Songs of Praise, Calais and that old BBC bias thing

So the BBC proposes to do an edition of Songs of Praise from the Calais refugee camp. So what, you may think. The Daily Express is not so sanguine, splashing the story on its front page complete with quotes from Nigel Farage.

You don't have to read what he says. You can imagine very easily.

Is the BBC right?

Let's start by agreeing that migration is a sharply political issue. People (and parties) are divided about how much immigration we should have, and who should decide how much we should have. The issue of our continued EU membership might well turn on the question. We're also divided about the issue of African refugees. How should we treat them? How many should we take? Should we help them cross the Med? Should we round them up and send them straight back? Should there be a formal allocation across EU countries? What is the best way to help Africa become a continent people want to migrate to instead of from?

Against that background, a programme which humanises and makes poignant the plight of those who have risked their lives to cross Europe in the hope of a better life (even if many of them are economic migrants) has an unmistakable political resonance. Sympathy for the migrants is easily equated to sympathy for migration.

Of course the BBC can't be above politics. It is imbued with it. And the political outlook of its staff is reflected every day even in the non-news programmes it makes. I've been arguing for years that if you tend to employ humanities graduates you'll tend to get a certain type of political outlook. A long succession of current and former BBC staff have confirmed this suggestion of emergent group-think (the phrase is Andrew Marr's).

As so often with the question of BBC bias, the most compelling signs are of the dog-that-didn't-bark variety. Where are the current and former BBC staff complaining of right wing bias? There aren't any. None. I've never heard of one.

I wrote quite recently here about the film Pride (W1A, Pride and the BBC). This, readers will remember, is the BBC backed film which followed the tribulations of gay men and women from London trying to help striking miners in the (fiercely socially conservative) South Wales valleys. I enjoyed Pride, but I couldn't help asking myself whether BBC Films would have put its money behind a film which took the other view.

"Would it", I wrote, "have backed a film showing Arthur Scargill as an evil communist intent on bringing down the democratically elected Thatcher government? Or about Jack Jones taking money from the KGB? Would it have put money behind a story about dutiful women of South Wales Chapel righteously upset about the promiscuous Aids-bearing homosexuals from the capital? Even to ask the question is to realise how laughably unlikely that would be."

And so with Songs of Praise. By all means go to Calais and do a programme humanising the awful tragedy taking place there. By all means show the plight of the migrants. But do the other thing as well. And that's the problem. The BBC wouldn't. Pace Pride, can you imagine Songs of Praise going to, for example, an unemployment blackspot in the North East and showing the plight of people who say they can't get jobs because the local industries are now the province of East Europeans? Can you imagine them doing the programme from places where people can't get their kids into schools because of the pressure from migrants and their families? Or from places where the local health service is facing bankruptcy because of increased demand?

Me neither. The BBC would just never do it. Why not? The most obvious answer is because it tends to employ people who tend to think that immigration doesn't have a downside. I'm not suggesting that, to use the Songs of Praise example, there would be a production meeting in which the possibility of going to an area of East London frequented by the gay-hating Muslim Patrol (see internet for details) was mooted and rejected. I'm saying the possibility would never occur to them. The Corporation just doesn't employ people who think like that.

You have to ask yourself, at a time when Charter renewal is only a few months away, with a newly installed Conservative government confident in its diagnosis of BBC bias, in a context where alternative funding arrangements which could replace the licence fee are increasingly accepted across the industry, how could they be so stupid as to present their enemies with such a simple tap-in?

I hope the Government doesn't throw out the BBC baby with the bathwater. But if they do the Corporation will only have itself to blame.

How Jeremy Corbyn could win (Yes, really).

At the time of writing it looks as if Jeremy Corbyn has quite a decent chance of becoming Labour Party leader. The last time I voted Labour in a General Election was in 2005, so I don't on the face of it have much interest in the outcome of the party's leadership contest.

The tactical point made by Blairites and political journalists alike is that the electorate opted for the Tories when offered a choice last May between Centre Left and Centre Right.  People are, the argument runs, unlikely to turn out in large numbers for a Labour Party further to the Left. Thus if Corbyn wins, Labour is bound to lose.

I actually think this is wrong.

