STITCHING UP THE PRESS FOR BREAKFAST

POETRY COUNTS: Speaking for the
silent
Blog 39 March 2013
Watsonworksblog.blogspot.com
James Watson Friends and contributors
Contents
EDITORIAL
NOTES IN PASSING: Poetry Counts: speaking for the silent
Quotable quote
Fishy business in China
Poems of Place (16)
Correspondence  Ned Baslow to Capability Brown

Editorial: stitching up the press before breakfast
A few descriptors come to mind in the light of the all-party, MP-majority launch of a royal charter to rein in the British press: fudge and stitch-up come most readily to mind. It’s what happens when politicians consider they are on roll of public popularity and establishment approval. In this case that ‘public’ for all intents and purposes has been the Hacked Off organisation who from their formation appear to have sought revenge as much as redress. It’s reported that among the politician conspirators plotting a midnight coup upon press freedom representatives of Hacked Off were present in Parliament offices. It is not reported whether a single publisher, editor, reporter or journalist was also present to offer counter-arguments in the desperate rush to hang British liberty out to dry.

No reverse?
The impact of what occurred in the ‘small hours manoeuvring’ (as the Guardian leader of 19 March described it), will be immense and possibly irreversible. Oh, and while we are nailing the British press to the straight-jacket of propriety (as defined by the great and the good) let’s drop in all Internet communications. What’s good enough for controlling the press is also good enough for every line and paragraph and picture published online.
    Hugo Riftkind in an article in The Times ‘This charter is out to get you as much as us’ (19.3.13) first speaks of ‘targeting an industry that is melting away…like butter in a hot palm’. Yet, he writes, ‘It’s not the tabloids that traduce reputations today, but Twitter. It’s not the Sun that reveals nude photography of the Royal Family, but American showbiz websites…’

Order, order
Will ‘exemplary damages’ soon be haunting (and crippling) cyberspace? It looks as though the amended Crime and Courts Bill will plough like a squadron of tanks into what Rifkind sees as the future, ‘a sprawling anarchic mess, in which anybody can do almost anything’. Most disturbing concerning what has been happening during the Ides of March is the breakneck rush to turn desires, passions, opinions, impressions, perceptions and prejudices into law.
    ‘Sometimes,’ believes Rifkind, ‘politics becomes a barrel rolling down a very steep hill. Once it gets going, all the good sense in the world won’t make it stop’. For that we have to thank Hacked Off, politicians either on the make or protecting their backs and some newspapers who ought to know enough about mission creep to regard legislation as anathema. Rifkind believes that ‘Born of the best intentions, Hacked Off has become a malign force. Every time they wheel out Evan Harris or one of those deathly professors I genuinely start to fear they’d be regulating the notes on my fridge if they could’.

Taming the digital Wild West?
It is difficult at the moment to share the optimism of media analyst Ian Burrell writing in the I (‘Leveson will be powerless to tame the digital Wild West colonised by bloggers’, 18.23.13), when  that ‘one thing we can be sure of: the new watchdog will be out of date before it even starts’. But we can hope, as Burrell points out how ‘even greater swathes of the news and information media will be operating in a digital Wild West where the saloons are everywhere and the regulating sheriffs have no jurisdiction’. Rifkind asks, ‘How did it ever come to this?’ chillingly adding, ‘Royal Charter or not, the published word has suddenly become the State’s business’.

Notes in Passing
Poetry counts: speaking for the silent
Poetry counts, or would do if Brian Patten’s lines could stir the people who count. Celebrating the 40th anniversary of Index on Censorship magazine Brian publishes two poems in Issue 4, Volume 41, 2012, A Message from the Silent and Fear of Teddy Bears. The first poem explains why the victims of persecution and censorship do not speak out, for they have loved-ones to protect: Speak out for us when like sleazy conjurers/Politicians vanish the truth/When rivers are poisoned, charities siphoned, wars bankrolled/Speak out for us/Whose tongues are nailed to the floor of our mouths by love/And whose lips are sewn together. The second poem is as redacted as the Pollard Review on the BBC’s Jimmy Savile Saga.
     Readers who wish to recover the blacked-out words are invited to visit the Index website for enlightenment, reminding us that in normal circumstances what’s redacted is permanently shut off from us. There is enough left in Fear of Teddy Bears to realise the horror so many teddy bears might stir in the hearts and minds of the holders of power: …Lukashenko squats the Web, and would control/Each threat of it. The implication is that somehow we are all – and that includes poets – to blame for looking the other way: while on a beach/Tourists bake in ignorance and, worldwide/Redacted words multiply like flies.

Spelling Malala
In celebrating its 40th anniversary Index ran a poetry competition, thus emphasising the connection between poetry and protest in contexts of persecution, exploitation, oppression and in the light of censorship. Rosemary Harris’ winning entry, Spelling Malala takes the topical story of the shooting in the head of Pakistani teenager  Malala Yousafzai by members of the Taliban; her crime? – demanding an education for girls. As she ‘fires unseen bullets from her mouth/each time she opens it those in control exclaim, What Devil, what God, puts brains in a girl? There’ll be no more I.WANT.TO.LEARN. much less I.WANT.TO.LIVE.
  Rosemary Harris picks up Brian Patten’s theme, the use of terror to command silence: Oh it is vital work, viral, one bullet in the right/soft tissue blasts shut a thousand mouths/myriad minds. One girl, one gun, one message. Both Patten and Harris are writing poetry but also making statements that take poetry out of intimate contexts and into the public arena, actions which in many countries would bring down on them the silencing hand of the law.

