Mark Thompson confused censorship and editorial morality. Griffin is not censored by the BBC – he is more often on current affairs than most Labour MPs. Thompson gave in to the stunt culture of the BBC and provided a platform for anti-semitism and fascism which shames the BBC. If we see a rise in racist and anti-semitic attacks Thompson should resign.
So says Denis MacShane, as quoted by James Macintyre on the New Statesman website.
Aside from the dull predictability of a politician attacking BBC management you really have to ask why politicians like Macshane insist on burying their heads so deeply in the sand.
The link between attacks and Griffin’s awful (for him) appearance on Question Time is impossible to prove. Are we to believe that the horrific homophobic attack at the weekend was down to Griffin being made to look like the odious ideological sewer that most of us he knew him to be already? Were the four teenagers who have been charged with that attack in Liverpool sitting down to watch Question Time on Thursday night?
It is a failure of education and a prevalence of ignorance that leads to attacks like that. And these failings breed the anger and resentment that allows Griffin and his motley collection of racists and thugs to win support.
That’s not Mark Thompson’s fault. It is, however, the fault of a political class which writes off the working class – and, although the term seems horrible, the underclass – and sees almost everything through a middle class prism.
By letting Griffin appear the BBC were forcing mainstream politicians to face up to these truths. The BNP is too full of hate and contradictions to be anything more than transitory. What the BBC might have done is refocused the debate on how we can again make our democracy relevant to everyone. And that is a debate that we sorely need.
Last week in The Guardian Jackie Ashley wrote about Twitter and caused a bit of a storm by dismissing the whole Twitterverse.
It appeared Jackie didn’t quite the point. She’s not alone in that. The British newspaper industry is stuffed full of people who don’t get the internet and the way it’s changing our habits.
The best response I’ve read is from Graham Linehan, creator of Father Ted and Twitter stalwart.
The Conversation brilliantly sums up what Twitter is about in all its power and its pointlessness, its seriousness and its humour.
If you know nothing about Twitter (especially, but not only, if you’re also a leading commentator on a national newspaper) please have a read and take note.
And you can follow me @scotfootblog
In the mid 1960’s my grandfather went on, what we could call today, a fact finding and relationship building trip to the United States and Canada.
By then he was in charge of the Orthopaedic Workshop at Edinburgh’s Princess Margaret Rose Hospital and, I’ll modestly concede on his behalf, had developed a reputation for the quality and ingenuity of some of the designs and solutions he came up with to help the victims of diseases like polio.
So, in many ways, he went across the Atlantic as an ambassador for the National Health Service.
As he told it in later years the reception he got was overwhelmingly positive with staff in the States appreciative of not only the breakthroughs that NHS staff were achieving but also enthralled by the very concept of a National Health Service that recognised no distinction of wealth or class.
But one doctor quizzed him aggressively about the service. When my grandfather’s responses were overwhelmingly positive – a position he held throughout his life – the doctor dismissed him with the cracking line: “Commie bastard.”
It was the end of a short and less than beautiful friendship.
Being a contrary sort the exchange probably hardened my granddad’s resolve to be ever more evangelical in his praise for what was then, and checking his passport I see he arrived in October 1964, still a young and radical service.
And he really did believe that the creation of a free to use healthcare system, a system available to anyone who needed it, was an achievement for Britain to be truly proud of.
He would be both amused and angry that today the NHS has become a target of abuse for the American right. Amused that the views of that doctor are now the default position of talking heads on channels like Fox News.
Angry that the service he worked for, the service that allowed him to help thousands of British people and many others across the world and in America, is the target of such misrepresentation and scaremongering by people who choose not to acknowledge the essential goodness of the principles on which it was founded.
We can’t ignore the fact that the NHS has flaws. Some of those flaws are common to any large organisation. Some are peculiar to the NHS. Many of them can be blamed on politicians and the revolving door of policies that has passed for government in this country for too long.
