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 Who Runs Britain Vote 2005
Who runs Britain? That’s the question we’re asking in this year’s Today Programme Christmas poll. We’ve invited three ‘bloggers’ to follow the arguments. Read their biographies.
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Thursday 29th December: JUDY
On Saturday 24th December , the Today Programme series on Who Runs Britain came up with its list of ten nominations , selected, they said, by a group of eminently wise people, including Dame Stella Rimmington , former head of MI5 , Will Hutton , Bill Morris , Kevin Marsh , editor of th! e Today Programme, and Dr James Sanders. Eminently wise they may be, but it's worth noting from the links I've offered that both Will Hutton and Bill Morris represent a continuation of the Iraq Derangement Syndrome which I blogged about earlier this week, with their views on supposed US imperialism and rapaciousness and the supposed evil of the invasion of Iraq.
It was frustrating listening to the sound clip of the nominations, because it was completely unclear to me how their selection was arrived at, and what the actual strengths and ranges of the nominations were.
It was quite bizarre looking at the actual list of ten nominations, and trying to decide how these had been arrived at. For example, how could anyone in possession of their sanity seriously believe that Shami Chakrabarti, the director of the civil liberties pressure grou! p Liberty runs Britain? After all, if she did, we would certainly not be on our way to having identity cards, and I very much doubt Blair would still be Prime Minister.
If the British people were running Britain, then we would probably still have capital punishment, and we would now have the more draconian anti-terrorist legislation that was voted down by the combined opposition of the House of Commons and the House of Lords earlier this year.
Then of course, there's Terry Leahy, chief executive of Tesco's. Ummm. If he were running Britain, how come Tesco's got over-ruled on its attempt to buy up the Safeways supermarket chain, that ultimately went to the Leeds-based Morrison's chain? And how exactly does Terry Leahy influence the running of Britain's nuclear deterrent, of MI6, of anti-terrorist operations? And how exactly did Tesco's influence the setting up of the Hutton inquiry, or the most recent judiciary appointments?
My favourite for absurd suggestions is that Google runs Britain (though actually I have to confess that I think it might be a more likely contender than Shami Chakraborti). This seems to me to confuse a particular tool (with a particularly interesting and complex ability to influence the choice of information sources) with the much more complex question of executive power in a modern nation state. Again, we only have to ask ourselves how exactly Google can be proved to have influenced British decision making about the EU constitution, involvement in the Euro or the use of identity cards to see how ludicrous this suggestion is. I would welcome any evidence from anyone that Google has influenced any government policy making anywhere.
Which leaves us with some more obviously usual suspects. I've already touched on the Today Programme's anti Rupert Murdoch agenda here . And I also featured Amanda Platell delivering a crushing rebuttal of the argument that he runs Britain by her references to the myriad policies that Rupert Murdoch has obviously not been able to get the British government to accept.
Then we have Jose Manuel Barroso, President of the EU Commission. That's the supposedly all powerful superstate which somehow seems to have been unable to persuade the UK either to sign up to the proposed EU Constitution or the Euro. Clearly obvious that he runs Britain, isn't it?
Which leaves Gordon Brown, Tony Blair and Sir Gus O'Donnell, head of the Cabinet Office and the Civil Service. Well, if Gordon Brown hasn't so far been able to persuade Tony Blair to resign and let him take over the post of Prime Minister, which he so obvious! ly longs for, how can he be running Britain. And unless we argue that Tony Blair is his catspaw, it's rather difficult to see how Brown has been driving the new agenda on schools, the particular Blairist agenda on modernization and the diminshed role of the unions which his own speeches do not entirely chime in with... Or is it all just a clever Brownist ploy to throw us off the scent?
Sir Gus O'Donnell is an interesting candidate, for indeed the setter and keeper of Cabinet agendas and the meetings of the Permanent Secretaries who run the ministries holds a powerful position. Does he run Britain? It's hard to argue that any one individual does. For even if his writ controlled every single government ministry, it would hardly account for the decisions being made by City institutions, major corporations and even the supermarkets.
