Getting Stuffed With Paxo

Tonight is Jeremy Paxman's last appearance as lead anchor for Newsnight, the BBC's premier long-form news broadcast. To many, Paxman is a hero of hard-hitting journalism, famous for encounters such as this, with the egregious Home Secretary, Michael Howard:



Or this more recent one with the hapless Chloe Smith of the Treasury



There are many other examples of him at the top of his game: the interview with Blair in which he tried to pin down the PM's rather shifty conflation of Christianity and neoliberalism, then listed (from 8.50) one Labour donor's publishing stable ('Horny Housewives, Mega Boobs, Skinny and Wriggly') to which Blair could only reply 'I've said what I've said…Look…'.

I used to love Newsnight. The other news broadcasts seemed lazy, lightweight, incurious and uninformed. They were also, to my younger self, thrilling. A rude, loud and openly sceptical interviewer demanding answers to awkward questions from people I hated - Tories and rightwing Labour ministers and MPs. It was, frankly, a macho thing, a gladiatorial battle. I felt exactly the same way about the Today programme, Radio 4's flagship 3-hour morning news show.

I no longer feel that way. Firstly, probably because I'm getting old, I find myself frustrated by the sheer lack of knowledge displayed by all sides. I keep thinking that if I can educate myself in basic economics, climate science, philosophy, the arts, sociology etc. etc., the least the politicians and journalists paid to be experts can do is be ahead of me. I'm also sick of the closed circle of Establishment voices represented on Newsnight and its equivalents. Despite the devolution of power to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, the importance of the EU, the dissemination of expertise to charities, universities and local organisations, the political and media classes are still resolutely metropolitan and Westminster-centric. I'm tired, too, of the relentless parade of privately-educated, Oxbridge-finished faces and voices reflecting a world-view and an interrogative style derived from the tired rituals of the Oxford Union debating society. The perspectives of tens of millions of other people just never get a look-in: and that's before we even touch the exclusion of female, minority-ethnic and northern people. Civil society is now invisible in political and hard news journalism, which I find deeply saddening. The obsession with the remnants of democracy seems rather archaic when executive and corporate power retreats further out of the reach of electoral politics.

Presentationally, I'm now utterly drained by the moribund, sterile set-up of Newsnight and Today. Paxman's aggressive approach was once essential: the interview with Michael Howard may well have changed the course of British politics by revealing him to be not just authoritarian but also profoundly dishonest. But it's a tactic that stopped working long ago. Any politician – with the exception of Chloe Smith – has had so much media training that an appearance opposite Paxo holds no more terror. They're trained in the art of 'bridging': filling the available 3/8/15 minutes with so much bland pap that neither the interviewer nor the audience is given anything to grasp beyond a sense of whether the interviewee is 'good on telly'. Paxman's brute force frontal attack can't do anything against an interviewee whose only concern is to 'fill'. They're trained to look human (I know, what a world, in which our representatives need training to sound like the rest of us, but it is, of course, our fault: we and our chosen newspapers and TV channels demand robotic perfection then mock them for giving us what we think we want), not to answer reasonable questions.

I am tired of the two-heads format in which people with extreme views are presented as equally knowledgeable while a presenter mediates ('Well he says you're a liar, what have you got to say to that?'). Yes, we all like a good argument but we often end up none the wiser, or even misled. Climate science is one particular victim here: presenting the views of corporate whores like Lawson (who has zero scientific background) as co-equal with 99% of active researchers in the field has literally done enormous damage to the planet. Last year I fruitlessly pursued a complaint against Newsnight, which presented Peter Lilley MP as an expert who'd written 'a report' about climate change, which he thinks is a hoax. The programme didn't mention that he has no credentials, nor did they mention that he is a director of an oil exploration company. In short, they presented him as a qualified and neutral observer. When I complained, they refused to accept that his interests should have been flagged up. When pressed, their defence was that Lilley's financial interests are listed in his Parliamentary Declaration of Interests, and were therefore common knowledge. Really? I strongly suspect that more people watched that interview than even know that there is a Declaration of Interests, let alone where to find it. TV is powerful, much more powerful than the notion that viewers are out there Googling the background of guests afforded the privilege of airtime on a flagship show. Newsnight's actions, and their response to my complaint, seemed little short of dishonest to me, an abuse of power.

