Having killed 11 workers, the event is already a human tragedy. Time will tell whether it emerges as a case of widespread, serious, persistent ecological damage. I am the first to admit it may.

But it is striking how the Amoco Cadiz (1978), Exxon Valdez (1989), Saddam Hussein’s Gulf War spill into the Persian Gulf (1991), Braer (1993) and Sea Empress (1996) were all widely advertised as potentially huge disasters, but were mostly seen to have had serious effects only for a year or so, if at all. My point (though I didn’t make this on-air) is that the anticipatory buzz got translated into a false history. People end up believing that these events did turn out to be as bad as was predicted as possible. (See details at my Life On A Modern Planet: A manifesto for progress, Manchester University Press, 1995, free download.)

[See below for some updated links for recent Exxon-Valdez and Prince William Sound research.]

Similarly, Chernobyl has for 25 years been characterised as having had massive consequences in cancer and birth defects. (See my www.chernobyllegacy.com.) The reality is sad enough, but much less powerful. Genetic modification of crops has so far failed to deliver the disasters which were predicted for it a decade ago. (See perhaps my pamphlet on the subject, GMOs: The troubled beginning of the 21st Century, IEA, 2000, free download).  BSE has proved horrible for a few hundred families, but not cataclysmic for the rest of us.

I do think things are improving. I mean that the media is slightly less prone to wind us all up nowadays, and the environmentalists have much less traction than they used to. I am also fairly sure that academics (especially at the universities of Lancaster and East Anglia) have failed in their bid of the 1990s to induce a sort of generalised anxietyabout industrial and ecological horrors, which they characterised as Risk Society (in which they followed some dreary germanic lines of thought). (See perhaps my Risk: The human adventure, ESEF, 2001, free download.)

I should have said that one of the pernicious tropes of media and campaign work is to say that such and such a disaster “may” happen, or has the potential to happen. The point here is that this is an unaccountable remark: just logically nothing would ever prove it wrong. It’s a safe and even cowardly class of remark.  

I notice that in the Obama administration anti-corporate riffs remain popular (“Our job basically is to keep our boot on BP’s neck” was Interior Secretary’s Ken Salazar’s charmless remark), and that is low rent stuff. Of course, it happens that BP’s back story is ripe with ironies, from its Beyond Petroleum smugness to its accident-prone recent US record. But anyone whose heart does not go out to the firm in its present crisis almost deserves to be on the receiving end of this kind of bad luck themselves, just for a chastening taste of what the fates can dole out.

Additional note

Updates on Exxon-Valdez and Prince William Sound:

Rather cheerful accounts:
http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/education/stories/oilymess/welcome.html
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16280-is-the-exxon-valdez-spill-site-finally-clean.html
 
Rather less cheerful account:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/03/090323-exxon-anniversary.html

Related posts:

1. BP Gulf spill: the end of the phoney war We are at the beginning of the end of the...
2. Will the BP spill transform the oil business? I was asked to appear on Radio 4’s special programme BP:...
3. BP oil spill update, 15 June 2010 It’s been a spectacularly bad few days for BP. Things...

I produced a letter on this which the FT were good enough to run, letters, 28 August 2009.

What I love about the issue is that it brings every kind of motivation into play. The Scots Nats apparently hate London’s New Labour machine. So did that influence their decision? Apparently the decision would always have been a Scottish one, even before devolution. But has devolution added a dimension to London’s pain (if any) at the compassionate release of Mr al-Megrahi? What does Gordon Brown or Jack Straw or Ed Milliband really think about any of this? Is oil the only really big issue, or is Libya’s approach to terrorism also very important? Which government – Scottish, UK or US – stood to suffer most if Mr al-Megrahi’s appeal had gone ahead? Isn’t it delicious that we have no real idea how to unravel the complicated and conflicted reactions all the players must have?

