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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