A creative department

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As an example of dodgy government statistics, the Taking Part Survey* by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport takes some beating. In an effort to prove their success at encouraging participation, they’ve come up with some gems of creative terminology:

• ‘Attending an art event’ stretches to seeing “street arts (art in everyday surroundings like parks, streets or shopping centres)".
•  'Visiting a historic site is as easy as going to “a city or town with historic character".
•  It counts as using a public library if one “used a computer outside the library to view the website".
• The most popular way for Britons to participate in an arts activity in 2007 was by “buying original/handmade crafts".
• The list of “active sports" includes snooker.

Shameless.

*Technical Note PSA21: Indicator 6", “annual data 2006/07", “Final assessment of progress on PSA3: complete estimates from year three, 2007/08." All published since May 2008.

Measuring poverty

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Financial secretary to the Treasury, Stephen Timms, has said that both parents should work in order to lift children out of poverty.

This is in reaction to Lesley Ward, president of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL), stating that many children face levels of deprivation, which "mirror the times of Dickens". Of course, Mrs Ward’s analogy is  entirely incorrect as far as the way most people understand poverty. In fact, in the details of what she says it is clear that she in not concerned about income at all but manners and lifestyle.

As has been pointed out on this blog and elsewhere, the government has it wrong defining child poverty as children living in families earning less than 60% of the median income. They are not measuring poverty but equality, patently not the same things. Also, any fall or rise in the median income will of course influence the measurement of poverty, despite no change in the actual conditions of the poor.

Mr Timms argues his case based on the fact that children are less likely to be in a family earning less than 60% of the median wage if both parents are working. But this tells us precisely nothing about the lives of children in these households. After all, both parents working is not going to solve Mrs Ward’s claims that many children attend schools without being toilet-trained, unable to dress themselves or use a knife and fork. It could in fact make things worse.

It is hard to measure poverty and any system is open to complexities and irregularities. Yet if poverty is to be measured, the principal test of its usefulness should be that it captures poverty as an absolute condition, not as a relative one. A good place to start would be to look at the work of the philanthropist Charles Boothe, the founding father of measuring poverty. Although clearly not the last word on the issue, the maps he produced in the late 19th century were – though far from politically correct – a clear snapshot on the areas and nature of poverty at this time. Something that the current way of measuring poverty fails to do.

When two sides go to war

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On Tuesday evening of this past week two groups of males decided that, at that moment in the celestial calendar, it was the most pertinent time to attempt to beat the other into submission. When two tribes go to war! And that's where the problem lies, if there is no tribe then there is struggle to come up with a reason to be violent, there is no attachment to a cause. In this case the groups concerned decided a re-enactment of the heady days of the 1970s would be in order and they adorned themselves in the colours of two football clubs: West Ham and Millwall.

Both inside the ground during the game, and outside, before and after, there were clashes between the two groups as well as with the police. As a libertarian if two groups of people wish to do battle to discover who is the better, as long as no innocent bystanders come to harm then there is no problem with consensual violence. It is when thousands of innocent people who wish to watch a football match or indeed go about their daily business in the environs of a football stadium get caught up in it it becomes a problem.

There has long been an association between football and violence, not just in England but across the world, for most who watch it (and play it) it is theIR way of releasing tension, for some though this manifests itself in violence. These people aren't football fans. They hold more empathy to the violence than they do to the football. These people should be allowed to set up their own alternative sport, something that revolves around groups who can meet up in a field and belt seven shades of leather out of each other. Basically hooliganism needs to become a sport in its own right as long as they all have private health insurance.

In case you wondering: West Ham won the football. As to which group of knuckle dragging cavemen came out on top in the fighting: it was a no- score draw for intelligence.

Monster in the media

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Its not just in music and radio that the BBC distorts the market and creates an unfair playing field. It has the same effect on the UK's online space. Even though the BBC is neither a newspaper nor magazine it competes with its huge online prescence, paid for by the taxpayer via the TV tax.

The Conservatives have been complaining about this Gorilla in the room before:

Back in 2003, John Whittingdale, the Shadow Culture Secretary of the time, said that the website should be closed down. Last year, Phillip Davies, another Conservative, said: "Basically the BBC with its massive licence fee does completely distort the market and makes it virtually impossible for its competitors." But given bbc.co.uk's popularity, closing it down would not be a sensible option for any government.

The trouble is that the BBC is trying to do all things media and its site suffers for it. Its not just the Conservatives that are concerned about this either:

Do we really have to count on the BBC to reveal that "Blue Square Premier side Tamworth have completed the signing of former West Brom youngster Anthony Bruce"? Surely this would be better left to theTamworth Herald's website, or the Blue Square Premier's site, or theNon-League Paper. Tamworth are, after all, a non-league football team which last season had an average gate of only 815.