We must also take some of the blame. It’s taken the interference of the American right – familiar hate figures for those on the British left – to rally us to the compelling #welovetheNHS trend on Twitter.
We’re too often complacent about the NHS, too often slow to defend it when it comes under attack. If an American wanted to build an argument against the NHS then a flick through the archives of our popular press would provide plenty ammunition. The misrepresentation and scaremongering begins at home.
When you speak to people they always have an NHS horror story. When you dig deeper most of the stories concern a friend of a friend, the details sketchy. Mistakes do happen – and in healthcare that can have the most terrible consequences – but more people get the highest possible levels of care than don’t. That remains something to be proud of, something to shout about.
Another family vignette. A few weeks ago my mum was in hospital getting treatment for a broken wrist. Chatting to one of the nurses she was horrified to learn the amount of theft that happens in the hospital. Patients and relatives steal anything and everything.
In sixty years we’ve gone from lauding the advent of universal healthcare to stealing the pictures off the wall when we go for treatment. Maybe it’s some of us rather than the NHS who should be having a long hard look at ourselves.
But for all that the NHS continues to provide a service that is the envy of much of the world.
Some might argue that if you work hard and save your money you shouldn’t have to pay for healthcare for the people that don’t.
That’s not a world view I share. It ignores the fact that many people who work incredibly hard still couldn’t afford to pay. It ignores the fact that children who have no control over the lives their parents choose to lead would be equally penalised by a country that had given up all pretence of fairness.
Making money shouldn’t absolve you of your moral responsibility as part of the community. The NHS is our most enduring and important monument to that principle.
Today thousands of people will receive treatment from the NHS. Some of it will be lifesaving, some of it will be minor but it will all be free. Many others will lose loved ones in NHS hospitals but even in their grief they will know that the staff will have done everything that could be done.
You must live in an upside down world if you consider that to be evil.
Hillary Clinton Secretary of State
So it looks like Hillary Clinton is going to accept Obama’s offer of Secretary of State.
You just can’t keep that family down.
I think it’s a good choice on the whole.
What will it mean for Clinton’s presidential ambitions? Will they take Bill’s passport off him?
And did Obama ever consider her as a running mate? Clinton v Palin. That would have been a debate worth watching.
A busy day at the BBC. The tabloids denied their extra pound of flesh, Jonathon Ross free to continue at the BBC. Heavily shackled no doubt but free to continue.
The big news though was the block put on the launch of the BBC’s video led network of local news services.
That move has been applauded by the Newspaper Society, its members claiming that the launch of the BBC service would have put their own local operations out of business.
If that had happened it would have been because a properly funded, well run BBC service would have been in direct contrast to the underfunded, amateurish local journalism that so many of us have to suffer today.
Stewart at Sour Alba has already discussed the disaster that Johnson Press has made of the Scotsman websites, robbing its three titles of a unique online identity, a mess that is reflected in the print editions.
From my own experience Johnston’s Midlothian Advertiser, a paper that, in fairness, was helpful to local charities, had to print an apology a couple of months ago because it printed no fewer than seven mistakes in a three paragraph story about a golden wedding. Apparently a case of a reporter not being able to take notes correctly over the phone.
The general feeling seems to be that we no longer have a local media worth speaking of. Local radio provides nothing. Scottish TV is desperate to jettison any commitment to local news.
Now, and anyone subjected to even five minutes of Jackie Bird’s Children in Need spectacular will agree, BBC Scotland can be dire.
But the BBC Trust appear to be telling the public that they are well served enough already. That’s complete nonsense, this is a victory for the lobbying of media companies who should actually be held to account for the substandard service they provide.
Competition from the BBC may have forced them to up their game. As it is now local media will be left to die out, controlled by companies that either don’t understand or won’t stump up the cash to adapt to a changing world.
And when the local papers have gone, their websites limped into the sunset, commercial regional TV news disappeared what will be left with? Politicians and the BBC Trust screaming at a Director-General telling him to do something about it?
