The problem is in England, not in Wales

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In the run-up to ‘that speech’ last night, the devolved governments were criticized in the media for ‘pre-empting’ Boris Johnson’s announcements or attempting to ‘steal a march’ over London. And in the aftermath, the media have reported that the devolved administrations have ‘rejected’ or ‘refused to accept’ what the PM said. It’s a classic example of the innate English nationalism and London-centric view of the world held by the British media. That narrow, blinkered view of events means that the wrong people are being asked the wrong questions.

All four governments were required by law to review the lockdown arrangements last Thursday, and all duly did so. The Scottish government immediately announced the results of its own review on Thursday and the Welsh government (whose cabinet met quite late in the day to discuss the matter) announced the results of its review on Friday. The English government decided to do things differently – they postponed any announcements for three days and went on to brief selected newspapers that the changes were going to be much more far-reaching than was actually the case. And they deliberately failed to tell, let alone consult with, the devolved administrations about their proposals. I don’t know why they thought it was sensible to do any of those things, although my best guess is that they seriously thought that it would build up Johnson’s speech to some great national moment – an attempt, in short, to gain some sort of political advantage. It backfired badly, largely as a result of the PM’s own failings and unsuitability for the role.

Ahead of a sunny bank holiday weekend, the English government deliberately confused the message and led people to believe that in a few days’ time there were going to be significant changes to the lockdown arrangements. It was entirely predictable that some people would conclude that a few days wasn’t going to make a huge difference, and we’ve seen the results of that on the news. Having given unattributable private briefings saying one thing, ministers were left trying to put the genie back in the bottle and failing miserably, succeeding only in sowing doubt and confusion where there had previously been clarity. Going on Sunday evening television to give people less than 24 hours’ notice that he expected them to return to work the next day with no pre-warning for employers and no usable transport system just added to the overall sense of utter incompetence.

So how come the devolved administrations are being criticised for not following suit? If three out of four governments have been straightforward and prompt in reviewing arrangements and clearly telling people their conclusions whilst the other has obfuscated, prevaricated and given out mixed messages in an attempt to secure party political advantage, why has the media criticism been aimed at the first three rather than the fourth? Instead of demanding to know why three governments have dared to act promptly and explain what they are doing clearly, shouldn’t they be asking why the fourth hasn’t? It reflects a London-centric attitude which fails to acknowledge that, on devolved matters, the Welsh, Scottish and Northern Ireland governments have the same legal competence, and the same authority to act, as the English government. The arrogant fashion in which the English government has changed its messaging with no consultation with the other governments in the UK indicates an implicit assumption that London always knows best and everyone else will fall into line. The real question isn’t demanding why Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland aren’t being sufficiently subservient to England, it’s exploring why the English government is so utterly dishonest and incompetent. But English nationalist exceptionalism is still preventing too many from even understanding why the question needs to be asked.

Misreading the words

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Reading the coverage of the decision by the ERG to set three tests for any amended deal that the PM manages to get from the EU, I found myself wondering, not for the first time, why so much of the media has such a problem with doing honest and thorough analysis of what it reports instead of swallowing the spin.  The ‘three tests’ have been presented as though they represent a huge change in opinion which opens the way to allowing the ERG to support the agreement.  But I didn’t have to read past the first test (“...clearly worded, legally binding, treaty-level clause which unambiguously overrides...”) to realise that these tests change absolutely nothing.  Indeed, if anything they represent a hardening of attitude, spelling out the group’s views in crystal-clear language.

Agreeing to accept and support a treaty only if there is another document over-riding its content is no agreement at all.  Agreeing that there is no need to re-open an agreed text for further discussion as long as that text is rendered inoperative by another document is playing with semantics, not changing position.  They are still asking for something which the EU27 can’t give them, even if it wanted to.  So why has the media fallen for it?

Parts of the media, of course, deliberately seek to mislead the public.  They’ve been doing it for years; I have zero expectation that they will stop any time soon.  But that doesn’t account for all parts of the media.