Politics of fear
A scan of the contents lists of copies of Index the extent, worldwide, and in a myriad forms, illustrates a universal redactive habit on the part of hierarchies of authority. Index 3 of 2012 features nine articles on censorship on campuses while edition 4 provides an international perspective on the censorship, and planned censorship, of online communication, summarised by Rebecca MacKinnon and Ethan Zuckerman in their article ‘Don’t Fear the Trolls’ as ‘the politics of fear’ dominating ‘the online environment’.
     The debates over free speech promoted by the Leveson Report have revealed a pulling back from the defence of press freedom as recent Watsonworks blogs have highlighted. Punishment for excess has become the name of the game, not yet a bullet in the head but certainly suggesting a risk – for poets, journalists, whistleblowers, bloggers, political campaigners and protesters – of having their tongues nailed to the floor of their mouths for the love of truth, or their version of it.
     Currently the hushed-up scandals of the past are at last being scrutinised under the light of day; a cause for celebration, perhaps. Yet, journalists being arrested in dawn raids in the UK can surely be viewed as another form of redaction, that is, a warning to communicators not to tread this path in future.

Quotable quote
'Libel law has served as a means to protect the rich and powerful, and London has become the defamation capital of the world as plutocrats from every corner of the planet ask the courts here to silence and punish their critics at home. Just this month, a London libel judge found in favour of a billionaire sheikh against a dissident Ethiopian journalist who is exiled in the US, where he runs a shoestring website about Ethiopian politics for an Ethiopian audience. Whatever the tribulations of the British tourist industry in recent years, ‘libel tourism’ has boomed.'
Mick Hume, ‘With Leveson and Libel, reforms are not enough’, Spiked, 28 February 2013.


Fishy business with China
By Alison Prince
First published in Voice of Arran, March 2013
When the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the dissident poet Liu Xiaobo in 2010, the Chinese government was furious. A spokesman for its foreign ministry described Liu as a ‘convicted criminal sentenced to jail by Chinese justice authorities for violation of Chinese law’ and said that giving him the prize was an act of ‘blasphemy against the peace prize.’ Norway was the natural focus of Chinese indignation, as it has administered the Peace Prize ever since Alfred Nobel, the Swedish dynamite millionaire, founded it.
    So China cancelled all imports of Norwegian salmon. Norway wasn’t bothered. It owns enough fish farms in Scotland to keep the China trade supplied - the only thing needed was an independent-sounding deal between China and the Nobel-free Scottish government. Nick Hunter of Oban Seil Farm, who has seen Norwegian salmon production shifted to Ardmaddy, writes to point out that the deal had strings attached.
    The Chinese foreign ministry stipulated that there must be no comment on Tibetan independence protests and no contact with the Dalai Lama or other ‘undesirables’, or the deal would be cancelled. Further, Nick claims, on orders from the Scottish fisheries minister, the then newly elected provost of Dundee University refused to host the Dalai Lama on his hugely popular visit. The ‘new’ exports to China were of course heralded as a big Scottish success. What price your human rights now? A straight swap for a load of farmed salmon, it seems.

Poems of Place (16)
Readers have pointed out that Editorial needs to gets is maths right as far as numbering is concerned. Blog 38 was racing ahead of itself. Sorry!

THE VALLEY TO STANHOPE
In the valley you can meet it
As a newcomer; it invites you
To reach out and touch it
As though it had the substance
Of these limestone walls.

Snipping all-day breakfast
On giddy slopes, sheep ignore it
With the same indifference
They show this divine morning:
The verges of a motorway
Would taste as sweet.

In voiceless woods, a solitary rook
Emits a single call,
Then tremulously thinks
Better of its irreverence.
I pause, listen to this amazing nothing,
Venturing this soundless scribble:
Could God be silence, And only that?

CORRESPONDENCE
Ned Baslow to Capability Brown
Preparations for the Wickerstaff-cum-Fernhaven international festival of the arts now to be held in the summer of 2014 (as a result of the hip operation undergone by the Festival chairman and star of The Spectacles of Don Quixote Councillor Gilbert Stokoe MBE) are well in hand. Secretary to the Festival Committee, Ned Baslow continues with his campaign to recruit the best of British and international talent for this historical event.

Dear Mr. Brown,
As I know that you were planting shrubs and trees and generally tidying up the estate of the Duke of Devonshire at the lordly pile of Chatsworth (one of my family’s favourite picnic-spots, by the way), my committee is wondering whether you would consider some work on the side.

Doubtless you will have heard of preparations that are being made for the Festival of the Arts being organised by the Wickerstaff-cum-Fernhaven Pantomime and Light Opera Society. Its chairman, Mr. Gilbert Stokoe MBE could, if his extensive acres are taken into consideration, be ranked among the landed gentry of this county, particularly as very few titled gentlemen and ladies are willing to put up with the acrid smoke that all-too regularly issues from the Fernhaven Power Station and the Utility Pie and Tripe company.

Mr. Stokoe, who we affectionately call Lord Gilbert, has a couple of meadows that could really do with a make-over. The first of these has mixed use, being shared by a flock of sheep and the local cricket team. The problem here – for the cricketers at least – is the slope, which is in excess of 45% in places. The pitch itself is as flat as the Oval, but if a fielder is posted at square leg or if the bowler is delivering from the other end, at point or mid-off, it is impossible to see either the batsman or the ball.

