Why Don’t We Have an Alternative to the BBC and Corporate Media?

Stefano Maffei (David Icke) [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

In November 2013 David Icke and others began broadcasting The People’s Voice after a crowd-funding appeal raised £300,000. The ability of a relatively small number of people – albeit with an established following – to secure start-up funding for a broadcast operation suggests that there is considerable appetite for an alternative to the mainstream media in Britain.

But the launch also prompts a question. If David Icke and his associates can launch a broadcast operation, why can’t the left, broadly defined, operate successfully as an independent player in the media field? We hear a lot about the weakness of the British left, but weakness is relative. Almost six million people are still trade union members. The Co-operative Group has around seven million members (there is bound to be a considerable overlap, of course).  UK Uncut and Occupy enjoyed considerable popular support. Many thousands participate in demonstrations and protests when they think that they might make a difference. Owen Jones has 60% more Twitter followers than David Icke.

The near-absence of the organized left in the main currents of the media is even more striking when one considers that most of the country is somewhere to the left of all the mainstream political parties. This is true even though this majority has few opportunities to hear its position articulated in the media.

(I don’t want to exaggerate the extent to which the left is excluded, There are some left-wing Labour MPs and some Labour-supporting journalists who are given an occasional public platform – Jones most notably. But academic studies suggest that analysis and discussion of key economic issues on the BBC and elsewhere skews heavily towards the interests of what we used to call capital. Mike Berry at Cadiff and Aeron Davis at Goldsmiths have both looked into this and come to broadly similar conclusions. Davis argues that ‘financial journalism, like financial regulation, over recent decades has been “captured” or neutralised by those it is meant to hold to account’. For Berry the evidence shows that ‘the BBC tends to reproduce a Conservative, Eurosceptic, pro-business version of the world, not a left-wing, anti-business agenda’.)

So the state and corporate media tend to privilege the rich and the powerful. This isn’t surprising. But it is strange that institutions founded to promote the interests of popular constituencies have been content to leave the media status quo unchallenged. Trade unionists I have talked to about this point out the huge costs of running a national newspaper and fall into an embarrassed silence when it is pointed out that the media landscape has changed somewhat since the launch of the union-backed News on Sunday in 1987.

(Actually the exchange usually goes like this:

“Why don’t the unions do something to get their message across without having to rely on a broadly hostile or unreceptive media system?”

“Ah, well, we did try. We launched a newspaper in the eighties and lost a fortune.”

“Yes, but now there’s the internet, and cable television. You don’t need to have a national newspaper to reach large audiences. Individuals and small groups like the Artist Taxi Driver and Novara Media show what’s possible.”

Long pause.

“We launched a national newspaper in the eighties and lost a fortune.”)

So, how much would it cost for the popular institutions and their allies on the extra-parliamentary left to create a news and analysis operation capable of challenging the mainstream? It would certainly cost something. Goodwill and enthusiasm can only carry one so far.

But the sums are not prohibitive. In 2011 Resonance FM in London was putting out an impressive 24 hour schedule for around £200,000 a year. The money paid for full-time technical, administrative and commissioning staff, as well as offices and broadcast facilities in central London. This, together with in-kind contributions from volunteers, has enabled Resonance to build an audience of somewhere close to two million.

Let’s say that we add television broadcast and budget for £100,000 for three more full-time staff. We’re looking at staff and office costs of £300,000. and we still haven’t got to the cost of content.

In 2011 Ofcom estimated that the contributions from volunteers at Resonance were worth a further £510,000.

There’s a lot of content available online and much of the original coverage will be commentary in-studio and interviews conducted via Skype. Organizations and individuals that stand to benefit from stronger coverage from a popular perspective will also want to contribute their time as interviewees etc. I am not a fan of volunteerism in itself and people who work should be paid. But paid trade union comms people could be expected to contribute their time, just as they would appear on the BBC as part of their job, if anyone ever asked them. NGOs, academics and others who are paid to conduct research are also keen to demonstrate public impact. Some would be happy to contribute.

Still, as a minimum you’d also need a news staff that can prepare early morning, mid-day and evening news reports and provide context and rebuttal for the other media’s selection and treatment of issues. In other words, you need to challenge the Today Programme as the dominant framer of the national conversation and continue to present an alternative take on the news through the day. This would be expensive, but it would be crucial to the station’s overall success. Say £100,000 for that.

(As for overheads, I can’t believe that the trade unions and the co-operatives haven’t got some commercial space in London they aren’t using, so we might save some money there.)

Anyway, let’s say a bare bones media operation costs around £400,000 a year to run. I am guessing, but it is not going to be vastly more than that. It wouldn’t be 24 hours, nor would it be heavily reliant on original programming, especially in the early days. But it would have enough money to run cheap talk-based commentary, interviews with experts, documentary specials, coverage of demonstrations and assemblies, and a spine of news coverage. At that level it would be a point of opposition that could challenge media (mis)representation elsewhere and provide its own perspectives on current affairs.