After all, we still remember Black Wednesday, some thirteen years ago, when the international money markets, and the! City dealers, ran the UK treasury into the ground and forced a retreat from the then European Exchange Rate Mechanism.
Sir Gus O'Donnell is indeed in charge of the administration of the government machine, and has a mighty influence through that on British policy making. But of course Britain regularly has to make major shifts and changes which have been imposed by majority votes in the EU Council, or by the actions of world oil markets, or even international non-governmental organizations, such as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trades, or the European Court of Human Rights.
Tony Blair? It's doubtful if he actually presides over as many direct decisions affecting the running of Britain as Sir Gus O'Donnell does. On the other hand, he does lead the political direction of the country, from which Sir Gus takes his cue. He presides over the Cabinet and seems to have done so with some success, seeing off or isolating supposedly powerful and brilliant would be adversaries like the late Robin Cook. His imminent or actual decline and fall from power is forever being announced by the BBC or so many of the experts it likes to invite onto the Today Programme, like Linda Colley, whose views on this score I highlighted here.
My daughter has often felt pessimistic about the political choices she's been presented with in the two years since she's had the right to vote. Though I'm pleased to say that she did force herself to vote at the last election. She usually mutters none of the above when asked what her choice of political party would be from those on her voting list.
I have a similar feeling about the Today Who Runs Britain poll. Because I don't think any one person or even any one government control centre runs a complex nation state with an international currency and trading role, and immensely complex patterns of international political and business alliances. However, if a gun were held to my head, I would vote for Tony Blair, because he has so manifestly been decisive in holding and setting directions against apparently overwhelming opposition both from his own party and from traditional power bases.
The weird thing is that in saying this, it seems I find myself in agreement with George Galloway, who was selected by the Today Programme to give his view (and why is this MP for a party with one seat in the House of Commons so regularly selected to air his off the wall opinions on the Today Programme?).
Let's see how the punters vote. I'll be blogging on that on 2nd January.
Tuesday 20 December: JUDY
Yesterday was meant to be the day we Today Programme bloggers got to broadcast live as part of the Who Runs Britain? poll series it's been running at the end of each day.
Let's just say, shall we, that this has proved to be a series still in a stage of fluidity and development. Probably happens to every programme, but we rarely realise it.
So we knew before we got whisked off to the studio this morning that we weren't going to live broadcast after all. They were going to record the interview and use it at some time unspecified between now and Friday. Will they broadcast it in the end? Maybe, if some big news story doesn't sweep everything else out of the way before it.
Visiting the BBC Television Centre, which I've often driven by in my car, was curiously like my last visit to the Department for Education and Science.
 
There's this colossal building with a reception area which is a mixture of charm and pretentiousness. I mean, how about calling the reception area of this massive production bureaucracy by this name?
Yup, those are some tasteful and understated Christmas lights. That should comfort all those who feel that the BBC is at the heart of a conspiracy to stamp out the core Christian identity of the UK. But maybe it's just a bit of subversive initiative by the floor staff who haven't bothered to get it checked out with their equality officers?
The amusing thing was that this "Stage Door" affectation seemed to be unknown to the conscientious Today Programme staffer whose job it was to meet me and take me up to the studio. My mobile phone rang as I sat by the Stage Door notice. It was the staffer. We had this hilarious conversation, in which, in response to her asking where I was, I said that I was sitting in front of the Stage Door notice in the front reception area of the building. What Stage Door? she said. Can you describe where you are? So I described the foyer and what was in it, and I explained that it was where all the BBC cars stopped and deposited their visitors. This didn't immediately do the trick. Are you inside or outside, she asked? Good question.
So when I got to the hospitality area (practically all the food had gone), there was Tim Ireland. Oliver Kamm wasn't able to make it in the first place. The best bit of waiting was Tim showing me his favourite Daily Mail type headline of the day. Only I can't remember if it was really the Daily Express or the Daily Mail. Vintage examples of the populist media agenda scare themes (gays! gay marriages! asylum seekers! bogus asylum seekers! gay bogus asylum seekers flood the country and destroy marriage!)
