Shapps Shots

I have a soft spot for Grant Shapps. Although he no longer does so since becoming Party Chairman, he was one of the first people ever to follow me on Twitter. I have no idea how he had ever heard of me in those days. But what are we to make of his remarks about the BBC?

Of course, the suggestion of left-wing bias is laughable when the Corporation is chaired by a former Chairman of the Conservative Party who continues to receive that Whip in the House of Lords, when it blacks out an enormous pro-NHS demonstration because of that Chairman's pecuniary interest in health privatisation, when it always has two Coalition representatives on everything, when it so over-publicises UKIP, when it lavishes attention on every Loony Right think tank boy in London, and so on, and on, and on, and on, and on.

From Rothbury to Thetford, Any Questions audiences cheer calls to renationalise energy, rail and the Royal Mail, including when articulated by Bob Crow to the very constituents whom their MP branded "the Turnip Taliban". There are no "Lefties" in such places, or far too few to "pack" such an audience.

As all polls confirm, public ownership of key assets, among other views supposedly peculiar to "the Left", are mainstream opinion even in the most affluent or the most rural areas, which are by no means the same thing. In fact, such views are mainstream opinion even among the Radio Four listeners in those areas. Manifestly.

But the television license fee ought to 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, although the ITV franchise areas might be better. 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.

One would not need to be a member of the Trust (i.e., a license-payer) to listen to or watch the BBC, just as one does 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. 

20 years after John Major's disastrous relaxation of the ownership regulations, the re-regionalisation of ITV is desperately overdue, and it is greatly to the last Labour Government's shame that it never attempted to bring that about.

A central company might usefully hold one third of the shares in each of the franchise-holders, but another third ought to be in mutual ownership, with perhaps half of those reserved for the workers, while the remaining third ought to be held by the local councils.

There would be local programming in designated time slots, but far more than that, there would be national programming made locally. The country would see itself. One Nation, indeed.

Not only soap operas made in Manchester and Leeds while set in Salford and the Yorkshire Dales, but a return to things like game shows live from Norwich, fairly highbrow as that game show was.

A minimum of one drama and one sitcom per week would be both made and set in each of the ITV regions, with at least one from each region broadcast in prime time. As would be at least one light entertainment programme and at least one current affairs programme per week.

Yes, from the Borders. Yes, from the North of Scotland. Yes, from the Deep South West. All on ITV 1. Of course.

Although in general they would be, those current affairs documentaries would not necessarily, in any given week, be about the region that made them. World in Action was a Granada programme. For 35 years, in fact. It ought to be so again.

Each edition of BBC Alba's Eorpa brings one story from the Gaelic-speaking areas and one from elsewhere in Europe; I heartily recommend it when BBC Parliament shows it with subtitles.

That seems like a very good format to adopt, in fact: one story from the region, and one from anywhere else in the world, with a particular mission to cover the parts that have hitherto been ignored by most of the British media.

There would still be complaints about lack of attention to, for example, County Durham. But that would be no small part of what the municipal and mutual ownership structures would be there to address.

The ITV companies have done a huge amount to define the cultures, including the political cultures, of the areas that they covered. Here in the Tyne Tees region, that station's creation pretty much invented from scratch what little commonality is felt, even now, among the disparate communities that it serves.

Another one, though, was the first ever indigenous broadcaster on the island of Ireland.

But enough of structure, of form; what of content, of matter? We all have our ideas. On Thursday, after he had tweeted his anticipation at the appearance of Peter Hitchens and Owen Jones on Question Time, I replied to Mehdi Hasan that the three of them and Peter Oborne ought to have a weekly programme, which might be called Fair and Balanced.

He retweeted it, as did others, if not necessarily in earnest. But over an hour, each of them in turn really could introduce a subject for 15 minutes of live discussion. It would hardly need a presenter, but if someone had to say "Good evening" and "Good night", then they could take that in turns, too.

Peter Hitchens might refuse to do it. But in that case, they could keep it paleocon with, say, Tim Stanley or Andrew Cusack. I should then be older than three out of four, but that kind of thing is happening to me with increasing frequency. I have a feeling that Andrew might be younger even than Owen.

Now that I think about it, and if Owen will forgive me, this might instead be an opportunity to give a higher profile to any of several Blue Labour stalwarts, such as Ed Rennie, Labour Councillor and Secretary of the All-Party Parliamentary Pro-Life Group, a valiant battler against economic inequality and cultural pornogrification, and whom I suspect to be very slightly older than I am; or Andy Walton, increasingly of Radio Five Live, and visibly my junior by quite a bit. There are others.

Yes, one of that lot, one of the paleocon boys of the same generation, Mehdi Hasan, Peter Oborne if he were up for it, another of the Young Old Righters if he were not.

Mehdi Hasan would also be ideal to write and present a five-part series on Islam in the BRICS countries. There is not much in Brazil, but there is enough in Latin America as a whole to fill an hour. Russia, India, China and South Africa would each have to be fitted into that time limit, but that could certainly be done by a professional.

In which vein, Ed West tweeted a week ago that, after The Ottomans, there ought to be a series on The Byzantines. I quite agreed, as I told him. If that were to be pitched as a package deal with the BRICS Islam series, then no one could argue that there was a lack of balance. 

I have long had an idea for The Twelve Tribes of Christian Palestine, a landmark series with an accompanying book and with as many tie-in newspaper articles as could be placed, on the Greek Orthodox, Latin Catholic, Armenian Orthodox, Coptic Orthodox, Syrian Orthodox, Melkite Catholic, Ethiopian Orthodox, Maronite Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran, Syrian Catholic, and Armenian Catholic communities in the Holy Land.

In the event of success, another such project, The Twelve Tribes of Christian Lebanon, would be more than feasible. By no means necessarily starring me in either case, I should add. Nor in 12 parts; three or four, of an hour each, would suffice.

And it recently occurred to me that there might be a series of three one-hour documentaries, one on those who performed non-military service during the First World War, another on the ILP Contingent in Spain, and a third on the fallen of British Palestine.

The ideal year of broadcast might be 2017, during the four-year commemorations of the First World War, 80 years after the ILP Contingent, and 90 years after the Balfour Declaration. That would give the time to do world class research into what, especially in the second and third cases, are shamefully neglected subjects. 

A Question Time-style programme might be broadcast live, with social media interaction, always held in a country town, and with the panellists including the local MP of right, the highest-elected Ward Councillor not of the same party as the MP, and someone from the local paper. Not for this, the parachuting in even of comedians from London in order to tell the rest of us what to think. The ideal place to start would be Chipping Norton.

Over 12-week series, of which there might be two per year with gaps of another three months between them, a programme might visit each of the 12 regions in turn. It would discuss over an hour the two topics most requested in the preceding 24 hours on its Facebook account and via its Twitter handle and hashtag.

While also allowing for continuing interaction through social media during the live broadcast, that would accommodate eight voices on each topic. One figure from within the given region would have been nominated by, though by no mean necessarily on behalf of, each of the eight parties in the House of Commons other than the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats and Labour.

I appreciate that the number of parties in the House of Commons is subject to change. But I submit that it is not realistically likely to change by enough to affect this format significantly, if at all.

The BBC could make all of these. As could ITV or Channel Four. And as could Sky News, RT or Al Jazeera, all of which are on Freeview. But who would ever do so?