As I told Radio 2’s Jeremy Vine Show (on Tuesday, 1 September 2009), I don’t think it matters that we are not necessarily being told the truth. A Lib Dem foreign affairs spokesman said that my view was quite wrong and that British people had died for the right to be told the truth. I only slightly agree. I think they died for the right to democratically elect the politicians whom we sometimes require to lie to foreigners and even to ourselves.

Of course, in the end – after 10, 20 or 30 years – everything ought to come out. Interestingly, in our new age of transparency and accountability I imagine much of what really matters will be kept totally privvy, never to be disclosed. After all, we’re getting to the point where anything in writing may be demanded, leaked, stolen, or mislaid.

We can expect to be misled now by politicians who know that the public is more and more cynical but less and less robust. It’s almost as though we insist they deceive us.

No related posts.

These are some of the things  I shall aim to say.

(1) Most of us are affluent now. Being well-off requires at least as much grace as being poor.

(2) The material pleasures of life are very real and most of them are pretty harmless. We should get on with enjoying ourselves instead of indulging in puritanical tosh.

(3) Living for material pleasures is not all bad: hedonism is a fair creed. But surprisingly few people really get off on it. Most people feel the need to deploy a wider emotional palette. I think  modern Westerners are affluent,  but that hasn’t made them less kind, generous, or neighbourly.

(4) I do think that modern people have had it so easy that they sometimes become a bit graceless, especially when they can’t get instant gratification. This is, as it were, an affluence deficit. But there were and are plenty of other deficits to being poor.

(5) People tend to overlook the way affluence has coincided with – and helped create – a literate, thoughtful society most of whose citizens have quite wide aesthetic and cultural horizons.

(6) It is of course important that parents should help their children understand both the merits of and limitations to materialism. The trouble is, this can only be achieved by being tight with them. This is hard work, and it happens that modern parents seem rather scared of their offspring.

(7) Whatever the failings in consumerism or affluence, for goodness sake don’t blame capitalism and capitalists. They’re just out to make a buck. They’re bound to love and exploit our weaknesses. So – as usual – we have to develop our own toughness to resist their blandishments.

Related posts:

1. RDN on affluence and envy on BBC News Channel The Observer ran a story about a pair of economists,...

Early reports suggest Lord Carter would like to help fix the crisis in local journalism. Commercial local journalism – print and broadcast – is in great difficulty. But ITV only ever did local news because it was made to, so Lord Carter’s move merely insists that the state must pay for whatever broadcasting it insists on mandating.

The real principle here is that local people should pay for local news and comment and whether they do this through the market, or their local councils or new voluntary bodies, is really their business. They could do this as the local branch of the National Trust of the Airwaves I propose.

I doubt that locally-financed journalism would use the ITV network as its main tool of dissemination, but it might. There’s local radio and local papers standing by as cheaper methods, and of course the internet and even local newsletters.

One good role for a national body might be for Reuters or PA to take local money to maintain local journalists whose material could be quality-controlled and disseminated by the wire services, local radio and TV and local papers.

That would maintain as much as possible of the great modern virtues: keep the state to a minimum; subsidiarity in funding and control (“as local as possible”); alternative technology (keep it cheap); encourage competition; fund good things commercially and voluntarily and only compulsorily as a last resort.

No related posts.

The annual bashes seemed to me to have evolved into occasions for a sort of Sunday-best breast-beating. Annually, the captains of our world herded together to hear special truths from pop stars and other gurus. The message they were supposed to be taking home was about enriching their business lives with philanthropic, environmental, social and even spiritual dimensions. The Masters of the Universe were to find redemption in Saving the Planet and healing The People.

I say this with a certain glee and malice. For several years I tried in a rather half-hearted way to get on this circuit. I wanted to lob up and argue that firms were at risk of not remembering that their core satisfactions (social, spiritual etc) should flow from a professional job competently done.

Now I am able to argue that the “Davos Mistake” may have been to misdefine the real crisis in capitalism. If (and it is a big “if”) Davos bigged-up the “free market” and if (as I believe) it sought to mitigate the resultant excesses by a bolt-on Corporate Social Responsibility, then it was recommending the wrong solution for a problem which it didn’t properly diagnose anyway. (Of course, I didn’t see the important details of the problem either, not knowing a CDS from a Bulge Bracket.)

