Hunt saboteur

I’d long imagined that the Culture Secretary merely organised yoghurt, but no. It appears that Jeremy Slang-Rhyming has decided to meddle in the affairs of the BBC.

Doubtless the former Charterhouse and Oxford University management consultant – he must be from the good kind of management rather than the public sector kind, a critical condem distinction – has conducted a line by line analysis of the corporation’s expenditure over the last five years, giving him a full grasp of its affairs, thus enabling him to make the definitive statement that there is “extraordinary and outrageous” waste at the BBC. Or perhaps he just read it in the Daily Fail.

It appears, for instance, that 85 execs at the BBC are paid more than £142,500pa, or more than the Prime Minister’s salary. You might take from that the fact that the PM – not the current moon faced one, but a theoretically good one – should be paid more in a year than John Terry gets in a week, but let’s not digress. For Mr Slang-Rhyming is on a roll, fully embracing the politics of envy that he and his ilk so derided when Labour were in power.

Basically, it’s all the fault of Jonathan Ross for getting so much money. Never mind that the Tories have spent years telling us that the best should get rewarded and, as it goes, Ross is as good as it gets at his job, adding considerably more to the sum of human happiness across the spectrum than, for example, the aforementioned Mr Terry, who earns considerably more.

And lest we forget, as the head of a production company, Ross is also an employer, precisely the kind of private sector entrepreneurial spirit that is going to fill the gaping hole in the economy that Slang-Rhyming and his colleagues are currently digging. Incidentally, why hasn’t Jeremy Clarkson been similarly scapegoated for his big BBC pay packet? Because he’s a Sun columnist, of which more later.

So the answer? Well, amid the current self imposed austerity – the one that the majority of the world economists seem to think is reckless at best – the BBC needs to cut its cloth, and the best way to do that is reduce its funding. Which of course makes no sense. The BBC gets its revenue from the licence fee. It does not take any other tax revenues, and therefore, there’s no way it can be part of deficit reduction, unless the government wants to nick some of the BBC’s money for something else. So that justification is, plain and simple, garbage.

What is going on is something rather more cunning. A cut in licence fee is shamelessly populist at a time when Slang-Rhyming and his mates are busy shredding the economy and charging us more and more tax for the privilege. They think that by knocking £20 off the fee, we’ll all be enthralled. This is because you notice you’re paying tax when the licence fee demand comes, but you don’t really think about it when you buy things in a shop and the VAT is largely hidden from view.

So, if you buy a £600 TV for example, after January you won’t necessarily notice that you’ve already paid £12.50 more tax than if you’d bought it today, thanks to the VAT increase. That’s why the Tories, the party who introduced VAT and the only party that has ever increased it, love it so much. People don’t really think they’re paying it – they blame the shop for charging them too much rather than the government for having money out of their pockets.

Oddly, at a time when we are looking to exports to boost the economy, Slang-Rhyming does not note the value of the BBC’s exports, the fact that it sells its programmes to broadcasters all over the world thus helping our balance of payments. It’s ability to sell its programmes on DVD also indicates the quality of its output. People might queue for a copy of “The Office” but they’re rarely camping out overnight to get their hands on “Come Dine With Me” are they?

Culturally, the BBC is the real crown jewels in this country, giving us a standing in the world that any other country would love to have. When you go online, do you ever consult any foreign news agencies for information? Few Brits do. But people all over the world turn to the BBC for their information because they trust it. They do not turn to Sky or to Fox. And there’s the nub of it all. Payback time.

Because after throwing the weight of his newspapers behind the neo-Conservatives, Mr Murdoch wants his pound of flesh. He wants the BBC brought to its knees, he wants them to have less and less money for programming, less to spend on sports. He wants the list of protected free to air sports events to disappear so that he can own Wimbledon, the FA Cup Final, the World Cup, the lot.

As Sky subscriber numbers stubbornly refuse to go up, as the market has been opened up to other competitors to carry his products – another reason for turning on the previous government – Murdoch needs another magic bullet like the Premier League, the institution that saved him from bankruptcy. More sport is it, coupled with a collapse in the BBC’s other core programming so that whatever Godawful garbage he shovels out on his countless channels, there will be no alternative.

More important, if the BBC’s ability to scrutinise the news is compromised, how much easier it will be for him and his lackeys in Downing Street to do whatever they like without being questioned? They’re already trying to decide who is allowed to go on “Question Time”, next they’ll be vetting the questioners, and presumably only going on Sky. A win-win for Murdoch and the government.

So, the Murdoch empire or the BBC, the choice is yours. The BBC costs you just under 40p a day, for which you get four TV channels, the BBC online network, the national and local radio stations, and a rare reason to be proud of this country.

Or you can get The Times, a shadow of its once impressive self, online, at an annual cost of just under 29p a day. How many radio stations and TV channels does it also provide for that subscription? That’ll be none. Precisely the amount of intelligent comment we’ll have left in this country if Slang-Rhyming is allowed to emasculate the BBC.

He should have stuck to yoghurt.

Follow the money

This deficit business. Don’t you think it’s weird that we have one, yet so do the French, the Spanish, the Germans, the Americans, the Italians, the Irish, the Greeks, and most of the rest of the western world, in spite of the fact that we’ve all had governments of differing philosophies, in power for different lengths of time and with differing attitudes towards public spending and taxation?