This state of affairs prevailed for decades until the local team organised a match against the Toffs’ Eleven, which included a junior member of the royal family. Fortunately it was only his bodyguard, fielding at midwicket, who suffered concussion from a hook out of the blue; but as you can see Lord Gilbert will have to take drastic action if the Toffs are to return in future seasons. In short, we are planning to shift the cricket ground to an adjoining field, the slope of which is not in excess of 30% and to use the existing ground for a miscellany of arts activities – oratory, poetry reading, recitals and the re-enacting of famous battle scenes.

What we are hoping to do is to give the ground a bit of style, and this is where a really decent landscape gardener such as yourself comes in, if you are of a mind to spare the time to do us a few sketches. The valley views are wonderful. In fact as my wife Betty, who’s at present doing an Open University degree and is studying at this very moment The Creation of the English Landscape: the Brutal and the Benign, believes there are no better views in the entire world (though to be honest, she’s only left the country once, to Benidorm – and hated it).

As Lord Gilbert says of the view, ‘It’s magnificent – but it’s not Chatsworth!’ Can you make the difference? We imagine a few trees will have to be shifted in order to align with the Golden Mean and that, and I personally would be happy to see the complete removal of the pine forest which Lord Gilbert’s father planted to help the war effort. There are a couple of abandoned farm buildings in the way. Our Betty insists they stay as being tokens of the Age of Romance though in my opinion they’re simply ruins that should have been cleared up years ago. On the other hand, my boy Benjie and his friends enjoy pretending they are castles built to resist the Picts (a lot of whom were once active in these parts).

The Committee is keen to employ a master of landscape design having failed to interest Mr. Alan Titchmarsh of TV fame, and we would be very happy to mention your contribution in our programmes and leaflets, making sure that what for the mass of the untutored in these matters would seem to be the work of Nature, is actually the subtle product of your genius.
Confidentially yours, etc.
Ned Baslow.

COMING SHORTLY…
Save the Ritz? Dad’s in hospital and 16-year old film buff and general layabout Clark Gable Stevens (Curlew to his friends) is faced with the biggest challenge in his life, rescuing his Dad’s cinema from the clutches of the developers. The obstacles are gigantic; the chances of success for Curlew’s Save the Ritz Campaign as likely as seeing a flight of pigs crossing the skies of Fetterton. Does destiny deter Curlew? Read on.

As anAmazon Kindle e-book

Press Freedom and Leveson

Blog 38

February 2013
Watsonworksblog.blogspot.com

James Watson

Friends and contributors

 A new look: The Watsonworks blog has been re-designed by

the Ed’s daughter Francesca in the interests of simplicity, clarity
and taste. Its particular virtue is that website and blog are linked;
how is beyond me, but it’s certainly convenient and a bit of a marvel

Thanks go to the redesigner for her fortitude and forebearance.

 Contents

Leveson: which tree are we talking about?
Quote of the Month
Notes in Passing: Battling Birgitte
Poems of Place (17) Return to Greece
The Baslow Letters (Cont.)
Picture of the Month

 Leveson: which tree are we talking about?

The article on the Leveson Report in Blog 37 prompted some interesting correspondence on aspects of press freedom and the proposals to rein in that freedom with a supervising body with legal teeth. Emails have been edited.

Dear Ed.,
Your article, rightly in many ways, argues that press freedom is a treasure to be valued – but above all other values? Surely that freedom needs to be balanced by responsibility, and yes, putting a value, a benchmark, on principles such as objectivity and balance.
We are not living in the 19^th century when the press was subjected to strict laws of censorship. Freedom of expression is what we’ve got, in the main and, considering the Internet, the diversity of means of expression eludes most efforts at censorship.
Our main point is that your article ignores the personal and family suffering caused when a rampant press, feasting on juicy headlines, makes the lives of victims, be they royalty, celebrities or members of the public suddenly in the eye of news, a misery.
In such circumstances, surely the individual has a right to seek redress without having to have recourse to expensive lawyers? Such an institution as Leveson proposes deserves to be more seriously considered than it is in your article.
Ron & Ann Murray.

Dear Watsonworks,
You too lightly dismiss the case made by the National Union of Journalists for an ‘anti-bullying’ agreement. Some of the stories of management bullying of reporting staff seem to me to demand action. Evidence to Leveson about the pressure Murdoch’s papers exert on staff to turn news into sensation is frightening. It threatens professional integrity and if it’s allowed to continue will reduce journalism to an adjunct of the criminal class.
Elaine Bennett

Dear JimBlog,
I’m all for freedom of expression. It’s a good principle at any time, whether it’s in parliament, in the media, in schools or on Facebook or Twitter. But does it mean unlimited freedom? Forget the case, often cited, of shouting ‘Fire!’ in a packed cinema, but what about the PC constraints that occur when religion is the topic of the moment? We should be free, as you seem to suggest, to express our opinions, or critiques, of what others hold dear – yes? But we should also be aware of the consequences of such free speech. Sometimes these result in riots, sometimes death (of the innocent as well as the guilty). Then where do you stand as far as free speech is concerned?
Yours, Alan Marsh.

Dear Ed.,
The press knows it’s dying. It realises that fewer people than ever before read newspapers, and that a generation has grown up, and is growing up, for whom the press is an irrelevance. Sensation is all it’s got to hang on to. Bullying editors are themselves as vulnerable to pressure as football managers. If Leveson has his way, it’ll just be another kiss of death for the press.
Sincerely, JRC.

Dear Jim,
I agree that there is already a vast amount of legislation designed to curtail freedom of expression, not just in relation to the press but in terms of what we as individuals can say or write. Cameron makes a good point that, while current authorities might handle new legislation curtailing press with moderation and good sense, it is no guarantee that tolerance will prevail in future.
Helen Arnold.