£400,000 a year isn’t chicken feed. How could such a thing be sustainable? Well, as I say, I am not a fan of volunteerism for its own sake and enthusiasm is liable to wane if viewers are subjected to constant appeals for money. But a popular news and analysis service would create opportunities to raise revenues. The Co-operative group would presumably want to support programming that in turn supports the co-operative principle. It would seem to make more sense than advertising in the Daily Mail as it currently does. And popular programming would give the unions a chance to build their membership – an expenditure that would pay for itself. A book programme could do deals with publishers so that the station took a cut from discounted sales. Magazines and publishers could also run their own programmes. (Deep Green Drive Time in Association with the Ecologist, insert your own jokes here.) There are lessons to be learned from alternative media and NPR in the United States.

Audiences are also commercial opportunities in their own right. In the States, successful right-wing media support a vibrant cottage industry of water purifier manufacturers and supplement distributors selling this this kind of thing … Credit unions, utility co-ops and similar enterprises could make their own use of a compatible media environment. If a cooperatively owned business doesn’t exist in a market where the station attracts considerable numbers of potential purchasers, then the station can work with existing co-op incubators to create one. It would be great if, as the audience grew, the co-operative sector were to benefit at the same time.

£400,000 is a start, and a combination of contributions from the unions and the co-operative movement, annual crowd funding drives and commercial revenues could probably cover that. It would be a threadbare offering at that level, but it would be enough to be starting with. Remember, David Icke raised 3/4 of that with only a 100,000 followers on Twitter. If you take Owen Jones and all the trade union feeds, you’re looking at, what, twice that?

A media group like this would want to raise more money to pay for investigations etc, either produced in house or contracted out to operations like Exaro and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. It would be an opportunity to give a mass audience a chance to participate in shaping the content of the public sphere, too. But all it this can be done over time, as the audience is established and begins to see itself as a group with a stake in the production process. Once up and running, the organization could even seek to secure public funds and access to the BBC network, in the event that the state broadcaster becomes democratic. It could apply meaningful pressure for just such a process of reform.

Popular institutions are not entrepreneurial businesses and I don’t want to suggest that they should be. But they are suffering acutely from their weakness in the sphere of communications. Of course the challenges are considerable. The operation would need editorial integrity and a genuine pluralism. The temptation to make it the rote deliverer of a trade union or Labour Party line would have to be resisted. But surely no one could deny that the need for an alternative space for deliberation and debate is very pressing. The risk of losing some money is there, of course, but the risks of doing nothing are much more serious.

Perhaps we could draft Owen Jones as the network’s first director of programmes? True, he’s no David Icke, but we have to work with what we’ve got.

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Submission to the House of Lord Communications Select Committee

The Future of Investigative Journalism

1. Summary

Two kinds of institution have, to a very large extent, funded and directed journalism, including investigative journalism, in Britain; commercial media groups and the publicly funded BBC.

This combination of market and public service provision has failed to keep the general population tolerably well informed about matters of deep common concern for long periods of time. Investigative journalists have tended to concentrate on private or marginal matters and as a result comment and analysis have been starved of relevant information and democratic decision-making has been severely impaired.

It is necessary to introduce another mechanism for directing and funding investigative journalism. I propose that we each – in virtue of our being citizens – are given some power to allocate public money to journalists and some power to determine the publicity afforded to their findings.

This joint power, to commission and to publicise, is currently in the hands of owners, managers and employees of large institutions. They have not been able to use this power responsibly and can no longer claim the exclusive right to direct journalism.

2. The Economics and Politics of Investigative Journalism

In the marketplace investigative journalism is usually a low profit or loss-making proposition. It also carries significant legal, economic and political risks. Market institutions have usually had to cross-subsidise investigative journalism with other kinds of content. Executives and editors at the BBC also keep a careful eye on their investigative journalists, being mindful of their need to maintain the appearance of political impartiality and to avoid attacks from commercial rivals.

Effective investigations can disrupt important external relationships and present significant conflicts of interest. In both commercial media operations and in the BBC, investigations are subject to close supervision by editors and executives who make essentially unaccountable decisions about the level and duration of support given to particular lines of inquiry. Often it seems that newspapers in particular use investigative journalism to prosecute vendettas rather than to serve the public interest.

Journalists are often reluctant to talk about the pressures with which they work and sometimes prefer to insist in public that no such pressures exist. Many of their colleagues would disagree. More importantly, the major media repeatedly fail to describe reality when doing so threatens their own interests or the interests of those who have the power to help or harm them. Their track record should count for more than the arguments of their apologists.

Neither market forces nor the principles of public service have succeeded in delivering adequate investigative journalism in recent years. Governments have presented essentially fictitious rationales for war, banks have misrepresented their financial position, and media companies themselves have been hosts to widespread and prolonged criminality.

The state, the financial sector and the media have operated for long periods without fear of exposure by a free press. Institutional arrangements that have repeatedly failed us must now be changed.

3. Public commissioning – the Democratic Principle

There is another way of directing journalism that has not yet been tried on any significant scale. Money raised from the general public could be distributed to journalists on the basis of a vote. Journalists would post proposals for projects that would be costed according an agreed scale. Each of us would have an opportunity to review these proposals and to vote for the ones we supported.

