sean bell

Viral road safety shock for lollipop man

2009-09-04T04:01:00.000-07:00

A short film made for £10,000 for Gwent Police with the assistance of Tredegar School has become a worldwide viral road safety campaign. A girl called COW texts while driving and and collides with an oncoming car.

It's a well-made film and hard-hitting. There is blood everywhere when COW's car is struck by another car and the convincing aftermath belies the low budget thanks to the co-oporation of the emergency services.

Directed by Peter Watkins-Hughes, a short clip on YouTube of the 30-minute film has proved very popular with the US media. Texting while driving is not illegal in the US and CNN, CBS and Time have covered the film.

Less explicit public information films there have not had the impact of this film.

Gwent police originally had approached the director to make a film on joyriding, but the school pupils felt that texting while driving was a more important issue.

In the clip, a baby is motionless and a child asks when his parents will wake up.

COW the 17-year-old driver has to be cut from the car while her friends lie motionless. The film cleverly combines the procedural reality of the emergency services with the emotional and physical consequences for the victims and is brilliantly acted by a young and unpaid cast.

Being distracted while driving usually does not involve a crash and this film shows what can happen. I work as a lollipop man (sorry, school crossing patrol officer) outside a primary school and see people looking their phones frequently as they drive toward me down a little village high street.

When I commute on my motorbike, I sometimes filter between lanes of slow traffic (I used to be a motorcycle instructor). I have often seen people texting and even people trying to read documents as they queue in their cars. Three times in about 30 years of riding, I have moved out of the queue into the centre of the road before a whole queue of cars crashed into one another, in front and behind.

I don't know how many accidents are actually caused by texting, but the film's well-told message highlights the ease with which distractions can cause accidents. This is a much better approach to making a road safety film than the other shockers commissioned by the government to support the anti-speed campaign.

The dead children in those films simply manipulated sympathy for a bureaucratic strategy of practice-based evidence that ignored actual evidence from real accidents that speed was a factor in less than five per cent of crashes.

Driver error and drinking are much bigger influences on accidents.

The anti-speed campaign group Brake once produced a show stand that asked motorcyclists when they would kill their next child. A search of accident data bases by Motorcycle News found no record, not a single one, of a motorcyclist having killed a child.

Watkins-Hughes' film looks really good. It's horrific and portrays the worst that could happen, but it does stress paying attention to where you're going, one of the chief causes of accidents.

Show the whole thing all over Britain.

Hello, good evening and welcome to 1960!

2009-09-02T08:21:00.000-07:00

Would a live TV general election debate encourage public political participation?

For the first time, the prime ministerial candidates for next year’s British general election may engage in live TV debates, possibly hosted by Sir David Frost. The first American TV presidential debate was back in 1960 when the young upstart John F. Kennedy took on the then Vice President Richard Nixon. There are similar televised hustings all over the world but Britain has never managed to organise them in the past. What if they had?

David Cameron looks more likely to come off better in a TV duel with Gordon Brown but Tony Blaire would have trounced Cameron in his day. Margaret Thatcher would have taken down Tony and given Harold Wilson a run for his money. To go any farther back would mean comparing politicians of the pre-TV era with those who were formed within it. I never heard Winston Churchill or Harold MacMillan speak live but, from their newsreel performances, perhaps those radio-informed orators would have come across poorly on live TV.

The paths of general elections in other countries have been changed in the past by performances in TV debates; Sarah Palin’s early appearance briefly rallied her party’s outlook in the Republicans’ uneven contest with Obama last year. But supposing who would probably have won previous TV debates in Britain, it’s not obvious how previous election results would have been affected. Obama raised an internet army of volunteers and small financial contributors during his election campaign that ruthlessly focused on obtaining votes. The President has been criticised by some of his supporters for failing to capitalise on this politically novel resource since his inauguration. Just when the US seems to show that electioneers must use the internet to gain significant advantage in political and financial support, British political parties may have finally come around to the last century’s mass communication system.

At first glance, it may seem that the failure of British political leaders to come to agreement about live TV debates confirms our suspicions about them: They don’t really care about what the public thinks; they would only take live political risks if their own parties could gain some advantage in the way the debate is structured; they focus on the demographics of key marginal seats when they want to form a government in our crazy, first-past-the-post electoral system, not on national issues.

Stepping back though, considering the British political system as a whole, how far back would you have to go before there really was a grassroots tradition of live political debate? The reactionary-sounding refrains that TV turns serious issues into sound bites and politicians into personalities have some truth. Following the MPs’ expenses row, politicians are particularly unpopular. John Riley, head of Sky News, has invited the leaders of the three biggest national parties to a live TV debate that he will share with other TV channels. “Something must be done to restore faith in our political system,” he said. While he has also said that he would “put out three chairs” and film whoever turned up and let the public punish whoever didn’t, Riley has also promised to engage an independent organisation such as The Hansard Society or the Electoral Commission to ensure fairness in the event.

The currently discussed format is comprised of three debates of an hour; one on foreign policy and defence; one on domestic and economic policy; and a final “town hall” event where the studio audience could ask the candidates questions. Welcome to 1960! Should it go ahead, live TV debate is unlikely to duck a situation afflicting all party-political debates at the moment.

None of the parties has much interest in talking about policies, except the Liberal Democrats who are vanishingly unlikely to win. Labour is running what Spiked editor Brendon O’Neil calls a zombie government. The party thinks it is going to lose the election and is focused on damage limitation that will probably do it more harm than good. The Conservatives are favourites to run the country from the spring, but don’t want to lose any support by expanding on their plans for austerity measures. Both candidates with a chance of winning have an immediate interest in letting events take their course, rather than firing up the public with ideas – even if they had any.

Beyond the immediate lack of motivation for the parties is a profound intellectual crisis that has been deepened by the financial crisis and the recession. The management of never-ending slow growth has been the arena of political contention in western economies for two decades. Now that boom and bust has clearly not been managed out of the system, there are no intellectual alternatives except marginally influential left- and right-wing fringes.

It would be more democratic to see the political leaders debate each other live, with as much studio audience and national audience participation as possible – but to what extent is the format capable of producing a genuine debate?

If the TV debates can be organised, and if the leaders can have an argument of substance - two big ifs already – then there is a third difficulty; in what way would the public engage with the issues raised? The public is a very slippery concept. Everyone is in the public but few would confidently predict what it will do in a general sense. In terms of voting, the public is imagined in demographic blocs of people who are more or less likely to vote for a political party, people who are more likely to change their vote and those who may not vote at all. In a broader sense, the public is a problematic concept, distrusted as much as relied on as the underpinning of cultural institutions.

In Jurgen Habermas’s classic book, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962), the public sphere was being privatised by all kinds of interests such as political lobby groups for business, all kinds of campaigns and an influential advertising culture. The public sphere was the space that had once comprised the intellectual forces that contested the future. It was a very small in its 17^th century beginnings, but later adapted and absorbed the media to encompass the masses in society. As it grew, it emptied itself of broader questions of progress and formal public representation within it became more claimed by organisations than won directly. The public sphere began to organise more limited contests in the name of the people without really involving them. Today, most people more or less agree with Habermas.

Even Habermas, though, thought that the period before an important election could call forth a public sphere that involved a greater percentage of the population in a public debate about the future. The public today is certainly capable of making itself felt, but does not engage in general political activity.

Public outrage about MPs expenses was anticipated and duly reported. This illustrated how unlike previous periods of mass-participation in politics ours is. The expenses issue polarised opinions about whether politics is any use or not. The anger of politically motivated people at least matched that of political cynics because the behaviour of MPs had encouraged further cynicism. Against this background, the result of the general election seems a foregone conclusion, although a huge mistake by Cameron might just conceivably tip it back to Labour.

A live TV debate between three leaders of whom one is thought to have already won, and where two of them have little interest in showcasing unpopular policies, would be interesting but incapable of creating public debate unless the public intervenes in it.

It is hard not to be cynical about politicians when they are shy of saying what they will do when they are power, but politics, in the broadest sense, remains the only way to change things. This makes it doubly unwise for anyone to be cynical about the public; it is largely submerged, but it is still out there. Sometimes it surfaces in all its might to bite someone.