To Watsonworksblog 37
Is a million quid, of whatever Leveson and his inquiry has cost the taxpayer, worth the fuss? It’s not going to happen. The pressures of media corporations, in particular Murdoch’s empire, are too great for governments of any hue to attempt to curtail them. Every government is desperate for a supportive press (It was the Sun ‘what won it!’). In 12 months’ time Leveson will be mentioned on a TV quiz show and nobody will be able to remember who he was and what he was up to.
Never fear – Rupe will be back, and with a vengeance.
SamX.

 To Watsonworksblog,
It amazes me to hear protests about the press and politicians, the press and the police etc. How else can a reporter get the facts of a story unless he or she persuades by one means or another those with vital information to divulge it? Okay, draw the line at paying for information. There’s already a law about that anyway. It’s still in my view vital that reporters protect their sources otherwise those sources will shut their mouths for ever. Yet there are those who argue for punitive laws to force journalists to betray their contacts. In other words, transparency would risk reducing news content to official handouts.
Ben Chamberlin.

Thanks all!

 A response to respondents

We’d probably all agree that freedom of expression is never guaranteed; that to today it is not only curtailed by laws but by cultural pressures. In the final week of January Murdoch put aside his commitment to free speech when Gerald Scarfe’s Sunday Times cartoon portraying the Israeli premier plastering a wall with cement mixed with Palestinian blood and body parts. This he found ‘grotesque and offensive’ and apologised, as of course did the acting editor of the paper. Scarfe regretted the timing of the cartoon on Holocaust Day.
      What is the message here? The accusation is that the cartoon, by attacking Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, was unfairly (and tastelessly) drawing parallels with the Holocaust, which makes it anti-Semitic, in consequence deserving to be censored. Comparisons may be odious but they are unavoidable. The slaughter of the Jewish people during the 2^nd World War has no parallel in terms of scale, but surely the lessons learnt have implications for present and future. In this context it is justifiable to ask, have not the Palestinians a lengthy history of repression at the hands of Israel?
      As for the government’s proposal to create a press watchdog backed by royal charter, a justifiable thumbs-down was offered by Kate and Gerry McCann on the Andrew Marr show. Such a proposal was, in Kate’s view, ‘a compromise of a compromise’. The government claims that it wants as hands-off approach; nothing could be more hands-on than a royal charter.

 Quote of the month

The British press has proved time and time again over the past decades that it is incapable of regulating itself, and after recent revelations about the lengths to which tabloid newspapers will go just to sell copies, one thing is blatantly obvious: not that the freedom of the press needs to be curbed, nor that it needs to be balanced with other rights, such as the right to privacy, but that the press itself is anything but free…

As well as freedom of the press from the state, we also need freedom of the press from the market. The state remains a potential threat, of course, but corporations now have unprecedented and unaccountable power. The battle for liberty and democracy has moved on, and the definition of press freedom needs to move with it. The problem is that while the free market is the best guarantee of freedom from the state, freedom from the market can be achieved only by some intervention from the state.
Simon Dawes, ‘Protecting Press Freedom From the Market: The UK Press After the Leveson Report’, Truthout, 25 January 2013.

 Notes in passing: Battling Birgitte

The Danish political drama, Borgen, is a reminder that government by coalition is a slippery business. Within hours of an initiative being driven into shape there is fallout, backsliding, promises of cooperation put into reverse. One minute the PM, Birgitte Nyborg, is flying, the next plummeting to earth like Icarus.
      The TV series is also a reminder of global recession. There are cuts in Copenhagan, the retirement age is being ratcheted up, there’s controversy over tax handouts for private health.
What a relief, then, for Birgitte to get on a plane to Africa to fulfil the calling of statesperson rather than politician being hunted from pillar to post by Denmark’s equivalent of the tabloid press and some double-dealing colleagues and allies. Given a head of diplomatic skill and sleepless labour on the part of her staff, Birgitte pulls off a remarkable peace deal.
      The parallel with UK prime ministers cannot be accidental. Our own leaders love being abroad – anywhere but among the whingeing, ungovernable Brits. They feel their wings; no doubt command respect: this sort of thing is what they came into politics for. The difference is that Borgen is fiction. Being honest fiction it will not sustain Birgitte’s image as a canny politician for long.
      Of course TV drama of this kind speeds things up, accentuates and possibly exaggerates the stress, not the least the strain brought about by a job that mercilessly abuses personal and family life. Even when Birgitte finds time for her children, scarcely a moment goes by when she is not interrupted by calls on her mobile.
      If the writers and production team of Borgen were sat down in a phone-less room, with the doors locked against the outside world, it’s arguable that a rare coalition of agreement might emerge that modern communications technology was turning politicians into robots, responsive to routines but incapable of finding the time, the inclination or the clarity to think things through. In short, sailing by the seats of their pants in a climate of instant decision-making and interpersonal squabbling.
 This lesson for politicians is constantly implied yet more overtly moralising on the part of Borgen’s production team is the collision between the public and the personal. Birgitte learns there’s a 50 week national health waiting list for treatment of her seriously ill daughter.
 She goes private, prompts a storm of accusations from the tabloid press, but then does a very singular thing. She does not resign as PM in order to care for her daughter; she steps aside for her deputy, with every intention of returning to her post when her daughter’s health improves – a solution as wise as it is rare. News has it that in the next series that wisdom rarely prevails over conflict for very long.

