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Where has all the good news gone?

Jun 11

Posted by The Burd in Holyrood, Media | 53 Comments

NewsstandIt’s been a bad week for bad news.

Ninety editorial jobs going at the Daily Record and Sunday Mail is a body blow to one of Scotland’s greatest newspaper institutions and will have struck terror into the hearts of every journalist in the land.

The scale of the losses, almost halving the editorial team and diminishing the whole staff by over a third, is breathtaking: every single one represents a human tragedy for the families involved.  No, they are not the first and won’t be the last people ever to lose their jobs but where are the alternatives?  Finding work in a diminishing media pond in Scotland will be tough.  Yet colleges and universities keep on churning out journalism and media studies graduates.  Hmm.

The attempt by the Trinity Media Group to spin this as good news is contemptuous.  Yes, there is an inevitability about the impact of advancing technology.  Online content systems reduce the need for scribblers and editors but – and I realise I’m stating the bleedin’ obvious here – they don’t seek out the news, research a good story, create a splash.  The more rationalisation in the Scottish press, the more ubiquitous and uniform copy we get as holes in pages are filled by agency releases.

I can’t help thinking – though of course I may be wide of the mark – that the Daily Record/Sunday Mail’s reduced circulation in recent years is more of an excuse rather than a cogent reason for these job losses.  The problems at Trinity Media Group are much more profound.  Bringing the largely standalone operation in Scotland under the Trinity wing and standardising it as a Trinity publication with shared content and features might make financial sense to the parent company but threatens to kill off Scotland’s national tabloid newspaper.

Charles McGhee opines eloquently about the impact of big proprietorial, often international businesses.  His article, and indeed allmediascotland’s leader on the issue, are excellent.  Others, of course, have used the bad news to have a pop, largely from their metropolitan boltholes, pointing out the many faultlines in the Scottish press environment and product.

I might even agree a little, believing firmly as I do, that the essential components of a flourishing press are to be free and fair, bold  and imaginative, not thirled to the political preferences nor personal foibles of owners and editors.

But the reasons for the decline of the national newspaper in Scotland are multifarious and complex.  For a whole host of reasons, people are buying fewer newspapers and that says as much about us, as a nation, as it does about the quality of the offering.

I will confess to reading the Daily Record/Sunday Mail only occasionally but I am a rare burd, being an avid newspapers and new magazine purchaser and reader.  I acknowledge and agree that there is a place in our world for tabloid newspapers and they have an existing and potential market and purpose.  How dull we would be if we all had the same tastes and views: newspapers should reflect and meet all the needs and interests of a population and its society.

Moreover, bloggers co-exist with media outlets and practitioners.  The media play a vital role at the heart of our communities and society, acting as the hub of a wheel that ensures information, news and comment reaches audiences.  Bloggers may like to think they are the new kids on the block, bypassing the media through modern technology to reach audiences directly but frankly that is delusionary.  The future might be social but our paltry viewing figures cannot hope to compete with the ability of mainstream media to reach mass audiences.  In fact, those that have become celebrity bloggers owe thanks to MSM professionals for their stardom:  many now have successful media careers as a result.

There is also a desperate irony behind the reason for my absence from these shores when the bad news broke.  The European Parliament office in the UK has been trying for years to interest journalists to do the visit I was on and find out more about writing news stories on Parliament business.  Few had the time or inclination to do so and often, the editorial line in the UK media, almost uniformly, is a negative one when it comes to European matters.  The Directorate-General for Communications has turned to citizen bloggers as a way of trying to influence the news agenda, neatly pointing up some of the embedded weaknesses in our current media set-up.

Ultimately, we need a vibrant, healthy media if we want a vibrant, healthy democracy.  To shine a light – as the Daily Record has done so effectively in years’ past – to expose, to praise, to promote and to defeat, to shame, to change.  If anyone doubts the power and role of the media in a free society, go check out PEN and Amnesty International.  Or just google *campaigns to free journalists*.

