POLITICS: Television is the real problem
And there's always time to turn the clock back
Andrew Marr has opinions
You could have guessed it: parliamentary broadcasting in this country is a Gemini. All the mercurial duality is there with this awful innovation from 15 years back. As, however, ERO, I am told, exists chiefly to point up vice, instead of simply celebrating virtue, I suppose I’d better tell you what’s wrong with the House of Commons on TV. Simply this: unless you are a.) a lunatic & b.) in possession of non-terrestrial television receiving equipment, parliament is never on television. Sure there’s a little programme on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday mornings fronted by Andrew Neil, but this is broadcasting of parliament reduced to its lowest volume of airtime since cameras were allowed into the chamber of the house. And even worse, I will argue, what coverage there is, is more of that idiot blonde woman who used to do the photo-copying for Charlie Kennedy than proper parliamentary politics. To be precise: we are subject to far more journalists spouting on than we ever are to members of parliament-in-parliament. This is something all Tories should be opposed to [put that at the end of all opening pars — Ed.].
Take just this evening’s handling of the news, such as it is, that Gordon Brown has successfully got the Prime Minister to, well, read the opinion polls. And so there’s not going to be any vote on the Euro. Because such a vote would be lost by the government. Which would be bad for the government. Now not all news outlets can have ERO’s famed precision, but how did the ‘best’ bits of the Beeb go about it? Take Mr Paxman, please, do: it was the normal arrogant barracking of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, when finally (some 15 minutes into the broadcast) they deigned to let Mr Brown appear on air. Various fiddling points about the BBC’s partisan naughtiness could be tediously made here, for example, how come it was just Jezza vs Gordo in a pre-record? Under John Major’s hapless regime, when government ministers and their press officers attempted to get the right to go on and not have to share the stage with their opposition shadows, the BBC, with Newsnight to the fore, successfully threatened to empty chair them. Seemingly, though, Labour, for the full 6 years they have been in power, have been able to pull this trick off (never sharing a studio ‘discussion’ concurrently with shadow spokesmen, save on programmes like Question Time).
In this season of anniversaries, we should ask ourselves: have two centuries of the parliamentary lobby turned out to be a good thing for the higher constitutional lifeform which this political parasite feeds off? The answer is in the question. No is the answer. But only in as much that the print media gave way to the broadcast, which uniquely affected to be the simulacrum of the real thing: for that’s television’s pretension and delusion. TV has defeated parliamentary democracy in Britain by pretending to people and politicians alike that it could make a better job of it, parliamentary democracy, than our democratic parliament itself could.
If ever there was a time to turn off the electricity and reject modernity, this — the broadcasting of the House of Commons — is it.
Never mind, quis custodiet ipsos custodes — who watches Newsnight?
A few years ago, Mr. Jeremy Paxman, Newsnight anchor, sometime Cambridge trot, and long-ago applicant to be editor of The New Statesman, contributed a diary to The Spectator. In it he regretted his having to go that week to the annual Labour conference. Although unlettered Bournemouth — very few second hand bookshops, apparently — was objectionable enough, real sorrow was induced in Mr. Paxman by his participation thereby in a 'fraud'. The fraud being the fourth estate's descent on various unlovely English seaside resorts, on the, sadly erroneous, pretext that 'political conferences matter'.
Since this Spectator item was perhaps the most significant contribution to the understanding of modern British politics in the last 43 years, it's worth very carefully explaining what little about it was unimportant. And that was its surface text. Namely Mr. Paxman's proposition that the 'extensive coverage' the media affords party conferences is as a result of the untrue 'belief that [they] matter'. This statement in itself doesn't matter; after all Mr. Paxman neglected to explain whose the false belief was: did it attach to the public, or politicians, or to the press? No, what tells us more about the age we live in than anything else yet written are, his belief (made undeniable flesh by his presence by the sea) that the media gives 'gravel-to-gravel' coverage of the party conferences, and, the critical reaction there was to his comments.