The most obvious reason is the inherent uncertainty of politics. No one knows what's over the horizon. Harold Macmillan's "Events, dear boy, events", if you like. It's perfectly possible that a disaster so fundamental could overtake the Tories that Jeremy Corbyn would seem quite attractive by comparison.

But even in the absence of some Black Swan event, as Billy Bragg (one of Corbyn's celebrity endorsers) tweeted the other day, it's perfectly possible to calculate that if Labour shifts to the Left it will gain enough voters (particularly among the young) to win. It's a defensible tactic.

As it happens I think that Bragg has set his terms too narrowly. Yes, Labour will gain some otherwise apathetic first-timers. But, faced with the prospect of a Far Left government, some Labour voters will turn elsewhere (perhaps the Lib Dems or UKIP), lazy Tories will turn out who might not otherwise and some Lib Dems will vote tactically to keep Labour out.
Moving Left may be a gamble worth taking, but it's a bigger gamble than Billy Bragg realises.

If a Corbyn-led Labour Party isn't bound to lose, it nevertheless probably will, and to that extent as a former Labour voter I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

The overwhelming majority of Labour supporters, and a good many of its professional politicians, think that the financial crisis was all the fault of the City, that Labour did not overspend whilst in office, that Britain is suffering the yoke of Tory austerity, and that any alleged black hole in the public finances can be filled by taxing the rich a bit more. For them public spending should be limited by compassion, not affordability.

Then there is a group which understands that Gordon Brown's tinkering with the regulations gave the City more freedom to misbehave, that Labour ran substantial deficits during the 2000s which left the Treasury ill-prepared to deal with the downturn, and that if the bankers had behaved responsibly the lending spree which Labour rode with such ill-disguised glee ("No more Tory boom and bust") would have come to an end much sooner. They grasp that, despite alleged Tory austerity, public spending actually continues to rise and that the trouble with taxing the rich more is that there aren't very many of them, they don't on the whole get their money in an easily traceable PAYE cheque at the end of the month and they can afford accountants. These people also grasp that, ultimately, you can only have the public services you can afford.

The second group is a very small minority within Labour, and one largely grouped within the parliamentary party.

If you had to choose a demographic in Britain likely to contain the smallest number of people who took this second view, the Labour party membership would be a pretty good contender. Which is why polls show Liz Kendall lagging a distant fourth in the leadership race. That's the crushing irony. The people charged with deciding who is best placed to lead Labour back to power are those least likely to understand what's necessary to do so.

Labour can regard its election defeat in two ways. It can say that the electorate was wrong, and that all it needs to do is keep on persuading enough of us to change our minds. 

Alternatively it could say that perhaps the electorate was in some respects right, and work out how it might change its pitch accordingly.

Unfortunately for Labour the first response requires nothing special. It merely requires its supporters to behave the way most people do faced with rejection. I was right! How dare they be so stupid! The second response on the other hand requires something exceptional - humility and openness. Since so many more of us are all too human it's not surprising that the first response has overwhelmed the second amongst the Labour faithful.

What makes it all the harder for them is that if the electorate were right, where does that leave Labour? If the days of the blank cheque are over, what is Labour for? The point of Social Democracy is that government taxes the surpluses capitalism produces, and uses the money to make a compendious safety net for the poor. But what if there isn't enough money to do that in the way Labour wants? How does it appeal to the electorate then? If it accepts Britain must live within its means, how does it differentiate itself from the Tories or Lib Dems?

This is the appeal of Corbynism. Rather than position itself as a Tory-lite party, the temptation is for Labour go the whole hog and stand proudly on the Bennite Left. The Blairite response to this proposition is, "But you will never win a general election". "Ah", say the Corbynites loftily, "but what is the point of winning when doing so would make us just as bad as our enemies?"

As I said, it's almost funny.

I can readily imagine circumstances in which I might vote Labour again. I think Liz Kendall is an incredibly impressive candidate. A good leader and some sensible policies might do it. 

But Jeremy Corbyn? Come on.

In my lifetime Labour has gone on a journey which reflects both the vaulting ambition of its statism and the undermining of the industrial base which might once have been used to pay for it.  It has gone from being the party of tax and spend (Wilson, Callaghan, Kinnock), to the party of tax, spend and borrow (Blair and Brown). Corbyn proposes a further transformation to the party of tax, spend, borrow and print money. Not on your Nelly.