Who will pay for a free press?

2009-08-31T03:31:00.000-07:00

To confront James Murdoch's "profit is good" stance with a "public sevice is better" is pointless. James Murdoch has every interest in attacking the BBC, but his parting remark to an Edinburgh media audience that profit was the only guarantor of good news services should not be answered in kind.

The news and its importance to democracy is not to be confused with the various business models that oversee its production, "public" or "private".

Murdoch's wrong to say the BBC is killing professional journalism with free news because it's dying even faster in the US, where newspapers are shutting and local coverage is disappearing. The US already has a market-oriented news landscape.

The BBC seems free and public, but it is not free and the public influences it more through projected viewing and listening figures than with its votes. Leaving aside the question of whether it is good value or not, the BBC is funded by £142.50 from most families every year in the form of a separately collected tax on TV and computer ownership. Because it has a guaranteed income set by the government, the BBC isn't facing the same difficulties as the private parts of the mixed, public and private, British media system.

The huge BBC website isn't killing national or local papers; they have been in decline for decades. But the BBC does occupy a big part of the online space into which all media businesses must expand if they are to adapt to digital reproduction.

BBC news is funded by the licence fee payers but is rolled out across the global media landscape, free to some of its audiences online. Terrestrial, cable and satellite TV, Freesat and freeview all have competing private TV channels funded by subscriptions and/or advertising. All the accompanying news is either paid for by subscription or by advertisers, the costs being passed on to consumers of goods. And BBC TV, although available terrestrially and digitally to licence fee payers, is paid for again when received by subscribers to cable and satellite services. This is a very mixed market from which to extract funding for news.

Newspapers may be free or have a cover price, but they rely on advertising. The many news channels online, and online versions of newspapers, offer similar text-based news services that are free to users. News is expensive to make because you need professional journalists that have to be trained somewhere in the system and when privately owned news companies feel the pinch, they train less of them.

Murdoch's dad Rupert has said much of his newspapers' content will have to be paid for by users in the future. Although the technical difficulties of micropayment systems for news seem no nearer to being solved, this is interesting because news organisations have so far struggled to find advertisers to fund free news online or in print. Among the difficulties facing the ITV companies and Channel Four and Five is that advertisers may continue to spend less on broadcast in the future.

Murdoch Senior's long-range warning of charging for content suggests that it is both risky but, from his perspective, unavoidable.

Most content, including gaming, is free on the internet and business models in that medium reflect that. Many commentators echo points from Chris Anderson's book, Free; youngsters will just not pay for content they can download free. The very low cost of digital reproduction encouraged many organisations to put their content freely online, but they now have to find a way to make it pay. The BBC, of course, does not.

The internet is culturally very powerful because of its cooperative potential. So far, it has provided various free services that are then monetised by their providers being able to charge for related products and services or attract advertising. Users can buy currency and equipment for their gaming adventures, for example, and premium or professional versions of services such as Flickr, which can fund the whole concern if successful. Google takes ad revenue by click, encouraging more use and revenue by offering more and more free services.

Internet models of business or cooporation that have been exploited so far may be unsuitable for news. The Huffington Post could launch online without the expense of print reproduction and distribution, but it is a news brand now because of the demand in the market for its kind of professional reporting, not because it started as a website or blog.

News is the basic information that informs society what it knows about itself. It is the most constant, day-today, minute-to-minute experience of our public sphere. News organisations, however they are funded, must gain at least some respect for their role of informing the public about itself within the larger domain of what is discussed and contested throughout society. The practice of journalists, taken as a whole, must meet external standards of objectivity and authority regardless of how the news is funded.

That role of a free press can be supplemented by so-called citizen journalists, especially by their ability to digitally eye-witness events. But the free press simply cannot be replaced by them wholesale. A crowd sourced cloud of microviews from citizens is very interesting but it is not journalism, nor anything remotely resembling it.

The nineteenth and twentieth century business models that funded the newspapers and broadcast have faltered in the new era of many-to-many publishing, but the news itslef has no loss of function.

The many difficulties facing us today require a public engagement as never before, and there are creative possibilities for pooling expertise on the internet. However, the conciousness of the public is not informed by millions of little discussions. News is intrinsically incapable of becoming a huge process of trial and mostly error. News organisations, in their plurality, can only expand and step up to play the role of a free press if the professional standards that the public expects of news are maintained by training journalists and sending them out to work. Someone has to pay for the news.

If we assume news could be free, who will make it? Who will bother to read it and would it still really be news? To have a US-style market place would be a culture shock in Britain, but a monoculture of Beeb would be equally bad.

Everyone agrees on a free press but no one wants to pay for it. Hard news is never going to be mined for the multitude freely. Taxes like the licence fee or profits from selling news are currently the only two ways to fund a democratically vital journalism. It is sensible to exploit both funding models rather than have a phony "public" verses "private" debate.

Ashes heroes celebrate calmly as a unit

2009-08-25T09:10:00.000-07:00

Straussy, Cooky, Ravi, Belly, Trotty, Colly, KP, Matty, Freddy, Broady, Swanny, Monty, Oniony, Jimmy and Harmy - heroes all.

The Sun says they are all heroes and that's right. But because 2005's victory celbrations were over the top, 2009's will be sadly muted.

He was hobbling about by the end, but that one priceless run-out at the Oval by Freddie turned the game and the series. Even when relatively inactive, he's been described as standing still "massively" on Test Match Special. What a hero. Real ale pumps through his solid oak heart. Let's hope the op will sort the knee out.

Broady - from cricketer to gay icon in one magical spell of fast swing bowling - who saw that coming? He's had to assure the press that he won't be stripping off like David Beckham. Stephen Fry, Lily Allen, Harry Potter and Draco, even Russell Crowe - all on TMS. Steady on. Fry went all Death in Venice over Broady on Twitter. Lily fancies Oniony and Broady. They must be heroes, but let's not get too carried away, right? But I want to get carried away.

Struassy. You beauty, you Boys Own hero of the first water! No one famous fancies you yet but you are the man. You're so steady. Is it your steady stewardship that keeps the unit from really letting go for proper booze-up? Are you the calming influence?

The whole team contributed to a famous victory over a good team, however you look at it, but we should not get carried away. Shame.

They've done the open-top bus thing and the honours were inappropriate last time. Freddie should have been made the Prince of Wales and KP should have got the Duchy of Cornwall. And Viscount Vaughny at the very least.

But couldn't we have had a bit of public celebrating? If you think that England're always going to beat the Australian Test team at home, then you're getting carried away.

2009-08-24T05:01:00.000-07:00

The privacy factor

Below is a letter to the MediaGuardian by me that was published in response to Jeff Jarvis's column on the publicness of his cancer.

While I wish Jeff Jarvis the best, his belief in the benefits of publicness should not blind him to those of privacy (Transparency benefits us all – even when it hurts, 17 August). He says it will one day be considered selfish not to disclose cancer and that he thinks he has become as transparent as a man can. Social pressure to reveal and share everything because of its potential benefits to others cannot admit that any area of life should be private. That sort of pressure would undermine your control of self-publicity.

I think Jeff is brave rather than attention-seeking. But there are far more difficult and embarrassing things affecting both the body and the mind suffered by many, and their disclosure could not be justified by the benefits of publicness. The ethics of transparency as they apply to companies and governments do not apply to all relations between people. People, if not all the collaborations they may form, need a little privacy.
Sean Bell Brighton

Psychologists 'protect' X Factor acts from the public

2009-08-20T03:31:00.000-07:00

Is the public gaze so dangerous that exposure to it isn't safe without psychological backup?

The X Factor talent show has kept psychologists on standby throughout the recording of its shows to help its contestants deal with the pressures of public exposure. After Susan Boyle was admitted to a private clinic following her appearance on Britain's Got Talent and 10-year-old Hollie Steel broke down in tears on the same show, the move is pitched as a protective measure.

Because of the extra pressure on the acts resulting from auditions for the show now being recorded in front of a live audience (of 2,000), X Factor executive producer Richard Holloway told the Guardian that "the pressure came from the huge interest [in Susan Boyle]" (Holmwood, L., 'Reality check: X Factor contestants to face judgment on their mental health', p9, The Guardian 19/08/09).