To take the latter first: the print media reported what Jeremy Paxman wrote. Every broadsheet newspaper considered it 'news'. Print journalists being nothing if not realists, one can't fault them for this. For what Jeremy Paxman says is news. To see why this state of affairs amounts to the perversion of mass democracy by the mass media we should start with its attitude to the conferences.
In truth you have to go back a decade for anything like blanket coverage of party conferences. Then, and for the preceding thirty years, the media not only took an essentially uninterrupted live feed, they also transmitted it on 'majority' channels. If Tory wirepullers wanted to cut off the oxygen of publicity to say Enoch Powell, the most in the seventies they could do was schedule his speech to the hall for the moment when the BBC briefly went back to Jemina, Big Ted and the rest of the Play School claque. (Of whom only Hamble had anti-marketeer sympathies).
Today things are different and have been for some time. These changes took place long before the Tories and their policy-irrelevant conferences left centre stage — so guff about recent internal Labour constitutional changes legitimately diminishing the attention that should be paid to their conference won't cut it.
Instead of quaint flummery such as showing delegates debating, BBC 'coverage' now employs television's three staple ingredients: the celebrity spot; the vox pop; and punditry.
At a party conference, the 'celebrity' is the cabinet or shadow cabinet member. Their speech will, near as damn it, be covered in full, BBC2's prior obligations to celebrity pro-am ladies golf tournaments in Thailand permitting. Though these speeches invariably conclude a debate it would be old-fashioned to treat us to too many of the contributions made by ordinary party members.
At least not in such dated fora as debates in front of other party members. That's were element number two in our truncated coverage on a minority channel comes in. The BBC, or at least a researcher empowered by both her Media Studies 2:1 and 6 months previous experience booking guests for Kilroy, chooses as many as 3 delegates, makes them stand in a hallway, and for 2 precious minutes illuminates them. Frequently the vox pop interview doesn't even attend to the dreary issue at hand 'on the floor'. Why should the parties presume to set the agenda at their own conferences? Not when the BBC can instead select its own unrepresentative sample to debate, often at upwards of 30 seconds input per loveable 'grass roots' type, vastly more important topics such as, 'Michael Portillo's three-quarter length trousers: fashionable, or, compassionate Conservatism?'
Lastly there is punditry. This vice can be engaged in by either failed politicians (anyone who got a life peerage in the last ten years will do) or by members of the commentariat i.e. other, but wait for it, non-BBC journalists. Whoever the BBC selects they end up in a little glass box amusingly set overlooking the fusty old conference venue. This is the mission-to-explain in action: instead of letting us listen to conference delegates we are obliged to listen to other listeners. Well, we hope they're listening.
Labour's conferences have changed to the extent that they are now much more like Tory ones always were. Nothing however in either main party's set-up justifies the deliberate decision by BBC management to degrade their coverage. However in considering the relationship between politics and the broadcast media change is something that has to be faced up to. Politicians change all the time.
When Mr. Blair formed the first Labour cabinet since 1979 not a member had cabinet form. An unparalleled event this — even the very first Labour cabinet had members who had previously sat in Liberal ones. Yet, one body of men remains immune to whatever the electorate can throw at politics. Whether it's an unprecedented period in office for one party, or an electoral cataclysm beyond the bounds of living memory, what stays the same? With redolent family names to the fore, it's white, it's public school, it's largely Oxbridge, and it's not the House of Lords. It's the media elite.
Contemplate David Dimbleby. He has been parlaying on at least equal terms with cabinet members since Heath was in Downing St. Whom amongst those transient figures with electoral mandates who composed his government still has any connection to frontline politics? Or from Wilson's cabinet? or Callaghan's? or even Thatcher's? One would be the answer in the last case. Margaret Thatcher's last cabinet was in November 1990; just one member of it sits on the Tory front bench today: Michael Howard (and even he took a break). Whereas John Sargent of embassy fame, or Jon Snow of the red socks, or of course, Mr. Paxman — they've all gone on and on and on. Other than death or senility what could strip, for example, David Dimbleby of his undoubted power?