Paxman famously cited Louis Heren's approach, 'Why is this lying bastard lying to me?' as the source of his style, but it's become unproductive, and contributes to a general cynicism which is infectious. I have no doubt that politicians did – and do – lie to Paxman and the rest of us, but Newsnight seems to have applied this method to absolutely everybody. The result is the grotesque sight, last Monday, of Paxman telling Professor Alice Roberts what the scientific method was, of functionaries, charity workers and ordinary people being treated as objects of suspicion, of climate scientists being accused of misleading the public for some kind of obscure conspiracist purpose, of good people being assumed to be up to something. This is corrosive, but it's also counter-productive. It's noticeable over recent years that Jeremy Paxman's editorialising and sneering is more frequently applied to people you might call liberal or leftwing. He has become openly reactionary, about climate science, non-neoliberal economics, youth culture, the arts, non-Establishment approaches to history and a host of other subjects, often, I suspect, those about which he knows least. This week's series of farewell interviews has been instructive. He seemed most at ease with Hillary Clinton, a rightwing machine politician well-versed in the art of giving nothing away. He is drawn to power and nowadays rarely interested in principle and motivation: like him, Clinton is about the exercise of authority rather than any kind of idealism. Paxman then talked to Lord Saatchi, who presented him with a copy of Hayek's The Road to Serfdom and proceeded to explain that corporation tax should be abolished in the name of 'freedom'. To this, Paxman had no response to the redefinition of freedom as merely economic and available to rich capitalists, despite there being no shortage of very mainstream alternatives. The gift, it seemed to me, represented the thanks of a grateful class of neoliberal governors.

Is Jeremy Paxman a Conservative? I doubt it: he seems like a patrician radical to me. But away from the individual personality issues, I think he represents a deeply radical-conservative perspective which is socially damaging. The assumption that nobody has any higher motives reinforces the status quo. It militates against social, economic and political change. It maintains the dominance of a ruling class which may occasionally incorporate some dissent and alternatives (such as the general acceptance of homosexuality) as long as the deep structures of the state and the economy remain unchanged. Once this is understood, Newsnight, the Today show and its ilk become simply ritualistic performances little different to the excruciating arse-kissing seen when politicians turn up on breakfast TV sofas to talk about what they feed their kids or whether their partners have to do all the ironing: it's just a way of reaching a different demographic.

We end up with the tired rehearsal of familiar scripts, as Chris Morris pointed out a very long time ago in a satire that now doesn't look particularly extreme.





Do we gain anything from these shows? It's noticeable that neither the flagship programmes nor the investigative newspapers foresaw the financial crash, LIBOR, Snowden, the Savile affair or any of the major scandals of our time.

I think we've reached an impasse. The Fourth Estate is now too entirely bound up with corporate interests (the private sector), paralysed by fear or simply too enmeshed in the ritualistic, performative practices of the establishment. Effective scrutiny of power is now out of reach. There are journalists I admire: Paul Mason for one, but it's too easy for those with authority to evade their grasp. Citizen journalists, big data analysts, leakers and websites do their best, but they're largely excluded from the public forum and lack the resources for serious investigation, or they're also wrapped up in corporate webs.

I'm sorry to say that I won't miss Paxman. There's a place for attack-dog journalism, but the media landscape has moved on. Power is dispersed, discursive and often invisible. Unfortunately, being a mere blogger and so-so academic, I now run into the sand. We need a searching, effective media environment more than ever, one capable of reflecting on, exposing and investigating our governments, cultures and societies. Newsnight, battered by the Savile affair, has attempted a new direction (perhaps occasioning Paxman's departure) but it's a sad and pathetic show, seemingly desperate to keep up with the kids on Twitter by running LOLcats, excruciatingly 'funny' or 'quirky' pieces and trying badly to be arty, which communicates little more than creative and journalistic exhaustion and insecurity. I have no idea where we go from there. Your thoughts?

Join the Masons

Morning everybody. Lots to do today, including finishing a column for the university magazine and seeing lots of dissertation students - mostly those who don't realise quite how good they are: my job today is to point out exactly how much work they've done and how much sense it makes.

There is a spectre haunting The Hegemon: the spectre of Mason

Firstly though, here are a few photos of last night's inaugural professorial lecture by Paul Mason, the distinguished Newsnight economics journalist, and now Visiting Professor. The main theme of the night was the crash and whether or not it fits executed Soviet economist Kondratiev's theory of long waves (Stalin's henchmen realised what he didn't: that the wave refuted Marxist belief in the historical inevitability of Marxism). 

'Peoples and countries will be pitched against each other' as we struggle to get out of the slump he said. There's a reckoning to be paid for the past 20 years or so of economic madness: the question is who pays it, and whether we take a lot of pain now or a massive amount of pain later (for instance, we could inflate our way out of debt now, but everybody's savings would disappear overnight). In a really serious slump, you see things like party political broadcasts being conducted by candlelight, as he remembers happening in the 1970s (send me a link, someone?).