Given Cameroon and the tea boy keep insisting upon the fact that the reason we’re in the mess we are was because of Labour’s profligate spending, surely those nations that didn’t have Labour in charge and had specifically right wing governments – eight years of Bush the baboon for instance – and hardly any public sector on which to lavish fortunes should be in infinitely better shape?

And yet they’re not. As I say, odd.

Yet not. Because the reason we’re all in the mess together was because of the banks. Remember a couple of years back when they went into meltdown and then held a gun to the head of the world’s economies, saying that if you let us die, we take you down as well? That’s where the deficit came from, because of the money that had to be pumped into failed institutions, that had to be injected into otherwise crippled economies, that had to be made available to ensure liquidity.

Remember in this country the way we had to give the kiss of life to Northern Rock and the rest, a process that was repeated around the globe? That’s where our deficit came from, and where the rest of it came from.

So why then are we getting rid it of by slashing public spending, by following a policy that will see children going to schools that are falling down around them, that has pensioners having to find £8billion over the coming years thanks to the VAT increase, that will see the NHS privatised?

Why aren’t we taking back the money – our money – from the banks? Banking is bizarrely, embarrassingly, one of the few growth sectors in this economy. Bonuses are beginning to come back for those at the top end – not the normal workers of course - profits are being made, and it’s like nothing ever happened.

What about taxing all bank profits and bank bonuses at 100% until the deficit is recouped? After all, Barclays, for instance, made profits of £1.8bn in the first quarter of 2010. At that rate, wouldn’t take us that long to get the bulk of it back would it? Never mind the NatWest sending volunteers out to paint cricket pitches green or whatever those idiots are doing in the adverts, give us our bloody money back. And then we might be able to keep hospitals open, rather than selling them off.

It’s pretty obvious really, I can’t think why it is that Saint Vince Cableanduseless hasn’t thought of it. Unless the government has a specific agenda that it wants to push under cover of the “crisis”. And they’re doing it well, because the public appears to be feeling virtuous that they’re helping to get the nation’s finances back in order. As Goebbels demonstrated, there is nothing so successful in propaganda terms as the big lie, and as a former - and current - PR man, Cameroon knows that better than anyone.

The biggest lie sits beneath the surface, the idea that the cuts are for the greater good. They’re not. They’re to change the face of this country, to smash the state’s role in the economy and in so doing ultimately create a situation where the need for tax revenues will be massively reduced.

The end game here is to bring the top rate down, perhaps as far as 30%, and who gives a damn if the schools and the hospitals are crap. Those at the top end can simply opt out and use their hugely increased pay packets to go private. Won’t we all feel virtuous then, when we’ve washed away a century of moving towards greater equality, an equality which is easy to give away, but much harder to recapture.

Where does that highway go to?

I was interested to hear Dick Clameron calling for the public to offer solutions to reducing the deficit on Thursday during his visit to a children’s hospital – presumably he was there because they’re the next generation whose vote he has any hope of getting in the distant future, since they’ll be the only group with no memory of the Pinnochic tendencies revealed since the election.


While this might be the shortest time within which any government has ever run out of ideas, and certainly the first time one has admitted it, let’s welcome this once in a lifetime – this is not my beautiful government – opportunity to help shape the future. They’re especially keen on telling us what we can do to help, so in a spirit of mutual scales from the eyes spring cleaning, let us the people turn our eyes towards what they can do for us.


So let us drag the Westminster gang away from London. Let’s establish a parliament in a disused factory in Birmingham – there’s going to be plenty of them in the next few months. After all, if a change of use for business premises is good enough for a free school, it’s good enough for the government. With plenty of office space going spare in the area too, it’ll be far cheaper than paying for prime plots of land in Westminster.


With the MPs congregated in the midlands, more will be in closer proximity to their constituencies, getting rid of the need for a second home. Expenses for second homes will of course be abolished anyway – after all, it’s only housing benefit by another name, and we all know how disgusting housing benefit is don’t we? In addition, we’ll abolish all MP expenses, because the public finances can’t afford to pay them.
In the same vein, both Downing Street and Chequers will be sold off, or used as tourist attractions, because we all know how the Prime Minister loves to don a hairshirt in the hothouse glare of publicity. It’s a public school thing. He’ll move into a maisonette in Chelmsley Wood.


Those MPs who do need to rent accommodation in Birmingham at their own expense will find plenty of opportunities to move into sink estates, paying low rents as they live six or eight to a house, as those living high on the hog of welfare benefits so often do. A few of them might even be encouraged to indulge in local community activities such as instigating teenage pregnancies in order to secure the one remaining universal benefit in order to help make ends meet.


Radically, MPs will also only be allowed to take one public sector salary, and that will be the salary for being an MP. No ministerial salaries. All MPs will get the same salary because we are all in it together. We know public sector pay is destroying the country, so they will be only too glad to help in this fashion.


With Westminster empty, we will open up the Lords and the Commons as a museum – no great change with the Lords of course. Tourists will flock to the historic site, thus bring in loads of money to the country’s battered economy. Alternatively, we can use them as a hostel for some of the thousands who will be made homeless under the new housing benefit system. After all, we’re all in it together.