In truth, journalists like Dimbleby and Paxman are hugely more influential than mere cabinet ministers. Most obviously we can't get rid of them, there's no way to vote Jeremy Paxman out of office. He and his friends define their own standards of success. If television was actually part of a competitive market, Newsnight would soon cease to exist. Even in its cosily regulated (i.e. protected) environment, the 'people' (remember them?) vote with their viewing feet, and ignore it. You will note that this phenomena does not occur in Fleet Street. Print journalists and commentators live and die by the popular sword. The public (the electorate) are swift to, and more importantly can punish those print media outlets that pump the familiar, the lazy, the dull, and the pedagogic into their lives. Try and think of a way to chastise Jon Snow. Lower his ratings? How? What ratings? Indeed, the very absence of popular interest in either BBC2 or Channel Four’s news flagships is invariably adduced as proof positive of their virtue.
Snow and his patrons define reality and then impose it on everyone else, or at least upon those other members of the establishment who feel obliged to deal with them on their terms. If Snow or Paxman do something that offends a section of their captive audience all this means is that at an awards ceremony a year hence Paxman and Snow and their friends will gather round and give each other an award for being so 'challenging', 'for pushing forward the boundaries', for 'resisting censorship in whatever form it takes' etc.
This system would be defensible if it produced results, was efficient, was good for some idea of the corporate, the nation perhaps, or our spiritual or moral well-being. Or if it (to reverse tack completely away from essentially statist notions of that abstract concept, national efficiency) helped improve democracy, helped exalt the individual over the collective — as represented by politicians, frontmen for the state. But the media elite are this state's priestly caste: always exhorting of their politicians more spending, more regulation, more, more, more.
That they will tolerate no other faith is the lesson of what happened to parliament.
The Canadians told them not to
When first the Lords, and finally then the Commons gave into broadcasting this was the culmination of a long run media assault on legitimate, traditional and democratic politics. Throughout it was presented (and eventually terrified enough parliamentarians, knowing as they did that if the message was been forced on them, it was beamed further, to every elector in the country) as an affront to the media's conception of democracy that parliament remained untelevised. Countless lies were told, promises made with every intention of being broken. Politicians were told, and the public were told that the politicians had been told, that it was the public's right to see them, how could it possibly be democratic if it was hidden away out of sight? what are they trying to hide?
In keeping with precedent, the media-whipped politicians gave in, but not before their consciences had been assuaged with promises about what would be the nature of television's coverage of the Commons. It was to be extensive, it would, as was only but right lead the 'national debate'. Which in their shallow, self-regarding, uneducated and ahistorical way the broadcast media simply cannot believe happened before they were called into existence, 'how could there be "national" debate without "national TV"'?
To prove its devotion to the cause of democracy television news accorded Parliament its highest accolade, it gave it top item precedence. How long did this last? The timing can't be exact, but I would say that the interregnum of parliamentary politics, which started in 1989, had ended by at the latest 1993. All the prominence that was given to comings and goings inside parliament has been removed (in direct contradiction of the promises that the TV companies gave in order to bring this fearsome rival onto their chosen field of battle). Only Prime Minister's Questions goes out unedited, and next to nothing, in the little other time still given to parliament is live; though there's always just enough time to squeeze in some pundits. In the decade since 1993, the broadcast media have, by very old means, completed Westminster's destruction as the fount of British politics. Television has been more destructive of true parliamentary sovereignty that any Brussels directive.
Their strategy was the physical removal of the political players from parliament. This has progressively been done by the interview, by the news programme, by the televised studio-debate and by the morning radio (Today now stands in relation to parliament as the Gran Consiglio did to the Assembly in the first five years of fascist Italy: in name, in constitutional form, Westminster is the seat of authority, it is where decision and debates should take place, but in this function it has been displaced by its BBC rival — the BBC brooking no competition). This has reached its naturally, in the sense that a weed is natural, absurd end by the manner in which the BBC condescended to cover Parliament, when it did at all, for most of the preceding ten years.
