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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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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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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Philosophy or Safety?

I read an interesting blog – by one of those Libertarians who advocates the kind of “freedom” that rides roughshod over the freedoms of everyone else. In this case, it is the freedom to speed in a car or motorbike.

The cause of this puerile outburst which you can read here: http://tinyurl.com/q2b5le – is the new GPS speed governor which is being developed in Australia. “Freedom dies with GPS speed governor” wails Alexander Mark.  His argument is that this is another step along the road to a “dictatorship of rules” against which we will all one day rebel.

Now, in a sense, I’m in agreement with Mr Mark about this dictatorship of rules – we are slowly being hemmed in by regulations and contractual requirements. The former have been instigated by governments who have put in place laws that govern our behaviour and require us to behave as good consumers and the latter are the contractual obligations allowed by these laws that require us to pay forever for things we have already bought.

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Down Shep!

It’s 1977 and me, Jack Dromey and Harriet Harman are on the picket line at Grunwicks. Harriet is the legal advisor to the strikers’ committee and Jack… well Jack is Jack. He is a bluff, charming man with a quick mind, a loud voice and strong, well argued opinions. I am this skinny, long-haired teenager with acne, a smelly Afghan coat, and for most of my time on the picket line, a large lump on my forehead – testimony to the firmness of SPG standard issue truncheons in those days. It’s no wonder Harriet noticed the loquacious Jack rather than me.

Wind forward five years and Jack marries Harriet and they now have two children, both boys, both bearing the surname “Harman”.  Given a choice of that or Dromey, they’ve probably both regretted not picking a partner called Smith or Booth or whatever…

To tell the truth, she wasn’t a raving beauty or anything, in fact she looked like a Blue Peter presenter without the sex, but that’s not what turned my head in those days. Instead, I favoured cerebral, left-leaning older women, with strong opinions and attitude. I still do, but I can do without the attitude and the older bit. Anyway, Harriet was something of a fantasy girl for the young UKHamlet in the seventies – I’m sure she’ll be delighted to hear it – but it wasn’t in a prurient way. Well, not often anyway.

No, I put Ms Harman on a mental pedestal. This is because I worked hard at not regarding women as sex objects in those days, and it would have been a betrayal of my principles to actually fancy getting jiggy with Harriet.

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Tony Blackburn

The Digital Switchover for TV appears to be in full swing and generally it appears to the consensus that this is a good thing. That’s another debate, but more concerning to me is the momentum being gained by the Radio Switchover proposed for 2015. It seems a long way off, but it is only five and half years away. If government has its way then at some point in 2015 all car radios, analogue hifi radios, the radio you have in your kitchen, your clock radio and so on, will become scrap.

Let’s just take the car radios. There are more than 35 million cars in the UK, with slightly smaller numbers in most European countries and slightly more in Germany. There’s about 200 million in the USA. In 99.9% of these cars there are analogue radios and for the foreseeable future car manufacturers will continue to pump out cars, vans and trucks with analogue radios.

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Irena Sendler

I received an email from a friend: one of those circular, viral emails – this one was about Irena Sendler. Irena (real name Sendlerowa) was an exceptionally brave woman – she, along with a couple of dozen others in the Warsaw RGO managed to smuggle out about two and half thousand Jewish children, who would have probably ended up being killed by the Nazis.

Indeed Irena was herself nearly executed. In 1943 Sendler was arrested by the Gestapo, severely tortured, and sentenced to death. Żegota – the Council to Aid Jews –  saved her by bribing German guards on the way to her execution. She was left in the woods, unconscious and with broken arms and legs. She was listed on public bulletin boards as among those executed.

For the remainder of the war, she lived in hiding, but continued her work for the Jewish children. After the war, she dug up the jars containing the children’s identities and attempted to find the children and return them to their parents. However, almost all of their parents had been killed at the Treblinka extermination camp or had gone missing otherwise.

The email I received got some of this correct, some of it incorrect:

Irena Sendler – who recently died at 98 years of age, was a 2007 Nobel Peace Prize Nominee;

During WWII, Irena was given permission to work in the Warsaw Ghetto, as a plumbing/sewer specialist.  She had an ulterior motive.