He added that Internet video sharing sites and social networking sites had driven the increased interest in reality shows, piling on the public pressure for its contestants.

The nervousness of appearing in front of thousands live, and millions on TV, is completely understandable to anybody, but this concept of public interest creating a pressure that unbalances people's minds is very interesting.

Sree Dasari cut his wrists after being evicted from Big Brother but still managed to appear on a spin-off show that evening. Hollie Steel broke down during her first attempt to sing in the Britain's Got Talent semi-final and appealed successfully to the audience and judges for another go. Susan Boyle spent five days at The Priory suffering from exhaustion after coming second in the final of the same show.

What exactly is public pressure? Not being famous, perhaps I wouldn't know, but the incredible interest that reality and talent shows have generated in recent years make them among the most public of events that now occur in our society.

Susan Boyle's debut was reportedly watched by 120 million people on YouTube, but that hides the other media forces that probably helped drive that big number. The British press follows these contests very closely, finding stories about anybody who catches the eye and the situations backstage. The shows are often much repeated or have spin-off shows that run through the week. When Boyle's debut was put on YouTube it initially had about 60 million hits over the first few days. Then the whole British press ran stories on the debut; whether it was a bit of a set-up and on the remarkable interest internationally. This press controversy and coverage, further TV coverage and good old word of mouth drove the interest further. One Guardian Guide TV review of that edition of Britain's Got Talent, obviously written before the show aired and the controversy broke out, did not even mention Boyle's appearance.

What else can take over public discussion these days with the immediacy of a controversial piece of 'water cooler' reality TV? Only a very famous pop star's death or the death of reality TV's first and only real star, Jade Goody. Perhaps even the next General Election will not match those events for public interest.

Even celebrities have difficult moments with the level of interest that their appearance on these shows can generate. John Sergeant, unflappable political reporter with a lifetime on live TV, was shocked by the public response to his appearance on Strictly Come Dancing. And he was popular!

As he won over a large section of the public to vote for him, Sergeant found himself at the centre of an increasingly volatile public discussion. The judges criticised the public that voted for him, emphasising that Strictly is a dance competition and Sergeant can't dance. Some fans responded that they could vote for who they liked, others that Sergeant's continuing presence on the show was kicking out more talented competitors earlier than they should have been. At first, Sergeant responded that he was working entirely within the rules of the competition and that the judges should check their rulebooks.

But when Sergeant unilaterally withdrew from the show, causing a media feeding frenzy that dwarfed the coverage of all other news for two days, he had changed his tune. He told reporters that he knew a little about how elections can run and that he felt there was a serious risk of his winning the competition - so he had best withdraw.

This suggests that someone who completely used to raising controversy on live TV, is popular and relaxed with the public eye and understandably believes he knows a bit about the public and the media, can still find himself shocked by the action of public interest when it reaches a very high level.

If this level of public interest can make John Sergeant retreat then it's perhaps understandable that ordinary people, thrust into the brightest of limelight almost instantly, might have problems. When the gaze of millions of people is shared, when the object of that generally public scrutiny is subjected to the intensity of that gaze, concentrated by the great lens of the world's media, then perhaps the person on the receiving end may burn like an ant under a magnifying glass.

Whether psychologists can really protect vulnerable people from the interest of the public is yet to be seen. One might have thought that they should have Max Clifford standing by instead. But the classification of the public interest, hyped by the media and expanded by the Internet, as an environmental, almost elemental, force, capable of unhinging minds is alarming.

The news ecosystem has many forms of life, some of a lower order than others, but this story goes beyond the usual idea of a rapacious media trying to satisfy the curiosity of a prurient public. The X Factor producers' decision that it would be irresponsible to continue to thrust talent show contestants into the public eye without psychological backup suggests we have all developed a fear of public scrutiny. We regard fame, and even popularity, with the suspicion and fear that these things, for so long considered desirable, may be toxic.

The point of a talent show is that it plucks someone from obscurity and gives them the chance to be famous and appreciated for what they do. If success in entertainment now comes with a mental health warning, why should we expect people to enter into other areas within the public sphere, such as campaigning, political and otherwise? If living in the public eye for even a limited time can be so dangerous, I fear many people will attempt to avoid the public sphere altogether.

A public that is scared of the public may well conduct itself and act in its perceived interests in ways that circumvent public scrutiny and have profoundly discouraging consequences for democracy. The possibility that the public sphere could come to be seen as too dangerous for ordinary people seems an overreaction to the actual risks and a cynical dismissal of the advantages of the achievement public recognition.

If you saw a gang attack someone, would you stab them?

2009-07-28T04:41:00.000-07:00

A man has been charged with attempted murder after a youth was multiply wounded in an altercation outside his home. Reporting of the apparent facts in newspapers breaks the usually strict rules of pending prosecutions, but it appears that the man charged was woken when his wife told him his stepson was being attacked by a number youths outside their home. He ran out to confront the youths barefoot, reportedly grabbing a letter opener before the confrontation in which the wounds were sustained. He is on bail as I write.

There may well be more to this case than meets the eye. The man’s wife photographed the youths, she told reporters, but this did not prevent their allegedly continuing their attack on her son. I don’t want to join in the judgmental media speculation about what constitutes heroism but, if it is true that the man decided to arm himself (however poorly) before confronting these youths, it speaks of our contemporary fears. Young men fighting are considered these days as necessarily a potentially fatal risk. One-sided punch-ups may well prove lethal, it is true, but considering the number of fights there are it’s more surprising there are not more deaths or serious injuries. The story has appeal for newspapers because of the sympathy they anticipate for the man charged. It also shows that police balance this fear we have of violent youths by bringing such a serious charge against a person who injured one of five people allegedly attacking his stepson. All five, including the one that was wounded, were all charged with assault and criminal damage. That police arrested six of the eight people involved in the incident is unsurprising.

I should emphasise that the reporting of facts on this case appears astonishingly presumptive (Steven Gerrard’s and Amy Winehouse’s acquittals of assault charges were clearly unexpected by sections of the red-top and black-top press). I anticipate that coverage may change its character between the committal hearings in a magistrate’s court and any eventual trials at Crown Court with juries. Comparison of different reports shows some papers are twitchy about certain things while others are not, which raises suspicions about the coverage. However, if the injured youth did not sustain life-threatening wounds, as has also been reported, an attempted murder charge looks like a sharp warning to the public to think twice before aggressively asserting themselves - even when they apparently have grounds to believe that someone else is quite seriously threatened.

Leaving aside the particular circumstances of that pending case, one of many issues it raises is that of what is legally risky to contemplate for someone who intervenes in an altercation. Given that most people would hope that, if they were set upon by a gang, someone would help, a sensible balance between the moral obligations to defend others and the use of a reasonable amount of armed force is required. If intervention by the private citizen is a serious legal risk as well as physical one, it does not just contradict the consensus that most people would have, it also establishes a legal barrier to maintaining the consensus of conviviality that we rely on for much of our day-to-day ability to get along - without recourse to higher authorities.

Some years ago while working as a local newspaper reporter I was invited by police to a presentation on the uses of the then newly installed CCTV cameras around Sussex. I was shown a tape of an incident in Brighton where a group of six or so young men armed with sticks rounded a corner and attacked two others. “This view shows the scene that confronted officers who were nearby,” a policeman told me. “But when you view the start of this incident from the viewpoint of the camera that covered the other side of the corner, it looks very different.”

The tape showed the six young men (none of whom appeared to be white) walking peacefully along the street, laughing and joking with each other like any group of friends. As they passed the two lads (both white) who were walking in the opposite direction, one of the white lads, inexplicably and without any warning or provocation, spun his foot around in the air and high-kicked the nearest of the group of six in the face, then adopted a bouncing, martial arts-style stance. The larger group showed great presence of mind and immediately rounded on the attacker, arming themselves with pieces of wood from building works right beside them, and drove the pair away round the corner.

The implication of this presentation was that CCTV had helped to establish the natural justice of the altercation. Had police relied on what they had first seen, the version of events that the larger group would have given would have seemed unlikely. Their assertion that they acted in self-defence might have been difficult to believe. To leave aside the now well-documented uselessness of CCTV in reducing street crime, it appears that today the assumption of what was justified might be very different and the legal risks of defending oneself might be much higher than they were in the mid-1990s.