I love it. Maybe I should look more carefully at those squeegee screen cleaners who still hand around waiting to pounce on cars stopping for the lights to change at Bounds Green on the North Circ. Will they all start signing up for fake gay partnership ceremonies? And why would they choose those rather than fake marriages?
So when we got round to the interview, it was all very civilised. We were interviewed by Caroline Quinn, one of the Today programme anchor staff. What kept coming across was how conservative the Today programme's audience is, given the reputation it has for being radical and setting a well left of centre agenda. They describe their audience as being great letter writers of what sounds like rather a pedantic type. They complain about the programme's encouragement of listeners to visit their web site.
But they're easy to send up. They're actually fairly typical, particularly of our middle class intelligentsia of a certain age. Last time I was at the DfES, the most energetic and outward looking of the HMIs said to me, why on earth would you want to keep a blog? I got to share a three hour train journey a couple of months back with a very lively young high-flying DfES head of department, responsible for developing policy in a cutting edge sector of the ministry, with a big stake in promoting the use of information technology in schools. She knew about blogs, but had never visited one, and didn't know what what they could be used for. Well it was a three hour train journey....
And that all reminds me of my experiences of the seventies, when I was the only academic I knew at my university who had a colour television. But almost all the working class people I knew had them! The same thing happened when video cassette recorders came out. Then when DVD players came out. And then with DVD recorders. I still find that huge numbers of schools don't have DVD players or recorders. And my feeling is that far more working class people have big plasma TV screens than middle class intellectuals, even when the latter have the salaries to afford them.
Not that I think that blogging is more popular with working class than middle class people. Most of the bloggers I know of are in their mid twenties to late thirties; they're university educated, more often than not from elite schools and universities, and they're often in media related jobs, sometimes working in sectors that didn't exist ten years ago. I know personally of only one blogger of around my age; the legendary Norm. The women involved in blogging I know of are mostly younger than the men, and there are far fewer of them.
Most of the people who are my friends have no interest at all in blogging. Which has its advantages. They're not particularly interested in looking over my shoulder to see if I write about them. When I do mention my blog, they listen very politely and express goodwill, in much the same way they might do if I started talking about a collection of cheese labels.
Ten years ago, I knew very few academics and trainers who worked as independent consultants. My own university seemed to be eternally unchangeable, and took about three years to make the simplest decision. One day I visited a little enclave on the campus which was hired out by a consulting outsourcing company which was involved in taking on contracts to inspect schools. It was something I was interested in. There were three large rooms, two men who were running the company and about six secretaries. One of the men talked affably about the various contracts they were running, and the work they were doing.
At that time, they were holding contracts for something like seventy percent of the inspections in primary and secondary schools. Then they were running the careers advice service for several counties, having won the contracts off the local authority providers who had thought of them as their eternal right. And they were running virtually entire education services for various small ex UK colonies in south east Asia.
The man told me the company was only a few years old, but their annual turnover was fifty million pounds a year. I knew that thet the turnover of the entire university, with its Royal Charter, its thousands of staff, sprawling buildings and eternal shortages, was forty eight million pounds a year. That revelation made me determined to change the way I worked, and to get out of being a member of an institution that saw itself as having an eternally unassailable place in the world.
I had something like those feelings yesterday when I contemplated the huge size of the BBC complex, the vast hordes of staff, the mega-budget sustained by the compulsory tax of the UK licence fee of £126 per household. All of which is running six or eight TV channels and seven or eight national radio services. But it's as big as the DfES which is responsible for thirty thousand schools, the colleges and the universities. Any private TV or radio production company you come across is small and lean.
Blogging is only just on the BBC's horizon. It is something they are quite interested in and ask questions about. They have a pretend version of it on their web sites. Meanwhile, there's this astonishing world wide exchanging and networking going on, high profile journalists, would be and published writers and people who sit up in the early hours in their pyjamas, taking apart the day's news stories. I draw my own conclusions.!
And I'll say more about the interview when they broadcast it. Or if they don't, I'll write about it by the weekend.
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