Poems of Place (17)

RETURN TO GREECE

As for the Acropolis,

I wondered whether I was suffering
From a case of seen-it-before;
Though the Parthenon stirred me
Despite the scaffolding, the crowds
And the hint of drizzle in the air.
     Yet to be frank
     I didn’t feel a poem coming on.

As for the Archeology Museum

I experienced nothing but delight
Whether I gazed on Cycladic or Classical Severe,
Votive reliefs in Boetian stone
Or the Lady of Kalimnos fished from the sea.
      Yet to be completely honest,
      I didn’t feel a poem coming on.

As for Delphi, mystic sanctuary,

I had better expectations, for here
Some of my own history lay
In pieces like the treasures of Attica
Amidst the radiance of flowers.

In lieu of a poem coming on

I issued a heartfelt invitation
To one among those myriad spirits
That wait beneath the temple stones
For the Oracle to keep its promises,
To meet me again under the olives
Stroll beside me once more
Circling with me hand in hand
The Tholos of Athene, just like then,
Help me write a better line
Than any I can compose alone.

Or if you prefer, considering the day too hot,

Let’s rest beneath these stupendous rocks,
Watch the lizard bask on marble steps,
And live again the moment when
A donkey’s hooves tapped out our evening walk
And an old lady gave you a sprig of rosemary,
Bid us ‘Kalispera’, leaving us a poem
As lasting as these monuments to hope.

The Baslow Letters (cont)
Readers have been enquiring by phone and email about the availability of tickets for the Wickerstaff-cum-Fernhaven Grand Arts Festival to be held in August. Though initially a modest enterprise, the organising committee’s ambition to give the festival an international feel has had a number of confirmations from some notable celebrities that they will be willing to contribute their talents, at a modest fee plus complimentary tickets for friends and family. Among such notables is the artist Billy Blake who has been in touch with Planning Committee Secretary Ned Baslow about scenery painting for Mig Cervantes’ epic musical, The Visions of Don Quixote.

Dear Mr. Blake,
I am very sorry to hear of the trouble you’ve been having with the management of the British Museum with regard to your Nebuchadnezzar painting (the one with him scrabbling crazily and shamelessly on all fours, with his hair growing out of all parts), and that it has proved bad for business.
      That the British Museum should be reluctant to, in their words, ‘rush in’ to altering the title of the painting before it can do further damage to Nebuchadnezzar’s image leaves me and my wife Betty (who’s presently doing an Open University degree in the arts) breathless at their pig-headed bureaucracy, but I can say with confidence that such disrespect for genius is not a characteristic to be associated with the Wickerstaff-cum-Fairhaven International Festival of the Arts.
     As our chairman Councillor Gilbert Stokoe OBE (Lord Gilbert as we affectionately call him), has said, ‘Our mission is to raise up artists of all kinds presently down on their luck’. To this end we have engaged the musical talents of the composer W.A. Mozart, of Eine Kleine Nacht Music fame who at this moment is putting Senior Cervantes’ epic story, Don Quixote to music, with the support of Spexsaver’s Opticians (midland branch).
     Which brings us to the good news that the festival committee is happy to consider your ideas for a backdrop of windmills, preferably white and any sketches you may have to hand of ruined castles and the squalid interior of inns etc.
  Naturally Lord Gilbert has insisted that your designs  ‘be kept within the bounds of decorum’ considering that our audience will be made up of the elderly, the young and impressionable as well as the fox-hunting fraternity. The main thing is to avoid depressing images, in particular no reference should be made to the current parlous state of Spain.
   As soon as you confirm this offer, I will send further details, including the  measurements of the stage at St. Olaf’s. This is rather on the cramped side though it can look bigger than it is with a careful application of perspective.
Yours etc.
Ned Baslow,
Secretary,
Wickerstaff-cum-Fernhaven Panto and Light Opera Society
In association with the Wickerstaff Indoor Bowls Club
In association with Gilbert Stokoe Enterprises
Sponsors: Cradle to the Grave Fish and Chip Restaurant; Parthenon
Greek Takeaway; St. Olaf’s Mixed Voice Choir; The Lord Cromwell Bowls and
 Darts Club, Fernhaven Sewing, Tapestry & Church Cushion Society etc.

CONTRIBUTIONS INVITED

Email the Editor: Watsonworks@hotmail.co.uk

Picture of the Month
Derry: where are they now?

 

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Leveson is barking up the wrong tree

Blog 37

January 2013

 

CONTENTS

Feature: Kill the Red Spot! Was Leveson

Barking up the wrong tree?

NewsScan: Walmart’s winning ways

Quote of the Month

Poems of Place: Urbino nocturne

Recommended reading: Instant Messages

by Laura Solomon

The Baslow Letters (continued): Dear Señor

Cervantes

 

 

KILL THE RED SPOT!

Was Leveson barking up the wrong tree?

 

Leveson seems to have forgotten that press freedom was not lightly won; that it took several centuries of defying censorship and establishment repression to achieve what we have now; that the word was always at risk of the blue pencil, or in the case of the 19th century in Britain – the red spot.

Leveson’s suggestion of a kite mark for a legitimised press is of course couched in the language of moderation, but it rather gives the game away. What was the red spot? It was the obligatory sign to be printed on licensed newspapers of the 19th century.

The spot confirmed that a newspaper had paid for permission to print. It differentiated the ‘respectable’, the establishment press, from the radicals. Its intention was to outlaw and silence papers edited by William Cobbett, Richard Carlile, Henry Hetherington, Bronterre O’Brien, Earnest Jones, George Julian Harney and Feargus O’Connor who demanded reform of parliament, democracy and a free press.

