Letter to Jeremy Hunt, Culture Secretary

Dear Mr. Hunt,

Rupert Murdoch is a man who will change his citizenship to gain a business advantage - not a toehold, as an immigrant might do, but a dominant position.  He will kowtow to Chinese suppression of freedom to gain market share in Asia.

Now he wants to take full ownership of BSkyB - News Corporation is a large entity, but it is still a very personal fiefdom - and is wondering how much he will have to give for that.

He has come up with a proposal to separate himself formally from Sky News, thinking that this is the kind of small price that the UK will be satisfied with, and you have recognised that the letter of the contract does offer  some kind of protection.

This is a small price to pay.  UK media law does not allow TV news organisations to take positions, so the provision of a respectable news service - a necessary commitment in the early days to gain Sky's general position and licensing - can be supported by means of an arms-length body.

He would not accept the same separation from the Times or the Sun.

The current move to take over the whole of BSkyB may not - on the face of it - constitute an increase in his control of British media outlets.  My argument is that his control is already too great.

The current scandal of phone-hacking and its latest development with the Milly Dowler case is the first time Mr Murdoch has shown any sign of vulnerability.  So far he has been beyond any but the minor criticism of the courtiers in the PPC - the weight of News Corporation silences or sits upon business and political attacks.

I understand that you have been painted into a legal corner concerning the grounds on which you could refuse the current application, but I cannot believe that it is impossible to stop the process in the light of new developments.

A news organisation which apparently behaves with impunity while flouting the law should give you pause.  I am amazed that they have not already started briefing against other papers - the fact that they have not suggests to me that News International's culpability is so massive that they dare not.

Mr Murdoch's control over the British media is already disproportionate in percentage terms, but the major factor is the cold weight of control - not just power, but deadening influence.

A judge-led inquiry into hacking and its relationships with police and politics (just to begin with) should be established immediately.  And an organisation which is under such scrutiny should not complain if other processes that it is involved with are halted.

Ed Wilson

Electoral geeks are among the worst, but...

Why will I vote Yes to the Alternative Vote system?  For my own reasons.

1. We should establish the principle that things like this can change.  It would be good for us.
2. AV is a bit better than first-past-the-post at reflecting voter intentions.

But it's only a bit better. Some people, including me, would prefer a more proportional system, but my main objection is that both AV and the common forms of proportional representation depend on the idea that the least popular candidates are eliminated one by one until someone crosses a numerical threshold and gets elected.

That means that the second choices of the people who vote for the least popular candidates are taken into account when most people's other choices are ignored. That is the only logical justification I can think of for the No campaign's assertion that AV helps extremists - the BNP will be eliminated, but its supporters may have their votes counted again and again.

So my own geekish proposal is that every choice expressed by every voter should be taken into account right from the start:

• a first choice vote counts as 1
• a second choice vote counts as 1/2
• a third choice vote counts as 1/3
• etc

If there are four candidates, and you use all your choices, ranking them 1, 2, 3, 4, then you have 1 + 1/2 + 1/3 + 1/4 votes. Candidates get whole votes, half votes, etc and they are all added up, and the person with the highest total wins. It doesn't have to cross a notional 50% mark, just come top when everybody's choices have been taken into account.

Have I woken the sleeping geek within you?

You lot out there frighten me

Pollsters announce (or rather they occasionally let slip) that a large proportion of the adult population of the UK don't know that a referendum is to be held to decide on voting systems  for general elections.  Of those who do know, a large proportion don't intend to vote and another large proportion (not necessarily the same people) don't know how the Alternative Vote system works.

Rather than go off in a middle-class strop about the stupidity of the masses and "if they can't be bothered to understand they shouldn't even have the vote"...

I have some idea of how stupid I am, and who among us has never voted on something we don't fully understand?

...I will simply make a few observations.

• Some people somehow contrive to be unaware of even the headlines of current news.
• To some people, politics is somewhere between a criminal racket and a game which is of no interest to them.