It could be simply laziness; much of what passes for reporting these days has become little more than printing extracts from rival press releases giving equal weight to them in the name of ‘balance’ regardless of whether there is any factual basis to what they say.  It could be that journalists don’t have the time or energy (or ability?) to critically read and analyse what they write.  I suspect both are at play to a greater or lesser extent.  But I also suspect that much of the UK media is so steeped in a UK-biased perspective on events that, like the politicians ‘negotiating’ on our behalf, they are simply unable to understand any alternative perspective and try and see things as others see them.

Time and again I have read or watched reporters talking about whether the EU is ready to budge ‘yet’, as though the whole issue of the ‘backstop’ and the integrity of the single market are just pawns on the board; things which can be sacrificed or adjusted when the political climate decrees it to be necessary.  That’s certainly the way in which most of the Brexiteers see things as they reduce everything to mere ‘transactions’ in which one thing can be traded for another.  But it completely fails to understand the importance which the rest of the EU places on the single market and the European project as a whole.

Does it matter that the reporting around this issue is so poor?  In itself, no; we can simply ignore the bias if we choose.  But what does matter is that the reporting reinforces the views of politicians who take the same viewpoint, mistakenly believing that, when they are reading their own views reported back to them, they are somehow reading an impartial and critical analysis of the situation.  And it matters more widely in that it reinforces the widespread belief that the problem is that those beastly Europeans are being horrid to the UK, leading to the demand that we ‘stand up to them’.  One of the few beneficial results of Brexit is the revelation of how poorly served we are by the media; the problem is that knowing about it isn’t the same as solving it.

Setting double standards

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Some of the proposals announced in the Tory manifesto yesterday seemed, at first sight, to be an attack on one of their most loyal groups of voters, pensioners.  Anecdotal evidence is necessarily unreliable as to the attitudes of the many, but after seeing a few pensioners interviewed following the launch, I suspect that attacking their benefits is not much of a gamble after all.  There are plenty of them prepared to blame immigrants, overseas aid, unemployed people – anyone except those actually taking the decisions.  Getting different groups to blame each other looks like a successful political strategy, sadly.

But it’s the response to the economic aspects of the manifesto that struck me.  I posted a few days ago that the expectation that any political party could realistically produce a sound costed manifesto for the next five years was plain silly, because there are too many unknowns and variables.  What parties can do, however, is look at one or other side of the balance sheet.  They can, for instance, set out their approach to taxation and borrowing, and state that they will manage expenditure in order to meet their targets.  Alternatively, they can set out a programme of policies and state that they will manage taxation and borrowing in order to deliver that programme.  It’s a bit like an economic version of the uncertainty principle – you can do one or the other but doing both is impossible.

In 2010 and 2015 the Tories effectively took the first approach.  They set out their over-riding aim of eliminating the deficit within 5 years, promised not to increase any of the main taxes, and simply stated that they would cut spending in order to achieve that.  Detail on what would be cut was sparse, to say the least, but they got away with it because they framed the whole debate in terms of the absolute necessity of that objective.  As it subsequently turned out, on the basis of the bar which they set for themselves they failed miserably.  Not only did they not eliminate the deficit, they borrowed ever more. 

In this election, they have thrown that approach out of the window.  Yes, they still have some vague commitment to eliminate the deficit by 2025, but in essence, their approach this time round is to set out their programme and state that they will adjust taxation and borrowing as necessary to deliver that programme, without spelling out any detail.  The chances of them achieving that deficit target look slim to me, but it doesn’t matter because it’s more than one election away, and it was always the wrong target anyway.  The ‘deficit elimination’ mantra served its political purpose of framing the agenda and putting the other parties on the spot; it was never that important in economic terms.

The point is, however, that the Tories have been allowed, for three elections in a row, to set out the detail of only one side of the equation, whilst the other parties have been forced onto the defensive in trying to explain exactly what they would do about both sides.  How has this happened?  Why are we in a situation where the bar has been set so much higher for everyone else?  Double standards have been applied with the active support and complicity of the press and media, including the publicly-funded BBC.  The real victory of the Tories, not just in one or two elections, is that they have been able to turn ‘impartial’ news media into their own propaganda arm; barely challenging what they say and do even in comparison with their own self-imposed target whilst tearing pieces out of anyone failing to meet a higher – and essentially unattainable – standard.