Mason's shadow makes a point

 It was complex, thoughtful and pretty gloomy. Mason himself spoke authoritatively and passionately: he thinks in the long term and clearly cares about actual people rather than economic models and states. He felt that elite groups such as those who meet at Davos are in a state of some panic, and have little conception or interest in the public good. We shouldn't look to China either: they don't want to be a hegemonic power setting and keeping to standards of behaviour. Instead, we should expect a prolonged period of post-globalisation protectionism (we can already see it happening in sneaky devaluation, which just shifts economic problems onto other countries): we just have to hope that it isn't fascists leading this charge. Or, he said, we could easily inflate our way out of trouble in no time: just start a war with Iran. Oil prices will rocket, so will inflation, debts wiped out. There are a few down sides to this of course…

This chap was sitting in front of me. I was very distracted by his directional haircut.

 The discussion also took in the big one of UK economics: the supposed high-tech manufacturing miracle which politicians always say is coming won't help employment. Modern factories are virtually deserted. So what is everybody else meant to do? We can't sustain an economy based on people serving each other coffee for low wages: there's no demand available now that credit-fuelled spending is off the table. I don't have the answer to that one, and nor does Mason. But he thinks we should be worrying about it. Plenty of people on the left (Marx, deriving it from Hegel) looked forward to the end of work, whereas others believe in the Dignity of Labour. Here's Marx's vision of the perfect society:

In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.

He also made the point that technology doesn't lead booms: oceans of cheap money lead to tech booms as investors seek risky bets. This reminded me of David Harvey's work. In it, he says that the credit crunch wasn't caused by too little cash in the system, but too much. The Germans saved all their money. They therefore got low interest payments on their cash. So they started showering it on risky, silly investments: obscenely high mortgages in Ireland, speculative Spanish building, weird derivatives, CDOs, MBSs and the rest of the alphabet soup. The more money went in, the safer it looked: after all, risk had been 'sliced and diced'. When actually, it just meant that everybody held debt with absolutely no idea of its provenance or actual risk. When the penny dropped, panic was the only sane response. Bingo: the crunch.

He's got the whole world in his hands

Other highlights: Mason reckons embittered Mervyn King (outgoing chair of the Bank of England) believes he saved the UK economy from a much, much worse fate by quietly allowing the pound to devalue in 2008, propping up exports to some extent.

Finally, Mason cautioned students even on the most vocational of courses to cherish the opportunity to engage with ideas, pure and simple. Music to my ears.

The rest of the photos I took are here.

Newsnight: the Reply

Afternoon everybody.

The big news of the day is that after a series of obstructions, I've had a response from Newsnight about my complaint that they invited Peter Lilley MP on to the show to discuss climate change (which he thinks is a monstrous lie) without mentioning that he's a director and shareholder of an oil exploration company.



I asked a series of questions:
1. Did Newsnight know about Mr Lilley's position?
2. Did it ask Mr Lilley or did Mr Lilley bring it to the producers' attention?
3. Does it have a policy of asking about and highlighting potential conflicts of interest?

The answer is predictably high-handed and evasive. Newsnight appears to have learned nothing. Here it is in full:

We forwarded your complaint to the programme team who respond that:
Peter Lilley was invited onto Newsnight as an economist, politician and supporter of the Global Warming Foundation. He joined a discussion that acknowledged that global temperatures are changing but asked whether there should be human intervention to attempt to reverse them? The previous day Mr Lilley had published an analysis of the economics of tackling climate change which we felt made him well placed to appear live on the programme.
It is a matter of public record that Mr Lilley is Vice Chairman and Senior Independent Non-Executive Director of Tethys Petroleum - it appears in Parliament’s register of members interests. Many MPs have interests outside Parliament and generally, as in this case, that does not affect their participation in media interviews. Peter Lilley has long held strong opinions on climate change which is why we wanted him involved in our discussion on the Newsnight.
I hope this is helpful and would also like to assure you that we’veregistered your comments on our audience log for the benefit of senior management within the BBC. The audience logs are important documents that can help shape future decisions and they ensure that your points, and all other comments we receive, are made available to BBC staff across the Corporation.

1. Peter Lilley is not an economist. He has a degree in economics and physics, and worked as an energy analyst for a stockbroker. His report is somewhat hampered by his lack of credentials in the field  of climate science.
2. His report was not discussed, explored or challenged.
3. It's true that Mr Lilley's Tethys Oil position is on the register of members' interests - but are Newsnight viewers meant to consult it every time someone appears on the screen? It takes five pages to get through to the correct information. I think this is a fundamental evasion of the programme's responsibility to fully inform viewers. For the record, Lilley's hourly rate as a board member is £375.
4. My general questions about Newsnight policy have been completely ignored. They're treating me - and all viewers - as outsiders with no right to information or opinion.