Today it seems there is no consensus on the basis of what Andrew Calcutt calls conviviality, the ability to of people to socially negotiate their private interests in public space, and get along with each other. The reflexive response, of both the state and a section of the public, is to attempt empower or re-empower the individual by the use of regulation and its enforcement. This contradicts the social processes that produced conviviality in the first place and drives away what it seeks to recover. The outcomes that are sought are the peaceful co-existence of various tensions or the suppression of harmful ones, but the unwritten, culturally inculcated basis of conviviality that existed previously, within and between the minds of individuals, has no way of re-establishing itself in anything like its previous form.

The increasing regulatory and legal interference with people intervening to preserve their own interests against transgression, as part of a broader, common social harmony, is corrosive to the fabric of society. To irreversably remove the right and freedom of action within the public space - in which we must all persue our legitimate and private interests - creates a non-public, regulated space that cannot avoid arresting everyone at once and subjecting them to the faulty panopticon of a population on remand.

Celebrity Sudden Death Cults and Public Life

2009-07-13T05:30:00.000-07:00

There was a moment during Michael Jackson’s funeral when millions of us around the world were supposed to come together and mourn the passing of genius. We were supposed to stop and share in an investigation of emotion conducted in anticipation of our yearning for a common bond of grief.

‘This is big’, the global media organisations said to themselves, and we had wall-to-wall carpet bombardment of the life and death of the King of Pop. News-providers across the world took up the challenge of connecting with what the premature death of a world-famous pop star means to people. To fill the pages and airwaves and screens with so much coverage, news executives must have decided, all at once, that: This is where the people come together; this is a moment when millions will all look in the same direction with unwavering scrutiny; the great lens of human civilisation will swivel and focus on the circumstances of Jackson’s death; the full force of the shared gaze of every eyeball will burn its way down through the experiences of all concerned; and thousands and millions will demand we explore every aspect of this celebrated person in our pages and broadcasts.

Jackson no doubt suffered a great deal of intrusion from the media while he was alive, but his death would become a seminal moment of networked reverence for his reconstructed memory. The king is dead; long live the myth of the king. The circumstances of Jackson’s death are murky but the many retellings of his last days suggest that the entertainer’s great achievements were in the past. Tabloid coverage publishes different theories by different members of the family or entourage. Broadsheet coverage assesses the cultural impact of Jackson’s legacy. This stuff and every kind of coverage in between screams ‘something important has happened; the world will never be the same again!’

Live broadcast of Jackson’s funeral on both BBC2 and Five shows how far up the pecking order of celebrity Jackson was, compared to the (relatively) private arrangements for Jade Goody. News and media organisations want big audiences, naturally. Superstardom produces a sudden cult of grief in the media because it gravitates to, and feeds off, events in which there is a demand for information. Jackson is in that category of celebrity of whom it can be said that they ‘touched millions of people in their everyday lives’.

The news corporations, particularly the BBC, once they had confirmed the initial reports, moved with great speed to replace their output with Jackson-related content. He was everywhere for days. The public displays of private grief by family and friends, making speeches for the TV at his funeral, completed the cycle of the sudden death cult. Jackson can now be remembered through the prism of the reaction to his death and how much the media told us his passing had ‘touched’ us.

Bit it was too much. Jackson has long existed in that celebrity hell where the brand barely survived the accusations and suspicions fame attracts. He was ‘Wacko Jacko’, he was beyond eccentric and he sent his kids out in public wearing veils. Whatever his past achievements, Jackson was a sad and lonely figure, much as Princess Diana was. She was openly ridiculed in the press the week before her sudden death and post-mortem rehabilitation into a different kind of saintly public figure. The transformation from ‘Wacko’ to King Michael of Pop is only partially complete. Accusations of abuse, drug-addiction and eccentricity notwithstanding, Jackson had no place in the national life and consciousness of the people like Di had, at least here in Britain. She was the outsider in the Royal Court, the quiet girl thrust into international diplomacy and the emotionally vulnerable victim of an uncaring establishment. Unlike Di, Jackson’s success was built on hard work and his reputation as the greatest pop star was earned by himself. He must take much of the responsibility for his fall from adulation as well. Jackson’s eccentricities, such as when he told Martin Bashir he liked children to sleep in his bed, were alarming. He acted as if he could not see why people would be alarmed and as if he no longer lived in anything like our world at all.

A person who enjoys the esteem of so many cannot rely on it when they appear to want to change themselves. It was who he was and what he achieved that made Jackson popular. He tried to change what he was with plastic surgery (accusations of his changing colour have always been denied). He did not try to regain his youthful looks, as is usual and tolerated; he tried to radically change his appearance. Jackson tried to become someone different from the person who won fame and fortune with their talents. It’s hard to forgive that or sympathise with that for most people.

It was all too much, the coverage. When contrasted with the recent anecdotes of watching the moon landings back in 1969, the funeral of Michael Jackson is barely an event at all in the sense that people really are thinking that the world has changed. Perhaps that sense of togetherness, that sense that, whatever happens, we are all in this and it affects all of us is something that cannot happen again.

Maybe there is just no reason any longer for people to surge together in great numbers. Recently, the financial system and its bankers, the political system and its politicians and now the press and its journalists have been pilloried for their behaviour in the name of the public interest. When the public is disconnected from, and suspicious of, these institutions and most others they can no longer play a role beyond that of the spectator who watches, cheers or boos and then exits.

Is the death of a pop star the last thing that the media can find to connect with the big, very general, public? Ersatz grief, mobilised by TV specials and special eight-page pull-outs is a tiny little piece of the common experience we once believed to comprise public life. The public, in whose name and in the name of whose opinion so much is done and justified, is barely engaged in any of the processes that directly affect it, but it is assumed still to feel, if not move much.

So media identify a big story and run with it. But that media identify this particular story as that big and that we the people are identified as that audience with those responses means that we are not really the public. We are not connected by experience of each other but by the emotion we may come to share about a cultural phenomenon of the broadest and most easily appreciated kind.

What else but the sudden death of a celebrity could change the TV programming, take over the news and create that shared spectacle in the space where we are all supposed to look? Probably not, say, a war breaking out or a big natural disaster in somewhere undeveloped. The exposure of wrongdoing by yet another set of personnel from a distrusted institution could not swing it. An unbelievably horrible crime such as the long-term imprisonment and sexual abuse of a woman by her father did not do it. The election of a black US president did, but one could say that Obama’s success story was interesting despite its political nature, rather than because of it.

Our society returns to normal service now that Michael Jackson has been interred. This week, accusations that News of the World hacks have been bugging celebrity phones may provoke politicians still smarting from the expenses scandal to re-regulate the press for the first time. One more public institution threatens to be rocked by another in a landscape of wobbly institutions. All of them wobble because the public in whose name they operate no longer trusts in them. Institutions such as banking, politics and the press were once central arenas where the future of society might be contested. If they pass away in their present forms, die off to become other kinds of public things, the public will not even be there for the funeral.

Notes on booze ban activism

2009-06-29T06:46:00.000-07:00

Brighton is a booze ban city. Drinking alcohol is not actually illegal, but possessing it can result in its seizure by police and community officers. This is a terrible idea legally, but the powers the Home Office has given Brighton and Hove City Council, and its abuse of them, is a socially corrosive crackdown on public culture.

This morning I saw my friend and colleague live on BBC1 discussing the alcohol-control zones that we had been discussing publicly and campaigning about this week.

Dan Travis produced and chaired a discussion on the Brighton booze ban on Thursday evening. It featured Josie Appleton, director of the Manifesto Club, and me, from The Brighton Salon. On Saturday afternoon, a dozen or so of us had a “protest picnic” on the beach near Hove.

Dan had been interviewed as part of The Times’ coverage (1) of a report Josie published on Thursday called “Robbed by the Police: Alcohol Confiscation and the Hyper Regulation of Public Space” (2).

Dan made long and determined efforts to involve someone from Brighton and Hove City Council to come and discuss the issue for three weeks. Needless to say, the BBC’s This Morning crew found someone to represent the council’s view at much shorter notice. The lady’s name I didn’t catch (link if the clip becomes available on BBCi), but I think she made two very important concessions to our objections about the law.

