The original story:
“Turkey mourns dead Gaza activists”
BBC Online
4 June 2010

Summary of the story:
The BBC reports on  Turkish mourners at the funerals of the “nine activists killed in Israel’s raid on a Gaza aid flotilla”. It then went on to major on the reaction of the Turkish government and the activists. It mentioned that the Israeli’s believed the ships were aiming to break the contoversial Israeli blockade of Gaza.

livingissues comment:
The following comments are intended to be valid whatever the reader thinks about the state of play between the Israeli government and the Hamas-controlled Gaza strip. Equally, they don’t depend on one’s point of view as to Israel’s blockade of Gaza. 

Israel offered to let the ships fulfill their aid mission by unloading most of their material at a port of the government’s choosing. So had the delivery of aid been the flotilla’s primary ambition, it could have been achieved without difficulty. So it is unlikely that this was primarily an “aid” mission.

It seems silly of the Israeli’s to pretend that the ships had a terrorist ambition as some spokesmen claimed. It isn’t even clear how the ships could seriously be thought to be attempting to break the blockade (as though forcibly), as seemed to be the Israeli’s main claim. It’s true of course that the activists wanted to break the blockade in a political sense (in the long term, for instance).

The flotilla might have been allowed through and in that sense might have “broken” the blockade. But isn’t it more likely that the flotilla intended or expected to be stopped and that there would be a lot of filmable outrage as the blockade was enforced and the aid didn’t get through to Gaza? One may say that that the Israeli’s over-reacted to resistance from some of the activists. But that’s what often happens when an armed force under-estimates the opposition and then has to retrieve the situation.  

What seems to be going on here is, in one way, quite commonplace in the world of protest: some naive, strong-headed activists get duped by people with much more sinister motives. Much protest is intended to provoke state violence, just as much terrorist activity is.  

 Also, of course, the level of violence contemplated by the hard-nuts on the Mavi Maramar was quite different to most protests. But this case is complicated by the involvement of the Turkish authorities. This seems almost to have been a government stunt by proxy.

The original stories:
“No Surrender”
The corporation will become smaller, but no less potent
The Economist
6 March 2010

“The BBC’s retreat may yet turn into a rout”
Losing a few digital stations and web pages will not be enough to keep the licence fee off the political agenda
David Elstein
The Times
4 March 2010

Summary of the stories:
The Economist made the usual noises about the BBC being a remarkable broadcaster and admired by Britons who broadly accept the licence fee they have to pay a little nonsensically since it’s supposed to be premised on buying the right to watch TV, though many watch relatively little of the corporation’s output. The magazine pointed out that the BBC is a bigger success with older people and the middle classes than with the young and less well-off. In response, the BBC has over the years expanded into hep digital radio and TV stations, and into the web. It noted that the BBC’s new strategy seems to be to head-off criticism that it crowds into markets where it threatens burgeoning commercial competitors. Its says  future it will concentrate on its core, home-made, high quality material. 

David Elstein’s piece covered much the same ground as The Economist but with the significant difference that Mr Elstein thinks that the BBC’s strategy may “backfire”:

“Paradoxically, a more efficient BBC spending more on content may strike its competitors as even more of a threat than its current incarnation.”

livingissues comment:
For a free market and socially libertarian magazine, The Economist is surprisingly friendly toward the state’s involvement in the funding and behaviour of the BBC. David Elstein has a record of being much more sceptical (not least in a ground-breaking review he chaired for the Conservative Party). He was writing for The Times which is regarded as being anti-BBC not least because it is owned by Ruper Murdoch, whose Sky is one of the BBC’s most important competitors.

It’s useful to remember that the BBC needs both to be high quality and even elite in its material whilst also offering a wide range of mass market material. It needs to appeal to everyone or its political support will disappear. In current circusmtances, as Mr Edelstein catches better than the Economist, it can’t please anyone very easily. When competes better in the elite market, it makes it even harder for commercial stations to offer work in this non-commercial arena, and when it sticks to its populist guns, it is robbing the commercial sector of viewers which are all the more badly needed in a recession (which has seen advertising revenues fall).

In short, in bad times, the BBC looks even more like a spoiled and protected monolith than it does in good times. Of course, the BBC retains a large amount of political support, partly because the public  likes and more or less trusts it, and partly because it’s quite cheap, and partly because voters hang on nanny for fear of something worse. 