Once an investigation was complete we would vote to determine how much publicity was afforded to what was discovered. The broadcasters could be required to summarise information from investigations in their news bulletins. They could also provide space in the schedules for stand-alone documentaries written and produced by publicly funded journalists.

Rather than relying on market forces or the principles of public service, we would make decisions for ourselves about what we wanted to know more about. Different voting mechanisms would deliver different outcomes but the principle – that each citizen should have some power to shape the investigative agenda – is clear, and clearly now necessary, given that every other method for securing journalism in the public interest has failed.

This power to shape the content of what is widely known and therefore politically relevant would encourage citizens to engage with one another as citizens; it would provide an effective means for marginalised and excluded groups to speak back to their fellow citizens, to correct stereotypes, and to introduce new perspectives in a media landscape dominated by privilege, complacency and demagoguery.

Most importantly, the system of public commissioning I propose would provide support for journalists who want to investigate those aspects of the social, economic and political settlement that are currently ignored or inadequately described in the media on which most people rely. Vested interests that can, to a considerable extent, shape the ways in which they are described would be subject to effective challenge. Problems that cannot now be sensibly discussed would become available as objects of democratic deliberation. We could discuss the economic crisis, for example, without relying on the dubious expertise of financiers and their favoured economists. Once the general public are able inquire for themselves the mystifications and evasions that pass for economic debate will give way to reasoned debate between civic equals.

4. Establishing the Principle of Public Commissioning

If the Committee wishes to support investigative journalism it should recommend that a series of pilots be run in the devolved nations and the English regions. The pilots would test out various models for public commissioning that use existing municipal resources (libraries, schools and colleges, and so on) that and develop new ones, online in particular. The pilots would enable people to exercise power in their own interests, to discover what is currently hidden, and to take an active part in the public conversation.

These pilots would surely find support among those who campaign against social exclusion, environmental degradation and a host of other ills. Public commissioning would be particularly appealing to the many, sincere supporters of the idea of a ‘Big Society’. The opportunity to collaborate in this way will surely create new forms of political sociability that challenge the deadening control of both state and corporate bureaucracy.

Those who currently control journalism in Britain might object and say that no possible system could perform better than the one over which they preside. They too should welcome and encourage the pilots. If they are right then public commissioning will fail. People will find the power they have been given repellent and will demand that they return to their former state of innocence. Editors, executives and owners will then take back the monopoly they currently enjoy with an easy conscience. If they are wrong, they will surely acknowledge that their loss of unaccountable and indefensible power is outweighed by the vast public benefit.

The money for these pilots could come from existing BBC revenues (perhaps from its marketing and public relations budget) and from lottery funds. It could be taken from new levies on the communications industry that ensure that News International, for example, pays a level of tax comparable with that of other companies. There is no lack of public money for journalism. The BBC’s revenues, for example, are somewhat greater than £3 billion annually.

The next round of quantitative easing might also be worth considering as a source of funds. Scarcely anyone understands how money is created or why it matters. It therefore seems apt that some fraction of the billions that would otherwise be handed over to the banks is used to create a system that allows citizens to understand what is going on in the economy.

5. Note on the author

I worked in book publishing from 1998 to 2009, at Penguin, Constable and Robinson, Duckworth and Random House. In my time as an editor I commissioned a number of books on matters of general concern, including the pharmaceutical industry (The Emperor’s New Drugs by Irving Kirsch), the financial sector (The Gods that Failed by Dan Atkinson and Larry Elliott and Treasure Islands by Nicholas Shaxson) and the US-UK invasion of Iraq (Fuel on the Fire by Greg Muttitt).  I was also responsible for the UK publication of Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, Joel Bakan’s The Corporation and Sheldon Rampton and James Stauber’s Weapons of Mass Deception.

I have written two books, The Threat to Reason (2007) and The Return of the Public (2010). The Return of the Public, an argument for democratic reform of the media, was the winner of this year’s Bristol Festival of Ideas book prize.

I am submitting the above on an individual basis.

Investigative Journalism at the BBC

I’ve written a piece about the BBC’s record in investigative journalism for the Power and the Media strand over at Open Democracy. You can read it here.

And another thing, don’t you think it’s about time you bought my book, hmmm?

It really is exceptionally good.

A Public System of Communications

Remarks at the Co-Operatives UK/NUJ/Goldsmiths Conference ‘Can the Media be Co-operative?’

Where are we now?

New technology has left the traditional media in disarray. Total newspaper circulation overall has fallen by more than 25% since 2007. Other media are also struggling. Book sales in Britain fell by 3.2% in 2010 against the previous year – the first annual decline since World War II.

Corporations are sweating existing assets and reducing the quality of their output. The drive for short-term super-profits is, from the point of view of shareholder value, rational. The newspaper groups see no growth potential in their traditional print products and are not therefore investing in journalism. Still, there is mileage to made from flogging a dying horse. And managers must have their bonuses somehow.

We’ve heard from Sion Whellens about the impact of new technologies on people who work in the communications business  and in the wider economy. Increasing numbers of people are working for free or for very little, in the, often vain, hope that they will eventually secure full-time employment. The rewards for creativity and innovation are being shared ever more unequally.

