|
|
-
The future of the BBC: Auntie?s big year
A LOT of people will be tuning in to the BBC this year. Celebrations in June to mark the 60th anniversary of the queen?s reign will remind people that ?Auntie??the BBC?s nickname combines familiarity with respect?is the narrator of the national story. In July the Olympic torch should cast a benign light on the corporation, as sports devotees use smart new interactive tools to replay favourite moments.Beyond the celebrations, change looms. Lord Patten, chairman of the BBC Trust, which oversees the corporation, wants to make a mark and is thought to be keen to see a change at the top. Mark Thompson, the BBC?s director-general, is likely to move on fairly soon after the Olympics. The years-long campaign to secure renewal of the BBC?s royal charter in 2017 will probably be fought by someone else.Mr Thompson got the top job in 2004, after Greg Dyke resigned following criticism of the way the BBC handled a report on the build-up to the Iraq war. Under his direction, the ?Beeb? has been more vigilant about political bias and is less prone to public-relations crises. Mr Thompson has proved a supporter of serious...
-
Dale Farm after the evictions: Bleak midwinter
Where to go?
ALMOST three months have elapsed since some 86 families were evicted from Europe?s largest unauthorised traveller site in Basildon, just east of London. The local council set aside £18m to pay for the eviction. Pitched battles were fought with police, 39 protesters were arrested and 19 cases have been passed to the Crown Prosecution Service. But that has hardly been an end to the matter. As many as three-quarters of the evicted families either stayed put around Dale Farm or have returned, claiming they have nowhere else to go.Some 20 caravans line the potholed road leading to the closed site. Men groom themselves on the roadway, peering into tiny mirrors on open caravan doors. Women throw cleaning water into deep puddles. Frustrated toddlers play behind closed doors. Their parents have mostly kept them inside since the eviction, fearing they will fall into the deep trenches dug by contractors to prevent caravans returning to Dale Farm. ?I feel like a refugee in my own land,? says one grandfather, Michael Slattery.Oak Lane, a legal traveller site adjoining Dale Farm...
-
High-speed rail: Train reaction
LIKE a steam locomotive chugging towards its destination, the government ushered in the next phase of its ?railway revolution? on January 10th. It had already declared it a priority to build a £32.7 billion super-speedy rail link from London to Manchester and Leeds via Birmingham (see map). The plan has cross-party support. Justine Greening, the transport secretary, will soothe outlying critics in Parliament by altering the route. But such tweaks will do little to boost the government?s wider economic case for the bullet train, due to start construction in 2016, reach Birmingham a decade later and farther north by 2033.Opposition to HS2, as the line is known, is part environmental and part economic. Ms Greening is particularly sensitive to the first of these. Fellow Conservatives have expressed worries about zippy trains slicing up pretty countryside, particularly the Chilterns, home to many Tory voters.To preserve such beauty spots, more than half the 140-mile track to Birmingham will now run underground. But the proposed tunnels will not bury all criticism. More than 60 miles will still be open; cross...
-
Executive pay: Money for nothing?
HARD work builds character, and should be rewarded. But many Britons believe the link between graft and gain has broken down. At the bottom, they see a dependency culture that costs them billions in welfare spending. At the top, pay for executives seems to soar regardless of the fortunes of their businesses. Even some on the right are rounding on corporate excess. David Cameron, ever alive to the public mood, announced on January 8th that he would reform executive remuneration. His ideas include giving shareholders binding votes on the pay, perks and severance packages handed out by companies. Vince Cable, the Liberal Democrat business secretary and perhaps the most left-wing member of the coalition, is leading the raid on boardrooms.Ed Miliband, the Labour Party?s increasingly criticised leader (see Bagehot), wants to go even further. He argues for putting workers? representatives on company boards and making corporate pay more transparent. Labour is the party of equality, yet the issue is a bind for him. If he is much more...
-
Scotland?s referendum: If at first you don?t succeed
FOR generations of Scottish children, a school trip to study the Battle of Bannockburn?a medieval clash which saw Robert the Bruce and his hardy spearmen rout a much larger force of English knights?has served as a milestone in their patriotic education. They learn how the underdog Scots caught the English in a trap, corralling their mighty horsemen ?like sheep in a pen? and leaving them no room to attack. This victory, school groups hear, has ?inspired the Scots ever since?.In June 2014 the 700th anniversary of the battle will be marked by re-enactments and the opening of a new museum. A few weeks later, Scotland will host the Commonwealth games and the 2014 Ryder Cup golf tournament. And Scotland wants to hold another stirring event in the autumn of 2014: a referendum on whether to quit the United Kingdom.The announcement came from Alex Salmond, first minister of Scotland?s devolved government and boss of the pro-independence Scottish National Party (SNP). Interviewed a day later at his official residence?a Georgian mansion in Edinburgh?s New Town?Mr Salmond admits that, with all its cheering events, 2014 will...