All the same, the funding system is unfair (it penalises the poor). Besides, bit by bit, a more radical argument gains traction: the state should stop controlling the broadcasters (there are more legal controls on broadcasting than any other media) as though they had a unique power to corrupt or defile us. This is especially true the more satellite and cable platforms give viewers access to a huge range of material from around the world. The more time one spends not “consuming” BBC shows, the less one is inclined to continue to pay for them.

[The editor of this site in 2007 wrote "Scrap the BBC!": Ten years to set broadcasters free]

The original story:
“Disadvantaged children failed by British system, warns OECD”
Strapline: Britain’s education and welfare system is failing disadvantaged children despite high levels of public funding, the OECD has warned.
The Daily Telegraph
1 September 2009

Summary of the story:
The papers – including the sensible Telegraph – have got excited by some OECD research (probably not much more than a look through existing data) which purports to show that the UK is failing the younger end of its young, and the poorer end of the younger end.

Here’s the work the papers are referring to: www.oecd.org/els/social/childwellbeing

livingissues comment:
I’ll look at the work in greater detail soon, but even a cursory glance suggests that the UK is an ordinary mid-range big European country in most ways. Our young have a pretty good school experience and are pretty safe. But they are bit hooliganish (they get drunk and have babies a bit more commonly than other rich nation kids). Most other countries seem to fail their young in more ways than we do ours. I think that’s the conclusion one comes to when looking at Table 2.1 (here: http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/19/4/43570328.pdf).

Of course, we don’t do as well by our children as the Scandinavians. But we compare pretty well with the French and Germans. We do better than the Italians and Greeks, who famously love their children.

The original story:
“It’s not Facebook that’s doing down our young”
David Aaronovitch
The Times
4 August 2009

Summary of the story:
Mr Aaronovitch looks at a piece of work by one commentator. He writes:

“Modern society was so bad, this declinist wrote, that one study showed how girls …. thought so little of themselves that the number answering that they saw themselves as a ‘worthless person’ had gone up threefold in 20 years. This was awful.”

Mr Aaronivitch said that the declinist then went on to cite Jean Twenge, author of Generation Me and The Narcissism Epidemic as having part of the answer. Twenge said modern young people have an “exaggerated and selfish idea of their own importance”. Between the 1950s and the 1980s there was an increase from 12 to 80 percent in the number of people who agree with the proposition, “I am an important person”.

According to Mr Aaronivtch, the Facebook generation mostly face the problem (not of TV or Pop Idol), but the

“determined – almost ruthless – cultural pessimism of some of their spiritual, academic and commentating elders.”

livingissues comment:
It is certainly true, as Mr Aaronovitch says, that modern gurus often cite evidence which is extraordinarily self-contradictory without any hint that both arguments can’t be true.

However. It is of course possible that modern young people are a bit contradictory. One could argue, for instance, that they have a sky-high but very fragile opinion of themselves. That is: they believe (because everyone tells them so) that they matter, can succeed, and ought not to defer to anyone. On the other hand, when they do fail this becomes an amazing surprise because they have no conception that if they aim low and attempt nothing they will be failures and if they do attempt things, and aim high, sooner or later they will over-reach themsleves, and fail.

In short, they do of course matter but they will fail. So it may be that they need to be told that one is bound to feel a bit worthless unless one has a very realistic understanding that success is quite rare, that life is a battle. In short, they may need a little modesty. On the other hand, too much modesty can be demotivating.

Life’s a muddle and it takes courage. To that extent, saying contradictory things about life (and young people) is inevitable. So one might refine Mr Aaronivitch’s analysis to this extent: he might have added that being contradictory is inevitable, but one ought to admit it. But that makes one’s writing rather nuanced, and it is probably the case that modern academics and commentators feel the need to make a large splash.

The original story:
“Lord Rogers’ attack on the Prince of Wales is outlandish”
Telegraph View
Daily Telegraph
17 June 2009

Summary of the story:

A crisp Teleraph leader opines that Lord Rogers is wrong to criticise Prince Charles’s intervention which led to the Qatari power elite pulling out of a London architectural scheme they were funding.

livingissues comment:

It is possible that the majority of people don’t like the Rogers scheme which Charles has scuppered. But it got through the democratically-mandated planning system ordained by the the British people speaking through Parliament. If people don’t like the scheme, they need to use the existing system. If they don’t like the system they need to fight to change it.

Of course, Charles can’t argue for those sorts of changes except discreetly. Not that being argumentative is his game. As Lord Rogers says, and it’s a secondary issue: Charles never debates the issues he chunders on about. Maybe his opining from on high is the luxury we have to allow him granted that he has watch his words (at least a bit).

But we really should not permit to Charles to stitch things up behind our backs: that is a serious abuse of his being heir to a constitutional monarchy.