Harry Underwood has it right. This is why Murdoch is mad enough to start charging for content.

Should taxpayers fund the arts?

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With the news that opera will receive £2.4m in recession support from Arts Council England as part of their first round of Sustain funding, is it not time that the state stopped funding a form of entertainment that appeals only to a small section of the population?

In the press release, Arts Council England state that “The number of applications to the fund illustrates how this recession is challenging the capacity of our arts organisations to continue to deliver the bold, ground breaking and excellent art that audiences demand." Not exactly. The applications illustrate a natural response to free cash upon application. And if it is the case, as the press release also states, that “the creative economy is the fastest growing part of our national economy", why on earth does it need taxpayers’ money?

Personally I benefit hugely from arts funding. I enjoy opera, theatre and classical music, which are all heavily subsidised. Living in London it is easy to visit the opera a handful of times each year and the theatre and classical concerts more regularly still. My entertainment is subsidised by other taxpayers who are either not interested, live too far away or cannot afford to attend. These events are mostly attended by a section of the population who are already wealthy beyond the average. At least the Romans had the good grace to appeal to a wider section of the public in their policy of bread and circuses.

Art is such a personal and ephemeral thing that it really does not warrant our taxes. Its appreciation (if not beauty) is very much in the eye (or ear) of the beholder, with difference and conflict being the order of the day. As its creation and admiration is hardwired into humanity, the money ploughed into arts is as valuable as subsidising conversation. And as in the most creative times public opinion and the direction of what is considered good can turn on a sixpence, the government and quangos will inevitably back losers.

Where next for the BBC?

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An article in Monday's Guardian and a subsequent column by Geoffrey Wheatcroft on Tuesday revealed that the BBC " has been using a distant sun-kissed villa as a base for entertaining.....at a cost to date of £90,530". Now to be fair, apparently it has been used to entertain television executives to persuade them to invest in future projects, reducing the net cost to us license-payers of programmes: reportedly £80m a year in investment is secured through such activities.

Whatever the truth behind this specific example though, and regardless of whether the entertaining was justified and represented good value for money, it raises further questions about the role and strategy of the BBC in an increasingly segmented and non-linear media marketplace. The problem is that if it makes popular (and generally populist!) programmes, it is quite rightly argued that these are produced effectively by the commercial sector. If it focuses more on traditional public service broadcasting, with an emphasis on factual, cultural and news programming, then it loses audience share and is attacked for failing to provide the service that most license-fee payers want.

Over the weekend, Ed Vaizey suggested that BBC's youth orientated Radio 1 should be sold off, claiming that it was failing to reach its target 15-24 demographic. This channel's output arguably encapsulates the modern BBC: the daytime programming is fairly mainstream, and is very similar to the output of a multitude of national and local commercial stations, whilst the nighttime shows promote new music and more diverse genres, something generally not offered by most other stations.

What I suggest then is that the mainstream populist output of the BBC (with which I have no problem and often enjoy) should be spun out into a commercial entity, funded by adverts. In the absence of the BBC, I believe that factual, cultural and niche programming would continue to exist on commercial channels, and in fact increase to fill the gap left. Already, broadcasters including ITV and Channel Four provide some excellent factual content. In the unlikely event that there was strong demand for a type of programming that the mainstream media (including an independent commercial BBC) was not providing, then people who wished to have such content would be served by niche channels, made possible by the increasing channel capacity of home TV services and the proliferation of web-based media. The fact is that the dramatic development of technology in the decades since the formation of the Beeb have rendered it an outmoded institution with an uncertain role, bloated by the regressive license fee.

Silliness from the Lib Dems

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As Labour’s popularity is at an all-time-low, the next general election could prove a real opportunity for the Liberal Democrats to make an impact on the two major parties. So, it’s good to see they’re focusing on the major issues affecting Britain today.

The idea that advertisements should be banned from showing airbrushed models is laughable, and yet this appears to be a serious proposal. Their argument is simple: teenage girls see airbrushed women on TV and strive to reach similar levels of unnatural perfection, damaging their health on the way. Therefore, we must ban advert actresses from being airbrushed. This is illiberal nonsense. I used to buy shaving gel advertised by David Beckham; it never tempted me to to cover myself in tattoos or grow a Mohawk!

Long before TV adverts came around, people would go to any lengths to look attractive and acquire what they saw as the perfect body shape, even if it damaged their health. In 1903, for example, Gladys Deacon had hot wax injected into her face to reshape her nose. It destroyed her face, but nobody considered banning candles. There is clearly a human desire to look good. Banning certain TV adverts is not going stop this.

If they are going to take advantage of the massive political opportunity the polls are currently giving them, the Lib Dems are going to have to up their game and tackle the serious problems facing Britain, rather than raising gimmicky minor issues worthy of a fringe party. It will be interesting to see whether Nick Clegg can take them to the next level.