We might have avoided some of the present crisis if Davos Man had been not merely greedy but also more professional. The answer to the economic and social effects of greediness is not to bolt on a measure of pre-packaged CSR (whatever its merits), but for senior people to deeply internalise a sense of seriousness and competency. So I agree with Mssrs Gapper and Hoskings that we need the competence (and the advice) of bankers, but I want to add something about the re-orientation which is needed.

The point of professionalism is to provide an interface (a balance) between the purely private and the public-spirited. But it recommends sticking to the knitting. It is about the good an engineer can do by and in building good bridges, a surgeon by cutting people up well. It requires people to think about their skill in a wide but not a limitless context. So a banker would wonder deeply whether he was putting people’s money at the requisite – the agreed – level of risk. And he would think about systemic risk too.

The Crunch with its huge bail-outs remind the professional in the banker how crucial the State is. Always was, always will be. I have the feeling that Davos Man – both in the form of politicians and financiers – did not attend properly to their interdependence. The bankers must be wishing they had not asked for such great freedom and their political masters must equally regret giving it to them.

But even that thought can be refined in a free-market direction. The more one asks for freedom, and gets it, the more one needs self-discipline in using it. Professionalism helps here because it is institutional: a professional is bolstered by his fellows as they work out what good and sensible behaviour is, but also disciplined by them if he strays from the path. This is to say: the people who know best the risks of their line of work (and of personal greed) put their shared expertise, experience, wisdom and probity into wrestling with the problem. Thus they avoid the moral hazard of relying too much on regulators to keep them safe.

No related posts.

I contributed written evidence to the committee, and also contributed some memos following my rather faltering oral evidence.

Here are the top ten things I ought to say on radio (not in order of priority):

(1) Protest doesn’t change policy
Sometimes (say Chartism or the Suffragettes) demonstrations and direct action are in tune with underlying politcal and economic forces: then it can look as though protest “worked”. But it’s mostly an illusion. In the cases of roads, airports, CND, Stop the War – you name them – activist protest more obviously had little effect on policy. (Drop the Debt may be an exception.)

(2) Even big demos aren’t a problem
Well-organised demonstrations (liaised with the police) – however large – are usually uncontroversial and vent a lot of public ire.

(3) Protest doesn’t help democracy
Almost all “direct action” – including non-violent direct action, NVDA – is neither effective nor valuable to a democracy. It almost always involves inconvenience or cost (or worst) but is not a serious contributor to policy debates.

(4) Westminster is special
There is nothing wrong with the premise of SOCPA that within a kilometre of Parliament all protest events should seek police permission. Such a rule is not repressive unless it is interpreted badly.

(5) The police are sometimes clumsy
Where police behave oppresssively against protest, they should be challenged and explain themselves.

(6) Most illegal direct action should be more severely punished
Civil disobedience activists want seem courageous and feisty. A little gaol time might deter the theatricals and chasten the threatening. (If we ended up having to gaol lots of lippy students, we’d need to lighten the punishments, of course.)

(7) Scrap “lawful excuse”
It ridiculous that protestors’ criminal damage and criminal trespass can be defended in court on the basis of “lawful excuse”. That was designed for quite different work.

(8) Direct action is illiberal
It is not “liberal” to defend direct action. It is “illiberal” to use protest to trump parliamentary democracy.

(9) Protestors are seldom extremists
It is important that authorities keep their categories in order: very little direct action is done by “extremists”. Messing this up makes unnecessary enemies.

(10) The right to protest is extremely important, even if it is mostly ineffectual.

Related posts:

1. Protest shouldn’t break the law I’m due on the BBC’s The Big Questions show in...
2. Sky gets Ratcliffe climate protest wrong Typically, the media (I’ve just been watching Sky news) has...