 

Invitation to the great and the good

No one would argue today that a kite mark might constitute a tax on knowledge as the red spot certainly was. It would ‘merely’ be a symbol of a press that did not abuse celebrities and members of the public, did not lie, and was accountable for its sins, honouring such journalistic principles as truth, objectivity and impartiality (assuming society could achieve a consensus on their definition). What Leveson says the modern press requires, seemingly with the wholehearted backing of Ed Miliband, J.K.Rowling, Hugh Grant and  the Hacked Off movement is a regulatory body that would be the custodian of such principles.

Alas one person’s objectivity is another’s prejudice and, as with the task of recruiting all committees, commissions and inquiries, the nature of that recruitment instantly breeds suspicion: who appoints the judges and according to what criteria? What is rarely considered in the selection of the great and the good is you and me; the florist at the corner, the Mum with her kids waiting for the Number 9 bus or anybody at the Darby and Joan Club autumn bazaar (much less the readers of the old News of the World).

No, the names to regulate whatever is deemed regulateable will be selected in the age-old manner – as Judge Leveson was, exercising narrow criteria not a little to do with being distinguished, part of the establishment – and ‘safe’. It does not take three guesses to envisage the constitution of a body to regulate the press. A few moments’ deliberation might lead to the conclusion that as far as regulation is concerned we have been here before, many times in many different forms, but always with the same intent – control.

 

Elephants in the newsroom

Writing in the UK edition of the Huffington Post (3 December, 2012), James Alan Anslow states that ‘in many ways the Leveson Report is an impressive piece of work; it is a detailed, political and expedient response to’ (here Anslow suspends his approval) ‘an absurdly amorphous and poorly considered brief’. He cites what he considers Leveson’s ‘two showstopping misjudgements: two ignored elephants in the newsroom’.

First, Leveson ‘neglects, almost to the point of dismissing its significance, the Internet, deeming it a “moral vacuum”. It is almost as if the power and reach of the Internet did not exist, scarcely impinging on the present and future of the traditional press’.

Yet in the UK, the US ‘and most other parts of the developed world,’ says Anslow, the Internet ‘is responsible for the irreversibly accelerating demise of print newspapers’. It is both the elephant in the room and, for mass communication via print, the enemy at the door.

Anslow considers that Leveson fundamentally misunderstands the nature of news journalism. He states:

 

Journalism operates in society's borderlands – it is liminal; that is to say it can only fulfil its function if it can move between structures, without being in thrall to any of them (including media moguls). For example, journalists must find operational space within which to conduct off-the-record conversations with contacts be they police officers or politicians; good hacks have always plied their trade by being less than straightforward.

 

In other words, subversion is both natural to the trade and inescapable. The publication of news is, says Anslow, ‘always, to one extent or another, "loaded" and provocative…There will always be times that journalism tests and even breaks the law: whether to expose corrupt MPs by buying stolen data or to unveil royal hypocrisy by procuring a transcript of an adulterous phone conversation’.

 

‘Quicksand of moral  relativity’

Like many other Leveson-doubters Anslow believes that there are already in Britain criminal laws in place to deal with press abuse if ‘those laws are applied with vigour and probity’. Invoking ‘public interest defence or mitigation invariably plunges the process into the quicksand of moral relativity so beloved of expensive lawyers’.

What we need in the opinion of journalist Mick Hume is more freedom, not less. Author of There is No Such Thing As a Free Press…and we need one more than ever (Societas, 2012), Hume believes that freedom is no exemplar of order but ‘an unruly mess’. He writes:

 

We should defend press freedom and freedom of expression as a bedrock liberty of a civilised society – and defend the right of a free press to be an unruly mess. That some abuse press freedom, as in the phone-hacking scandal, is no excuse for others to encroach upon it. Press freedom is not a gift to be handed down like charity only to those deemed deserving. It is an indivisible liberty for all or none at all.

 

Calculated gain

It was to be expected that commitments to such liberty, expressed by politicians including prime minister David Cameron, would be seen by many as calculated to curry favour with the press. After all, Leveson and the public learnt much about the cosying-up between government ministers (and those of the previous, Labour government) and high-fliers in the Murdoch empire such as former Sun editor Rebekah Brooks (affectionately referred to as ‘Country Suppers’). Cameron had actually appointed ex-News of the World Andy Coulson his press secretary until revelations about phone-hacking forced Coulson’s exit from Downing Street.

Two QCs, Ben Emmerson and Hugh Tomlinson in a UK Guardian article ‘No threat to freedom’ (4 December 2012) conceded that ‘The politicians who oppose Leveson will be able to rely on the support of the media in future’, adding, ‘The whole point of Leveson was to expose this sort of patronage, and bring it to an end’.

Even so, forgetting for a moment where the comment is coming from, Cameron’s doubts about regulation are valid. His swiftly-expressed view was that ‘We should, I believe, be wary of any legislation which has the potential to infringe free speech and a free press’. He went on:

 

The danger is that this would create a vehicle for politicians, whether today or some time in the future, to impose regulation and obligations on the press, something Lord Justice Leveson himself wishes to avoid.

 

Cameron’s position would be worthy of support if it were not for the fact that his government was concurrently launching draconian plans to put Internet communications under further legal surveillance.

 

Point missed

That many British newspapers have a dire record of abusing the responsibilities of a free press is not in doubt as Leveson illustrates in telling and often distressing detail. Such practices are evident from day to day and obvious to all, but there seems to be scant analysis of why. Writing in the Guardian former Times editor Harold Evans, while believing Leveson ‘deserves support’, points out a serious weakness: ‘The biggest disappointment…is how far he [Leveson] skates over the crucial issue of ownership’.

