Britain without the BBC

It's being reported this morning that the BBC has commissioned a review into the relationship between the BBC and the BBC Trust.

The Corporation quite often does this sort of thing.  In 2012 it asked for a review into its handling of the immigration issue from ex ITV CEO Stuart Prebble.  The review came to the conclusion that the BBC had a "deep liberal bias". It thus cost £175,000 to find out something anyone with two eyes and ears could have told them for nothing.

So what does the BBC do when it turns out that it's been wasting millions of licence-fee payers' money overpaying departing staff?  Answer, it wastes hundreds of thousands in further navel gazing.  Across the Corporation more lowly staff must be reduced to scratching their heads, having of course torn all their hair out over the last few weeks.

Meanwhile the BBC leadership sails blithely, on unaware that, having done its best to cast the Corporation's reputation down with its nest-feathering profligacy, it is now dancing blindly around, trampling it into the mud.

I am with Allison Pearson, who writes in the Torygraph this morning, "I have no desire to live in a Britain without the BBC.  At the end of this unedifying week, that terrible prospect has come a little closer".

General Patten and the BBC mutiny

That luminary of the Public Accounts Committee, Margaret Hodge, has apparently described the appearance of former and current BBC bosses before the committee as "an unedifying experience".  In the dispute about whether severance payments were necessary, and whether the BBC Trust knew about them or not - Mark Thompson says they did, Lord Patten says they didn't - it seems to be common ground that in the period 2009 to 2012 the BBC paid out £3 million to departing senior staff that contractually it didn't have to.  In anyone's terms this is a disgrace.

The licence fee is a tax (and a poll tax at that, since it doesn't reflect ability to pay).  If you want to own a TV you have to fork out.  Would a government department be able to get away with paying its civil servants to depart like this out of taxpayers' money, at a cost to public services?  Not in a million years.

Senior BBC executives are paid too much.  Mark Thompson was paid £460,000.  The argument used to be run that this was the going commercial rate.  Curious therefore that the BBC seems to have been able to lure Covent Garden supremo Tony Hall for somewhat less than that amount.

The Corporation is effectively a Quango that is not subject to democratic control. Yes, it is meant to be regulated by the BBC Trust, but the Trust has an uneasy dual role as regulator and cheerleader, and unsurprisingly does both rather badly.  The Corporation is staffed at the top level by people who live in a bubble, detached from rank-and-file staff and from the rest of us.  How else to explain their kleptocratic behaviour?

The Trust is staffed by the same kind of people, the Great and Good whose lives oscillate between agreeable restaurants in London and weekends in the Cotswolds or Chiantishire.  Unsurprising then that they should think there was nothing wrong with the payoffs. People like that expect to have their paths smoothed before them.

BBC executives had no incentive to stop the gravy train - they knew that when their turn came to leave they would also benefit from the public's generosity - and neither had the Trust.  People working for the Trust know that their interests are congruent with the BBC itself, since damage to the Corporation jeopardises their own jobs. Why make a fuss about the size of severance payments?  Bound to get into the papers, old boy.

What BBC staff further down the ladder must make of this, God only knows, told on the one hand that programme budgets are to be cut, and on the other that millions are being spent encouraging top staff from London to go.

There is a pleasing irony of the most mordant kind in the reflection that at a period when the BBC admitted it had a "liberal bias", its senior staff were fleecing the people left right and centre.  This is the kind of behaviour you'd expect from a South American dictator or a crooked City capitalist, not from West London's bien pensants.

What lessons to learn from this?

One, the BBC Trust isn't doing its job properly.  Ofcom anyone?

Two, spending other people's money is a lot less painful than spending your own.

P.S.  It's being reported this morning that the BBC has commissioned a review into the relationship between the BBC and the BBC Trust.  The Corporation quite often does this.  In 2012 it asked for a review into its handling of the immigration issue from ex ITV CEO Stuart Prebble.  The review came to a conclusion anyone with two eyes and ears could have reached, namely that the BBC had a "deep liberal bias". It cost £175,000 to find this out.