Targeting the lager, not the louts

A Designated Public Place Order allows police and community safety officers (or police community service officers) to confiscate alcohol, even unopened containers, on suspicion that the alcohol may be drunk in public within the zone and result in some form of nuisance or disorder. Refusal can result in a fixed penalty for disorder of £50, arrest, fines of £500 (soon to rise to £2,500) and a bail condition order forbidding a person drink in public.

Dan related how his unopened cans were seized by PCSOs after visiting the off-licence on his way home. The council spokeswoman said that the law was supposed to be targeted at people likely to offend and street drinkers, who had been causing problems for local residents.

Brighton’s Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnership comprises many different groups from the authorities, residents and commerce and has had some cool ideas, such as the chill-out zone where people can leave their worse-for-wear friends behind in safety. It is a hub in the spider’s web of agencies that aim to make our city safer. Its website provides local information and statistics on crime, disorder and anti-social behaviour upon which is based explanation of the policies being pursued.

On This Morning, the Brighton council spokeswoman quoted a CDRP survey from 2003 that showed 89% of people in Brighton would welcome greater powers to deal with anti-social drinking, citing street drinkers as a particular problem for the city.

The CDRP info on crime and disorder incidents stretches back only to 2005 online, but some of the results of different surveys go back six years. Since 2003 the situation looks very different (3).

Plotting the percentage of respondents “feeling that people being drunk or rowdy in area [is] a problem in their area” over four surveys, a graph shows 63.9% felt this way in 2003; 49.2% in 2006; 37.2% in 2007 (the year I believe the alcohol control zone began to be enforced); and 33.9% in 2008.

This perception of the problem of on-street drinking was in decline when the council turned most of the city into an alcohol control zone. Perceptions about street drug abuse and dealing fell sharply during this period as well, so perhaps the various agencies were doing some things right.

Police recorded incidents of social disorder between April 2005 and April 2009 show seasonal variation between a low of about 1,000 per month in winter to a high of between 1,400 and 1,500 in summer.

There were about 15,000 incidents between 2008 and 2009. In that time, only 13 ASBOs were obtained in the city.

There has been a surge in the number of street drinkers. There were, on average during quarterly counting exercises, 27 in 2006/07, 32 in 2007/08 and 48 in 2008/09.

The number of violent crimes since April 2005 has shown seasonal variation but appears to be on a trend downwards. A peak shows in summer 2006 possibly, the site suggests, as a result of the World Cup, although this is not explained.

All violent crimes fell by 13.9% and 21.8% and “A&E assaults outside the home” fell by 15.5% and 5.6% in 2007/08 and in April to September, 2008.

Tough on crime; tough on stuff that’s nothing to do with the causes of crime

The figures from the CDRP website suggest that there is neither a perception of crime nor an increase in actual crime that requires draconian powers.

Brighton and Hove City Council applied this power of alcohol confiscation across most of the city but diagrams of the distribution of both public place violence and recorded incidents of social disorder, arranged by council ward, show there are hot spots, unsurprisingly in central and coastal areas.

The council has applied Home Office-derived powers across most of its territory that were intended by central government only for particular areas of concern. At the same time, other, less headline-worthy initiatives appear to have been having some effect.

The perceptions upon which justification for new powers was based no longer apply.

Street drinkers targeted as contributors to the problem, perceived and in reality, seem to have little effect on it. PCSOs are arbitrarily targeting random persons with drink, not people whose drinking is a problem.

Even if problematic drinkers were targeted by these powers, how would a cop or a community non-cop be able to tell they were going to offend before they have actually done so?

Hyper regulating the public destroys public space

If the random targeting of people that makes possession of alcohol an inarguable offence were not bad enough, the council also has the power to suspend its DPPO and licence alcohol itself for temporary public events such as fetes, farmers’ markets, carnivals and so on.

Through its licensing powers, the council can now control what events can or cannot have alcohol, effectively deciding what events, formal or informal, may or may not go ahead. The council always had this power over premises and public areas it owned, but they are now extended over most of the public space of the city, regardless, and can be applied instantly in response to any improvised appearance by numbers of the public.

The operation of the DPPO was in itself anti-social but, coupled with the same authority’s licensing powers and its zeal in persecuting any unlucky drinker, a sinister potential to close public space down entirely has been brought into existence.

The council was understandably sheepish about coming to defend treating people like sheep for our public meeting. Dan’s appearance on TV winkled out a spokesman, however, and that shows that the little protest we made and the meeting we called on the issue were well worthwhile.

After discussing many aspects of the booze ban in Brighton last week, it struck me that many of us were thinking about how this law might be fought in a legal way. I think that bringing it out into the open and forcing the council to defend it, politically, has a much better chance of reversing the DPPO sooner than any challenge in the courts.

The Manifesto Club is organising further protests against the hyper regulation of public space as part of its Freedom Summer. Read Josie Appleton’s report and see their events at http://www.manifestoclub.com/.

For an article by me on the depersonalisation of the public in Brighton, see http://www.facebook.com/l/;http://seandavidbell.blogspot.com/2009/06/confiscating-alcohol-turns-people-into.html

For further coverage and other events organised by The Brighton Salon, see www.thebrightonsalon.com and www.thebrightonsalonarena.com

1. “A glass of wine with your picnic? It’s against the law”, Bennett, R., and Ford, R., p12, The Times, 25/06/09 or view at http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/law/article6571617.ece

2. http://www.manifestoclub.com/

3. All the CDRP’s data I have quoted can be viewed and downloaded from pages on its “Safe in the City” website. Start here: http://www.safeinthecity.info/?q=priorities/alcohol

Democracy isn't something you watch anonymously

2009-06-23T01:21:00.000-07:00

So what if NightJack's blog isn't up any more? So what if anonymous bloggers can't use the law to protect their identities?

The Guardian's director of digital content, Emily Bell, deplored the news that the High Court would not uphold DC Richard Horton's right to remain unnamed. The detective had obtained a court order preventing The Times from naming him that was overturned by Mr Justice Eady.

In a comment headed "A bad day for bloggers and democracy" (MediaGuardian, p6, 22/06/09), Bell said The Times' opposition to the injunction silencing it has resulted "in the closure of a blog and the disciplining of Horton by the force".

How ironic, Bell said, that just as Iranian protestors "harnessed the power of the web" to organise demonstrations, the public can theoretically no longer publish anonymously.

What on earth have Iranian demonstrators got to do with a cop who uses a court injunction on the press so he carry on being a detective and a blogger?

Those campaigning secretly against a repressive regime are anonymous to prevent their arrest by authorities. NightJack wanted to remain anonymous so he could carry on writing about arresting people.

You see what this reasoning does: Unnamed bloggers are trying to overturn a general election result in Iran and are organising resistance to repression; we're unnamed bloggers so we must be freedom fighters too!

Those nasty journalists have exposed NightJack's identity so they must be repressive - just like the Iranian government!

"If a citizen journalist, or a blogger, or a witness is only allowed to remain anonymous if published under the protection of a news organisation, it suggests yet again that courts have some way to go before understanding the full impact of democratised media," said Bell.

First, get past that tiresome "if you disagree with me, you don't understand me" bullshit from a digital enthusiast, and check the reasoning. NightJack used a court to try and remain anonymous - a court!

It just doesn't matter usually who anonymous bloggers are. They write crap that no-one reads. In this case, because it was a crime blog, apparently published by a detective, there was great legitimate interest in who wrote it.

Furthermore, journalists, and everyone else, are severely restricted in what they can publish about an ongoing case, especially if the charges are serious enough to warrant the use of a jury.

Under the strict liability rule, a news organisation, or blogger, or "citizen journalist", may not publish anything that poses a "serious risk" of "substantial prejudice" to the trial of a case. As a contempt of court, heavy fines and prison sentences for violation of the strict liability rule may be imposed.

A police blogger just gets a slap on the wrist from the force, apparently.

NightJack's blog was entertaining and well-written, but it wasn't whistle blowing, or a ruthless expose of police procedure.