I'm actually pretty angry about this. The news media is the only way to hold power to account, and if it has no checks and balances, power wins. In this instance, Newsnight failed to fully disclose a fundamentally relevant fact which would have influenced viewers' assessment of a guest's credibility. To airily claim that we can look it up in a parliamentary register is to assume that viewers have the time, skills and inclination to chase details – or it's an arrogant brush-off from an Establishment that has lost sight of the audience's needs. Not every viewer knows the Register exists. A casual viewer, I think, would have been under the impression that Lilley was a disinterested expert in the field rather than a man who is financially and ideologically committed to one side of a debate. This is why I think Newsnight behaved dishonestly.

The refusal to disclose Newsnight policy on guests' interests is similarly arrogant. It's announcing that some things are none of my business. Yet Newsnight  is in deep trouble precisely because a closed group of editors has resisted scrutiny and become detached from basic common sense. I don't think it's too much to ask for a news programme to ensure that guests' interests are made known. Ignoring my question indicates an institutional failure to address key questions about its practices.

But this is the end of the line. There's nowhere else for this to be taken up: I can't even reply to this email, as it comes from a no-reply address. Newsnight wins - and journalistic integrity loses.

Welcome to the BBC wing of Opus Dei

Anyone else watch Newsnight last night? I certainly did. It's like visiting the deathbed of an ageing relative to whom you're theoretically attached but actually rather fed-up with. The viewing experience becomes like an episode of Miss Marple. Will there be a deathbed confession? Will we find out whodunnit? Or will there be another executive's body on the carpet by the time the show ends and I've turned over to something less morally troubling like South Park?

In the event, the show became less Poirot and more Witchfinder-General. After Eddie Mair's raging hints at suspension or cancellation last week, this week's editors (dead men walking, presumably) decided to take the Opus Dei route and self-flagellate before the mob of Tories and Murdoch employees turned up with pitchforks. Nowhere did I hear many facts: such as the inconvenient truth that Newsnight didn't name McAlpine, and the victim of the sexual abuse was misinformed by North Wales Police.

Instead, we got a decent amount of considered self-criticism followed by a shell-shocked public confession to all crimes barring murder on the Marie Celeste. Sure, Newsnight massively screwed up by not running the Savile film and making basic journalistic errors in the Bryn Estyn story, for which it should be severely reorganised, but let's not lose sight of the way the public narrative is trending. Conservative MPs and Murdoch papers have always hated the BBC. They think it's one of the last state-corporate institutions left and they want it dismembered to make way for fully-privatised media. And they think (wrongly) that the BBC is full of lefties. Excuse me if I just say Homes under the Hammer, Flog It, Escape to the Country, the Today programme as merely a few examples of cultural and political conservatism in action.

As it happens, I was discussing public service broadcasting with the students yesterday. After initially not seeing a problem with privatised media, they then began to understand what happens when licence-funded media and investigative journalism and abolished. Imagine the Sun being left to cover phone-hacking. Imagine any newspaper or TV station conducting consumer investigations into its own advertisers (this show about climate science is brought to you by Shell and British Airways). Imagine TV news being Fox vs MSNBC. Imagine children's TV without the Beeb: bought in dubbed toy adverts and nothing else. Who would make shows for the groups with little purchasing power: Welsh-speakers, the old, the very young, ethnic minorities? How would boring but important shows get made if they didn't attract advertisers, such as local news or discussion programmes?

Newsnight and the BBC need urgent surgery - but just look at the contorted faces of its enemies and ask yourself: who stands to gain from a shrunken, cowed BBC? The very same rich and powerful forces (politicians, police, corporations) who have made the UK a rotten, corrupt and bankrupt oligarchy. The £145 licence fee is quite a bargain when it keeps these forces at bay, however imperfectly.

And it's goodnight from them…

Poor old Newsnight. They got hammered by everyone for not broadcasting a true story about Jimmy Savile. Then they got hammered for broadcasting an untrue story about Lord McAlpine.

Or rather, the Conservative Party and their Murdoch allies (the newspapers that didn't get the Savile story despite hacking every celebrity mobile in London) are trying to get Newsnight shut down when in fact it didn't name McAlpine. If anyone's guilty, it's the Heddlu Gogledd Cymru/North Wales Police, who apparently told Steve Messham that the man in the photo was Lord McAlpine when in fact it wasn't.

However, Newsnight is in deep trouble, and rightly so. I've crossed swords with it recently too: they interviewed an MP who'd written 'a report' on climate science, allowing him to rant and rave without ever mentioning that he's a director of an oil exploration company. There's been no reply to my formal complaint and I don't expect one now, given everything else that's gone on. But it is symptomatic of an editorial team which has lost sight of basic journalistic safeguards. They should have checked on the MP. They should have got a comment from McAlpine. They should have shown Messham a photo. They should have run the Savile film without regard for what the rest of the BBC is doing.