Put like that, it's easy to understand.  I have no idea what's going on in the world of reality television and I consider investment banking to be somewhere between a criminal racket and a game which is of no interest to me.  My interests are obviously the right ones and other people's are simply depressing, but I have no right to criticise.

Trident roadblocked - just about

Every now and then the Defence Minister Liam Fox comes out with a declaration that the Trident project is still alive. Today he announced the spending of a whole £25 million!

And yet the work is still formally suspended, in that the final go-ahead (the "main gate" decision - why does the military-industrial complex come up with such stupid phrases, and why do doe-eyed politicians go along with them?) has been postponed until after the next election.

I hold out no great hope, because...

• Conservative and Labour are signed up to the "independent nuclear deterrent" (Jeremy Corbyn and a few other honourable exceptions notwithstanding).
• Governments since the 40s have spent and spent on these phallic beasts whatever they declare in public.
• Whatever the official status of the accounting stream (and Mr Corbyn asked an interesting parliamentary question on that subject today, which may have some mileage given the coalition's declared commitment to "transparency"), somehow nukes always find the money to keep going - rather like MI5.

It's worth noting that the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston is managed by Lockheed Martin (that fine not-British company that's running our census as well), Jacobs Engineering Group (another US corporation, not well known, looks like a mini-Halliburton) and Serco (fairly British, but originally a subsidiary of the Radio Corporation of America). That's the "independent nuclear deterrent" for you!

The fact remains, however, that the Lib Dems have managed (with the fortuitous support of a painfully diminished defence budget) to get the commitment to major expenditure delayed. They sit there not saying anything - I fully expect to see Nick Harvey studying the ceiling and whistling on the front bench. Clutching at straws, certainly, hoping that something will turn up, but it's worth having that slight chance.

The Conservatives keep sending me letters

...but then so do the LibDems.  They seem to have lumped together all their lists of anybody who contacted either of them at any point during the election (like Obama without the brain) and they desperately send out scattergun emails, though they do have different formats and different messages.  Know the person who wants you to think he's your friend, at least as well as your enemy.

This is a lie!

Andrew Lansley claims to be banning below-cost selling of alcoholic drinks.  This is simply not true.

The limit of duty plus VAT takes no account of the costs of manufacture, distribution, storage and selling and therefore allows alcohol to be sold at a price below cost.

Tuition fees? Who pays?

Opponents of the coalition government scream that tuition fees have been trebled, and "good" universities do little to disabuse them. A new generation is politicised - in an initially scattergun/scatterbrained direction - and Aaron Porter is kidnapped/kettled by the people he was elected to represent. Another day on the political front line.

First the good bits...

• the coalition government is piling more resources into further education
• the coalition government is including part-time students in the loans/grants scheme, where before they really did have to pay up-front
• given where they start from, the new loan repayment scheme is much "fairer" than what it follows (it doesn't change anything for those who are already facing a levy when they get to £15k pa)
• that's about it, though it isn't nothing

Now the bad bits...

• withdrawing most, or all, government funding from university teaching is a powerfully symbolic move which I would also label despicable
• expecting a large proportion of young people - from whatever background - to start their working lives with a sizeable loan hanging over them goes against every change we need to make in our thinking about money
• hey kid, it's OK to have a loan, it's OK that you never had to prove you could pay it back, and - you know what's best about this? - most of you won't have to!

I'm laughing all the way to hell.

Sex offenders get up the nose

The UK Supreme Court has decreed that sex offenders should have the right to seek to be removed from the sexual offenders' register, the right to demonstrate that they have changed. Parliament - all three main front benches - strutted its opposition to the idea. I have no doubt that the Sun's presses are melting with indignation as I write.

This is a difficult subject, but the establishment reaction to it is predictably ridiculous. The decision was that there should be a right to "seek" a change, not to expect one. The convicted offender would have to demonstrate a change.  The last figures I saw suggested that only a third of convicted sex offenders actually re-offend.  How is this different from an application for parole?

From observation of actual cases and from a lot of reading, my conclusion is that there is a spectrum here. A "paedophile" is someone who feels sexual attraction to inappropriately young people (how young is defined differently by various groups).  Not all "paedophiles" actually do anything about it, and not all of those that do repeat the offence.