As Natalie Fenton pointed out the corporate organization of journalism is making fewer journalists do more in less time. As a result corporate press releases increasingly crowd out original, independent inquiry. What we might call civic journalism loses out to soft news about lifestyle and celebrity. Investigative journalism, always marginal, has almost disappeared altogether.

Why does it matter?

This matters because, as Professor Fenton has already said today, democracy and news are inextricably linked. Indeed, I would argue that meaningful democracy depends on reliable and pertinent information.

The media we have, however, are unreliable and impertinent. They consistently misunderstand or ignore developments of vast public significance, for example, while insisting on their right to publish the minutiae of people’s private lives.

They are too busy suffocating sprats to notice the monster approaching the boat.

Consider coverage of the financial sector in the period before the crash of 2007-8. If newspapers had spent a small fraction of the time and energy that they lavished on the antics of professional footballers and actors investigating the state of Britain’s banks we might have been better prepared for what was about to happen.

As it was, to pick up Granville Williams’s phrase, the media that most people relied on was in tune with the music of our time – a traditional 19th century air arranged by Alan Greenspan, Gordon Brown and others entitled ‘Markets Rule’.

This music has drowned out other tunes – including the music of industrial democracy and of the common good.

Give people want they want at the lowest possible cost and the highest possible price. Ignore the possibility that there might be more to the public interest than what the public happen to be interested in at the moment they make a purchase.

And Hilary Wainwright is right; any movement serious about addressing what is a deepening social and political crisis must start thinking about the structural organization of the media. Both the unions and the co-operatives need to break the noise and misinformation that surrounds them. Otherwise they will continue to be drowned out.

The failings of the media in the last decade will not come as any surprise to those like the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom who have long pointed out the pressures that bear down on reporters. Indeed a mixture of legislation and market pressures has decisively shaped news content since the 1840s, as Professors Curran and Seaton have described.

So I don’t want to argue for a return to a golden age of journalism – there has never been such a thing. Things are certainly worse for working journalists. Standards have clearly declined. But it isn’t enough to resist the increasing intensity of market forces or even to call for the restoration of the social democratic media economy that existed after the Second World War. The mix of public service and market values that prevailed until 1979 failed to give people the information they needed for self-government and it didn’t stop the Daily Herald from being strangled.

But right now the commercial crisis runs alongside, and is in part driven by, a crisis of plausibility that is unprecedented in scale. And this crisis of plausibility goes some way to explaining patterns of consumption. If supposedly serious coverage is so often nonsensical, then why not gravitate towards celebrity? Brad Pitt is better looking than Jeremy Paxman and is about as likely to tell audiences what they need to know about the British economy.

Paying for Public Interest Journalism

Infotainment can look after itself. But public interest journalism, broadly defined, has never been funded by simple market mechanisms. There have been three kinds of subsidy at work:

1.) Direct state subsidy. The television license fee – not the BBC license, note – most notably, but also differential VAT rates and other forms of support.

2.) Publicly mandated subsidy within private companies – the ITV regulators require a public service commitment from broadcasters. So, classically, Grenada took profits from, say, Coronation Street and used it to pay for World in Action.

3.) Cross subsidy within private companies. Harold Evans’ use of revenue from the Sunday Times‘ colour magazine to pay for the Insight team’s investigations has been mentioned. But think also of Peter Cook’s enlightened ownership of Private Eye.

These last two depend on high and stable rates of profit. One can only redistribute surpluses that exist, after all. In their absence we are left with public subsidies.

Historically, public subsidies have been massive, as Aidan White pointed out earlier. But they have been little discussed.

So let’s change that.

Public subsidies have been organized top-down. In the case of the license fee a sum of money is taken from a large number of people and given to a central organization, the BBC. Managers there determine how the money is used. Not surprisingly they spend  fortunes on market research and other, more or less useful, efforts to discern and preempt the public mood. They become savants of public opinion, exquisitely attuned to the stated wishes and feelings of the British people. That is their edge, the knowledge that justifies their salaries.

This man is spending your licence fee.

In my book, The Return of the Public, I argue instead for the bottom-up organization of public subsidy. We can avoid ‘political control’ in the sense of control by bureaucrats and elected representatives by bringing in ‘political control’ that is egalitarian and participatory.

In the model I propose we no longer rely exclusively on unaccountable professionals to set the editorial agenda, i.e. to determine how public funds are spent on reporting as in the current BBC. Instead, in virtue of our being license-fee payers or, more properly, citizens, we have some power to commission journalism and research – and some power to determine the prominence given to particular discoveries and analysis.

The issue of trust

Journalistic co-ops and non-profits would be well-placed to compete for public funds in this system, to the extent that they were, to use an loaded term, embedded in communities – by which I mean both communities of location and communities of interest and knowledge.

But, note, I am arguing a publicly funded co-operative model, in which users of the media have a direct say in the direction and dissemination of inquiry. That’s the best way I can see to direct funds to organizations that regularly and reliably serve the public interest. It’s how worker co-ops of journalists that wanted to challenge the dominant assumptions of our time could be funded.

Indeed, it’s the only way I can see, for this reason.