The show has been in trouble for ages. The leading presenters are trapped in a failed paradigm: talking heads and sarcasm may have worked once, but the politicians, PR spinners and assorted other publicity-hounds are well-versed in this kind of thing. Quizzical looks and sharp one-liners are no substitute for sustained, critical journalism. Paxman has long since stopped being the attack dog of the Third Estate and become a fully paid-up member of the establishment. The editorial side has been looking desperate for a while too: as an example watching the hugely impressive Paul Mason (perhaps the best journalist on TV at the moment) being forced (by his editor, he told me) to use teen hacker-speak to sex up a piece was nauseating. Then there's Allegra Stratton's monstrous and dishonest presentation of a hard-working teenage mother as some kind of parasite.

This is a programme that's lost its way: it doesn't know what's news, what's comment, and what's serious. It also, I suspect, doesn't know what its audience is or where a new generation will come from. It knows that the Westminster bubble is a turn-off but can't wean itself off the access and familiar formats. Mason is doing superb work with the Global South and the struggles of the bottom dogs, but the rest of the show is addicted to shots of Downing Street, head-to-head shouting matches and painful attempts at occasional levity.

However, we need Newsnight. Without it, BBC news becomes Huw Edwards putting on his furrowed brown for earthquakes and his grovelling face whenever a politician hoves into view. Sofa news, feel-good fluff and no more investigative journalism than you'd find on BBC3's celeb-driven drivel. It's news as wallpaper, as safety, as tame pussycat. The BBC is constantly under suspicion as the 'state' broadcaster, and it's true that plenty of its output may as well be government-approved: check out its use of 'efficiencies' when it means cuts and job losses - vocabulary from Tory HQ. But check out also the Daily Mail and the Sun, the BBC's biggest enemies. Did they get Savile? Did the Sun report the hacking story, or Leveson? Did the Mail  cover its editor's appearance at Leveson? Only briefly and in the most fawning terms. The Hillsborough cover-up wasn't revealed by the tabloids: the Sun participated in the demonisation of Liverpool fans.

The primary responsibility of the media is to enable the people to hold power to account. Newsnight has failed to do that, but nowhere near as completely as the popular press. This is why we need to defend Newsnight now. Look at the people circling round it: Tory MPs and the rightwing press. They hate the BBC and they hate being held to account. What they want is a cosy, neutered BBC which welcomes the powerful onto the sofa and asks them if they have anything they'd like to share with the nation. Yes, Newsnight and the BBC need a clear-out, and a cold hard re-appraisal of its standards and practices. But we'd be a poorer, weaker nation without a bold, independent hard news programme. Call it Newsnight or anything you like, but without it we're left with ducks on skateboards and Tory MPs demonising the poor/young/foreign without question, while Fox and Co fill the airwaves with poison.

Cynicism has a name. And it's Chelsea

No, not the football club. The human being, Chelsea Clinton. The little girl hounded and mocked by a disgusting rightwing press who has now become the poster girl for Liberal Interventionist Colonialism.

I've just watched an interview she gave to Newsnight about her charity work in Nigeria. 'What's wrong with that, you misanthropist bastard?' I hear you cry. 'She's very good, devoting her life to helping others.'

Here's what's wrong with that, in no particular order.

1. This isn't charity. It's self-help. It's an extended gap year designed to instil a degree of humility in rich, privileged Westerners.

2. This isn't charity. It's PR. It's an attempt to generate a dossier of 'caring' pictures to be used in an election campaign somewhere down the line. It's a shortcut, a simulation of struggle and of altruism. If aid work has a hyperreal component, Chelsea is it. Alongside any football player's charity work.

3. This isn't charity. It's zipless politics of the worst sort. Look caring without expressing the slightest opinion about anything. I guarantee that Chelsea Clinton will run for office in the United States of America before too long. She's never had a proper job and depends at least in part on her husband's income as an investment banker - one of the people making life worse for everybody, and she needs to build a public service profile. But if she got involved in poverty reduction, reproductive rights, social justice or anything like it, she'd be open to attack from the right as some kind of communist.

4. This isn't charity: it's image management. The Clinton Health Access organisation opposes maternal and child death. It's something nobody could oppose - and is therefore an easy way to appear virtuous. Being based in Nigeria seems - on the face of it - to be a nice safe bolt hole from political questions: the US hasn't invaded recently. Unfortunately, Nigeria is wracked by religious warfare and has been turned into one of the prime victims of Western oil interests. Despite being one of the world's largest oil exporters, Nigerians are desperately poor, governed by corrupt thieves, policed by Shell Oil's private armies and live in a dystopian wasteland of environmental degradation caused by reckless drilling. It's all our fault, and Chelsea Clinton's work with the Nigerian government is a cynical piece of PR by them and by her. They give her some charity work, pose for some photos and continue diverting money away from systematic healthcare and infrastructure into their own pockets.