Some "paedophiles" are extremely nasty and extremely dangerous.  Some are not so bad.  And some people on the sex offenders register were sixteen-year-old boys caught having sex with their fifteen-year-old girlfriends. I've given up on the tabloids, but it's Parliament's job to think carefully about things like this.

The ratchet effect in politics

As a citizen of the UK it is far too easy to...

1. lay into the Conservatives for their ideological obsession with privatisation
2. support the aims and some of the methods of the coalition because you are (still, just about) a LibDem
3. lay into public bodies because of your own experience
4. suspect private bodies for the same reason
5. lay into the Labour party for just carrying on Thatcher's work

... but (as I once delighted in reminding a Conservative MP twice my age) life isn't that simple.

One of the main strands of coalition thinking is to offer the opportunity to deliver public services to "any willing provider". As well as opening up the profit pot for the United Healths, Bupas, Capitas and Sercos of this world, much is made of the idea that people currently working in the public sector will set up cooperatives to do what they know so well, but do it better.

The health sector is perhaps the biggest and most symbolic example of this move, but there are also free schools (inspired by local groups of parents and teachers they say, but also an opportunity for faith groups to spread their influence, and in many cases managed by private companies - see the names above), and others.

Many arguments can be had here, but the thing that worries me tonight is - cruel cliche - the slippery slope. Once you open up a public service to competition (started a long time before the current government and promoted energetically by Labour), it is hard to imagine that change being reversed. When the market has its claws in, and European competition law is the regime, is there really more than one possible direction of travel?

What happens when the group of parents who started the free school breaks up - people move on, Toby Young's kids get their A-levels? What happens when one of the driving individuals who makes your health co-op sing leaves to look after a baby?

A new parent, with children of the right age, a new consultant may step up and everything may carry on beautifully. But if the recruit is not there the critical mass may be lost, and if the school or the service has worked well so far, somebody has to decide how to support and maintain it. A new set of parents has not come forward, a new co-operative is hardly likely to spring up in the same area and the same speciality, so who is left to do the job?

A big organisation, probably, which can easily reallocate resources to take on a new responsibility. The NHS, the Department for Education... why not? Because once these services are out in the free market world it is perhaps even illegal to bring them back in. Again, the names above, these organisations will suffer no such restrictions.

I put it no more strongly than to ask: is this really what we want?

Faith restored

I was beginning to think that everything had really changed, that politicians were going answer the questions asked of them. However little I might agree with their policies, the courtesy and intelligence shown by cabinet ministers were winning me over to the "new politics".

And then Eric Pickles appears on the BBC and everything is back to normal - questions evaded, contrary evidence scorned, questions answered that were never asked, the radio shouted at. It doesn't make me feel any better.

Awaiting the deluge (2)

So Cameron's speech is over and we are really not much further on. It's still the softening-up process and probably will be until the budget, though Clegg's message from yesterday was included. Tomorrow's instalment is a "framework" for the budget and spending review process.

All the figures he used (and there were few) could have been worked out (and often were) before the election, so the judgement that the situation is worse than anybody thought is as yet not demonstrated.

Once the budget has specified the sums available it will be up to us - all of us - to contribute to the debate about what should be spent on what, what should not be done at all, etc. He gave no idea of how this might be achieved - some sort of online process I assume - or how to convince people that they have actually been listened to.

Awaiting the deluge

Yesterday they tried to soften us up in the papers - Cameron all doom and gloom, Clegg not denying the scale of the cuts but promising no return to the sink-or-swim policies of the 80s. Keeping his members onside, or a gloss on the policy? "Progressive cuts" sounds incredible, but "intelligent cuts" may actually be the fall-back position.

So today comes Cameron's speech. The cuts will change the British way of life. There is talk of following the Canadian method of 20% across-the-board reductions. Then it is explained that the Canadians used a reform minister to rethink what government should do, and there is mention of public consultation so that we too are involved/implicated in the infliction of pain.