So what does the BBC do when it turns out that it's been wasting millions of licence-fee payers' money?  It wastes hundreds of thousands in further navel gazing.  I guess that's an advance of a sort, but the BBC leadership sails blithely, on unaware that, having done its best to cast the Corporation's reputation down, it is now dancing blindly around, trampling it into the mud.  I am with Allison Pearson, who writes in the Torygraph this morning, "I have no desire to live in a Britain without the BBC.  At the end of this unedifying week, that terrible prospect has come a little closer".

Why I love . . . #9 Prefab Sprout

Please may I introduce you to Simpson's Coefficient, a new concept which measures the relationship between the quality of a band's music and the coolness of their name.  A low reading is obtained by having a cool name (Queens of the Stone Age, for example) and terrible music (Queens of the Stone Age again), whereas the highest reading so far recorded has been for the band with the worst name of all but the most heavenly music.  Step forward Prefab Sprout.

In particular, step forward Paddy McAloon, singer/songwriter and now alas only member of the band, at least on the new album, Crimson / Red.  The Sprouts started life in the Newcastle area as a three piece with Paddy, his brother Martin on bass, and a succession of drummers.  Fan Wendy Smith joined on backing vocals, the band signed to Kitchenware Records in the early 80s and then made a succession of records of increasing gorgeousness, from Swoon to Steve McQueen, and having a chart hit with When Love Breaks Down. 

Things then went rather badly wrong.  Paddy's relationship with Wendy really did break down, and his pitch for an ambitious concept album were vetoed by a suspicious record company. Not long afterwards he started to suffer health problems associated with Meuniere's disease, including tinnitis and partial deafness. A series of bootleg and demo albums surfaced sporadically in the following twenty years (no-one does long-lost demos like the Sprouts), but McAloon retreated to the North East, where he devoted himself to family life, going grey and growing a luxuriantly Brahmsian beard.

I haven't heard Crimson / Red, which McAloon wrote, recorded and produced himself, but I am thrilled and fearful at the prospect.  To say McAloon is a great songwriter is a bit like saying the weather in Manchester is changeable.  His muse is a kind of masculinity which lies a million miles away from macho stereotype. Paddy is sensitive, romantic, but also somewhat shrewd.  "Don't look at me and say", he writes on Couldn't Bear to be Special, "That I'm the very one / Who makes the cornball things occur / The shiver of the fur / I'm just an also ran / There's a mile between the way / You see me and the way I am". There's a streak of nostalgia and regret running a mile wide here too. "After that last unholy row / I never ever play basketball now / it joins the list of things I'll miss / like fencing foils and lovely girls I'll never kiss"  (I Never Play Basketball Now).

But also humour.  Here he is on the Beatles tribute, Electric Guitars: "I'd a dream that we were rock stars / And that flash bulbs popped the air / And girls fainted every time we shook our hair / We were songbirds, we were Greek Gods / We were singled out by fate / We were quoted out of context / It was great".

Paddy also sees that some things are too awful for pop to encompass, hence Cars and Girls, his attack on Bruce Springsteen: "Brucie dreams life's a highway / Too many roads bypass my way / or they never begin / Innocence coming to grief / At the hands of life's stinkin' car thief / That's my concept of sin".

The difficulties of being an artist, real if not the worst, get an airing on Nightingales ("If singing birds must sing / No question of choice / then living is our song / indeed our voice / best agree, you and me / are probably nightingales") and Music is a Princess ("I'm just a boy, in rags / I'd gladly spend my life / carrying her bags / If their weight is much greater than I first supposed / I'd remember my oath of allegiance / true love is a monarch who won't be deposed / treason hasn't a chance").

And all this set to tunes which owe something to the Beach Boys and Hollywood musicals, sung in a voice of honeyed gold.  Why Prefab Sprout were not huge is beyond me. Truly they laid pearls before swine.