What would be the alternative for a "witness" to publishing through a news organisation and opting for the protection from identification that way? Anonymous accusations don't work for police and the courts; you have to ask for their protection.

And Suzanne Breen, who faced prison when police tried to force her to hand over information on the Real IRA, won her right to protect her sources on the basis she might be killed, even though the judge accepted the information she had would be useful to police hunting the terrorists.

Despite all this, Emily Bell says that, in future, whistleblowers and witnesses will think twice about going to The Times because it "thinks it is in the public interest for anonymous writers, sources and citizens to be exposed". Sources should worry about The Times?

I worry about where The Guardian gets its idea of what public opinion is. Dredging up the nameless bottom feeders of the blogosphere and presenting the silt as public opinion is only sort of like finding a source.

A serving cop who wrote what he liked, used the court to gag the press when he was found out, then gave up writing and accepted disciplinary sanctions because he agreed he acted unprofessionally is not a good example of "democratised media".

Democracy is something you stand up for and take part in. Iranian protestors and many, many others throughout the world, do not just sit at their screens publishing a stream of unconsciousness under a silly name. It takes a lot more than that to win the littlest bit of democracy and allowing courts to silence newspapers was never going to help them.

To even imagine that the opportunity of being able to publish to others is so dependent on secrecy and anonymity, in this society, that courts should protect bloggers from the nasty press, shows the thing most treasured, the thing that Emily Bell wants most to protect, is not democracy, not freedom of expression and not even independence from news gatherers.

The most precious thing is the mode of expression, how you have your say not what you say. The independence that only flourishes in secret is called isolation and that makes co-operation difficult, let alone democracy.

It doesn't stand up, Belle de Jour

2009-06-19T08:31:00.000-07:00

The exposing of the identity of the police detective blogger, NightJack, has highlighted a serious problem with “citizen journalism”.

Detective Constable Richard Horton, who published an award-winning blog on his experiences as a Lancashire cop dealing with the rough end of the criminal justice nightstick, had won an injunction against The Times preventing it naming him after a reporter figured out his identity. The High Court has quashed that, Mr Justice Eady remarking that a blogger “has no reasonable expectation of privacy” (“’Ello ’ello ’ello. Blogging detective unmasked”, The Guardian, p3, 17/06/09).

Another uniformed blogger, Tom Reynolds who publishes Random Acts of Reality about his experiences as a London ambulance worker, says the ruling is similar to making journalists reveal their sources. His point is that, as journalists who are their own sources, bloggers need privacy to be honest and protect them from the consequences of what they say.

The presumably occasionally uniformed sex-working blogger, Belle de Jour, whose writing turned into books and a TV series starring Billy Piper, weighed in with the announcement that journalism was dead and that it now was killing off the bloggers who had replaced it.

“We need people to tell the truth, to speak truth to power. Once that role was served by journalists. No longer,” she said in The Guardian (“A Dangerous Precedent” p33, 18/06/09).

Citing the need for privacy of bloggers in repressive parts of the world, and the similar need for whistleblowers in our own society, Belle asserted that there’s a need for anonymity for bloggers, even if what they do goes public.

NightJack - I mean DC Horton - took a disciplinary hearing from the force rather than attempt to benefit financially from his writing, as Belle did. Accepting that his conduct had been unprofessional, his blog has been stopped and its archive has gone.

Belle de Jour, whose identity is presumably either known or not important to the journalists who dish out comment space in The Guardian, accused The Times of destroying the NightJack blog because it must have contained something “incendiary”.

Belle has this issue back to front. The police blogger tried to use the power of the court to silence a journalist. The Times wanted to publish the identity of a person who had won the Orwell blogging prize and had been reportedly approached by agents and publishers. There was immense interest in his identity because of his own blog.

Lancashire senior police officers might have considered allowing NightJack to continue, as ambulance bosses have encouraged Reynolds, but it might also have devalued his writing once the public knew of the force’s permission. The DC decided to stay with the force anyway. Presumably, he contested the revelation of his identity so that he both blog and remain a detective.

The professional reporter that uncovered his identity has no special powers or warrant card, as DC Horton has. Really, it was always going to be a matter of time before the detective was named because he had initially and unavoidably placed himself within a relatively small group of people among whom he could not have long hidden once a journalist started looking.

It is a pity that the blog has stopped because it was entertaining and well-written. But that doesn’t mean that it’s a good idea to slap reporters with court orders under the assumed name of freedom.

When you are fed some nonsense in a paper or on TV by a journalist, you know who they are and who they work for. You might complain, correct and respond in all manner of ways because the journalist reports to the public with a responsibility to the public (however badly) and news organisations must stand by their stories. The accountability of journalism to its public is very, very imperfect, but there is some.

Belle do Jour used The Guardian to promote her obituary of journalism. For her, freedom to blog rests on anonymity, of course, so she is not accountable for what she says. Until now, it never really mattered what she said, because it was just about her and her sad clients.

Bloggers in repressive countries comprise an underground press that writes and publishes under extremely difficult conditions. What they do to oppose their regimes has absolutely nothing to do with blue-light stories from the front line (or red-light revelations).

People, who risk imprisonment in, say, Iran for reporting their experiences on blogs are in no way assisted by the silencing of journalists by courts in this country.

The logic that bloggers need anonymity is faulty. Undercover work in our society can be unfair to the whistleblowers who collaborate with journalists; they have breached confidence with their employers, albeit in the public interest. To expect a blanket court ruling of privacy from journalists, so that one can carry on anonymously commenting, reveals how narrow the interests of a personal blogger can be.

Even a really terrible journalist has some standard by which copy will be judged, some concept of the readership that should be informed or represented.

Does honesty rely on no-one knowing who you are? In the small world of the western “citizen journalist”, maybe it does. The secrecy that protects some anonymous bloggers from reprisals protects all from having to take responsibility for the truth of what they say. Anonymous writing in newspapers used to come with a name and address supplied tag – indicating that the author was known but their details were withheld for some reason. That is protecting a source. Purely anonymous submissions were once binned. Now newspapers frequently publish anonymous material with the online tag in place of the name. Journalists should not give up on their own jobs by presenting the fall-out of the blogosphere as public opinion.

If you speak out in public, and you have something interesting and original to say, you will not be able to hide behind a blog tag.

The public wants to know who’s poking it; arousing curiosity about something invites curiosity about you and what your motives are.

Try giving a speech at Speakers’ Corner in a ski mask.

Public scrutiny is the essence of journalism and a court should never be used protect anyone from that, as NightJack demanded.

Belle de Jour, after your comment in print I would have said that you should not give up the day job. But I want you to give that up as well.

Confiscating alcohol turns people into drunken children

2009-06-19T01:20:00.000-07:00

Among the injustices in the world and of all the poor political decisions we must endure, a local by-law that allows police and others to confiscate alcohol seems trivial.

It is equally true that within the booze control zones around Brighton and Hove there are many more grave social problems than those caused by alcoholics taking over parks and seafront areas and those caused by binge-drinking.

Brighton and Hove City Council has many, many organisations and policies aimed at improving the quality of life for residents, among them the Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnership that is behind the Safe in the City intervention.

Some of these policies actually seem to work.

One good idea was the creation of a safe chill-out zone where people can park their friends who are the worse for wear. Others who have had too much drink or too many drugs may find sanctuary from the risks that insensible and intoxicated people otherwise face on the streets at night.

But the use of special powers granted by the Home Office to confiscate drinks, on suspicion, from anyone, turns much of the town into a specially policed chill-out zone. Within the confines of a sanctuary for the inebriated, it's useful to treat the clients as people who cannot properly make decisions for themselves and care for them.

To treat anyone, though, as incapable has a consequence far beyond the relatively trivial loss of their drinks. As people privately enjoying the public space we all must accept some standards of behaviour to get along. We have rights under the law that normally protect us to some extent from having to justify what we do unless we break laws. If we do not all know what all the laws are we at least know when they are likely to be enforced.

There is no case so far in Britain of anyone providing a 'reasonable excuse' for refusing to hand over drink to a police officer, support officer or even park/beach ranger. Here in Brighton and elsewhere there is anecdotal testimony that security guards and doormen have also adopted the Home Office's new powers.

