UKHamlet's Blog

BBC Broadcasting House - turned into apartments for the wealthy?

There’s an idea being floated in the ranks of power that the BBC should be made to pay its own way. The concept is that through its own endeavours, the BBC should fund its activities and perform as a commercial organisation would have to. I disagree and I’ll tell you why.

If the BBC had its 40p a day public funding removed, it would have to fight for revenues in the shrinking market of advertising, it would have to ramp up its commercial output, it would have to cut costs and it would have to change its output to meet the demands of a commerce. Not such a bad thing you might think. You would be wrong.

According the BBC’s 2008-2009 annual report its income is derived from the following sources:

• £3493.8 million in licence fees
• £775.9 million from commercial business
• £294.6 million from government grants
• £41.1 million from other sources such as overseas sales

Recently, it was reported that Internet Advertising had overtaken television advertising, with a record of £1.75 billion spent in the first six months of 2009. So, we’re talking about a comparable period. Extrapolating from that, making the assumption that advertising spend remains constant at this record level, we can assume that the Internet will generate £3.5 billion in advertising revenues in year. This is roughly the same as the cost of the licence fee and more than the total spend on television advertising. So, for the BBC to replace its licence fee with advertising, it would have to take ALL the advertising revenue from the ITV companies and then find some more.

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Prof Joseph Stiglitz says Osbourne has it wrong

The first human casualties of our wonderful government’s war on the deficit have come to my attention. Alison is a friend, she’s the mother of two small children, and a woman whose husband “took one for the company” last year and reduced his hours by 25%. They are the parents in a family who can just about get by, and they have been told her civil service job will not exist in the near future, not because it’s not a necessary job, but because she’s been sacrificed to the ideology of neo-liberal economics.

Think of the country as a work horse. You need it to work hard to help you pay off your debts, so would your first action be to cut its food? That’s what Cameron, Osbourne and Clegg are doing to the economy.

You may have heard of Professor Joseph Stiglitz – he’s the Nobel laureate economist who correctly predicted the global crash. He’s distinctly unimpressed with Osbourne’s budget. This, he predicts, will make Britain’s recovery from recession longer, slower and harder than it needs to be. The rise in VAT could even tip us into a double-dip recession. He took time to offer George Osbourne a bit of advice – which will probably go unheeded, because Osbourne’s objectives aren’t necessarily to improve the economy. They are an ideological attack on the state, with the intention of shrinking it by forty percent.

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Beryl Bainbridge

Beryl Margaret Bainbridge was, my favourite English language writer from the second half of the Twentieth Century. Although the great and the good (The Times greatest British writers since 1945) have her at number twenty-six behind such luminaries as Muriel Spark, Martin Amis and Penelope Fitzgerald. Ah well, so much for the great and the good.

Her creative period extends from 1967 to 2005 and includes eighteen novels, four non-fiction books, and two collections of short stories.  She also wrote the screenplay of her novel “Sweet William”. Perhaps she kept the best until last: her final novel, published in 2001: “According to Queeney” is a masterpiece and worth its place on the bookshelf of any discerning reader. A fictionalised account of the life of Samuel Johnson through the eyes of Queeney Thrale, eldest daughter of Henry and Hester Thrale, it received wide acclaim throughout the literary world.

Although nominated five times for the Booker, she never won the award, but collected the Whitbread twice and is rightfully described as a national treasure.

She died from cancer aged 75 on 2^nd July 2010. I will miss her words.

Why has “yours” in the phrase: “yours is no disgrace” no apostophe? After all, it’s possessive. In fact “yours” is the second person possessive pronoun – it replaces “your” plus a noun. The reason some people think it might need an apostrophe is virtually every other word, ‘s indicates possession, so English speakers sometimes think yours should be spelled your’s. However, this is always incorrect – yours is the only correct spelling.

It is perfectly permissable to punch someone in the face if they’re found writing “your’s” and if they add an “e” on the end as in “your’se” you can kill their entire family. I hope that sorts out that little quandary. Next week, we’re going to learn to use “I”, “me” and “you” instead of “myself” and “yourself”, plus we’ll have a general discussion of the argot of the call centre generation and why a split infinitive could mean a split lip.

Irrespective of where you stand in this dispute, I’m sure you’ll agree that what BA’s management are doing will have a deleterious effect on industrial relations. To have a ballot where 81% of those participating voted in favour of strike action overturned on the technicality that the Union had not sufficiently publicised the BREAKDOWN of the votes, is a real slap in the face of the whole democratic process.

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Don't let this man ruin everything

This Labour government has been pretty bad, but it could be worse. David Cameron wants to cut the deficit quickly. That sounds good, but what it means is – taking money out of the economy. It may be borrowed money, but it’s money that’s keeping our shops and garages and bakers and electricians and plumbers and cafés and newsagents and every other kind of small business afloat. It’s money that’s keeping our economy alive.

Not only do the Conservatives want to cut the deficit by restricting the amount of borrowing, they want to pay it back quickly. That sounds good too, until you realise it means an increase in VAT. They have form in this respect. When Labour warned that Mrs Thatcher would double VAT, everyone laughed. She increased it from 8 to 15% – not quite double, it wasn’t until later that they increased it to 17.5%. Now the figures are saying that they’ll have to increase it to 20% now and 25% later. This will kill the retail economy. Worse than that it will savagely cut your income. For every £10 you have, two pounds fifty will be taken from you. A quarter of everything you earn ON TOP OF INCOME TAX. It would not surprise me to see it introduced on food…

Yep, this Labour government has been pretty bad, but it could be worse. Much worse. I’m a businessman, I’m the Managing Director of three companies and I’m voting Labour.