If ever there was a time to play a nationalist media card, this was it.  Scotland needs a diverse media mix in rude health.  It needs smaller ownership, not bigger, and more homegrown products to succeed.  More powers over all media regulation – to create an enabling framework – and full fiscal powers to create a tax regime that allows the flourishing of talent and creativity, and protects the very good products that we still have.  Two very recent examples include the Sunday Herald’s expose of the reach of organised crime gang culture into our lives and Scotland on Sunday’s partnership with Wikileaks.  As a nation, we punch above our media weight in so many ways.  But we can do more and better.

So, go on, cyber nats, do your worst.  Enough gloating about the job losses – very unedifying and immature by the way.  Don’t focus on the Daily Record’s current political slant as the source of all its ills – you’ll be wrong by the way – but put your invective to good use for once.

The thing about standing up for Scotland is that we stand up for all of it.  And it’s time to stand up for Scotland’s press.

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We’re all Social Democrats now?

Jun 10

Posted by Guest Blog in Ideology, Parties | 134 Comments

A guest post from Aidan Skinner – a Labour activist from Glasgow who considered the election through the prism of Monty Python.

At the (brutally frank and accurate) Refounding Labour Glasgow event last week it was remarked upon that, from a certain point of view, voters had the choice between two social democratic parties, one of which had a flag.

That may be the perception, and it’s one that Labour does need to address, but it’s not true. Not withstanding the fact that Labour is, of course, a democratic socialist party (says so on the tin back of the card in my wallet), the SNP aren’t a social democratic party, despite frequent claims to be. This, for me, was one of the more frustrating parts of the campaign. We indulged in vacuous Nat-bashing. We called them names, we insulted their ideology but we didn’t actually offer any critical analysis of their policies.

And there’s a lot to be critical of. As Neil Findlay pointed out in First Ministers Questions yesterday, they want to cut corporation tax even further than the Tories, and create a differential rate between Scotland and England. Now, the basic idea of cutting corporation tax itself is flawed. It will be ineffective because, like the broader Tory economic policy, it’s economically illiterate. Corporation tax is levied on profits, not revenue. The economic argument that a decrease in tax will increase investment ignores the reality that currently even potentially profitable projects are not being invested in. Across the EU there’s an effective, if unofficial, investment strike. Cutting corporation tax will, in all likelyhood, have no effect on investment in Scotland. At best it might encourage companies to bounce their profits through here, but that model clearly hasn’t done Ireland much long term good and, with the best will in the world, the Caymans have better weather.

It’s not even a progressive policy. It’s utterly, fundamentally, regressive. It will mean even deeper cuts to council services, to universities, to police and to schools than are already planned. Peter Robinson warned that it might be as much as £1.5bn, which is roughly the same amount as the entire cut from the block grant last year.

So the SNP are essentially proposing doubling the cuts to people’s services in order for companies’ taxes to be cut by a third. I don’t think that can be characterised as “social democratic” on any definition. We can see evidence of the disconnect between the SNP image as a social democratic party and their actual policy in other areas, such as the council tax freeze and free prescriptions which benefit the better off, but don’t do anything to help the least well off at all who didn’t pay those anyway.

Labour, on the other hand, went into the last Holyrood election proposing a new patient-centered, integrated National Care Service. We promised to implement the Living Wage, to look at non-profit forms of ownership of Scotrail when the franchise is up for renewal and to invest in the infrastructure necessary to support local communities generating their own renewable power and feeding the surplus into the national grid. There were hints of a new mode of production and enterprise based around co-operative principles.

We didn’t talk about them much, and we should have. People expect Scottish Labour to be a democratic socialist party. When I was knocking on doors and talking about our policies, that was what people responded to. They wanted strong, Labour, democratic socialist policies.

So, are we all social democratics now? Not really. I’m not even sure there are any social democratic parties in Scotland, let alone two.

