Ben Bradshaw attacks the BBC Trust, and the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority publishes its quaintly titled "horizon scanning". Reform of both bodies should be along similar lines.
The license fee should be made optional, with as many adults as wished to pay it at any given address free to do so, including those who did not own a television set but who greatly valued, for example, Radio Four.
The Trustees would then be elected by and from among the license-payers. Candidates would have to be sufficiently independent to qualify in principle for the remuneration panels of their local authorities. Each license-payer would vote for one, with the top two elected.
The electoral areas would be Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, and each of the nine English regions. The Chairman would be appointed by the relevant Secretary of State, with the approval of the relevant Select Committee. And the term of office would be four years.
You would not need to be a member of the Trust (i.e., a license-payer) to listen to or watch the BBC, just as you do not need to be a member of the National Trust to visit its properties, or a member of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution to be rescued by its boats.
At the same time, we need to ban any person or other interest from owning or controlling more than one national daily newspaper. To ban any person or other interest from owning or controlling more than one national weekly newspaper. To ban any person or other interest from owning or controlling more than one television station. To re-regionalise ITV under a combination of municipal and mutual ownership. And to apply that same model (but with central government replacing local government, subject to very strict parliamentary scrutiny) to Channel Four.
And the HFEA should be elected in the same way as the BBC Trust, but with universal suffrage rather than any restriction to license-payers. Expert advice would still be taken. But it would be as it should be: on tap, not on top.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
If you did this, most people would elect to take the BBC for free, and thus save themselves £120/year, or whatever it is.
ReplyDeleteTherefore the Beeb would either be a)chronically underfunded or b)funded by an exorbitant licence fee. In the latter case, you increasingly price people out of the market, leaving the Beeb as the plaything of the rich.
I thought you were pro-worker?
No, it would just do less, and do it better. It would do very well indeed the things that it was good at, and not do the things best left to the commercial sector, with or without inverted commas. The license-payers, as the members of the Trust, would ultimately decide what those were and were not.
ReplyDelete...and the license payers will be the rich. A once-great national institution becomes the preserve of the upper classes. For shame.
ReplyDeleteWhy need they be? Why need the license fee go up above inflation? Doing less better, as I said.
ReplyDeleteAnd anyway, if vaguely or very posh members guaranteed Radio Three, Radio Four and their television equivalents for the nation, then what would be the problem? Probably Radio Two, as well. Stations playing only the latest pop music, and talk radio stations, would still exist, as would television appealing to those markets. They exist anyway.
The BBC is much like this already. You don't have to have a television. But you can still listen to BBC Radio or visit the Beeb's website.
Because if you offer 90% of people the choice between getting something for free, or making a large voluntary donation, they'll plump for the wallet-friendly option. This is why cathedrals have turnstiles next to their "voluntary donation" booths.
ReplyDeleteDoing less better is fine to a point, but with only a 10th of the income, the Beeb won't be able to do anything at all well.
Why not? It could do an awful lot on one tenth of its current income.
ReplyDeleteI said, who is Stephen Alexander?
ReplyDeleteHe's off topic. And your persistence with this is the imprisonable offence of criminal harassment.
ReplyDeleteStephen Alexander and Martin Miller. Who are they?
ReplyDeleteOn Stephen Alexander, as I have just said over on Harry's Place, nothing to do with me. Would a major newspaper use me if it were?
ReplyDeleteStill, not yet in the league of the last effort (still ongoing, I see), which involved a moderated site on which I comment almost every day without difficulty and which removes references to the allegations in question (Fraser Nelson himself has been known to comment under his own name on my blog in the period since … well, whatever it was supposed to have been), and an organ which has *paid* me since I allegedly wronged it.
Give it up, people. No one believes you. Given your record on no less a matter than war, why would they?
No more off topic comments will be put up. I will not indulge your criminality any longer.
If asking a question you dont want to answer amounts to an "imprisonable offence of criminal harassment" then I hope BPA do not ever get in to power....
ReplyDeleteYou don't know a half, a third, a quarter, a fifth, a tenth of these people's vendetta against me. They are vicious, vicious, vicious to the core.
ReplyDeleteNow, back on topic.
Is that a guilty conscience I see? All I asked was who is Stephen Alexander. You immediately interpreted it as an accusation against you. Why? And who is Stephen Alexander?
ReplyDeleteIt is an accusation against me. It is baseless, and indeed absurd. But it is tiresomely set out in corners of the Internet inhabited by those who were wrong about global capitalism and about the Iraq War, so that they cannot tolerate the progress of those who were right.
ReplyDeleteThey are the David Lindsay truthers and birthers.
ReplyDeleteBut with even less to base it on.
ReplyDeleteI had never heard of Stephen Alexander until today.
ReplyDeleteLucky you...
ReplyDeleteHe doesn't even appaer to be a real person, just someone made up by the cult leader(s) and, tragically, sincerely believed by the cultists.
Anyway, enough. Enough, enough, enough, enough, enough.