More to the point, it’s amazing to think that the Daily Telegraph doesn’t see any of that and would rather celebrate the outcome of Charles’s intervention because architecturally it suits them. Oh, and theirs is the populist view – which again is hardly the point of a being an intelligent right-winger.

The original story:
“Crisis? What crisis? The market confounds the left”
Philip Stephens
Financial Times
12 June 2009

and others…

Summary of the stories
Philip Stephens – a commentator symapthetic to New Labour – notes that a largely free market view of capitalism and globalisation seems to have survived the latest ruction. He notes that in the recent EU elections, the left – including the social democrats (the UK’s LibDems, for instance) and incumbents of the left – did badly, whilst the right (including some “far-right”) – including incumbents of the right – did well.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the same newspaper, Peter Clarke notes that the LibDems might surf to success on Labour’s discomfiture and resurface to mimic the success of their Liberal forebears. Richard Reeves made much the same point.

livingissues comment:
It is indeed fascinating that the left at the moment is suffering even though capitalism and ancient institutions have proved rather fallible. The City and Westminster have survived their recent crises much better than is widely supposed and in all sorts of ways, it may be business surprisingly as normal.

I think this is because people do deep down recognise that things have worked pretty well and probably will again.

There is a pretty good chance that MPs and Parliament will emerge stronger than ever. Good. It is likely that Anglo-Saxon capitalism will stay different from more state-controlled capitalism. Good.

It is indeed quite possible that the problem of politics being a battle between dead classes and ideas will be solved. Good. That may happen because centrists parties hoover up the right of the left and left of the right. Good. It may even be that party structures will matter less. Good.

The British on the whole like private life and not public. Their ideal is not to have to bother with the public realm because it is doing well in the hands of professionals paid to run it. They make a partial exception for politics because it is sufficiently like sport to offer amusement at least as a spectacle. Similarly, they follow business news when their wallet is on the line, or the events are exciting.

It is very fashionable just now to say that politics is about to become less “top down” and more “bottom up”. On this account, the elite won’t be able administer everything centrally because we the people will spring up in myriad forms to manage things more locally, and for ourselves. This is supposed in part to be a function of two-way digital media. These may be good developments, but I see no evidence whatever of a widespread urge to take up the tedious and irksome business of running things like schools, hospitals, prisons, and welfare services. If you do… do write in.

The original story:
“Trudie Styler: Saving the world one jet at a time”
Marina Hyde
The Guardian
15 May 2009

Summary of the story:
Ms Hyde is making something of a profession discussing the absurdity of celebrity conscience and here’s a good installment in the saga. It’s a tale of extravagant flying in jets and helicopters by a woman with lots of homes and a mission to save the planet.

livingissues comment:
Ms Tyler responded to the piece with an interesting assessment of the trade-offs to be made. Every square mile of rainforest that’s saved, saves a good deal of greenhouse gas and so a bit of jet fuel to save a lot of forest is a good deal.

I have no idea how much rainforest Trudie Styler has saved and how much her flying was indispensable to her saving it.

In principle, she could be right. Similarly, the airmiles of a person like Sir Nicholas Stern might well be worth it, if what he achieves needs face-to-face contact.

In her response, she mentioned her part in the campaign against Chevron and its supposed involvement in destroying Ecuador’s wildernesses. It happens the Economist had a little piece on the background to this saga and it’s well worth a look. One way of looking at things is to say that the Ecuadorian government squandered its own assets and it’s far from sure that any US company has much to blame itself for.

The original story:
“Making Allowances”
Leader Comment
The Times
9 May 2009

Summary of the story:
The Times‘s leader writer ran the gamut of argument on the problem of finding the right people to go into politics, especially how to reward them properly.

livingissues comment:
The nation has been indulging in an orgy of dislike of Members of Parliament and their allowances. Interestingly, The Telegraph is not universally admired for its expose. It was seen in some quarters as a witch hunt which risked taking our eye of the real issues. As The Times remarks, the upshot is probably that the MPs’ “take” is quite small and not very corrupting.

MPs will have to rethink how they pay themselves.

Actually, though, the public has more rethinking to do than the politicians. We have been so busy wanting everybody in authority to be responsive to the point of submissiveness that we haven’t noticed that we want to be informed and led by an elite.

We won’t be led by serious and worthwhile people until we signal that we admire public service. (Nick Stacey told A N Wilson (FT, 9/10 May 2009) how badly we were lacking this sense.) Of course, public servants have to be well-rewarded. But they’ll need respect too.