I said I am thrilled and fearful of the first new Sprout album for a decade.  Fearful because Paddy's star was at its highest when the band teamed up with producer Thomas Dolby, a brilliant arranger and sonic wunderkind.  But Dolby has dropped out Paddy's worldview, whether because of personal differences, because Paddy can't afford him or because Paddy now thinks he can do it all himself.  As anyone who has tried to self-produce knows, total control robs you of perspective and deprives you of the ideas of others. Nothing Paddy has produced post-Dolby quite matches the highs of Steve McQueen or Langley Park to Memphis.  Not because Paddy has stopped writing great songs, but because Dolby helped him realise them perfectly.

But if control is double-edged sword, who better than Paddy McAloon to be swinging it gleefully about his head?

Vasily Petrenko and the wally on the box

The RLPO conductor, showing a lack of awareness of the consequences of speaking his mind which almost rivals my own, has given us the benefit of his thoughts on women conductors.  They are, apparently, distracting to red-blooded men.

The holes in Vasily Petrenko's argument are immediately obvious.  One, orchestras are extensively populated by women these days.  Two, gay men are probably over-represented in orchestras in comparison to their distribution amongst the population at large.  Are they not just as likely to be distracted by a handsome man? Three, what makes Petrenko think the players look at the conductor anyway?  Stories are legion about the musicians who didn't notice who the conductor was.  I once asked a gnarled ex-pro what it was like to work for a legendary late 20th century great.  "Oh he didn't give us too much trouble", was the response.  That pretty much sums it up.

Personally I have played for and watched a number of women conductors.  Marin Alsop is very impressive. Others less so.  But that goes for men as well.  For every Mark Elder, there are a dozen, puffed up, vain, grandstanding hacks.  No wonder the players concentrate on listening to each other instead of watching the wally on the box.

The one about George Monbiot and the sheep

The always interesting (and never more so than when he is admitting he got something wrong) George Monbiot writes in the Graun this morning attacking the National Trust's attempt to get the Lake District listed as a World Heritage Site.  Far from being beautiful, Monbiot sees it "as one of the most depressing landscapes in Europe", bemoaning the extent to which sheepfarming has stripped the landscape of its trees and flowers, denuding the landscape and wrecking habitats.  "You'll see more wildlife in Birmingham", he concludes.

Notwithstanding the fact that last week in the Lake District I saw buzzards, a peregrine, dippers, linnets and stood in a river to find an otter looking quizzically up at me from a distance of about ten feet, I have some sympathy with Monbiot's view.  The hills beloved of Wordsworth and Wainwright would originally have been far more forested, and had much more wildlife.  I believe that Scafell means "bald mountain" in Norse, which rather suggests that the other hills were more hirsute.

How recent is their denudation?  The many dozens of hut circles on the moor near our family house suggest that the area has sustained a human population for at least three or four thousand years.  It is suggested that the occupants were forced to move on because their forest clearances destroyed game habitats, so the problems of sustainability are nothing new.

I don't find the Lake District depressing.  First, although he's right about the mountains, the valleys are much more wooded than Monbiot suggests. Secondly, the beauty of the country lies partly in the evidence of its human occupation.  It's not just the green patchwork fields and the way in which the buildings huddle into the landscape.  Those buildings, made from the same stones that outcrop around and about, were devised and built by people whose instinctive feel for what would be appropriate and practical just happened to result in some of the most beautiful human settlements ever made.  Architects please note.  

Actually, the remarks Monbiot makes about the Lakes and sheep farming are much truer of Scotland and red deer.  But that's another post.  In the face of the ruination of most of the rest of Britain, the Lake District offers a vision of how man can live in harmony with the environment which is deceptive and imperfect, but it may be about the least worst we've got.

Syrian intervention and pleasing President Assad

So Parliament has chucked out David Cameron's attempt to get agreement in principle for military action in Syria.  The Guardian thinks this a good thing, judging by its leader this morning.  "The most important objective in the current phase of the Syrian war", it writes, "is to stamp out any use of chemical weapons". 