Whose Broadcasting Corporation is it really?

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In reporting on the proposed new charter for the BBC, the Western Mail chose to lead with the proposal that Wales would be guaranteed a place on the new BBC board.  How nice for Wales – another opportunity for a Welsh voice to participate in discussions before being over-ruled by the majority from England.  (Unless, of course, the chosen representative is carefully selected to be the sort of person who won’t make waves in the first place.)

It’s an obvious attempt to find a ‘safe’ Welsh angle on the news by another organisation not particularly well-known for making waves either.  But I didn’t think that it was the most significant element of the announcement from a Welsh perspective.  For that, we have to go further down the report, until we reach the part where the UK Culture Secretary said that one of the BBC’s “many responsibilities” was to “bring people together” and support “greater cohesion, not least among the nations of the United Kingdom.”

Now the quaint idea that many have that the BBC is somehow an ‘impartial’ reporter of events has never been true; it has always been the tool of the establishment, presenting all news from an establishment viewpoint.  But it seems to me that this is taking that lack of impartiality one stage further; this is giving the BBC an explicit responsibility to act as a tool for one particular outlook, and promote the idea that the nations of the UK are a homogeneous whole.  It says a lot about the self-styled “national newspaper of Wales” that it treats that as almost an addendum to the glorious news about us having a representative who can always be outvoted.

We need a better media than this in Wales; and in the field of broadcasting, the BBC needs to be broken up into an EBC, a WBC, a SBC and a NIBC, each with its own charter decided by the relevant devolved parliament.  And the sooner that happens the better. 

Progress depends on wanting it

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Wales is not Scotland, of course, but the recommendation by a panel of MPs that Scotland should have its own version of the News at Six in place of the ‘UK’ version currently broadcast can and should raise questions for us as well.  Since the advent of devolved parliaments in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, policy in a number of areas has increasingly diverged.  Yet it often feels as though the BBC’s news coverage has not reflected that change.  Time after time, news bulletins refer to – or even lead with – stories on issues such as health or education which only apply in England. 

Certainly, there is usually (but not always) a caveat of some sort thrown in that the situation is different elsewhere, but similar issues in the devolved nations do not receive the same coverage.  Those who want to know what the impact of the same issue is in Wales (and presumably Scotland and Northern Ireland as well) then have to wait for the ‘regional’ news which follows; although unless there is a specifically Welsh angle, the issue may well not be covered at all.  It often seems as though the ‘Welsh’ news is more interested in simply repeating much of the ‘UK’ news.  If the principals are Welsh, then it’s generally a direct repeat; otherwise they try and find someone whose great-grandfather’s cat allegedly once visited Wales to make it sound more ‘local’. 

However, in defence of the BBC, something like 85% of the audience is in England; why wouldn’t a news programme trying to cover the whole of the UK have 85% of its ‘domestic’ news emanating from England?  The problem isn’t just an editorial one, although it’s sometimes described as such; it’s more to do with the fact that one nation of the UK is so much larger than the rest, and that a major UK institution has not adapted to a situation where there is no longer a single body of policy in the whole territory of the state - and doesn’t really seem to know how to adapt either.  It underlines the UK approach to constitutional change – tinker with one part at a time, and don’t worry about any consequences.  What’s needed is a more thorough-going rethink about the function and purpose of a single UK wide state-owned news medium in an environment for which it was never designed or built.

It’s inevitable that attention focuses on the BBC, because it’s a state-owned body; but the issue of the relevance of news provision and consumption is really much wider than that – it also includes private sector broadcasters and the print media.  The BBC itself published a story a few short months ago, highlighting the fact that only 5% of the Welsh population read a Welsh newspaper, and that four times as many people in Wales read the Daily Mail as read the Western Mail.  An academic from the Cardiff School of Journalism described the situation as being one of a ‘democratic deficit’; people in Wales voting on Welsh issues about which they were poorly informed because their news sources carried mostly stories about the situation in England.