Other approaches will run into the patronage problem – more or less well-meaning intermediaries will decide what should and should not be reported. Vested interests will make strenuous efforts to manage these intermediaries, to shape their perceptions about what is, and what is not, ‘newsworthy’.

Only an open cry system, where funds can flow to projects through the support of motivated fractions of the population, and then reach large numbers audiences, will address the pressures and constraints that currently shape coverage. The system also motivates people to engage in the communications process – challenging the music of our times ceases to be a minority pursuit.

What is true stands some chance of being widely shared, no matter how uncomfortable it is to particular interests.

(There are a number of objections to public commissioning along the lines I propose – I deal with them in the book)

It’s a long way from here to there

What I propose is deeply unpopular with those who currently control editorial decisions in the private media. I am arguing explicitly for an end to their monopoly control over day-to-day decisions about what gets investigated and widely discussed. They have so far tried desperately to avoid any open and public discussion of the structure of the media, even as they angle for more public subsidy.

Senior managers in the public service media do not like what I propose, either. I want to replace the lucrative and engrossing theology of research about diversity and inclusion with a system of production that is, in its nature, diverse and inclusive.

The Coalition will, as in other areas, use the language of crisis to justify a further concessions to the corporate and financial sectors. They will doubtless seek to demand less public interest material from broadcasters, to permit more consolidation and so on. They will develop policy that serves the interests of large media corporations and debate will be limited to those issues where companies feel the need to argue among themselves.

The response of the unions, the co-operative movement and other elements in civil society cannot limit itself to attempts to defend the status quo. The status quo failed to prevent the turn towards financialised capitalism after 1979. Defending it is boring and depressing, at a time when people around the world are waking up to the need for direct participation in the political process.

That game is rigged. The major media will ignore civil society when contemplating their own interests, to the extent that they can. Calling on them to be fair and balanced might be necessary – but it is not sufficient. If it absorbs too much of our limited resources and attention then pretending that the media can be impartial judges in their own case will be disastrous.

It is time, instead, to articulate an alternative model of communications that is egalitarian and that also rewards the skills and labour needed to assemble and present information in the public interest. The case can be made in the abstract. But it also needs to be made through material action in the world.

There are a number of steps we can and should take to prefigure a larger system of publicly supported and democratically governed news production. Both the union movement and the co-ops could engage with their members about the kinds of information they want to see more of – the principle of public commissioning could be tried and tested in smaller, defined publics in ways that lent support to the case for greater democratization and helped break through the misinformation about them that I mentioned earlier.

If trade unions and co-operative organizations went into the communications business in a serious way I have no doubt that they could compete effectively with a corporate sector and that is bloated, incompetent and only intermittently in touch with reality. It is, I must add, the one thing that your opponents most fear you will do and do well.

It need not be a loss-making proposition, so long as people felt the money, time and effort they spent informing themselves were contributing to a wider social transformation. That much abused word progressive is relevant here. Informing oneself of the ills of the world will always be a minority pursuit, absent a sense that conditions are going to change, for the better, and soon.

There are other things that might be considered.

The Co-operative Bank, for example, could create a micro-payments system that is tailored to the needs of independent producers and creators. Such a system would be trusted by users and it would have the added benefit of improving communications between co-operative businesses and their customers, social enterprises and other public spirited groups in civil society. And if the bank committed explicitly to a low-commission model it would be well placed to overcome consumer reluctance to grant network dominance, and hence super-profits, to a single provider.

(The creation of a popular micro-payments system would be an excellent business opportunity for the Bank, notwithstanding. What better way to break inertia about changing bank accounts than such a web-based system? Producers could transfer balances held on the system into a new bank account, for example.)

Both the co-operative and trade union movement have enormous, currently largely latent, powers to communicate. They can, and often do, provide a venue for democratic discussion and debate. They can play a much greater role in both describing and enacting the kind of society we want. If they embrace the principle that communication is a conversation of equals rather than something that an unaccountable elite do to a passive audience then their values will, I believe, prevail. 

Conclusion

We have financial crisis and war. Workers are receiving a declining share of the wealth they produce. There is plenty of work to do, but unemployment is high and rising. We need far-reaching change. Reform that acknowledges the constitutional significance of information is central to achieving that. Indeed I would argue that it is the necessary first step.

So the fact that the unions and the co-operative movement have met here to discuss the structure of the media is extremely good news.

I hope it is a sign that things are about to change. The music of our times turned shrill and discordant in 2007. The political classes and most of the media have responded by playing it louder.

We need new songs.

I was not paid to present or transcribe this talk. If you would like to support my work you can do so via Flattr.

The Return of the Public is the winner of this year’s Bristol Festival of Ideas book prize. You can buy it here.

Brief Remarks on the English Question

At a joint IPPR/Open Democracy event yesterday there was a brief discussion of the prospects for the Union between England and Scotland. The point was made that the Scottish nationalism is not so much a political party as a political movement – and that a progressive movement in support of the Union would be needed to stop it.