-
Bagehot: Edonomics
ED MILIBAND, leader of the opposition Labour Party, has a problem which should not be serious, but probably is. In this buffed and burnished television age, he sounds and looks a bit odd. This makes him increasingly the butt of jokes. Things are so bad that a BBC interviewer this week asked him?more or less directly?whether he was too ugly to be prime minister.There is not much that Mr Miliband can do about his slightly prissy delivery and doleful, irregular features. In contrast another, genuinely grave, flaw is entirely his own fault. Mr Miliband?s plans for solving Britain?s most pressing problems manage to be both too timid and implausibly ambitious.On January 10th Mr Miliband gave a speech on the economy, explaining what his party should stand for, now there is less money around. Amid horrible approval ratings (according to YouGov, a pollster, some two-thirds of voters think the Labour leader is doing a bad job) allies of Mr Miliband talked up the importance of the address. They called it a moment to ?bash on the head? the idea that Labour is in denial about the need to fix the public finances.Mr Miliband...
-
No-frills accommodation: Room without a view
LONDON is renowned for its grand hotels. It is also notorious for the dinginess of some of its less opulent ones. But the lower end of the market is growing and churning. Although budget hotels account for only 16% of rooms in Britain, their capacity has roughly doubled in the past decade and is growing faster than any other part of the sector. The latest craze in no-frills accommodation is for rooms without a view?or even a window.Capsule hotels were pioneered in Japan in the 1980s. Guests slotted themselves into small, horizontal enclosures like bees into honeycomb, with space only for a bed and a tiny television. London already has its own take on these pods: in 2007 two ?Yotels? opened at Heathrow and Gatwick, the capital?s busiest airports, with 78 ?cabins? for hire by the hour at any time of day or night (the minimum booking is for four hours). Another 25 rooms will open at Heathrow this year.The airport capsules are frillier than Tokyo?s: there is a pull-out table and compact bathroom alongside the low-ceilinged bed. But they are stuck in a niche, serving people in transit. Japan?s city-centre capsules, by contrast, serve a local market with repeat customers.The bigger test of Britain?s taste for windowless pods will come with a new project starting construction this year at the Trocadero, a Victorian building in Piccadilly Circus that was most recently host to an...
-
Terrorists and historians: Deathly archive
Material for art historians
TRUTH and justice will inevitably clash when the history of terrorism is concerned. From a police point of view, all such serious crimes must be investigated, using all available evidence. But academics want the historical record enriched, eventually, with as much first-hand testimony as possible. If necessary, this may be gained by promising lifetime secrecy to those who provide it.That was the undertaking given by Boston College when it started collecting interviews from 26 former members of the Irish Republican Army about their paramilitary campaign against British rule. But the Police Service of Northern Ireland wants to examine the material, chiefly because it may shed light on the notorious murder in 1972 of Jean McConville, a widowed mother of ten children. The IRA killed her, believing, almost certainly wrongly, that she was an informer for the British.Police are particularly interested in the interview recorded by one former IRA member, Dolours Price. In an interview with an Irish newspaper she implicated Gerry Adams, a leading Northern...
-
Bagehot: A murder that changed Britain
THE assault that killed Stephen Lawrence, an 18-year-old black student stabbed as he waited for a London bus, lasted less than a minute. That was in 1993. On January 3rd, after a campaign for justice lasting longer than her son?s life, Doreen Lawrence heard a jury find two men guilty of the racist murder of her son.Mrs Lawrence declined to celebrate as she emerged from the Old Bailey. Racism still exists in Britain, she told reporters. It has taken 18 years to convict her son?s killers because the police failed ?so miserably? to do their job. Yet high-profile supporters of the Lawrence family, drawn from across the political spectrum, take a much more upbeat view of the case, and its impact on Britain.January 3rd was a ?glorious day?, declares the Daily Mail, a conservative-leaning tabloid which?at one point in an admirably dogged campaign to see the teenager?s suspected killers in court?splashed five men?s faces and names across its front page, daring them to sue if they were not murderers. It was a glorious day for Stephen Lawrence?s parents, the Mail insists, and...
|
| The Economist: Britain Thu, 12 January 2012 16:04:24 GMT |
|