As I argued yesterday, killing 500 people with chemical weapons is not much more loathsome than killing 50,000 with conventional ones, and possibly quite a bit less so.  But moving on, "That is best achieved by making a renewed case to the nations of the world that chemical weapons must always be beyond the pale, by establishing that a breach of that global proscription of such weapons has occurred, and ensuring that the international ban on them must be upheld and enforced.  The world's message is more effective when most widely supported".

Gosh. The person who wrote that must have been welling up.  I almost got a lump in the throat reading it.

But the key word here is "enforced".  Enforced by whom?  As the Graun knows very well, there is absolutely no chance whatsoever of the ban on chemical weapons being enforced.  Even getting an UN resolution condemning the Assad government's conduct is impossible, because any motion will be vetoed by Russia. The idea that the international community is going to enforce a ban is laughable.

But for the Graun, trotting out ringing declarations of principle is infinitely preferable to facing the reality that, at least according to their own view, something outstandingly dreadful has happened and they aren't willing to support the only action that might plausibly reduce the chances of it happening again.

The only people who might have the reach and resolve to do something are the much-reviled Americans. No-one else will.  The "world's message" the Graun speaks of is, "we think it's dreadful, but not so dreadful we're actually going to do anything about it".

Foreign policy as self-delusion.

Did Parliament do the right thing?  These are agonisingly difficult choices, but on balance I would say no. Undoubtedly the legacy of Iraq, which British politicians remember chiefly for Blair's manipulations and the accompanying failures of military intelligence rather than the free press and free elections which followed Saddam's downfall, has made it very difficult to get MPs to authorise foreign adventures.  It's a shame they don't think back a little further, to Kosovo, where Blair persuaded Bill Clinton to authorise limited air strikes which eventually brought the Milosevic government down.

At present, I'm guessing that President Assad is quietly pleased with David Cameron's defeat.

PS Here is Paddy Pantsdown, aka Lord Ashdown, trending on Twitter this morning - "We are a hugely diminished country this a.m.  MPs cheered last night.  Assad, Putin this morning".

Syrian intervention - the moral maze

Let's assume for a moment that the nerve gas incident outside Damascus last week was the responsibility of the Syrian government.

Personally I find it slightly perplexing that for over two years the Assad regime should be terrorising its own people, killing tens of thousands in the process, accompanied only by the slippery sound of Western hand-wringing; yet when it kills five hundred with sarin this is felt to be going a bit far.

I am willing to believe that dying via nerve agent poisoning is spectacularly unpleasant, but not that it is much worse - morally or actually - than being blown to bits by high explosive or bleeding to death from gunshot wounds.

Superficially, waiting for the UN weapons inspectors to report makes sense; actually it makes none.  Why does it matter how these people died?

For that matter, waiting month upon month for President Assad to wheel out his WMD made no sense either. It has been clear for years what was going on in Syria, and the case for intervention is no better now than it was at the beginning; actually in some respects it is worse, because now the fundamentalists, supported from Iran, have got their hooks in the country and it would have been easier to shoulder them out if the West had intervened earlier.

It seems to me the only question worth asking is, "Could we intervene militarily in any way which might result in less suffering than there would otherwise be?"  Obviously I can't answer the military aspect of that question in any authoritative way, and any answer to the political aspect is speculative at best.

But - if we do nothing, the Assad government will probably survive, pro tem.  At some point in the future however it will be toppled.  What will happen then?  Answer, there will be mass bloodshed.

In other words, the conflagration the hand-wringers fear will probably come to pass eventually even if we do nothing now.  As Tony Blair pointed out, doing nothing is a kind of decision too, and one with consequences. As with Iraq, the opportunity exists to fast-forward Syrian history, to by-pass what would otherwise have remained of the Assad years, and start Syria on the messy road to democracy.