Gordon says what he really thinks of the Tories

It’s amazing really – for years I believed that the economy was badly run by Labour in the seventies as they tried to square the circle of their allegiance to the Unions and the need to manage the country.  It turns out, it’s all a lie promoted by the Conservative press in this country.

Now, at the end of Gordon Brown’s premiership, we’re seeing a repeat of the exercise, in which his stewardship of the economy is being called into question – people are virulently attacking him with a fervour normally reserved for paedophiles and cop killers.  Again most of the attacks are founded on lies and deceit – spun so that Gordon is portrayed to look incompetent and indecisive.

It’s the same story – the same distortion of the truth, with the same aim of using a tyre iron to remove a Labour government and replace it with their friends in the Conservative Party.

Let’s take the end of the seventies. The “Winter of Discontent”, it was called. Kenneth Morgan describes it in his biography of Jim Callaghan: “Sick patients went unattended; schools were closed because of strikes by school caretakers or cooks, or just because they were unheated in freezing weather; ambulance men were failing to answer 999 calls; frozen main roads were not being gritted; dustbins and refuse bags piled up in town centres in their tens of thousands, full of rotting and insanitary waste. There were secondary pickets all over the country preventing non-strikers getting through.”

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Lovely bones

I’m not thin. In fact I’m what some would call a BHB – big handsome bloke. That doesn’t include me, because I don’t like being big. My bigness is more to do with genetics than diet – I eat moderately and do a certain amount of exercise, including visting the gym twice a week. Still, I can’t shed those midriff pounds.

The reason for this is I convert more of my calories to fat than thin people – it’s a simple fact. The equation is easy to understand (even for skinny people) – everyone has a daily calorie burn off rate and it varies from day to day and person to person – if you consume more calories than you burn off, you will get fatter. FACT.

So, I could eat exactly the same number of calories and do exactly the same amount of exercise as a naturally skinny person, but I would burn fewer calories, therefore put on more weight, or lose less. This, of course, is a simplification, but it is in the area of accuracy and for the purposes of this article, it will suffice.

The thing is, I’m not complaining about the unfairness of this, or desirablility of being skinny, or even making excuses about my own inability to lose weight. No, I’m complaining about the sage like posturing of naturally skinny people, who want to tell me how to join their ranks. Why? Because they don’t know. They are there, they have always been there and they have no idea why or how I’m going to make that journey.

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I’m not a drug user – I experimented in the seventies, but lost interest in the eighties and I have a certain amount of sympathy with those who believe cannabis use leads to lethargy and psychological problems. In my view, however, there is mounting and undeniable evidence that continued prohibition of narcotics is causing society more problems than it is solving.

The cost of drug prohibition to society is enormous – from policing the supply and use to the cost of property crime associated with drug use, through the cost of NHS treatment for overdoses, AIDS, hepatitis and so on. If you remove prohibition, regulate the supply and quality, allow prices to fall to a market level low enough to remove the need for additional funding from crime, and offer support from the NHS, you will at a stroke remove:

• The cost of policing drug use and supply
• The cost of crime against the person and their property
• The cost to the NHS
• The criminalisation of people that need help not condemnation
• The opportunity for criminals to control addicts, forcing them into prostitution and other crime

You will also create jobs in a new narcotic supply industry – not just at home, but abroad too – where farmers in poor countries can grow cash crops without fear. We will generate income for the Exchequer through taxation, save lives through quality control, allow the police to focus on “real” crime and disassociate drug use from criminality.

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The Six Nations Championship is upon us again. Speaking as a Welshman, the first game is absolutely critical this time. Talk about your whole season hanging on one game. If we win at Twickers – which would be a mighty task given the history of this game – we will be on a roll. History is against us though. Not only will it be our 4th Six Nations win against the English in a row but it includes back to back wins at Twickers . We’ve done it before, but not very often – certainly not in the last thirty years :

• 1950 & 1952 (4 win streak ’49-’52)
• 1970 & 1972 (5 win streak ’69-’73)
• 1976 & 1978 (5 win streak ’75-’79)

In our first golden era we had a 10 game unbeaten run (1899-1909). In our second golden era we had only lost once (1974) to England in the period 1969-1979.

Can this team do what the Golden Era boys did?

We are 8th in the IRB table, only Scotland and Italy are below us, with England, France and Ireland 2, 3 and 4 places above us respectively. We have just come off the back of a pretty dire autumn series, our regional teams are stuttering and our management seems bereft of new ideas.

So far has the stock of our coaches fallen, that the Irish are suggesting that they’re glad they sacked him. Obviously, their Grand Slam is worth both ours. Now, it would be churlish to suggest that they only got theirs courtesy of a missed game winning penalty by Stephen Jones, but no more so than the implication that Gatland is an Irish hater. He probably has a gripe about the IRFU, but who wouldn’t given his treatment? They are lucky they have a great coach in Declan K – who has turned a team of honest plodders into a tenacious fighting unit. He took one season to do that.

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