Until the recent scheduling changes that accompanied parliament’s own change in its working hours, a set pattern had emerged for ‘parliamentary television’. The television companies did it from Westminster, in line of sight outside the Palace of Westminster, but hardly if ever from inside the actual chamber of the House of Commons. In particular, the BBC pretended to cover what was happening in the palace by transporting parliamentarians a few hundred yards up the road to studios at Millbank. The final, dreadful insult was in the name. When the British broadcasting-poll tax financed public service television network bothered to cover the houses of parliament, it did so for most of the last 15 years in the guise of a programme called Westminster with Nick Ross. Or whoever the lead presenter at the time happened to be. A clear sense of what's what there.
Andrew Neil’s quite good, chippy, but good
Having manoeuvred the old order into the trap, the ambush has well and truly been sprung these last four to five years. At every opportunity the BBC, through all its myriad outlets has injected the message into the mind of every viewing voter about the irrelevance of parliament in the new age, how the old parliamentary order had fallen out of favour with the people. Though somehow this message could never be fully reconciled with the images from, say, Italy, where a parliamentary system really had let the voters down during this period, and so they had accordingly swept it away entirely. But no matter for the media, for who's there to draw that discrepancy to the attention of the British electorate? How can that message get past the media filter? The message from the BBC, and from before Tony Blair came to power, was that the traditional parliamentary system no longer delivers results, and thus ‘new’ political structures and methods were required. And how did we know this essentially Blairite truth? Not through any systemic failure that we can reasonably observe of parliament, but because in its own invented national fora the media told us it was so, and got its cowed acolytes to say likewise.
In this climate who cannot forgive the media, Dimbleby, Paxman, Snow, Humphries and Dimbleby et al, their hauteur towards politicians? Why should they have to deny their true natures? They know they're on top, why not come out of the closet and say so, or at least, show so? It's little wonder that such heady responsibility can lead to extravagance. We can understand why they see themselves the way that they do: as the brave seekers after truth (and not the lazy ladleers of stodge); as the group whose gross, shameless and enervating privileges over the common man, er, sorry, as the group who precious bedrock of 'press freedom' guarantees liberty for all the rest of us; as the men who put the questions to the powerful that we can't! The assumption of this last role, the intense self-belief that almost convinces us that this is what Dimbleby, Paxman, Snow, Humphries, Dimbleby and Frost think they are doing, goes beyond satire. Can they really be so venal, so arrogant, so oblivious that they think they, in a democracy for God's sake, are the tribunes, nay, the heralds of the people? At a physiological level one would have to believe so, how else to account for their lack of doubt, their consistent sameness (in format, in tone, in agenda, in set design, in vocabulary, in everything), their intimations of infallibility?
You think I go too far? Think back then and email me when you can last remember a British broadcast media mea culpa about politics. You don't hear them and you don't see them, not because they don't make mistakes, but because there is no-one to 'hold them to account', that task they take such satisfaction in proclaiming that they have performed for us towards our politicians every week. Truly, who watches the watchmen?
How much, for instance, do the pananjurums of the media elite get paid? Why shouldn't we be told (especially in the case of the BBC)? Consider their behaviour towards and questions to the 'fat cats'. There is no free market in British TV (a handy comparison with the privatised utilities), bearing that in mind we can see that a BBC news anchor gets an inflated salary because of the artificial regime created by him for his benefit (i.e. that 'news' on the BBC is worthwhile, deserves its protected and privileged position, both in terms of scheduling and statute, and that it should be immune to the test of ratings). The difference between e.g. Mr. Paxman and the average 'fat cat' is that the latter is now accountable, he receives his income courtesy of the volatile free market, and many have suffered the consequences. Cedric Brown, a working class gas-fitter who through toil rose to become boss of British Gas was destroyed by a campaign largely waged by public employees, i.e. BBC journalists, whose salary scales, uniquely amongst state employees, are not published. Monstrously in a democracy, there is no accountability for this caste. Media elite salaries could be a matter of 'public discussion' (that hallowed instrument cited by the media for the purpose of ascertaining righteousness) if they were subjected to some good old fashioned investigative journalism . . . satire is left far behind.
