Waiting for Lunchtime

BBC execs more powerful than MPs?

Are senior executives more powerful than MPs? It sounds a ridiculous question, but apparently that's what a small number of Conservative MPs believe.

A couple of days ago my MP, Nick de Bois (he's a Tory) mentioned on Twitter that he was prepared to support an Early Day Motion in the House of Commons which calls for an annual vote via the internet "on the BBC's programmes, the level of BBC operational activity and administrative overheads, salaries, and on the standards of BBC programmes".

These were (and still are!) my primary disagreements with the proposal:

• If you ask people in general what they want from any kind of public service, the answer is usually "as much as possible". If you ask them how much they want to pay for that service, the answer is nearly always "as little as possible". Therefore putting budgetary decisions of any kind of public service to a public vote will inevitably result in a sharp decline in that organisation's budget.


• Determining the budget for an organisation the size of the BBC is hugely complex, which is why the Licence Fee agreements between the BBC and Government often take many months to conclude. The recent stitch-up between Jeremy Hunt and Mark Thompson doesn't negate this point.


• Television programmes take a long time to plan, film and produce. Any organisation making them needs to have some idea of its budgets, not just for the current year, but for at least the following one. Leaving the licence fee to be determined annually at the whim of an electorate would make the BBC un-runnable.


• Even if you think the idea in this EDM is a good one, there are many public and pseudo-public organisations which could have their finances determined in this way. Why are BBC employees being singled out? Why not also vote for the "salaries and administrative overheads" of the police; judges and the court service; social workers; teachers. Or ... how about this ... MPs?

The EDM has been proposed by Robert Halfon, the Conservative MP for Harlow. Mr Halfon is also on Twitter so I struck up a brief conversation there with both MPs on this subject.

Eventually I got Mr Halfon to admit that his idea wouldn't apply to all BBC staff, but only to "board and celebrities". Well the BBC Executive Board is less than a dozen salaried people, and the majority of "celebrities" who appear on TV shows are contracted freelancers and not actually employees of the BBC. They negotiate their fees individually, usually via their agent. So Mr Halfon's idea is half-baked at best.

But, more importantly, I tried to get both Mr Halfon and Mr de Bois to agree that if it's important to have an annual vote on the salaries and programmes of the BBC (because it's a public service), surely it's even more important to have an annual vote on the salaries and policies of MPs (because they're public servants, and far more powerful).

Initially both MPs fell back to the tired old "oh but you have the opportunity to sack us every 5 years" claim. But that's not the same thing at all as an annual appraisal, and I've never seen a General Election ballot form with "how much do you want your MP to be paid?" on it.

Despite a little bit of pushing (not much, I admit, I got bored with it very quickly), neither Nick de Bois nor Robert Halfon would agree that MPs should have their policies and salaries put to a public vote every year. However they both seem to agree that senior BBC officials should face such a vote.

My conclusion is that both these MPs believe that senior BBC executives need to be kept in check more than MPs do because they must think the BBC staff are more powerful than MPs. So there you have it, two Members of Parliament who are in completely the wrong jobs. They presumably went into politics to be able to change things in this country, but they both believe that it's easier to change things as (say) the Director of Audio & Music at the BBC, than as an MP.

posted by Iain @ 06:34 0 comments

Holding the country to ransom

Back in the 1970s the Trades Unions in Britain were quite a bit more influential than they are today. Thatcher's anti-Union laws hadn't yet been implemented, and unionisation was the norm rather than the exception, even in many private-sector employers.

As a result, whenever a Government (of any political hue) tried to implement policies that would affect the standard of living of ordinary people, they knew the Unions would defend their members' interests and cause an awful lot of trouble. So we had the miners' strikes in 1972 and 1974, resulting in the three-day week and eventually bringing down Ted Heath's Conservative Goverment. A few years later Jim Callaghan's Labour Government tried to fix inflation by limiting pay rises, leading to the Winter of Discontent and ultimately the end of that Government.

The establishment and newspapers were (and have remained) absolutely livid about this. Union leaders have been called unelected troublemakers, accused of holding the country to ransom and only interested in lining their own profits.

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Now fast-forward to 2010 / 2011.

The banks -- especially the investment banks -- have brought the global economy to the brink of collapse. All round the world sovereign states have had to invest hundreds of billions of pounds to prevent their banks from going bankrupt. In doing so Iceland, Greece and Ireland (so far) have themselves been brought nearly to the point of bankruptcy.

So how do the Governments around the world propose getting back this vast investment and starting to reduce their deficits? Well the obvious solution would be that those who made the mess should pay to clear it up. But as soon as there's any suggestion of putting any kind of extra taxation on the financial sector, we're told that if we do that the bankers will leave the country. And because the UK in particular is so dependent on the financial sector, if the banks just up and leave the country's finances will be in an even worse state than at present.

So ... we again have a situation where a bunch of unelected people, seemingly only interested in their own profits, are able to dictate Government policy. They're ... yes, you guessed it ... holding the country to ransom. So why isn't this on the front pages of the Telegraph and the Mail? Fred Goodwin was briefly public enemy number one, but even he never faced the same level of vitriol and bad press as Arthur Scargill, for example. And what about the others? The CEOs and Boards of Directors of Northern Rock, HBOS, Bradford & Bingley should -- if there's any justice in the world -- be in prison, not retired on million-pound-a-year pensions.

And what's the odds that the Coalition Government will enact a series of anti-banker laws, akin to the anti-Union laws of the 80s/90s/00s? Yeah, that's right, not even the most audacious of stockmarket gamblers would take a punt on that one!

posted by Iain @ 19:27 0 comments