5. This isn't charity: this is colonialism. We - and I very much mean you and I, not just Western states - have wrecked Nigeria, and we make ourselves feel better by donating a few quid to 'charity' rather than doing the right thing: paying for our oil, cleaning up the mess, apologising for and helping correct the consequences of imperialism. Charity is destructive: it makes us believe that Africans depend on us, that they're incapable of identifying and solving their problems, that they need us, that their problems aren't our fault.

Chelsea Clinton and her ilk are the human faces of celebrity politics. She is a diversion from fundamental issues. I'm sure she and her supporters think they're doing good, and they are on an individual level, but it's a distraction from structural problems. She'll get a good career in politics without having to do anything more strenuous than speak in air-conditioned boardrooms and appear on TV, while the roots and systems which generate global inequality and suffering go unexamined. This is worse than being ineffectual: like Mother Teresa, the activities of the Chelsea Clintons of this world actually perpetuate and justify continued injustice.

But she looks great on TV.

So that's how the BBC plays it…

You may recall that I complained to the BBC about Newsnight guests not declaring their oil exploration interests while discussing climate science. I got pretty annoyed that the complaints unit made me go through the same 28 questions to give them the transmission date even though a) I'd already done so and couldn't have completed the web questionnaire without doing so and b) it's on Newsnight's website.

Judging by the tone of today's email, this was clearly a delaying tactic:

Thank you for taking time to contact us again. We are sorry that you were not satisfied with our earlier response to your complaint and appreciate that you felt strongly enough to contact us again about the matter.

How to read this other than an admission that viewers are intended to undertake trial-by-website to weed out those too tired or dispirited to follow things through? Their 'earlier response' was simply an e-mail (from an address which can't take replies) asking for the transmission date - not a 'response' at all. I can't point this out to them because I can't reply to this email either. To do so, I'd have to fill in the 28 question website again. Kafka would certainly feel at home at Capita/BBC

So what's being done about my complaint? Well, this latest email is to tell me that they won't be able to respond within the standard time-frame.

*Bangs head on desk*.

It's not just Shapps!

Thanks to a combination of electronic media and time on my hands, I've become a serial letter-writer and complainer. It's a terrible stereotype, and I'm always watchful in case I start reaching for the green ink. On the other hand - it's what active citizens should do, holding authority to account.

A few weeks ago, Newsnight featured Peter Lilley MP. He was presented as an expert who'd written 'a report' on climate science. The report itself wasn't scrutinised at all, and nor were his credentials. Instead, he launched into a bizarre diatribe, a torrent of abuse which basically said all climate change science was lies (at the start and from 5.50):



Fair enough - some people believe this stuff. But what really annoyed me was Newsnight's failure to mention that Mr Lilley is the director of Teuthys Petroleum: an oil exploration company, and might be thought to have a vested interest in promoting fossil fuels and damning climate change science. So I fired off an email to Newsnight asking whether they knew this, whether they should routinely check for conflicts of interest, and if they did know, why they didn't mention it. No reply. So I went through the BBC Complaints procedure, which turns out to be run by Capita.

A few weeks later, I get a reply:

In order for us to look into your concerns, we would need a transmission date. If possible, please write back using the complaints webform.
Thanks again for contacting us.
Kind Regards
Gemma McAleer
BBC Complaints
www.bbc.co.uk/complaintsNB This is sent from an outgoing account only which is not monitored. You cannot reply to this email address but if necessary please contact us via our webform quoting any case number we provided.

Which is bollocks. The complaints website consists of a series of drop-down boxes to be filled in. If you don't fill it in, you can't move to the next page and the next question. So they do have the date. Furthermore, I cannot believe that the combined forces of Capita and the BBC lack the resources to find out when a particular guest was on a particular edition. I'd assume they have a list. Failing that, how about checking Newsnight's website, or good old Google? But no: they mail me. And not, I notice, via an e-mail to which I can reply: that would be too simple. Instead, I have to go through the whole complaint again - 20+ questions (including the original one asking for the broadcast date) simply to provide them with information they a) already have and b) can easily find. 

It feels, frankly, like a delaying tactic. Not just for me, but a way of fending off most people's complaints by making it as difficult as possible. 

Scraping the bottom of the oil barrel?

I wonder if Newsnight will bother to reply…

Dear Newsnight,

after Peter Lilley's appearance on Newsnight to discuss the economics of climate change, could you answer a couple of questions so that I can decide whether to take this matter further?

1. Was anyone at Newsnight aware that Mr Lilley is non-executive chairman of Tethys Petroleum Ltd?

2. Does Newsnight have a policy of asking guests about potential conflicts of interest before booking them?

3. If Newsnight was aware of Mr Lilley's position, why was the discussion not foregrounded to inform the readers?

As it stands, Mr Lilley's violent attack on renewable energy appears to have been framed as an appearance simply by an expert who'd written 'a report' rather than as an individual with an economic interest in one particular energy industry.

