Open Road

Wednesday Mar 5th 2008

Snooker Loopy

It is no secret that the new Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, Andy Burnham, is football-mad. Not only is he a life-long follower of Everton FC, he is also a former Chairman of Supporters Direct, and a regular in the parliamentary football team.

Burnham has now gone and out-done himself by being the first politician to suggest that the public realm be treated as though it were a game of football.

The Evaluation of the Impact of the Licensing Act 2003, which was commissioned by Gordon Brown and published by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport on Tuesday 4 March, puts forward a number of recommendations designed to further the fight against binge drinking.

One of these is the proposal to subject retailers, particularly those accused of encouraging underage drinking, to a new ‘yellow and red card’ alert system when said retailers are in breach of their license conditions. In his Written Ministerial Statement, Burnham even promises that “when the circumstances are right, it will be a straight red”. Blimey.

What matters here is not the merits of the proposal. Burnham is clearly onto something in trying to blur the boundaries between the worlds of sport and public policy.

Here is what you could be tried next:

Random drugs testing: This is now prevalent in all sports and has brought about the demise of many a Tour de France cyclist and Olympic athlete. Surely there really is no other way of explaining Margaret Hodge’s recent pronouncements on the Proms (see here)?

The Sin Bin: Used in Ice Hockey, the House of Commons already has a similar system (most recently, George Galloway and Derek Conway). Would the deterrent not be even stronger if rogue MPs were made to purge their sentence inside the Chamber, stuck inside a plexi-glass box, watching the action unfold without them?

The Blood Bin: Ministerial scandals are often followed by the (not always inevitable) demise of a competent Cabinet member (Peter Mandelson, David Blunkett). One way to remedy this could be through the introduction of a rugby union-style ‘blood bin’ whereby a temporary replacement, usually a rising star (a junior minister?) or an experienced old hand (a former Secretary of State?) comes off the bench, literally, to take over duties while the incumbent is taken away, patched up, and returned to the fray once their confidence restored.

Video replay: Increasingly, technology is used to settle moments of contention in sport. Would the accountability of the Government to Parliament not be enhanced by capacity for video replay during Oral Questions? Did the Minister answer the Honourable Member’s question or not? Let’s see what the video says.

The video replay: coming soon to a bicameral legislature near you.

There must be more…

Tuesday Feb 19th 2008

Chewing on the Rock

So Darling, you have nationalised Northern Rock. Well done, it is quite an achievement after a gap of 37 years since the last state takeover. To put 37 years into some sort of perspective it is practically as long as the gap between the premierships of Neville Chamberlain and Margaret Thatcher.

So what did the media make of this major event on the Monday morning after? Behind some bold headlines there was a curious reticence. The Daily Telegraph comment pages, where a chance to re-fight the battles of the 1970s is rarely foregone, provided no opinion on the topic and instead provided analysis of the merits of Bertie Wooster and Billie Bunter. Perhaps we really are going back in time, and for once the DT is ahead of the rest of the country.

At the Guardian this was certainly a major event. Indeed, according to Martin Jacques it marked “the dawn of the biggest geopolitical shift since the dawn of the industrial era.” He went on to blow all hyperbole not so much out of the water as across the Atlantic – the nationalisation of the Gosforth-based company is the result (or was that the cause, I forget) of the “economic decline of the US” and its dependence on East Asian capital. In case this is still not big enough news the nationalisation also heralds the end of the “triumph of neoliberalism” that began in the 1970s. Mr Jacques neglects to inform us that during this period of “triumph” the state actually grew from 40 to 42% of the UK economy.

Over at the Financial Times the event seemed to provoke utter schizophrenia. The headline reported “fury” and it was declared that Brown had “a lot of explaining to do” for what was nevertheless described as “the only solution” that was likely to leave taxpayers “close to quits.” The paper’s editorial declared that the Rock can now look to the future – opposite opinion pages bemoaning Germany’s public sector banks and calling for the privatisation of Radios 1 and 2, followed by complaints in the Lex column about government hand-outs to Japanese banks. FT readers who probed other stories might have been further confused about the future of banking: financial services are recruiting fewer graduates but now is apparently a great time to start an MBA as part of a move into banking.

The Independent must be awarded points for financial illiteracy, with headlines proclaiming that the Rock is now owned by ‘UK Ltd.’ In case any Indie sub-editors are reading this, “ltd” stands for limited; basically meaning that the level of debt the corporation can accrue is limited. This is not the case for governments or societies. Inside were further pearls of wisdom: the columnist Steve Richards assured us that it is “not the Chancellor but the Tories who are isolated.” He seemed to have no comment the next day in response assorted media headlines entitled fury, backlash and under fire.

And away from the passé world of newspapers? What was happening in the hip, viral, now world of the interweb? The “Nationalize Northern Rock”(sic) Facebook group lost four members overnight, and seemed to have no comment in what was surely its hour of glory.

Wednesday Feb 6th 2008

Super Tuesday

Forget the Super Bowl. The Oscars can move over. For US political junkies this was the night to stay up till dawn to watch the results roll in. Yes, Super Tuesday had finally arrived, with more states voting at one time than ever before in one of the most exciting elections in a generation.

Tuesday Jan 22nd 2008

The BA crash and the media

Guest blog from Andrew Caesar-Gordon, managing director of Electric Airwaves, a leading media, crisis and presentation training agency. www.electricairwaves.com

Last Thursday’s crash of a British Airways Boeing 777 at Heathrow Airport should have been a media disaster for BA. Yet within 24 hours, BA had turned its worst accident in 32 years into a PR triumph. It has emerged with reputation enhanced and several key messages/ implied competitor differentiations firmly locked in the public consciousness. How did they do it?

Monday Jan 21st 2008

News Views

After just one week, the evidence shows that ITN’s revived News at Ten is not doing nearly so well as hoped.  BBC’s Ten O’Clock News is still in the lead as far as the ratings are concerned and Huw Edwards is winning the war of the silver foxes in a straight shoot-out with Sir Trevor McDonald.