I found myself wondering aloud what a progressive movement in support of the Union would look like. The Union is a union of crowns. And unionism as a political identity is, to my mind, inextricably linked with notions of Protestant supremacy and capitalist imperialism. To put it another way, when I think of Unionism I think of Niall Ferguson. I can quite understand why the Scots might want to be shot of the thing.

For myself, I don’t feel very British most of the time. Although I don’t support England in the World Cup, don’t especially like the English (some of my best friends are English, I hasten to add), I am sentimental about the Cotswolds, and that’s what I think of as my country when I am abroad. Like lots of English sentimentalists I live in London and pine for deciduous trees.

To be suspicious of the Union isn’t to think that Britishness is empty. Some people feel more British than English, Scottish, or Welsh. But that is not the same as wanting to preserve the Union, I don’t think. After all, a Kingdom of England, Wales and Northern Ireland would still be populated by British people.

Those who want to keep the Union with Scotland presumably want to do so for a reason. Conservatives embrace the Union because it is part of the moth-eaten brocade of flummery and familiarity that allows them to perform their magic tricks in front of the electorate. You think I am privatizing the NHS? Now look! It’s a royal wedding!

The Left has a more complicated task. I can see why the Left might want to keep the two countries united, but I can’t see how we can insist that they do so on the existing terms. The constitutional order in Britain is, after all, a shambles.

On the other hand, the idea of a federation of the various countries of the current United Kingdom would have a certain amount of appeal. Each country would have its own legislature, judiciary and executive. Their powers would be clearly defined and that would be an end both to the West Lothian Question and Westminster’s system of parliamentary despotism, in which the executive has attached itself snugly to the face of the legislature (see illustration below).

The Westminster Model. Is it time to consider reform?

These separate governments would benefit from coordinating institutions. We could, for example, imagine establishing a currency managed by an elected central bank. This elected central bank would ensure that monetary policy served the interests of the population as a whole, rather than those of the City of London. It would strengthen the bargaining position of the North and the Midlands as well as Scotland (outside Edinburgh, perhaps), Northern Ireland and Wales, by ending the financial sector’s privileged relationship with the Bank of England.

We’ve tried leaving monetary policy to a technocratic central bank inside the Square Mile and we are still in shock from the noise when the edifice collapsed in 2007-8.

A democratically controlled currency, combined with large banks that are mutually owned and grounded in particular regions and devolved nations, would help us to bring decisions about investment under public control – each region and nation would strive for the best possible deal for itself, but each would have a reason to act in the interests of the whole. A democratic version of the regional oligarchies that balance the Federal Reserve, if you like.

One could imagine a reformed BBC taking its place quite comfortably in a federal Britain of this kind. The regions and the nations would have democratically controlled investigators, researchers and reporters and a national broadcaster would collate and share the most important information gathered. The federal nations would together create a more robust public service broadcaster and it would in turn provide the many English speakers around the world with a better source of news than the material currently on offer.

Given that the Scottish Nationalists are in no hurry to join the Euro, then a democratically controlled central bank and a democratically controlled broadcaster/publisher might be the best way to maintain the link. We could all defer joining the Euro until they too adopt a properly federal and democratic way of managing monetary policy.

The Scottish Labour Party could spend some time developing a plan for more extensive devolution that assumed the existence of a federal Britain. The English could then have a referendum to decide whether they liked the idea. The English are quite keen to have their own parliament, and they can hardly be blamed for that. Throughout Britain there is consistent support for greater democratization – decisions should be taken by those who are affected by them. If Englishness is problematic as a civic identity in a way that Britishness isn’t, then English civic institutions will surely remedy that.

A campaign for Scottish independence will force the British media to notice constitutional matters. Jeremy Paxman will huff and puff about practicalities, but still, it gives us an opportunity to make a progressive case for reform in the British Isles. Whether England and Scotland end up sharing some institutions or not doesn’t make that much difference, to me, at any rate. What matters is whether we emerge from the next few years as freer and more democratic societies.

At the moment we have a British Parliament and a Bank of England. What we need, perhaps, is an English Parliament and a Bank of Britain.

Structure and Milieu

The inexhaustible novelty of how we feel serves to protect the old order from what we think.

C. Wright Mills begins his esssay The Sociological Imagination by drawing a contrast between the ‘everyday worlds’ that ordinary people are aware of, where ‘their visions and their powers are limited by the close-up scenes of job, family, neighbourhood’, and the ‘structure of continent-wide societies’. The two worlds – the visible, tangible and emotionally coloured world of milieu and the abstract world of structure – are inextricably connected –

The facts of contemporary history are also facts about the success and the failure of individual men and women … When classes rise and fall, a man is employed or unemployed; when the rate of investment goes up or down, a man takes new heart or goes broke. Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both.

But for all that we do not seek to make sense of our own lives in structural terms –

Yet men do not usually define the troubles they endure in terms of historical change and institutional contradiction.

Mills wanted to find the means by which ‘the personal uneasiness of individuals’ might be ‘focused upon explicit troubles’ and ‘the indifference of publics’ might be ‘transformed into involvement with public issues’. To this end he argues for the development of a ‘sociological imagination’ –

The sociological imagination enables its possessor to understand the larger historical scene in terms of its meaning for the inner life and the external career of a variety of individuals.