The European Parliament is a very different beast

Jun 9

Posted by Malc in Europe, Media | 4 Comments

On our wee sojourn to Strasbourg, we’ve seen some contrasting sights.

We’ve seen the good – the welcome we have received as “blogger-journalists”, both from those we’ve sought views from as MEPs or press officers, not to mention the lengths the European Parliament’s Edinburgh and London offices have gone to in organising the trip and advising us.

We’ve seen the bad – arriving to a Parliament in the middle of a fire drill (though that perhaps qualifies as more ridiculous than bad).

And we’ve seen the ugly – the very ugly views of some of the more right-wing representatives (including UKIP’s Gerald Batten) on the Roma people in the plenary session on ascension of Romania and Bulgaria into the Schengen area.

Indeed, we were pretty taken aback at some of the contributions made to this debate.  Some of the language used was more akin to what one might hear in the back of a pub after several too many shandies.  On the back of this, we had intended on attending this press conference held by Marine Le Pen, but unfortunately time constraints meant we were unable to make it to that.

I suppose there are a couple of points to make about this.  That there are representatives in the European Parliament who hold such distasteful views is not a surprise, but their candour and forthrightness in delivering them in such an open debate was.  These views are now a matter of public record, recorded for all eternity on the internet.

Of course it should be noted that these ARE minority viewpoints – held, in the main, by MEPs from parties with whom other parties will not condescend to join in European parliamentary groupings – and which were shunned and even booed when recorded in the hemicycle.  Indeed, when a speaker rose to condemn these views and rubbish the claims made by certain far-right MEPs, they were roundly applauded.

The problem, I suppose, is that really no one – well, except for you, intrepid reader – will actually discover that such views are held and declared in Europe’s Parliament.  The mainstream media – television and newspapers – particularly in Scotland have ceased to report even semi-regularly from the European Parliament.  The result of this is that the words spoken by MEPs in plenary sessions or in press conferences seldom make it back across the English Channel to these shores.  There are instead lost in the maze of official reports on the Parliament’s website.  Which is probably why these MEPs feel safe enough using such language – because they are not fully held accountable for these views by our media.

So yes – one of our discoveries about the European Parliament is the candour with which representatives discuss topics.  There’s much less of a fear of offending potential voters here – which, in some cases, could be a positive if it contributed to a more frank and honest exchange of views.  Instead it provides cover for the far-right to espouse views their own electorate would likely find abhorrent.

That’s one of the paradoxes at the heart of the European Parliament – it is certainly the most transparent EU institution, and perhaps more transparent than some national and sub-national legislatures – and yet it is the institution in which that transparency makes little or no difference, since no one bothers to check what their representatives are doing.

As a visual illustration of just how different the European Parliament is to what we are used to in the UK, here’s a classic clip (YouTube) of then MEP Rev Ian Paisley protesting the arrival of the Pope into a plenary session of the EP in 1988.

– blogged from the European Parliament’s media centre in Strasbourg

 

Can the SNP win the Inverclyde by-election?

Jun 9

Posted by Jeff in Elections, Westminster | 20 Comments

The sad, untimely death of David Cairns is the cause of the first election in Scotland since the Holyrood vote last month. Speculation will of course be mounting as the date of 30th June draws nearer as to whether the SNP can wrest this seat from Labour and take its tally of MPs up to seven.

The 2010 election result was:
Labour – 20,933
SNP – 6,577
Lib Dem – 5,007
Conservative – 4,502

The 2011 Scottish Parliament election result (for what I believe is a very similar area) was:
Labour – 12,387
SNP – 11,876
Conservative – 2,011
Lib Dem – 1,934

The contest will of course be a two-horse race between Labour and the SNP, there is little point in pretending otherwise and the candidates are confirmed as Iain Mackenzie (Labour) and Anne McLaughlin (SNP).