Being German, Irena knew what the Nazi plan was for Jews.

Irena smuggled out infants in the bottom of a tool box she carried in the back of her truck.  She used a burlap sack for bigger children.

She also had a dog in the back that she trained to bark when Nazi soldiers let her in and out of the ghetto.  The soldiers wanted nothing to do with her dog.  The barking covered noises of the infants and children.

Irena managed to smuggle out and save 2500 infants and children, before she was caught!  The Nazi’s broke both her legs and arms, and beat her severely.

Irena kept a record in a jar buried under a tree in her back yard of all the children she smuggled out.

After the war, she tried to locate all parents that may have survived to reunite families, but most had been gassed.

The children she could not reunite were placed with foster families or adopted.

Irena was nominated for the 2008 Nobel Peace Prize.

She was not selected.

Al Gore won for a slide show on Global Warming!!!!????.

Help send this email around the world so that this ‘noble’ lady is remembered for her bravery.

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“Blimey, are you listening to Obama’s missus?” Lol missed the usual pleasantries.
“Trying to, but someone’s on the phone spoiling it.” I was and he was.
“Soz mate, I’ll shut the fuck up, shall I?” He took my silence as the affirmative it was meant to be. For the next three minutes we both sat there, either end of a phone line, not saying anything, but meaning everything. When she’d finished my lip was trembling, and I couldn’t say anything anyway. The sharp intake of breath with a slight terminal shudder coming from the Westminster end of our line told me I was not alone in this respect.

Few politicians, if any, can inspire me to an emotional response with their words. I get the occasional flicker of anger, but even then it subsides quickly, replaced by a weariness borne out of several decades of despair. Even fewer politician’s wives can evoke any kind of response at all. Michelle Obama is different though.

Her powerful speech to Elizabeth Garrett Anderson School in Islington took my breath away. The sheer passion, and emotion evident in her voice, the message her words conveyed and the response she had from her largely teenage audience, all spoke of a woman who not only believed what she was saying, but knew how to say it and not just to the hundred or so youngsters in her immediate audience. Her voice broke too as she referred to the girls as “diamonds”, my heart broke at the same time because I knew, I knew exactly what she was saying. Better still, anyone watching now knows about those hidden diamonds, just waiting to be discovered and polished.

The real Michelle according to Google

“If you want to know the reason why I am standing here, it’s because of education,” she told them.
“I never cut class. I loved getting As, I liked being smart. I liked being on time. I thought being smart is cooler than anything in the world. You, too, with these values, can control your own destiny. You, too, can pave the way.”
“For nothing in my life ever would have predicted that I would be standing here as the first African-American First Lady. I was not raised with wealth or resources or any social standing to speak of. I was raised on the South Side of Chicago — that’s the real part of Chicago.” Continue reading

Sean Hodgson, also known as Robert Graham Hodgson looked fearfully at the tall, broad shouldered man standing at his cell door. The officer’s black uniform seemed to cast its own shadow, filling the room with despair. Sean shrank back into his bunk, pulling his knees up to his chest, rocking back and forth.

“I didn’t do it,” he whimpered, his voice breaking with choked back tears. “I didn’t fucking do it. Please don’t do this…”

“Come along, Sean,” the officer said in a deep, throaty voice, “be a man.”

He held out a leather gloved hand and touched Sean’s shoulder, softly at first, but then more firmly. His cold, blue eyes locked with Sean’s, his mouth a firm line of determination. Sean knew there would be no getting away, and in that moment he gave up.

They stood him up; hand and leg cuffed him, and then carried him into the next room, a room dominated by the inverted L of the gallows.

Sean stared at the priest with wild eyes, his mind scurrying around in his head like a mad mouse cornered by hungry cat. A dark suited man stepped forward and slipped a thick hemp rope over Sean’s head then everything went dark as a musty hood was pulled over him. He wet himself and managed to say; “I didn’t do..” before the floor opened and his head was jarred to one side, distending his neck and pulling its bones apart before severing his spinal chord.

The attending officers grimaced at the smell. “Oh fuck, he shat.”

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