It contributes to the situation on which I posted a few days ago; people in Wales assuming that the supposed ‘immigration crisis’ about which they read daily in the Mail and Express is not only true, but applies equally in Wales.  The issue also came to the fore in the debate prior to the EU referendum, where there was an almost complete lack of a specifically Welsh perspective on the issue.  Dr Daniel Evans of Cardiff University drew attention to this in a blog post for the LSE (see point 5 here).  The logic of having a more specifically Welsh media to report the news is clear, whether we’re talking about print media or broadcast media.

There are, however, a few problems with actually bringing that about:

·         To repeat: Wales is not Scotland, and in this context there are at least three important differences.  The first is that the smaller the population of a nation within the UK, the harder it will be to fund a specific media.  The second is that the border between Wales and England goes along the ‘long’ edge of the country; Scotland’s border goes along the ‘short’ edge.  This impacts directly on the extent to which policies (on health for instance) in England do directly affect a large number of people in Wales.  And the third is that the degree of policy difference is smaller, reflecting the more limited powers of the Assembly.

·         Horses can be led to water … by which I mean that even if there were separate Welsh news outlets available, there’s no way of being certain that people would turn to them.  If people buy the Daily Mail rather than the Western Mail, that’s the exercise of choice.  Even a vast (and much-needed) improvement in the quality of the latter newspaper would not guarantee a change in people’s preferences.

·         Is there enough Welsh news to report?  One of the depressing features of the referendum campaign was how little effort was made to put a specifically Welsh perspective on the issue; Wales’ politicians and campaigners seemed content to argue that the only real difference was the extent of our dependency on the begging bowl.

·         If sensationalism sells newspapers, what guarantees that a specifically Welsh media would be any more truthful or honest in its reporting than the English tabloids?  I sometimes think that some of those calling for a more specifically Welsh media are making an implicit assumption that the editors would be nicer and more honest people because they’d be like ‘us’ rather than like ‘them’.  I’m not sure that assumption stands up to examination.

There are other issues as well, of course, but of those listed above, I think that the second is the most important.  In the coverage a day or two ago about the matter of the ‘Scottish Six’, one of the issues raised was that there doesn’t really seem to be much demand for it amongst the consumers; the demand is driven by politicians seeking better coverage of what they’re doing rather than by the viewers.  And in this case, I suspect that what’s true for Scotland is even truer for Wales.

One can argue that it’s the result of long term conditioning or whatever; but the underlying question here is about chickens and eggs.  People won’t demand new media in their own nation until they realise the inaccuracy of what they’re getting now; and they won’t realise that until they have and use those new media.  Demands for change often seem to be predicated on the assumption that ‘others’ should do ‘something’; but unless we can first create the demand, why would they?  Like so many aspects of Wales’ situation, progress ultimately depends mostly on first creating the desire for progress.

Hold the front page!

Tweet It doesn’t seem to take a lot to get on to the front page of the Western Mail these days.  Being called Hain is usually quite enough.  Yesterday’s Western Mail headline was “Corbyn, Carwyn and the huge test for Welsh Labour”, but it was, in essence, a platform for His Unroyal Hainness to expound his views – again.  (And, of course, with a link to the “full report” on an inside page where his book also gets yet another free plug.)

Reading what he actually says, it doesn’t necessarily relate to the election of Corbyn at all.  His core message is that if the Labour Party mobilises the enthusiasm of its members and supporters to get out and canvass, then it could do well in the next election regardless of who the leader is; if it fails to do so, then it could face a difficult time.

In fact, I’m not even sure that that message is limited to the Labour Party.  HUH could equally have said that ‘if a party can fight a good doorstep campaign it might win votes, but if it fails to do so, it might not’.  Who’d have thought it?  This is a secret which has clearly eluded many to date, and comes as stunning news to the Western Mail. 

We really need a better Welsh media than this.

Being ourselves

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I’m sure it’s very nice of Richard Branson to have spoken out in support of the Welsh Government’s proposals for a soft opt-out on organ donation, but is it really the most important thing which happened yesterday, from a Welsh perspective?  By making it the front page lead story, the Western Mail clearly thinks it is.