A Radio 5 show asked me on to discuss whether the news media follow or set the news agenda, and whether their role is a good one. Here’s the sort of thing I worked out to say.

In general

It’s worth noting that some sorts of stories get an unhealthy momentum of their own and that editors are only partly to blame.  The classic example was the death of Princess Diana, in which the nation seemed to indulge in a phony mass grief which was silly to a degree but which was a real phenomenon the media had to report. There was a positive feedback effect, sure. But the process was real enough.

Equally, there are certain sorts of story which produce “moral panic” which is understandable but not particularly useful. Violence will do it, but it needs to be capable of being seen as an epidemic and “ideally” it will be perpetrated on children.

The story of the Madeleine story

The story of the story of Madeleine McCann has upset lots of people who worry about the media. The common theme, rightly I think, was that the story received far more coverage than it deserved. Time and time again, non-developments were picked over in minute detail. In one sense, again, the media can’t be blamed. There was real public interest, and the media can’t easily insist that this or that audience concern is mawkish or redundant.

We can’t mince words. Audiences enjoyed this sort of material. I say ” enjoyed” and am inclined to stick with the word. I simply believe that there is an unhealthy pornography of suffering in which attractive and young victims are the best stars.

One aspect to it was that the media organisations committed big resources to covering this overseas story. Once the trucks and talent were in place, it must have been very tempting to put plenty of material through them.

It is worth saying that Madeleine’s parents seem not to have contributed to any of this.  They have been dignified in the face of tremendous suffering and provocation. If they handled the media with a degree of sophistication and professionalism, they can hardly be blamed for that. They believed that publicity increased the chances of Madeleine being recovered and they weren’t stupid. And they had to be all the more brave because they were criticised for not emoting. The less they played the parts generally assigned to suffering parents, the more they had to suffer – and it must have caused suffering – public indignation.

They also learned the hard way that short of hiding on a Scottish island, media attention must be managed somehow.

The story of the Matthews story?

Here is a wild speculation but a very tempting one. One of the victims of the Madeleine story may have been poor Karen Matthews, the mother who kidnapped her own child and sought to put her up for media ransom. One can’t help feeling that the events in which Shannon starred (if in absentia) may have unfolded as a desperate attempt by her abusers to have a piece of the McCann sort of action. I rather share the sympathy for Karen felt by a policewoman, Christine Freeman, who must have got to know her well. It seems absurd to call Karen “pure evil” as a policeman did in a statement after the verdict.

The late Alan Brien said that violence was the repartee of the illiterate.  Seeking celebrity is the homage paid by the untalented to the glamorous.

The Matthews story is very sad. With luck, no bones broken and maybe not even a tremendous amount of suffering additional to being brought up in a dysfunctional family. The worst of it may unfold in the care regime now awaiting Shannon. But it may be that her life will be the better for the absence of her mother. Who knows? But every aspect of the thing is stamped with grimness.

That it sucked in millions of pounds-worth of policing is perhaps inevitable.

That it hoovered up oceans of TV truck-time surely gives us all pause. Shannon was perhaps abducted because her abusers longed for the media attention which they knew accrued to abduction stories. Or perhaps they believed they could play the attention in some way.

What we know is that the media saturated the story with coverage because they knew abductions gripped audiences. Even then there was irony: the media and public were accused of not liking the Matthews back-story as much as they liked the McCann attractiveness. The thing became circular when the media corrected their former squeamishness (was it in fact a sort of prescience?) and shone their full attention on the case.

The long media tail

Many stories become long-running media roundabouts. Victims get hooked on the stardom their misery has brought to them. They long to put their suffering to some use by affecting policy. They want to make sense of the loss or suffering of themselves or their loved ones by “making sure this sort of thing never happens again”. Victims make great TV and never more than when they fight back. They command sympathy, if nothing more mawkish. Their passionate pleas are far sexier than the nuanced policy judgements of the authorities in charge of policing, welfare, child abuse, railways, or whatever.

No related posts.