Evans refers to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s sidelining of the law of competition in 1982 in ‘a secret deal’ by which Times Newspapers came under News International control:

 

All Leveson’s fine language about the need for future transparency is justified by the vaguest of references to what made it necessary in the first place. It surely matters a great deal that the greatest concentration of the British press was achieved by a backroom deal that gave News International such sway over British public life.

 

Culture of the bully

The issue is ‘structure’, the nature of the landscape of newspapers dominated by the usual suspects, the corporations; News International being only the most dominant in a pool of corporate sharks. That landscape in recent years has been characterised by the closure of many good newspapers or the switch from daily to weekly, especially in the provinces (a situation dramatically echoed in America).

Competition has always been fierce, but the advent of the Internet has transformed traditional rivalries into a battleground where all values take second place to naked profit. The pawns in this battle are journalists, many of them forced into reportorial conduct that permits them no option: get the story, do the dirty, tap the phones, or make way for somebody who will. In short, as the National Union of Journalists emphasise in their journal and stressed in their evidence to Leveson, it is a culture of bullying.

What meets with sympathy in the Leveson Report is the case made by the NUJ for a journalist’s ‘conscience clause’. Leveson was struck ‘by the evidence of journalists who felt they might be put under pressure to do things that were unethical’.

The solution, ‘a whistle-blowing hotline’ for journalists to report bullying does, however, sound naïve if not laughable. Until the structural circumstances – the centralisation of media ownership into fewer and fewer hands – are acted upon in the name of plurality little will change, except the inexorable decline of the paper press.

 

In the wake of Brian

After unparalleled publicity over many months, the Leveson Inquiry will sink beneath the waves of consciousness and memory; perhaps most importantly because it set out to ask the wrong question.

What’s regrettable is that the main issue concerning the media – the nature of ownership and control – remains unaddressed. There is nothing in practice or in the stars that will in future bar the Murdoch empire from fulfilling its ambition to own the whole of BSkyB and thus rule the roost of British broadcasting.

 Scandal has only delayed the process. Meanwhile, though the News of the World arguably suffered harshly as a sacrificial victim, what do we have, as the current cliché has it, going forward? Why, the Sun on Sunday. Plus ça change and happy country suppers!

 

NewsScan:

Walmart’s winning ways

By Alison Prince

Walmart, currently facing down a massive strike, is America’s largest private employer. In 2011 it enjoyed a profit of 16.4 billion dollars, by the simple wheeze of paying their staff so little that the state has to make up their wages. It’s not illegal. The US federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour. That’s dollars, mind, not pounds. If you work in a restaurant or anywhere that might provide tips, the federal minimum wage is just $2.13 an hour, against which the value of meals provided by the employer can be deducted.

A recent study by University College Berkeley found that Walmart’s low wages are costing the state of California alone $86 million a year to provide public assistance like food stamps. The state spends nearly $2,000 every single year on each Walmart employee who can’t afford basic essentials like housing, food, and healthcare. The tax-payer has to fork out more than $2.6 billion every single year to enable Walmart workers to live. As if that wasn’t bad enough, Walmart has just adopted a new healthcare policy that will deny insurance for any employees working fewer than 30 hours a week. And guess what - hardly any of them are now employed for more than 30 hours a week.

So who exactly are the benefit scroungers? Not the wretched workers struggling to stay alive, but their wealthy employers (owners of the British chain, ASDA, by the way) who are clawing money in from the state in order to foot their own wages bill. Talk about bah, humbug - it makes Scrooge look like the Angel Gabriel.

First published in the January 2013 edition of the Voice of Arran newsletter.

 

Quote of the Month:

If, in fact, torture is a crime (a mortal sin, if you will) - a signal of a nation's descent into depravity - then it doesn't matter whether it "works" or not. Zero Dark Thirty condones torture. Not a single character involved in "The Greatest Manhunt in History" expresses any regret about the CIA's use of torture. Maya/Chastain gets her man (code named "Geronimo!") and that's all that counts. The end justifies the vicious means.

David Clellan, ‘And the Academy Award for the Promotion of Torture Goes to…’ (truthout, USA, 9 January 2013).

 

Poems of Place (16)

 

URBINO: NOCTURNE

 

If you sleep deeply enough,

You believe in Urbino’s ducal

Silence; if like a prisoner

In the dungeon of San Leo

Another life commands wakefulness:

You hear the baying of frightened dogs.

 

With the dawn the sorry animals

No longer yelp and bark, comfortless

Across the stillness of their masters’ neglect.

 

Strangely, too, and unexpectedly

Fears of the night have left

The dawn chorus in shock, unless

The season of killing long ago filled

The skies of Montefeltro

With the quietude of exploded feathers.

 

 

Recommended reading…

INSTANT MESSAGES

By Laura Solomon

Proverse, Hong Kong

Joint Winner of the Proverse Prize

Kindle edition (2010)

 

A teen read full of insight and humour

Fifteen year old Olivia (Livvy) Best has problems. On Christmas Day her Mum walks out on the family to live with her lesbian lover; her twin sister Mel, though a talented musician, is thieving, drinking and self-harming; her Dad is jobless, wrapped up in his first novel, and there is a gang of school thugs who are determined to make her life a misery.