This trivial regulation, probably intended to target street alcoholics, trouble-makers and underage drinkers, can at one stroke criminalise and depersonalise anyone it is used against.

Having committed no offence, and there being no actual offence for a normal court to consider except that of refusal to hand over drink (and therefore implicitly accept an offence might have been committed, by oneself), a person becomes the object of authority, like a small child.

The people, associated with problem drinkers simply because they are enjoying a drink, lose their normal rights as persons and are left unable to contest the suspension of those rights.

The confiscation of a can of beer may be trivial materially, but to agree to it is to accept the suspension of what you are as an individual with both rights and responsibilities in society.

Many people do not accept that the threat of terrorism justifies the suspension of our rights. They feel that to drastically alter our way of life in response to terrorist violence would grant them an ideological victory over us that would help them justify their actions.

If our response to the more constant, low-level violence of street disturbances by the drunken minority is to infantilise us all, to turn local society into a chill-out zone, we will reap what we sow. People treated like children by authority are encouraged to behave like them.

I will speak on this issue at The Brighton Salon on June 25 at 7pm at The Terraces, Marine Parade.

I will look also at how the demonisation of drink has taken on a startling new character recently and finding further praise for policies that seem to work. Joining me is Josie Appleton of the Manifesto Club, which has started a survey of what is actually happening in these alcohol control zones.

Come along and have drink, listen to what we have to say and take part in a full and frank discussion.

Politics isn't working, so don't reform it

2009-05-20T04:51:00.000-07:00

“Public dissatisfaction with politics has never been greater: a national debate is needed on what must change.”

The Guardian is launching a discussion thread on its website entitled “A New Politics” with the above statement. The public can respond there on the contributions by the paper’s commentators. Trawling through the reader’s responses, there seems little chance of any kind of consensus on just what reforms of the political system would actually work.

Most respondents call for some kind of restraint on MPs, either with new bodies, a constitutional limit set on their powers or in many other ways, some funny, some bloody.

It’s all very well to encourage discussion and invite new ideas, but the job of politicians is not just to represent the people but to lead them. The sovereignty of Parliament is a very old idea but a good one. The representatives of the people, the MPs, are not constrained by anything that a previous Parliament, or monarch, has done in the past. This tradition is part of Britain’s unwritten constitution because it means that the body that runs the country looks only to its own people and their future. It can reverse or abolish anything that has gone before and it can drop or revive a tradition if it decides to.

Calls for a written constitution are understandable when one looks at those democratic countries that have enshrined certain rights and freedoms in their constitutions. Abolishing the Lords and the Monarchy are also great ideas. Unfortunately, to embark on such a project right now would be counter-productive.

Any constitution enshrining our rights for ever, written now, would be profoundly affected by mistrust of political parties and their politicians and the mutual suspicion of the public and their representatives. Rights of all kinds have been undermined in several ways recently. To fix them permanently now, in a constitution that must be designed to be difficult to change, would probably result in more control of people’s activities and more surveillance of their lives, not less.

To limit the power of MPs also would be a backward step. They are elected by the people and anything that constrains their power constrains the will of the people, quite literally. A constitution written now, without some corresponding input of genuine public opinion that is refined and discussed, would not have the support or consensus that a constitution needs to be workable. It would not be representative of the interests of the people. Without a long, hard discussion throughout society of what the principles of a written constitution should be based on, anything produced would be a knee-jerk reaction to the current preoccupations of the political class and the commentariat. It could not represent the people unless they were involved.

Perhaps a constitution might seem to be a good thing to reinvigorate a process of political engagement by the public. The underlying reason for the problems experienced by the political class (and media organisations, too) is that they have become the technical managers of a system that required no real public debate.

The public is certainly ready for change, A New Politics and a national debate, but the politicians and the parties and the gatekeepers of national discussion, the media, are certainly not. With hard-won consensus comes real leadership and nobody is ready to risk that yet.

A process of the reintegration of the public into politics and debate would be off to disastrous start if we jump straight into the deep end with a written constitution. The political classes and their communication facilitators need some practice before working up to a constitution.

Let’s all start with a relatively simple one – sort out the economy. If any politicians can rise to this challenge they will have engaged the people and learned to lead them. Then we could start the hard stuff.

Attacking MPs is journalistic cowardice

2009-05-20T03:24:00.000-07:00

Billions have been spent on banks that will not lend. The crisis in finance means the next government, whether under David Cameron or Joanna Lumley, will have to make savage cuts in public expenditure. But no politicians are talking about any of that until after the next General Election while the champions of the people in the media are letting them get away with it. They are checking receipts for second homes and moats.

Shaken politicians and excited reporters say public anger and disgust may destroy the foundations of trust that underpin democracy. Except that opinion polls don’t support this view. Support for all parties has hardly varied during the course of the affair so far.

The public is imagined in the minds of politicians and Westminster journalists as an unstable and unpredictable rabble. They fear the anger of the mob, but how, exactly, has this anger been expressed? A satirical website planted a pound-shaped flowerbed in an MP’s garden and some more were booed on Question Time. The public may be revolted, but it is not revolting. Some polls say people see the expenses issue as peripheral.

The media, led by The Daily Telegraph, has been humiliating MPs as part of a long-running feud. There is a strong blame culture involving the politicians we vote in to represent us directly and the media that scrutinise, edit and communicate what they do in our name. “Village” is an apt description of Westminster if it describes a parochial, paranoid place where scandal results from everyone knowing your business.

Both antagonists have trust and legitimacy problems. The media, especially its biggest British organisation, the BBC, can’t do anything right. Newspapers are declining, commercial TV is going broke and local media are endangered species. Journalists collecting and editing information on behalf of the public are representative, in fact, of the organisations that sell and exploit that information. Reporters must chase circulation and eyeballs, not the big picture.

Politicians are suspicious of the reporters’ agendas and try to channel and control communication through to their voters. The reporters must be seen to work under Jeremy Paxman’s maxim: “Why is this bastard lying to me?” The public, endowed with the many eyes and arms of the media, becomes capable of bringing about the downfall of politicians without recourse to the voter.

The politicians’ refusal to discuss the near future is cowardly. The Tories, as the probable next government, are particularly craven. they are not trying to win the next election, ther're just sitting back, waiting for Gordon Brown to lose it. They spinelessly waffle about austerity while keeping quiet about unpopular policies.

Political journalists cannot even prod the Prime Minister-in-waiting to say what he will do in power. The media, led by that vanguard of the people, the Telegraph, take the government to task for its decoration bills while it runs up the biggest public debt ever – after a 15-year boom.

MPs’ expenses have taken a long and winding route to become a strange form of public property. Investigative journalist and author Heather Brooke tried to use the Freedom of Information Act to publish MPs’ expenses in 2004 and received such a run-around she ended up in the High Court last year, where she won. The Commons still had not published the information before it started to be incompetently hawked around Fleet Street and partially leaked last month. Then the Telegraph somehow obtained the data and fearlessly published the choicest morsels via a circulation-boosting daily drip feed.

Poorly performing politicians deserve to be kicked out of office. They have all performed badly on the economy, wars and much else. But it is not the public that is venting its anger now. The public does not express its opinions through the media, much. Public opinions are only directly revealed by elections.

Mainstream parties are right to fear the wrath of the public but wrong to assume there will be apathetic lynchings. Politicians that cannot give you a reason to vote for them do not deserve your vote. Give us something to vote for in a plan for the future. The political journalists will investigate the persons of MPs if they are not given any policies to scrutinise. The Westminster press pack might even start asking politicians the questions people really want answered.

Do you wish Joanna Lumley was on your side?

2009-05-11T03:24:00.000-07:00

I support the Gurkhas' victory against Gordon Brown and their winning the right to settle in Britain, but I can't accept the role Joanna Lumley has been given as their political spokesman and leader.

After campaigning for years, the Gurkhas appear to have snatched the prize from a crisis-ridden government by the masterful, strategic use of a comedy actor.

Lumley was magnificent: bellowing the war-cry in her beautiful posh accent; accosting ministers with irreproachable manners; and glamorously forcing the Prime Minister to back down.

Brown's series of unfortunate events and his disastrous responses have been established as the political top story and easy narrative that pretends to explain everything as it happens.