So The Sociological Imagination is an argument about the methods and assumptions of social science, an attempt to persuade his peers (‘journalists and scholars, artists and publics, scientists and editors’) ‘to use information and to develop reason in order to achieve lucid summations of what is going on in the world and of what may be happening in themselves’. It is a call to reconcile the registers of biography and history, since –

No social study that does not come back to the problems of biography, of history, and of their intersections within a society, has completed its intellectual journey.

He goes on to suggest that –

Perhaps the most fruitful distinction with which the sociological imagination works is between ‘the personal troubles of milieu’ and ‘the public issues of social structure’.

Mills’ distinction between structure and milieu, and his insistence on the need to explore their connections, remain of the utmost importance. But he was mistaken when he wrote that the sociological imagination was becoming ‘the major common denominator of our cultural life and its signal feature’.

Far from working to make reasoned sense of the relationship between milieu and structure, those who together hold the power to shape our shared understanding have tended, in one way or another, to confuse the two, or to disparage one in favour the other. Over the last generation the cultural community – Wright’s ‘journalists and scholars, artists and publics, scientists and editors’ who together determine the field of things that are widely discussed  – this community has concentrated on milieu at the expense of structure, even as the structures in which it operates have become more colossal, global rather than continent-wide.

And milieu has changed, too. For many people in Anglo-America, it has become ever more cluttered with cultural products that seek to reproduce the world of affect. Matters of structure have become a peculiar and unsatisfying subset of things that might, somehow, occasionally be brought into this well-lit world.

Such political coverage as there is tends to focus on personal rivalries or the vices and virtues of individuals. A handful of journalists try their best to give due attention to institutional factors – they therefore retain some capacity to think structurally. Most are discouraged from doing so, working as they do in structurally significant institutions that don’t like to be described. What is left is milieu.

Recently the campaigner for tax justice, John Christensen, described how attempts to reach large television audiences with descriptions of offshore finance – perhaps the most radically under-reported and consequential structure in the world – repeatedly founder on the broadcasters’ desire to re-frame the issue in terms of milieu:

The important part – when I talk to the journalists – and you can spend hours and hours talking to them, you say ‘look this is systemic’ and we will spend way more time talking about it for a documentary. Several weeks or months into the process, and I find that the whole thing’s been turned on its head: you’ve moved from the systemic to the individual. ‘Let’s focus on the Royal Family.’ or ‘let’s focus on the Cayman Islands.’ That’s the problem all the time – and that’s been over ten years’ experience.

All the time we say: ‘don’t focus on the islands, or on the companies, but focus on global financial architecture issues.’ The BBC isn’t engaging in its mission to inform properly — it is only engaging in the most superficial stuff.

(quoted from Nick Shaxson’s Treasure Islands blog)

The islands can be filmed. They exist in the world. The Royal Family excites envy or admiration, it is part of a landscape of shared emotional resources. Structural matters are only thought to become accessible once they are represented in the familiar terms of milieu – recognisably personal tales of wrong-doing, or the impassioned crusader’s search for justice.

Perhaps audiences can be made to feel indignant about money launderers or crooked financiers? So that becomes the way to approach the subject. What is particular to the thing itself, its nature, loses definition as it is made to conform with the demands of narrative. As it blurs we lose yet another chance to understand what is going on around us.

Offshore finance, a system that must be understood in its own terms if hundreds of millions of people are to make sense of their  lives, vanishes in the effort to make it seem like another feature of the close-up world. It ceases to be a matter that must be weighed and considered alongside other structural features – the state, the corporation, the system of communications. It becomes another opportunity for sentiment, for outrage, perhaps, or self-satisfied worldliness. Structure collapses into milieu and our intelligence is insulted in the process. The patient work of relating structure and milieu – of showing how tax evasion contributes to fiscal crisis, and so to attacks on ‘unaffordable’ public services – all that is skipped in favour of the sentimental, the luridly coloured, the emotionally accessible.

When the public fails to be interested in the results, which have to be misleading because they are, in a quite specific sense, deranged, the cultural community feels free to dispense with structure altogether and to experiment instead with ways of refining and mass producing affect. They can concentrate on reality television, lottery results, and the lifestyles of the rich and famous – the cultural forms that reproduce in cartoon form ‘the close-up scenes of job, family, neighbourhood’.

Efforts to describe the world according to a rational order of priorities give way to the sobbing contestant, the blind and mistreated donkey, the nasty one in the house. What is important is obscured by what feels significant.

The same process is at work in the debate about the financial crisis. Politicians assure the public that they, too, are angry with bankers. Nick Clegg tells us:

I am like anybody else: you want to wring the neck of these wretched people who behaved so irresponsibly and then we are now having to bail them out.

And so the private language of sentiment substitutes for a public language of structural description.

(Attempts to challenge the facts of structural power have, more or less successfully, and more or less honourably, sought to work within this concerted moral and intellectual myopia. NGOs who opposed genetically modified foods did so for structural reasons – they were concerned about food security and about the very real human costs of corporate control of the food chain. But their concerns were often framed in terms of ‘Frankenstein foods’. The structure of the food economy was crowded out by what looms large in our individual relationship with food – in this case the fear of contamination.

