniable. You can fit two or three into the space of one regular till, customers don't end up waiting half an hour for the trainee to work out what the code for "potato" is and supermarkets can sack 90% of their checkout staff and employ the remaining two or three to staff the self-checkouts. Hooray! Innovation in action! Costs lowered for all! Trebles all round!

Except, of course, for all the workers who've been laid off. They're thrown onto benefits, and demonised as scroungers for not having a job, largely due to the wonders of technological progress. The pattern is visible everywhere, from automated call-centre computers to the rise and rise of internet shopping, automatic ticket machines and even computerised trains. People are vaguely aware of this phenomenon, "There aren't the jobs" was the refrain on QT, but nobody perceives its root cause. The answer is always to "get the economy going" to "create jobs", although the argument of the government seems to go "cut spending and jobs in public services==>?????MAGICFAIRIES?????==>Jobs+growth" and Labour aren't much better. Job creation is definitely the answer, but I'll bet you some more miscellaneous sealife that when politicians say "job creation" they don't mean what I'm saying.

Before I say it though, I have to admit that I was worried that I might be redundant, as a result of some old gaffer on Question Time who, hero that he appeared to be, stuck his hand in the air and said, "Do you not think that the problem might be that wages are too low, not that benefits are too high?" This got a hearty cheer, largely because it's the right approach to this. If you have your priorities right, you want everyone to have the basics, then you start looking at how to incentivise work, to which the answer is clearly "Make sure you get more money for working than you do on benefits". So far so good. But in a situation where demand for labour is shrinking, real wages, particularly for semi- and unskilled jobs, are only going to go down, as more people compete for the same or less work. On the other hand, skilled workers will become ever more protective of their labour, and demand more and more of new entrants, as can be seen in the rise of the unpaid internship, and absurd working hours and demands for new professionals. Sadly, the gentleman in question didn't go on to expound a theory of labour regulation, like I'm about to, but instead said that he thought benefits were too high and he couldn't pay high enough wages to attract people. Shame.

But anyway, that's the situation. Not enough jobs to go around, and a society in which being without work is demonised. And also one in which there are huge inequalities in income. So the solution is this: Cap wages, but also cap hours. Break up high paying jobs into two or three or four moderately well-paid jobs. Now I don't pretend that this is any kind of panacea, and nor do I pretend that everyone will like it, but I believe that it is a better option for more people that the system that we currently have, and will only get more so as technology progresses and people find new ways to cut down on the amount of labour needed to make stuff for the increasingly small number of people with any money to buy it with.

The point of life, after all, is not to work but to enjoy, something that very few people manage simultaneously. It is my most humble opinion that nobody needs (at current prices) more than £50,000 p.a. to enjoy themselves to the hilt, and even if more money does mean more enjoyment, it's not worth the misery that it causes someone else. Moreover, studies have shown that greater efficiency at work is not linked to higher pay but to greater job satisfaction (once they don't need to worry constantly about money), and that giving people better working conditions leads to greater productivity, even where they have less money. So take the jobs that currently stress out the man on £200,000 p.a., split them four ways and give them to four people. Realise the Utopia of people working just six hours a day, with greater employment. Prevent the great accumulation of useless capital and unspent wealth and allow the whole population to participate in the economy. Create jobs in a meaningful way.

As I said, this is no panacea. Various highly-paid and highly-strung individuals will get on their high horses about how hard they have worked for their money (unlike those on the minimum wage, who never work hard, or those on benefits, who are deprived of even the chance to work hard). They may even up sticks and leave the country. To them I say, fine. We're better off without you. People who value their own luxuries more than the basic welfare of others don't deserve an opinion. The greater problem is the lie that everyone is fed from birth that people deserve what they own simply by virtue of owning it. That taking away someone's property and limiting income in order to make the whole world better is a bad thing. This means that not only the rich and greedy but also a great many who are neither would oppose a policy that involved limits to wages which they will never reach but which they are told they can aspire to and, if only they work hard enough, attain. But that's a different topic entirely.

As I also said, though, this is a blog about what people never say. And probably never will. Not sure why I'm bothering to be honest. The debate on QT swung back and forth between "Benefits BAD culture of entitlement GRR" and "But it's only £67.50/week, how can that be too much?" without anyone, even with elderly prompting, thinking that perhaps the answer might lie at the other end, in wages and the amount of available work. But there it is, it's the sound of a deafening silence about what could be the most profound economic problem the world has ever faced: what do we do when the work runs out? And it makes almost everyone's life infinitely worse.

EDIT: Guess I was right. Note the date.

WHY?

Warning. May contain something scarily like a mission statement. Yikes.

I've always been something of a cynic when it comes to blogs. "Why do you think that anyone cares what you have to say?" is a question I frequently find myself asking when confronted with innumerable barely-literate brainfarts about celebrities, documentations of some randomer's life or, heaven forbid, tumblrs (shudder). Unlike twitter, though, which is pretty uniformly crap (very few people can say anything worth saying in 140 characters) some blogs are genuinely interesting, or at least not entirely pointless. I have friends who blog about food and fashion. I find that dull. But largely because I find fashion, to quote a famous John, "irrepressibly drab and awful", and whilst I find food all too interesting, I want to eat it, not read about it.

Then there's the blogs I do read. Avidly. My first blog-love was the wonderful Speak You're Branes, which is all about taking the piss out of the clinically stupid and incurably right-wing comment-spewers of the BBC's Have Your Say, and is now sadly a limping shadow of its former comedic self. This, though, led me on to angryyoungalex, whose close analysis of everything from why sick jokes are (or aren't) funny through to why the French ban on the veil is essentially the same as making it mandatory to have your tits out is incomparable, funny, and incredibly convincing. Through that, I've discovered literally some other blogs that are worth reading for their insight and thought, which probably have a total readership of some other bloggers and various nutjobs and sadacts like me. Certainly in the hundreds rather than the thousands. So even they, then, good though they are, make me writing a blog ultimately pointless. Even if I could match their insight and wit, and anyone who knows me is introducing their face to their desk at the mere thought of my sense of humour, why bother, if nobody will read it. What's more, of those who do, I will be either preaching to the choir or talking to a brick wall. The internets doesn't change opinion, it reinforces it, as people find others who also hold their views and cling to them as evidence that they aren't just bog-standard, isolated fucknuts.

But, and mine is a big but (badum-tish) I've decided that I don't care for one pretty poor reason. This idea for a blog has been bouncing around in my head for a while now, and I've decided to let it out to have a run around. If I write about the things that aren't said that should be, the important aspects of a debate that are skimmed over or ignored and that guide our debates and thought processes down one very narrow track, then I'm not trying to change anyone's mind, but rather to open it, to make people aware of the possibilities that they're not looking at. Even if only twenty people ever read it, and they all think that everything that I've suggested is a gigantic steaming pile of walrus manure, at least they'll have thought about my ideas. Maybe?

Either than, or I'm just another futile scream in the packed, sweaty, overloud nightclub that is life, and anything I try to say will be drowned out by the din being made by the people who actually run the place.

Oh yeah, I can be pretty morbid and armchair-philosophical at times too, sorry.