Lumley is supposed to have taken advantage of the situation and manipulated events to raise awareness of, and public sympathy for, the Gurkhas' cause.

Brown is supposed to have caved in under pressure from this public opinion, but the significant section of his Parliamentary party that did not back him was his more practical problem.

The public was not really involved in the Gurkhas' victory, however much the public may have supported the old soldiers.

The affair was enacted by its principle players, Lumley and the elderly Gurkhas, in the arranged gaze of the media and in scenes created for the media. Perhaps anticipating how the public perceived these performances, a number of Labour MPs dissented from the government's line.

Joanna Lumley raised awareness of the plight of the Gurkhas and starred in the media portrayal of that plight. She went on to improvise by buttonholing a minister in the street.

But the public functioned as a passive receiver of the campaign, as it had of the top story of the decline of Brown's administration. Those MPs of all parties who voted with the Gurkhas are under pressure from public opinion only as it will be expressed next year in the General Election. There was no public involvement in any of the events that led to the Gurkhas' demands being met.

Furthermore, the issues discussed were narrowed the more that the government backed down.

Having originally objected to settling more Gurkhas in Britain on the bases of cost and the numbers of other claimants who might come forward, the government retreated by making the Gurkhas a special case, deserving of rights that accrue to them alone on the basis of their particular status as faithful colonial retainers.

I support the extension of rights to live in work in Britain because it is immoral and irrational to distinguish between people on the basis of their appearance or origins and because immigration has been very good for Britain and made it a better place - let 'em all in!

Joanna Lumley, 'daughter of the regiment', closed the discussion down to concentrate on the particular merits of British settlement for Gurkhas. That they had fought (fought?) For Britain and therefore had the moral right to live here was the winning, morally undeniable coup de grace to Brown's resistance.

So while it's good that Gurkhas have settlement rights, those rights have been won in such a peculiar way that it will make campaigning against those immigration controls that had previously denied the Gurkhas' rights even more difficult.

If Joanna Lumley was on your side you could certainly expect cameras and media attention. You might hope to create public debate and support from the publicity.

However, nothing like that happened with the Gurkhas. Their story and the merits of their claims became a dramatised example of a lame duck administration.

Perhaps your cause is one that can afford to be dislocated from wider issues where, as long as your particular demands are met, you will happily narrow the debate around it to a simple moral imperative.

If you don't want to challenge the assumptions that have been the basis of resistance to your cause so far, then you do need Joanna Lumley on your side.

Perhaps celebrity involvement in campaigns may become more common now, but most things worth campaigning for involve the kinds of discussions that change people's minds or opinions.

Would you ask Joanna Lumley to speak for your cause on the basis of her expertise in the arguments and rhetoric of the issues involved?

Supra-national Swine Flu Alarmism and the Measured Public Response

2009-05-01T03:13:00.000-07:00

The World Health Organisation has ramped its swine flu warning up to level five (out of six) while the British public (and even its media) seems to have scaled down its response to a one or maybe two.

The Guardian's Ben Goldacre (who writes an excellent column in the Saturday edition called Bad Science) reported yesterday that the media had been bombarding him with requests to rubbish the WHO's response and say that there's no risk of a flu pandemic (Goldacre, B., p30, The Guardian, 30/04/09). He points out that there is a risk and, because so much is unknown about pandemics and this particular strain of the virus, it's probably correct for the WHO to send out a preparatory warning and it's also probably correct for British politicians to have taken the steps that they have, even though a pandemic is unlikely.

It is very likely that, in the aftermath of the epidemic/pandemic to come, big agriculture and the Mexican and American health authorities will come under fire from many sides, the authorities here in Britain can hardly be expected to foresee the behaviour of the virus in the British population. They seem to have been prepared to be unprepared and have been fairly honest about the unknown nature of the risks that outbreaks of these new types of virus can pose.

Crying wolf about SARS and other health problems (we were all going to die of AIDS 20-odd years ago) in the past may have made the media here a little more circumspect than it usually is. The public has responded the most sensibly, so far. Even more refreshingly, there has not been a knee-jerk attack on the authorities by any organisations that represent (or claim to speak for) the public. Even if a pandemic does occur, so far there is a refreshing amount of sensible discussion about the current situation that points to our being able to deal with it.

So the supra-national authorities are more alarmist than our beleaguered government. The normally sensationalist British media have done more or less the right things this week. In the space of just five days we the public have not panicked and kept calm, as the poster says. The media, while trying to manufacture an inappropriate doom verses cry-wolf angle, has largely fallen into step with the sensible public and has not sensationalised the fears of the (over) precautionary authorities.

I am a bit more optimistic, this week, that much can be learned from this unique set of circumstances. Measured responses to the other unknowns that face us in solving the world's many problems would be very useful. If only a sensible response to malaria and all the other easily treatable illnesses that kill thousands every day was contagious.

Energise! Power to the People

2009-04-28T07:04:00.000-07:00

"I know I'll be alright when the climate changes. They'll build flood defenses and so on in my part of the world, but what about people in Bangladesh? There's no 'we' when we talk about what 'we' can do to save ourselves from the effects of climate change."

That was one of the points made by a member of the audience when Joe Kaplinksi, co-author of Energise! A Future for Energy Innovation (with Professor James Woudhuysen), presented the April Brighton Salon at Bellerbys College.

Adaptation, mitigation and transformation are three strategies for dealing with climate change (regardless of one's views on humanity's contribution to global warming) that Joe and James identify in their book. Joe told us that he had wanted to to try and find a different approach to the question of climate change; one that did not subscribe to the moralistic and shrill doom-mongering of the eco-warriors and at the same time did not line up with the flat denial that there are problems at all of the climate sceptics.

"We realised that we had to look much more carefully at energy and its uses and production. The politicisation of climate change is a serious issue because it stands in the way of solving problems and stifles debate," said Joe.

Joe says that those who adapt to climate change and those who seek to simply mitigate it both tend to try to do less, to use less power and resources. Joe and his co-author make the argument for transforming the way we do things by working toward a new kind of power grid across the world. Every kind of fossil, sustainable, natural and nuclear methods of producing energy people can use will have a part to play until there is enough power available to stop having to worry about how much we use.

As energy production is currently the biggest single contributor to the greenhouse gases that raise the level of CO2 n the atmosphere, so one would assume that deep green activists and commentators would try to find alternative power sources, said Joe. But the approach, which is influential upon many more in the mainstream, is to try to limit all kinds of human activity, as they all require power.

I don't think the man in the audience I quoted at the beginning will have been won over by Joe's argument, but I for one admire the approach that Energise! takes to many questions.

"The time for debate is over!" say some deep greens, but I don't think has even been a proper debate on how growth and development can be used to actually clean up the planet rather than assume it will just mess it up.

I recommend Energise! (available on special offer at Amazon) because it's an unusual book, full of facts, figures, asides into different technologies and very readable. Also, Energise! doesn't duck the political and moral questions the way so many books on energy, climate and development do; either taking to the unreachable moral high ground or hiding behind catastrophe. It recommends policies regardless of how unpopular they might be with those engaged in the current debates on climate change.

Swine flu survivalism

2009-04-27T08:15:00.000-07:00

There have been two suspected cases so far of swine flu in Britain. There were 1,021 confirmed and suspected cases, worldwide, reported yesterday.

The World Health Organisation has called an international health emergency, which will ratchet up to a full-on pandemic alert, if more cases are discovered around the world.

There have been more than 100 deaths in Mexico where people must wear face masks and the public is being discouraged from mingling.

Elsewhere there were no more deaths reported yesterday, but most countries have published some reaction to the threat.

Britain's government has said its anti-viral treatments in reserve can cover about half the population, with health workers receiving their protection first.

Mexican health workers are reported to have guessed that tens of thousands of people there have been infected, although many may have already recovered.

Antivirals have been stockpiled worldwide in response to the avian flu outbreak a few years ago.

The Guardian in Britain reports that health officials in New York are particularly concerned because those most at risk of dying of swine flu are healthy adults whose immune systems 'overreact' to the virus.

Considering the simple and treatable illnesses and medical conditions killing and maiming people in their millions across the world, isn't our healthy and developed country overreacting?