The SNP has picked a great candidate – Anne has experience of being an MSP, was the mastermind behind the Glasgow East by-election triumph a few years back, is female and seems to be very likeable. However, Labour have picked a great candidate too as Iain is the leader of the local council and perhaps has more ‘local credentials’ than his rival. The opening salvos do seem to suggest that a common Labour refrain will be ‘this area needs a strong local voice’.

The by-elections in the last term are not much to go on in terms of by-election form. The SNP won Glasgow East with a shocking swing from Labour but were then brought down to earth with thumping defeats in Glenrothes and Glasgow North East.

The problem for the SNP of course is that it is easier for it to take seats from Labour in a Holyrood election than it is in a Westminster election. There is no ‘strategy, vision, team’ from before, there is no Swinney record to rely upon, there is no Council Tax freeze to outmanoeuvre Labour on and there is no Iain Gray to set against Alex Salmond for First Minister. In a media-driven narrative of Cameron vs Miliband, how does Angus Robertson get a look in? Let alone a Scottish Tory, Scottish Green or Scottish Lib Dem viewpoint? One genuinely has to wonder if it’s worth those three parties gambling with their deposits and instead just staying at home.  

Furthermore, the independence hare is off and running, cooped up as it was before May 5th. How many voters will that keep at home or spook into voting elsewhere? 

Labour will send busloads of activists up north telling all sorts of terrible tales about the Tories down south and, at the end of the day, if you define yourself by not watching Coronation St, you watch Eastenders instead, not BBC Alba or Gardener’s World. The 2010 election did help confirm that, in a Westminster context, Labour vs Tory is indeed the norm.

Many will seek to make inapplicable hay out of the SNP finishing second and the Salmond honeymoon being shortlived. It shall be tosh. I am sure the Nats are in it to win it but falling a few thousand votes short, as I believe they will, is a result to be proud of in a deep red area like Inverclyde and Greenock.  

EXCLUSIVE: Greens urge Italians to vote Si on Sunday against nuclear energy

Jun 8

Posted by The Burd in Environment, Europe | 5 Comments

Green MEPs, Daniel Cohn-Bendit (France) and Rebecca Harms (Germany), today urged the Italian population to vote ‘si’ in Sunday’s referendum on nuclear energy, claiming that a yes vote rejecting nuclear power as an energy option for Italy, would start a “snowball effect” across the rest of Europe.

Cohn-Bendit pointed out that the referendum was the first in Europe on this issue and urged the Italian people to vote in order to give all European citizens a better future.

Harms outlined how a majority of European citizens now opposed nuclear energy – a view that had grown since the Fukishima tragedy in Japan earlier this year.  And she listed all the countries rejecting nuclear power.  It was not only Germany who had recently moved to phase out nuclear power but a whole host of countries had never chosen the nuclear route, including Ireland, Denmark, Austria, Spain, Greece, Portugal, Switzerland and Belgium.

Poland is also due to hold a referendum and France is debating the issue afresh.  With elections due in France, Germany and Italy in the next three years, the Green MEPs argued that we could shortly reach a position where there are three governments “at the heart of Europe” adopting an anti-nuclear stance and that this would send a “strong message” to nations around the world.

The MEPs suggested there were sound fiscal reasons to reject nuclear power.  It would cost Italy at least 700 million Euros to earthquake “proof” any nuclear installations.  Fundamentally, the country’s topological and geological make up made it inherently unsuitable for nuclear power plants.

Moreover, Cohn-Bendit highlighted the “inherent contradiction” at the heart of UK policy on nuclear energy.  Its position of including nuclear power in the mix for future energy provision was predicated on such development being privately funded and not involving public funding.  The Green MEP claimed this was impossible to do.  Experience in Japan showed that even with private investors, public funding was still required and frankly, the UK Government did not have the money to do this in the current financial climate.

While the fiscal issue is a key one, it is also clear that the UK is travelling in the wrong direction on this important issue from its fellow EU members.  The future is bright, it would appear, and it does not include nuclear.

So long as the Italians do indeed vote si on Sunday.

– blogged from the European Parliament in Strasbourg –

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