Ironically at the very core of the broadcast mass media's successful plot to displace democratic politics is the way the state gives it the sacerdotal tag, 'politically neutral'. Something even the dimmest elector perceives the print media not to be, and thus he consumes that news source accordingly. This is the juju that gives the BBC its vast power over the trusting viewer-electors. The last place in modern British life where deference has not yet broken down is towards the BBC, and especially its news bulletins. Everything else is corroded by those bulletins, but not of course the BBC itself.
To reassert the primacy of politics requires either openly partisan television news broadcasts, or a return to the '14 day rule'. This was the inhibition which governed the broadcast media until it broke down during Suez. It prevented radio, and latterly television from addressing any political issue less than a fortnight 'cold'. Given the damage television has wrought to Britain in the last 40 odd years, its reintroduction would seem to be the only sensible thing left for us to do. If they'll let us.
No one in this country kills journalists
When radio first broadcast the proceedings of the House of Commons to an expectant nation, the first two men to speak were an opposition member putting a question to a government minister — the perfect synthesis of legitimacy and form in action, in other words. The replying minister was, ironically enough, Tony Benn. Ironic because, although he has since powerlessly become the doyen of the parliamentary romantics, in his pomp as a secretary of state, there can be little doubt that what Mr Benn wanted to do was to dissolve parliamentary government and replace it with industrial soviets. Tragically the man who asked the first question of the radio age was the martyred Ian Gow. A man who was murdered exactly because of his defence of parliament and its right and obligations, a man, as different as it is possible to imagine to a political journalist therefore. Yet radio, because of the hierarchical nature of the broadcast media, was not in itself fatal to the principle of parliamentary government in Britain. What did for that was television, all radio did was to serve as television’s wedge in.
Even MPs have recognised the problem with the broadcasting of parliament, though typically they have lacked the courage, or perhaps more accurately, the political resources with which to do anything about this state of affairs:
We therefore conclude that, in the terms that the televising of the House was originally conceived, the availability of coverage has failed, and continues to fail, the people of the United Kingdom by broadcasters cherry-picking the sound-bite and the confrontational. As far as televising Parliament is concerned, the broadcasters' duty is to educate and inform, not simply entertain.
The only way parliament is going to reassert itself in the life of the nation, and incidentally cast off the prime motor of excessive legislative activity (which is, the whinging way in which political-coverage-on-TV is currently configured), is by casting out the cameras. Keep the microphones by all means, but get rid of TV now. The immediate and long lasting upshot of this will be twofold. First, such exposition of politics as there then will be on television will necessarily require more and more detailed explanation by the journalists: the cribbed short-cuts of five second fillets from the House of Commons’ chamber will not be available to them. And to sanctify this presentation in the only way that television knows how, flesh and blood MPs will have to be produced to lay their hands on the broadcasters’ output. Again, this will be to the good. Second and more important still: perversely, without cameras, Parliament will heighten its mystique, will move the brand upmarket, and be of greater appeal to television, but only in a way that television cannot so readily corrupt. When television news had to report what went on inside the Commons, it made a notably better fist of it than it does now, when it supposedly ‘shows’ us what has happened inside the House.
Loathe as I am to say this as criticism, the only body that benefits from our present set-up is the executive, and honestly, they could do with a bit of opposition. Since the Tory party appears to be hors de combat for the moment, the House of Commons will have to do.
Kit Kildare, June 9, 2003 12:08 AM