Yours etc. 

The cleanest Games ever?

Did you watch Newsnight's rather stunning exposé of the boxing world's alleged deal with Azerbaijan? $9m investment in a failing Boxing World Series venture in return for two Olympic gold medals.

At one level, it's obvious that this stuff is happening. Since the development of pay-TV and media rights, popular sports have become financial mammoths, and where you get money, you get corruption: the IOC is notoriously corrupt on a systemic and personal level (as well as traditionally being run by people with a background in fascist politics - I mean you, Samaranch). And then there's FIFA, football's governing body. The rise of instantaneous and anonymous betting is the other driver. You can't just pay a team to let a goal in these days, but you can persuade individual players to commit fouls in the 32nd minute and so on.

What struck me was the statement from AIBA's infamous lawyers, Carter-Ruck, which stated that fixing boxing matches was an 'impossibility'.

Oh yeah? 5 referees scoring the match by pressing a button when they see a valid punch? It's a subjective system which is wide open to corruption.

I'm not completely speaking out of my bottom. I've refereed in my sport up to World Cup level, and I've sat in bland holding areas with Olympic and World Championship referees while they shoot the breeze. They've named names (not ones I recognise, because I'm small fry) and pointed out actual fights I've watched and explained who, how and why the scores were awarded in spite of the evidence of my eyes. Like boxing, it's subjective: a fencing referee according to the rules awards points by interpreting the action. A fencer can challenge the referee's knowledge of the rules, but never his/her interpretation of what's happened.

In two of the weapons, the fencer has to have right of way: s/he has to attack first, or defend himself from attack before retaliating. When both fencers' scoring lights come up, the referee has to decide who took and retained right of way: when the blades are moving at 180mph, that's a tough decision, and an easy situation in which to call the action incorrectly, by accident or by design. 30 years ago, there wasn't even an electronic scoring system: it was all down to the referee to decide even whether someone had been hit.

There are also institutional reasons why fencing would be easy to fix: many of the top referees are Eastern European, and less than affluent, and there are no doubt plenty of greedy or weak referees from anywhere. $20,000 to call a single point the wrong way - not even fixing the whole match - might be a strong temptation. Has it happened? Well, referee scuttlebutt around the Beijing Olympics claimed that referees were being flown in from another country and not told until the last moment which fight they were presiding over, to minimise the opportunities for corruption. We've also added video appeals: a fencer gets 3 opportunities to appeal, and another referee makes the call. I'm pretty certain that the chances for match-fixing are minimal compared with the past, but doubtless there are ways round every system.

'An impossibility'? Not a chance.

Quiet time for Oliver James

Morning all. You won't hear too much from me today: 3 90 minutes sessions with new students in a row will keep me from the keyboard and interweb for quite some time, thankfully.

Anyone watch Newsnight last night? It included the unedifying sight of media psychologist Oliver James - supported by Jeremy Paxman - berating a young academic. In particular, James repeatedly implied that she was a liar. Given that the subject was whether or not children required incredibly intensive parenting in the toddler years to avoid ruination as an adult, I found myself wondering what Mr. James's parents had done to him: I've rarely seen such intemperate rudeness on television. There was also a distinct air of ageing macho lions about it too. No matter how calmly she tried to make her reasonable points, she was interrupted by these bullies.

I have no idea whether Oliver James's ideas are good or not: all I saw was a choleric, ranting playground bully.

I blame the parents.

Here's a rather more balmy 'Oliver James'.

This is what an angry man with a brain can do

Yes! Someone's posted Will Self's virtuoso onslaught on the mush of platitudes which pass as politics and regeneration. So here it is.

(I'm a little bit guilty: I've volunteered for the Olympics. I feel compromised, slathered in disgusting branding and now doing my bit to efface East London's grimy, messy, lovely culture.  Ah well, a man alone can't solve the world's riddles).

All hail…

…Will Self.

I have never seen anyone destroy an opponent's arguments with such silky skill as last night's attack by the author on the plastic 'legacy' of the Olympics. Last night's Newsnight featured a lovely piece by psychogeographer Iain Sinclair on the top-down 'iconic' regeneration of East London, followed by Self ripping apart Tessa Jowell's claim that a shopping centre and an 'academy' for shopping centre employees are suitable legacies for the borough.

Unfortunately, it's not on Youtube, It's now on Youtube: see it here. but you can see the Self section here (for now), and the whole show here (OB 20.35, Iain Sinclair piece 32.35, Will Self v Jowell 37.37). It's like watching a tiger toy with a mouse. He rips apart the linguistic blancmange used by all management types and employs actual intellect to take the long view - something our triangulating politicians can no longer handle. Compelling TV.

Seriously, just kill yourself…

Bill Hicks had a great routine about advertising executives who could only think in terms of market demographics, even co-opting rebellion as one more marketing tool.