In my little book, “Scrap the BBC!” I argued that markets could provide broadcast media just like they provide print media. But I also addressed the possibility of “market failure” by the emergence of, say, a National Trust of the Airwaves.

I told iPM’s Eddie Mair that I like the idea of a voluntary body funded by subscription by the affluent, literate, concerned middle class. It could fund “elite”, “posh” or otherwise unpopular broadcasting which might not be funded by advertisers.

Let’s assume there are 10m fans of Radio 4. If only 2m of them divvy up £1 a week, that more than covers the station’s £73m cost plus “central news gathering” (the BBC central news operation). I’ve also said that 5m people divvying up £100 a year would handsomely fund all of BBC radio and BBC2 television.

Further: I think TV is much less of an equity problem than radio because on a fully digital service it is easy to give the poor pre-paid scrambler cards for their (free) set-top boxes. The state or the National Trust of the Airwaves could make these gifts. That could overcome the problem that Freeview has free rider problems.

Of course I am being mischievous. I do believe what I say: better that firms, individuals and associations sort out broadcast funding than that the state does. But I also enjoy saying that “the middle class” ought to fund “elite” broadcasting. I believe strongly that being middle class is a matter of being literate, affluent and concerned. But I also believe that it is wrong for the middle classes to avoid its duty. It ought to want to lead the nation by taking on more of the work of the state. And besides, it is fun to hoist the middle class lefties on their own petard: broadcasting is something they ought to provide for the poor if they are so darned worried about poor people being unable to access quality material.

Related posts:

1. BBC is nearly history now The BBC won’t survive the next five years without massive changes....

A BBC Radio 5 show (Sunday, 24 November 2008) asked me to go on and discuss this question. Here’s my attempt to think things through.

The answer is that some news media are too excitable and others are too exciting.

Taking a trivial case first: I can’t see that it matters that John Sergeant made such a big splash. It made a welcome change from the Congo and the Crunch. Crucially: Strictly and those other stories are not remotely mutually exclusive.

Secondly, I hardly ever worry about the print coverage of anything. There are papers which are silly quite a lot of the time and no paper which isn’t silly sometimes. Who cares? Taken as a whole, print coverage is wonderful. On the whole, the victims of the press’s worse excesses make a decent return for their trouble.

I do worry about TV. It is famously a “hot” medium: it is briliant at passion and not so good at analysis. I know a 93 year old who finds the BBC 6 O’Clock News very upsetting. I tell him to turn it off and gets his news from his Daily Telegraph instead. Or, I suggest, he could switch back on for the 7 o’clock Channel 4 News. It’s much clamer and more cool than “The Six”.

Never mind that the C4 News is wringing wet and drenched in attitude, it’s a proper news show. I doubt it would suit my old boy: it isn’t driven sufficiently by the headlines. He could of course listen to the news on nice middle-class and steady Radio 4. But like many old people, he can’t be bothered with radio. Weird, but there you are.

Whilst we’re at it, here’s a conundrum. Why is Sky TV rolling news calmer and cooler than BBC News 24? I know it’s visually louder. But it often seems somehow more grown-up. I think that may be because it treats its audience as adults rather than people in need of remedial education.

The point is that television can be very hot or quite cool, and I much prefer channels which treat me as a grown-up.

The BBC has one very deep fear, and that is that it will lose the mass market. That means that it must play to the vulgar strengths of the media in which it deals.

The result is a bit schizophrenic. The 6 O’Clock works both sides of street as best it can. It does the doomy drama of a “Stabbings Season” and parades of weepy victims saying they’re devastated. And then it puts on ana analyst such as Mark Easton to spray some comparative data about, like a fireman at a five alarm fire. (I should perhaps add that the BBC is very seldom any good about climate change: I think that’s because it feels a terrific need to get us to want to save the world, like it knew how to do that.)

There is one slightly peculiar conclusion to all this. It isn’t the agenda which changes as we channel-hop or go from airwaves to print. It’s the style.

No related posts.