What has become of the country of free Englishmen?

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Coming from a country haunted for decades by its totalitarian past, and being born at dawn on May 1st 1945, only a few hours after Hitler killed himself with a shot in his mouth, I have always had qualms with people telling me that Britain has become a police state. Even more so because I was so grateful for the sacrifice the British people made for my freedom, and because I eventually emigrated to this country. However, having experienced what happens if you cut yourself off from the number one state propaganda outlet, you get the impression those people are right. I dared to cancel my TV Licence in March this year because I was so bored, and because I get all I want from the internet anyway. Since then I keep getting scary letters from the TV Licensing Enforcement Division. Each of these letters assumes that I keep watching TV – they just don’t get it that there are people out there who think the value for money offered by the license fee is poor. Importantly, the letter indicates that equipment liable to pay the licence fee includes computers and mobile phones. Under the headline “Official Warning", suggestive of state action, the letter I received today went on: Our Enforcement Officers have now been authorized to visit your address in Gloucester Place. This is because we have no record of a TV Licence at Your address and you haven’t responded to previous letters. Indeed, I took the liberty not to bother with their previous letters and threw them away. The question emerges here: Does the state monopoly of the BBC really encompass all digital information gadgets such as mobile phones, blackberries and laptops? Thinking it through, surely that would mean they would be entitled to collect the licence fee worldwide from anyone who watches BBC broadcasts anywhere?

Feminism has become just another special interest

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We recently learned from Tim Worstall that the so called gender gap is actually a motherhood gap. But meanwhile. the recession is about to  reverse even that gap. Since men still dominate the construction and manufacturing sectors, which have been hardest-hit by the recession, they are much more likely to lose their jobs than women. This is likely to be true in most Western countries, not only the US, where 80% of the 5.7 million jobs lost between December 2007 and May this year were held by men. Far fewer jobs are expected to be lost in the service sector, especially in public services like healthcare and schools, where women dominate. These sectors even gained 588,000 jobs in the same period in the US.

Therefore, economists are already speaking of a “man-cession" with deep implications to the social fabric of society. It was not only market forces which brought this about. Organized feminist lobbyism played a major role here, manipulating president Obama’s stimulus plan, the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Originally his emulation of the 1930’s New Deal aimed to protect jobs in exactly those hardest-hit sectors by investing in “shovel ready" programs to modernize roads, bridges, electric grids and other infrastructure.

Woman’s organizations immediately denounced this as a “Macho Stimulus" and about 600 feminist economists and 1000 feminist historians managed to press the president to scrap his “sexist bailout". The anti-stimulus feminist action group called WEAVE – Women’s Equality Adds Value to the Economy was a huge success. They managed to get the Obama administration to completely rewrite his stimulus along gender-correct lines with 42% of new jobs going to women. Yet since women had only held 20% of the jobs lost in recession the stimulus as it passed through Congress on February 17 skews the creation of new jobs heavily towards women. And its working: the Labor Department’s latest June data revealed a 2.5 percentage-point gender gap for women over men.

Will the dinosaur howl or whimper?

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It's a strange time for the BBC. As its Annual Report comes out, it faces attack on all sides; sometimes for editorial reasons, often for reasons of quality and decency, and endlessly for being so damn big and intrusive.

But if a dinosaur stands up and says over and over again that it's the biggest and best player in the steamy swamp what else should it expect?

The oddity about the Beeb is that it always plays with one very old bat - that as the incumbent at the wicket of British culture it has a mission to reflect our culture across its entire diversity and that without it, we would all be worse off. The trouble is that, like politicians, it has been found out. By being part of the establishment, ossified in its position, it has adopted the stance of a typical nationalised entity, with highly paid executives, multiple layers of administration and a self-opinionated belief in its own value.

Seen from outside by viewers who are discovering the delights of many new ways of taking in information, entertainment and education from other source channels, the BBC is in serious risk of becoming - er - quaint. Where a howling vibrant kick-ass BBC would be out there creating waves in drama and documentary, stirring up stupid politicians, and pushing back new frontiers of content delivery, it has become more self-conscious about its position as owner of half our broadcast industry and much more besides. It knows it has to look inward to protect itself against waves of anger by viewers and listeners measuring its offerings against their licence tax. Is that any way to run a vibrant business? Whimpering about good value, compliance standards and splendid achievements does not move it forward.

The BBC desperately needs to be privatised, to move us further towards a universal subscription model, to allow consumers decide what they want from its considerable creative talent. Only then will we get the real diversity we want, the incisive journalism we want, and the ferment in new media that will emerge with true competition between creative players. The Dinosaur can then take its place among other scary raptors, novel mammals and yet stranger fish. Plurality will out, and we can enjoy the tussle for our attention.