It came to mind as I watched a discussion about cigarette advertising restrictions on Newsnight last night: two not very bright but highly confident marketing whores chortling away because they could see that if cigarettes are literally put out of sight and sold in plain packaging, the cigarette companies would use social media to sell smoking: going for the rebellious dollar. Watch it here from 34.27.

Kids: smoking isn't rebellious. It kills you and the money doesn't go to cool nonconformists. It goes to massive global corporations and the men in suits give the money to the Republicans, the Tories and other unpleasant types.

Oh happy day

What a day I have ahead of me. 2 hours of Milton (great for me, slightly bemuses the students), then going to the Paul Mason appearance - he's one of the best economics journalists around: you may have seen him on Newsnight - then 3 hours on Beauty: the book with which I'm getting more and more uncomfortable, not maquillage tips. Though I reckon I could do that too.

Here's a little piece which rather dignifies labour: I'm a huge fan of Cannonball Adderley and this is 'Work Song'.

A Fanboy moment

Paul Mason has the best job in the world: he's a roving correspondent for Newsnight, and he really gets the connections between economics, politics and culture. He knows a lot about them all, writes in a concise and witty style, and gets all the best jobs: his piece on Gary, Indiana was a model of documentary film-making. Here's his review of the year, and his conversation with the ghost of John Maynard Keynes.

Buy his book too!

Er… well done

Congratulations to Newsnight - that bastion of Oxbridge privilege - which managed to label a speaker as 'Principle' of a university. Very impressive.

Can anyone else see a little Godzilla logo on the previous post? I tried to copy it yesterday when talking about the students' use of Google Maps to track the protests, and couldn't. Now I can see it on a different post! Weird.

I'm in the mood for dumb fun. Which leads me to this Friday's question: what's the pure, stupid, song that just makes you happy? Here's a selection of mine, starting with Camper Van Beethoven's 'Take the Skinheads Bowling'.

Come on Simon, where were you?

Simon Armitage was on Newsnight yesterday evening, talking about his Pennine Way walk (here, about 42 minutes in). No indication that he got lost on his way to us, but it's good to know that he didn't fall down a mine shaft or get lost.


I bet Roger McGough keeps his word.

Let Me Die a Youngman's Death

Let me die a youngman's death not a clean and inbetween the sheets holywater death not a famous-last-words peaceful out of breath death When I'm 73 and in constant good tumour may I be mown down at dawn by a bright red sports car on my way home from an allnight party Or when I'm 91 with silver hair and sitting in a barber's chair may rival gangsters with hamfisted tommyguns burst in and give me a short back and insides Or when I'm 104 and banned from the Cavern may my mistress catching me in bed with her daughter and fearing for her son cut me up into little pieces and throw away every piece but one Let me die a youngman's death not a free from sin tiptoe in candle wax and waning death not a curtains drawn by angels borne 'what a nice way to go' death

The clocks struck thirteen

Won't be blogging much today - I'm stuck in MC331 waiting for you all to collect your essays.

I'm still feeling utterly miserable about the elections, amongst other things. Yesterday, I should have phoned my local MP or branch and joined in with the process of recovery, indefatigably knocking on doors, putting forward the case for a hard-left turn, persuading people to see the light.

Instead, I bought a massive sack of Marmite-infused cashew nuts (thus proving that industrial food can be a good thing), a box set of all the decent-ish Star Trek films (1-6) and went to bed at 7 p.m., to catch up on the weekend's newspapers and some sleep. I didn't even listed to any news later than Channel 4's at 7, which is unprecedented for me: usually I take in The World Tonight on Radio 4 from 10-10.30, then turn over to Newsnight from 10.30-11.20, then the midnight news on Radio 4. Sometimes I'll even listen to the World Service news at 1 a.m too. That's how I know stuff.

By the way: if you eat at Café Rouge or Bella Italia, make sure you give the staff a tip in cash, but be careful. These restaurants, and many others, keep the tips to make the staff pay up to the minimum wage if you pay by card, and they're sacking staff who mention what's going on. From October, staff will legally be paid the minimum wage (currently £5.72 for over-21s) without counting tips. Of course, in a civilised society, everybody would be paid enough without tips, but being a waiter is a horrible job (as I know from experience), and they deserve something extra.

(title of the post is from 1984)

Today's cultural icon

Last night's BBC2 was particularly good value: double Heroes, Newsnight and The Wire. However, greater than all these was Lauren Laverne reading John Keats' 'On Leaving Some Friends At An Early Hour' as a promo for the upcoming Poetry Season! I could have swooned… Unfortunately, Youtube has failed me and the BBC hasn't posted it yet (but watch this space).What's not to love about Lauren? Kenickie were a great band, she genuinely loves poetry, and she called the Spice Girls 'Tory Scum'.