Similarly, critics of corporate power focused on the practices of companies that had sought to become objects in the private worlds of milieu – brands like McDonalds or Nike, say. They aimed to create relationships with their customers, and so they became vulnerable. In the process the structural similarities between corporations could be lost.)

What then is to be done? Those who benefit from the existing structures aren’t that keen to see them described accurately. They would rather we didn’t see clearly how present structures connect with what happens in our lives. People lose their jobs, their benefits, their footing in close-up, day-to-day world. Let them blame themselves, or find consolation in racial prejudice or interactive entertainment. Let them do what they want, so long as they do not seek the cause of their private troubles in public issues. Above all, keep them away from the idea that they have the means to change the structures within which their visible lives take place.

C. Wright Mills put his faith in experts, in the hope that the joy of knowing how the world is in fact, and the joy of creating lucid summations of this knowledge, would outweigh other considerations. Instead social science, insofar as it tried to explore the relationship between structure and milieu, all but vanished from our shared life. Economists took centre stage with elaborate fantasies about anarchic markets in which atomised individuals sought to satisfy their preferences. The facts of structure vanished in a concerted act of professional make-believe.

Journalists reveled in the endlessly rewarding inanity of their intrusions into the intimate lives of the well-known or the merely unlucky. Denied a public life we were encouraged to look on as their victims (their subjects?) learnt what happens when the structural demands of a competitive media system meet the ordinarily deceptive and faithless conditions of our close-up worlds.

Adam Curtis has noticed how the personal world of affect has crowded out discussions of what is the case, and of what might be done. My own book includes a discussion of the phenomenon, as well as an account of why it has become more complete over the last thirty years – more of a trap, to use a word from Mills (‘Nowadays men often feel that their private lives are a series of traps.’).

The solution is not to be found simply by restating the problem – though there are elegant and entertaining ways of doing that.

We will only restore a proper balance between structure and milieu when we have some power to determine the objectives of social science. There are always good reasons for individuals to avoid certain subjects. Powerful individuals and institutions will seek to shape the way they are described. In large part their ability to do so is what we mean when we say that they are powerful. If we leave decisions about what is investigated in the hands of a few editors, researchers and journalists, then they will come under irresistible pressure to concentrate on some matters and to neglect others.

Those who understand a complex matter for the most part benefit from their understanding and from our ignorance. We need independent means to fund expertise and to reward service to the common good. We need to have, in virtue of our being citizens, the power to commission investigations into the facts of structure, and the power to commission attempts to make these facts meaningful – to relate them to the conditions of our lives.

That is the project I outline in The Return of the Public.

A Moment of … Delicacy from the New York Times

The print edition of the Observer newspaper in Britain carries a supplement of articles from the New York Times. I’ve never seen an explanation as to why this is. But it is.

This week the lead article in the section is headlined ‘Tilting Away From Strict Islam’. In it Tim Arango explores the relationship between Islam and democracy. The country, he tells us, is ‘a volatile laboratory for testing how Islamic a democracy can be, and vice versa‘. The struggle between social liberals and strict Islamists over bar culture provides him with his theme:

In January, bars and clubs, including the Writers Union, were raided in what many Iraqis saw as a government move toward a stricter interpretation of Islamic law. But soon after, as protests for reform began about other issues, the boozy haunts were allowed to reopen.

The reader might reasonably wonder what these other issues were, but the article, at least in its British incarnation, was remarkably unforthcoming. Arango tells us later that ‘inspired by uprisings by Arabs elsewhere, Iraqis held their own protests in Tahrir Square’ in late February. The authorities attacked the protesters and the protests did not ‘blossom nationally’. But apparently the government did decide to ‘dial back the crackdown on night-life’.

But why were the protesters taking to the streets in Iraq? The New York Times doesn’t give us much of a clue. But the Guardian, the Observer‘s sister paper in London, published a piece by Sami Ramadani that sheds light on their grievances. Ramadani quoted some of the slogans:

“Nouri al-Maliki is a liar.” … “The people’s oil is for the people not for the thieves”; “We want dignity, jobs and services”; “No to terrorism, no to Saddam’s dictatorship, and no to the dictatorship of thieves”; “No to the occupation”; “We are not Ba’athists, repression is Ba’athist”; … “Sunnis and Shia, this homeland we shall never sell”.

Thanks to government repression it is not easy to establish a clear picture of the protesters’ concerns. Amnesty International has ‘found disturbing evidence of targeted attacks on political activists, torture and other ill-treatment of people arrested in connection with the protests, and attacks or threats against journalists, media outlets, government critics, academics and students’. But for the New York Times to be so vague about the grievances of the Iraqi people in a country that is, after all, still occupied by 50,000 American troops seems to me to be extraordinary.

My guess is that Tim Arango could give us a pretty good idea of what these ‘other issues’ are. He is based in Baghdad and I am sure he is a diligent journalist. Perhaps the paper’s editors will allow him to do his job.

And if it refuses to publish stories that explain what is going on in Iraq, it can hardly be surprised if its writers seek solace in the Writers Union.