I’m not a fan of ‘celebrity endorsement’ in the first place.  I don’t need to know which rich or famous people support or oppose a particular proposition before making my mind up on an issue.  Indeed, such endorsement is generally counter-productive as far as I’m concerned.  It tends to lead me to the conclusion that if the best that proponents of a proposition can come up with is a series of endorsements, then the proposition can’t be a terribly good one.

There’s another aspect to today’s story though.  It plays to a peculiar trait of the Welsh character, to which even the most nationalistic of people sometimes fall prey.  In the field of politics, it affects left and right alike.  We seem to have a certain need for approval from others, rather then having the confidence just to say what we think. 

It’s all too easy to blame that on some sort of inferiority complex resulting from our history; I suspect that it’s a great deal more complicated than that.  Whatever the reason, lack of confidence in ourselves and our ideas is one of the things which hold us back.  And a media which think that getting an endorsement from Branson is of such vital importance feeds the complex rather than helping us conquer it.

It doesn’t mean that we should be ungrateful for support and praise from outside Wales, but  we don’t need to be quite so gushing about it.

Too big to succeed

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At the time of the banking crisis, we were told that we had no choice but to bail out the banks – they had become too big to fail.  In the light of recent events at News International, I find myself concluding that some companies have become too big to be allowed to succeed.

There’s something very wrong with the idea that the editor and staff of a newspaper should pay with their livelihoods for the sins of, and to protect the backsides of, their predecessors.  The closure of News of the World may, of course, turn out to be little more than a cynical ploy, and the same staff may end up working on a very similar paper called the Sunday Sun within a short period.  For the sake of the staff (well, most of them – the exceptions still need to be properly dealt with), I sort of hope that that will turn out to be the case. 

But it should be something of a wake-up call to discover that the parent group has become so large and rich that it can afford to simply close down, overnight, a successful and leading brand.  It appears that the income and profit from that brand is little more than pocket money to the parent company. 

It makes me wonder whether, had the newspaper been a stand-alone brand, or part of a much smaller group, they could have afforded to take such risks in the first place.  It’s an open, and probably unanswerable, question – but would they have had to have been more careful about what they were doing had they not been so peripheral to the group?

The power of the media mogul behind the group to have politicians – Labour and Tory alike – supplicating before him has already been noted elsewhere.  The claimed influence of his titles on voting habits has probably been exaggerated, but the fact that parties and leaders fear him to the extent that they do is enough to make it a serious issue.

At the very least, the planned takeover of Sky should be blocked.  But it’s also time to start looking at breaking up the rest of the empire.

Titanic Brown

Tweet I find it hard to comprehend how far Labour have fallen in such a short time. Less than twelve months ago, they looked invincible; I was convinced that Gordon Brown would win an election any time he cared to call one. But now, I don't think he has any chance whatsoever of recovering the situation, and Labour are facing a potential wipeout.

Many in Labour seem to be trying to console themselves with the idea that if it went wrong so suddenly, it could just as easily turn around – they do, after all, have almost two years before an election becomes unavoidable. I think they're being unduly optimistic. There's been a change in mood of the sort which happens from time to time, and I suspect it's become irreversible before the next election.

I now think that Brown is doomed. Labour party MPs are starting to panic, and that just adds to the story line. Talk of replacing Brown is rife - but I doubt that it would make any difference at this stage. The ship is sinking. Arguing over who should be piloting it - rather than trying to plug the holes - is merely helping it to sink even faster.

Ceredig seems to blame the media; but my main criticism of the media in all this is not particularly the fact that they have decided on a particular story line – I suspect that they are actually reflecting more than promulgating a change in mood. Rather, it is that they have allowed Cameron and his Tories to get away with not explaining what they would do any differently.

There is an almost total policy vacuum from the Tories, which is hardly subject to questioning at all. The media are right to be holding Brown and Labour to account for a succession of failures. They are wrong, however, not to be subjecting Cameron and his crew to even a remotely similar level of scrutiny. That lack of scrutiny is in danger of encouraging voters to jump from the frying pan into the fire, rather than examining genuine alternatives. And jumping into the fire is something people would come to regret.