Is Livvy downhearted; in despair? Is Laura Solomon’s book about to pitch the reader into a pit full of teenage angst? Mercifully not, for it soon turns out that Livvy is the only really grown-up person in her household, honest about her feelings, but in charge of them. Throughout this highly readable, first-person narrative, Olivia remains cheerful, optimistic, witty and unfazed.

 

GF (Green Frog)

Okay, she is upset by her Mum’s abandonment of the family and unimpressed by her then taking up with a teenage lover. Livvy is also deeply concerned about her sister’s manic behaviour. Yet she opts for tolerance, understanding and support, with the aid of her soft-toy pal, GF (Green Frog) who ‘has thoughts and feelings’: ‘Would you,’ she asks the reader, ‘think I was crazy if I told you we held conversations?’ admitting that she can see how such interaction ‘between a stuffed animal and adolescent girl might be construed as insane’.

    As GF shows perception and good sense throughout the novel we accept him rather as an exemplar of sanity; until, that is, Livvy’s own maturation frees her from such dependency.

  

Bevan: no picture book

Set in London in quite clearly a period earlier than the current recession, Instant Images  throughout portrays a life that brings its problems but at the same time never shrinks from opportunities. It’s also a tale about how people shift over time and through experience from antipathy to tolerance, to affection. Livvy’s fellow pupil Bevan is initially in the story unwashed, uncared for and violently bullied by his brother. Worse, he smells. He’s impossible.

Gradually, an appealing human emerges from the stereotype and Livvy is instrumental in bringing about that change; a change that culminates in love. Such a story could have submerged itself in dark shadows. Instead it is funny and optimistic, a reminder to the young reader that parents rarely make convincing role-models and occasionally let their own interests and passions come in the way of their responsibilities.

That, Livvy Best would argue, is not a reason for rejecting or disowning them. Laura Solomon has produced here a lively, funny, touching and engrossing novel about a time not so long ago when the life of a teenager probably held more promise than it does today.

 

CORRESPONDENCE

Continuing the Baslow Letters

Plans for the production of DON QUIXOTE: THE MUSICAL are, we are delighted to learn, well under way. Here Ned Baslow has information to cheer up the author.

 

Dear Señor Cervantes

Good news! It looks as though we’ve found a decent composer/arranger to put our script of your masterpiece Don Quixote to music and delight the good people of Wickerstaff and beyond. It has been to our advantage that Herr Mozart (Wolfie to his friends and sponsors) and his family have fallen on hard times along with the rest of the Euro population, it seems. He is not only prepared to compose a number of areas for Lord Gilbert who plays the loony knight and a couple of duets to be sung by Quixote and his sidekick Sancho Panzer, but he has ideas for lively pieces of Spanish fandango for the intervals.

I’m afraid we still haven’t resolved our differences over sponsorship. Spexsavers have been very generous in the past supporting our light operas and pantos, but there’s no such thing as a free meal and their PR people have made it clear to us that they’ll want a bit of a return for their money – meaning, in our case, putting it out, in publicity and to the audience, that Don Quixote’s bizarre behaviour in attacking windmills thinking they’re giants, is down to his poor eyesight, a factor that is to be remedied, in the opera’s grand finale, with his discovery of contact lenses.

We do understand your concerns with regard to rewriting the script of Don Quixote, but it’s important to understand that we are producing your work, without fee, in the 21st century when anything written prior to the Internet is considered old-hat by audiences.

Never fear, Lord Gilbert will do the melancholy knight proud, especially as we are hoping to engage a local author from Bakewell –  Lord G’s second cousin – to gee up the text with a few well-placed jokes. Rest assured that the current political and economic problems of your country will not be mentioned.

Further, you’ll be delighted to know that the committee has approached the famous British artist, illustrator and visionary poet Billy Blake (Jerusalem etc.) to design the sets. He owes us as we put him right concerning his famous portrait of a horrible hairy creature on his hands and knees, wrongly identifying him as Nebuchadnezzar instead of the true varlet and worshipper of false gods, Nabonidos.

 

Yours in good spirit and happy anticipation.

 

  Ned Baslow

 Secretary and Treasurer,  Wickerstaff Panto and Light Opera Society

  In association with the Wickerstaff Indoor Bowls Club

  In association with Gilbert Stokoe Enterprises

  Local Sponsor: Cradle to the Grave Fish and Chip Restaurant.

 

Programmes of the Festival will be available shortly. Tickets to all events will go on sale at the beginning of April. Londoners and those resident below a line between Luton and Watford, are advised to make early phone bookings with any of the following institutions: The National Theatre, The Old Vic, the Royal Opera House and the London Zoo.

 

Thanks for reading Blog 37. Submissions, factual or fictional are welcome at Watsonworks@hotmail.co. Next: mid-February 2013.

 

e-reading

James Watson books.

Five originally paper-print novels are available

from Amazon Kindle:

THE FREEDOM TREE (£1.03), set during the Spanish

Civil War, reaching its climax with the bombing of Guernica.

TALKING IN WHISPERS (£2.01). Chile during the tyrannical

rule of the generals.

TICKET TO PRAGUE (£1.63). Tale of a friendship between Amy,

a teenage rebel, and Josef, an elderly Czech poet who had lost

the will to write; until she reads him The Good Soldier Sveck.

JUSTICE OF THE DAGGER (£2.03). Earthmovers, the Yellow Giants,

advance on the rainforest of East Timor. The people have only

arrows and courage to resist them.

FAIR GAME: THE STEPS OF ODESSA (£5.15). Uneven playing fields

in Ukraine: with the ball at her feet Natasha shows talent,

resolution and the will to win. Her quest is to discover whether

these qualities translate into life.

 

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