The failing is partly in the leadership cadres. For all the humbug and arrogance that has always littered the elite – the professional classes – there was also a more widespread understanding of the idea of vocation. Helena Kennedy made something like that point on BBC2′s Newsnight (11 May 2009).

We need to build a new sense of professionalism and the vocational pleasures it can bring.

So it’s a reciprocal matter. The led need to understand their obligation to their leaders and the leaders need to have quite a strong sense of their duty.

This sort of ethos was once quite openly discussed and taught. It wasn’t the preserve of the public school, though public schools certainly took it very seriousy and still do (as the headmistress of Roedean reminded the FT (9 May 2009). Actually, it ran right through society as a value and was taught at every point. It was, for instance, accepted that adults had a leadership role, and it didn’t really matter how poor or uneducated they were.

The original story:
UN backtracks on claim that deadly IDF strike hit Gaza school
Amos Harel
Haaretz
3 February, 2009

Summary of the story:

Haaretz’s reporter began his story:

The United Nations has reversed its stance on one of the most contentious and bloody incidents of the recent Israel Defense Forces operation in Gaza, saying that an IDF mortar strike that killed 43 people on January 6 did not hit one of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency schools after all.

livingissues comment:
[This is slightly amended from earlier versions of this blog - apologies, RDN 14.45hrs, 4 February 2009.]

Haaretz’s story mostly checks out at a site referred to by the UN as an official source, ReliefWeb. See their story here. The story is buried by the UN low down in a document, without headline or signposting. So it looks like multiple apologies are in order.

The British media pushed out powerful elements of the original untruths with a great deal of emphasis, and presumably they believed that such allegations if true would do real hard to Israel’s reputation. Using that logic the British media ought to put the record straight – and with a great deal of emphasis.

Of course, the 43 dead remain dead and their families’ grief won’t be diminished by this “news”. Nor, perhaps, their sense of grievance.

It is worth noting that early reports of the incident on 6 January 2009 were often headlined in terms of an attack on a school (for instance, the Independent‘s). But the stories themselves (including the Independent‘s) often then noted that the shells fell outside the school. It was then often left ambiguous as to whether the fatalities and casualties from those shells were inside or outside the school.

Some accounts did report at least one UN official saying that the shells were outside the school and that there were no fatalities (but some casualties) inside it as a result. Indeed, the UNRWA seems to have got itself into a muddle and reversed its account quite early on. So the latest UN account confirms what some said, and corrects others. Namely, that the shells definitely landed outside the school, killing no-one.

One is now looking forward to evidence on the two other main allegations against the Israeli military and its New Year operations in Gaza: that they used phosphorus and “herded” a group of civilians into a building and then shelled it and them.

The original story:
“This is indeed a class war, and the campaign against the Aga starts here”
George Monbiot
The Guardian
14 January 2009

Summary of the stories:
George Monbiot’s column criticises middle class consumption habits and asserts that the climate damage they will cause will mostly afflict poorer people. He cites the Aga (an expensive cooker and room-heater). But he also takes on the “no frills” flying revolution. He quotes authoritative data that whilst all classes are flying more than they used to, there hasn’t been much change in the share of flying done by the well-off.

GM also looks at the class warfare aspect of the argument over climate change and notes that the Marxists at spikedonline seem to be caught in a paradox as they defend the rights of middle class people to damage poor people.

livingissues comment:
George Monbiot is surely right that the better-off do much more climate damage than poor people (and he might have stressed the degree to which most damage by well-off people is discretionary whilst much of the damage done by poor people is unavoidable).

However, whilst it is popularly believed that the main effect of low-cost flying was to unleash a working-class flight to the sun, in fact almost everyone in all classes is doing more flying. It really ought not to be a surprise that the proportion of poor and rich people flying has not much changed.

The data GM seems to be using says that about 60 percent of leisure flying is done by people earning over £46,000. About 40 percent is done by those earning less. This may not be hugely just, but it is not very surprising.

Interestingly, the data also suggests that much of the increase in flying is amongst people travelling on business, and it seems that the big increase here is amongst the less well-off passengers.

GM is right that spiked online are vigorous – and seemingly paradoxical – in defending the freedoms of consumers (rich or poor) against the anxious nay-saying of the environmentalists. But he perhaps overlooks the value of spiked online as squib-merchants. Besides, spiked and others are surely on the money when they argue that environmentalism is in large degree an argument between affluent greens and affluent consumers, and that these are often really the same type of person and even the self-same person.

But then much protest has a middle class accent. Does now, allways has. See here for a wonderful video about a charming protest at Heathrow.