spinoff

Ho ho! ‘Tis the season to be jolly, the season of good will, of gifts, generosity and of shafting the BBC over its licence fee. Gather round for the singing, the mulled wine and the below-inflation funding over the next five years. Ho ho ho!

     

Dashed unfortunate for the BBC, I suppose. Poor BBC. We at Spinoff, while recognising the inefficiency of the Beeb – its Byzantine structure, misguided foray into ratings-based, rather than public service-based programming – still love both it and the idea of having a public service broadcaster removed from the commercial exigencies suffered by other channels. We love the fact that we alone in the UK are able to watch TV channels and listen to radio stations that aren’t spoiled by adverts. The BBC stands as an uncommercial oasis in a commoditised world.

        

And now the Govt. are going to curb the BBC’s pocket money. Gordon Brown and Tessa Jowell concocted the rate cut equivalent to a 0.45% drop in funding each year. The Beeb is desperately trying to negotiate something more favourable.

       

There are several reasons why G.Brown has put his name to so sensitive a decision. The first is that he really doesn’t have all that much money at the moment. We hear all sorts of Tory flatulence about how “the public finances are in a mess”, and when one sees the Chancellor scrabbling around for cash – bonking the Beeb on the head and nicking its dinner money like this – well, one is inclined to suspect that something out-of-the-ordinary must be afoot with the village accounts.

        

The second reason is more cynical still and it is this – that the BBC has permanently blotted its copybook with the government over the 45 minutes / illegal war / dead weapons inspector rumpus, and that Gordon has decided to crack down on them as hard as poss. in order to cement the master/servant dynamic in place before his bid for glory next year.

       

And Gordon is, to a certain extent confined to this sort of tactic by dint of his personality. Over these last ten-or-so excruciatingly painful years, he has seen his partner in crime T.Blair win the media over with oodles of charm, warmth and so on, all the while knowing that he himself has no such charm. Let us not beat around the bush here – Gordon has, quite frankly, all the interpersonal skills of the Cairngorms.

       

But just because he is blessed with a demeanour that makes a deep freeze seem as warm and as welcoming as a week in the Bahamas, that doesn’t mean to say that Gordon can’t win over the media. No sir. He will win them over. Absolutely. It’s just that he’ll use a different method to our Tone. It will involve “carrying on the war by other means”.

       

And in this case, those other means are financial. Squeeze the buggers. Cut off their money. Twist their tails. Get them involved in a fight with us that they can’t afford to lose, and which will involve them sucking up to us and not the other way round. The Blairite smarm-machine has been replaced by the Brownite purse strings garrotte and the BBC is the first victim to feel the tightening about its throat. He withholds money now but dangles the carrot of a renegotiable increase of up to 2% in 2012 – is the Beeb therefore more or less likely to be “on side” when Gordon runs for P.M.?

       

And the third reason is the most cynical of them all, and can be summarised in one word. “Murdoch”. (Should be fairly obvious where this one is going, so will make it brief). Before he got into power, Blair assured Murdoch that he would not fiddle with the UK’s media ownership laws, or in any way attempt to trigger a break-up of the News Corp. empire. He stuck to this promise, and in fact loosened media ownership laws, which has recently allowed Murdoch to buy a large chunk of ITV (depressing days indeed).

          

Moral of the story is therefore: “you want be elected P.M., you got make Rupert happy”. This Gordon has recognised, and this Gordon is attempting to do. Murdoch HATES the BBC. It is everything that he hates: it’s leftie, non market-driven, subsidised by the state, not for sale. God he hates it. The sight of Gordon Brown chipping away at this smug, liberal media henge in the middle of the thrusting, ad-driven whirlpool will indicate to R.M in no uncertain terms that indeed, this is a chap who seems to have the right ideas.

        

So this is our prime minister in waiting: taking money from the public broadcaster to plug gaps in the national balance sheet; chipping away at the BBC to scare them into submission; falling head over heels in order to please an un-elected, un-accountable oligarch who controls the majority of the UK’s news flow.

      

  

Merry Christmas everyone.

     

Yours etc.,

      

Spinoff.

Mr. Baker and the Iraq Study Group’s (ISG) report on the situation in Iraq marks a turning point. If his recommendations are taken up, the Iraq project will have been profoundly transformed for the better.

     

Mr. Baker has recommended: engagement in the Israel Palestine situation; engagement with Iran; engagement with Syria; a drawdown of troops from Iraq. These suggestions differ absolutely from the approach pursued so far by the George W. Bush White House.

       

Though the report by the ISG has been hotly anticipated, its contents have been no real secret – strategic leaks have seen to that. Often during the Iraq war it seems that politicians have approached Iraq with fully-formed and unshakable conclusions already in mind. Not so Mr Baker. His suggestions are born of nothing other than dry reason.

     

This is in sharp contrast to George W. Bush, and to the mindset that he engenders. For the President has a perfectly-formed world view. Perfectly-formed world views are complete. There is no room for alteration. Such mental states do not allow, indeed cannot allow, any deviation from a rigidly formed outlook on the world. In the case of George W. Bush, this rigidity is a consequence of a starkly moral world view. This view has proved fatal. 

    

At root, the U.S. neo-conservative credo is a moral one. At its base stands one simple moral judgement and it is this: “the U.S. is good”. Certainly, such an assumption is uncontroversial. The U.S. has done great things and contributed much via its rich culture, its financial institutions and so on. In one sense of the word, the U.S. is certainly “good”.

    

But there is of course another application of that word, one that stems from the American exceptionalist view that the U.S. is not only culturally, practically and materially beneficial, but is also morally good. When combined with the fact that the U.S. is the lone super power, the neo-con conclusion is this – that there is a moral obligation for the U.S. to use its strength in order to transmit “good”.     

       

The Iraq war is a manifestation of this attempt at transmission. A small, highly mobile and technologised U.S. force was deployed to: liberate, free, bring democracy, fight the forces of terror in Iraq. The idea of the small and surgical U.S. army force was envisioned, specifically by Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld (who still technically retains that post until his successor is confirmed) as the perfect neo-con foreign policy tool – the ideal moralistic army, small, able to penetrate a country quickly and with the minimum of casualties, and then depose the undesired leadership, replacing it with a U.S.-friendly government. 

          

But a moral view of the world necessarily prohibits giving any quarter to “the bad”. The effect of this is to limit one’s choice of potential allies. There can be no half way – either “the bad” is made “good” or an attitude of aggression must be struck. The world is therefore cast sharply into two camps: “you are either with us, or you are against us.” This binary view is extremely potent for two reasons, firstly because of its extreme simplicity and secondly, its emotional basis. 

       

But a moral view of the world is both practicably useless, and philosophically anachronistic, and in political terms, the urge to act solely on perceived moral grounds is highly restrictive. Neo-conservatives – the current White House administration – are thusly restricted. As a result they have been unable to speak to Syria. They cannot negotiate with Hamas. They cannot talk to the Iranian government. They will not see Shia clerics or leaders of the insurgency. (They also could not talk to the North Koreans. The result? Disaster.)

     

But now we have Mr Baker. We also have his report. For the first time, in connection with the war, leading U.S. voices are making statements such as: “Our political leaders must build a bipartisan approach to bring a responsible conclusion to what is now a lengthy and costly war”.

    

Implicit in this statement is a refutation of the most fundamental bases upon which the case for this war was constructed. Mr. Baker has no political career to protect. He is not running for office. He is disinterested and rational.

    

We must hope that this voice of political reason is capable of drowning out the self-destructive moralists whose fictional and overly-simplistic view of the world has prevailed so far with such catastrophic results.

     

Yours etc.,

     

Spinoff.