Balancing the elephants

An insightful post from Simon Wren Lewis on fiscal reporting at the BBC and its recent report.

Not much to disagree with ... except for this.

Alongside demonstrable ignorance in the way some of the BBC reports government getting and spending, there is, Simon argues, another pachyderm on the sofa:

'The second elephant is one which the report could not avoid, and that is in adopting impartiality as the overriding frame of reference ... its biggest problem is that the truth becomes of secondary importance. Impartiality seems to be defined in terms of what people think, even if what they think is just wrong.' 

Simon is absolutely right about the lack of knowledge amongst the newsroom generalists, the journalists who write the news scripts, oversee the graphics, book the guests and brief the presenters.

On ‘impartiality’, though, he's sort of right. And sort of wrong.

Right, because there is a damaging frame that has exactly the outcome he says. Wrong, because ‘impartiality’ isn’t it.

It’s ‘balance’. And the two are very different from each other. Sadly, very, very few BBC editors and executives – including the DG, if his Select Committee appearance back in September is anything to go by – understand that difference.

It’s not a new confusion. Since 1926, the BBC has had to grapple publicly with governments and the powerful over ‘impartiality’ – what it means and how to both achieve and demonstrate it – and for a generation or more it’s realised it’s a problem that’s constantly shape-shifting. 

Way back in 2007, just as we were all taking our first tentative steps into social media, the then BBC Trust commissioned independent TV producer and former BBC news man John Bridcut to think his way through what ‘impartiality’ meant in what he called ‘multi-polar Britain’.

John’s report, From Seesaw to Wagon Wheel, mischievously positioned ‘impartiality’ in the sphere of alchemy, its ingredients:

‘a mixture of accuracy, balance, context, distance, evenhandedness, fairness, objectivity, open-mindedness, rigour, self-awareness, transparency and truth.’ 

For all its insights, it was a piece of work that never got the traction it warranted. Instead, BBC editors – and Directors General – continued to fling around the separate ingredients of John’s impartiality cocktail as if each was sufficient in and of itself.

Worse, the words ‘impartiality’, ‘objectivity’, ‘neutrality’ and ‘balance’ bounce round BBC newsrooms as if they’re interchangeable. 

They’re not.

And the most damaging false equivalence of all is that between ‘impartiality’ and ‘balance’, a howler that’s guaranteed that, over the years, the BBC has got so much of its contentious coverage around its neck; climate change, the Iraq war, Brexit, immigration, Trumpism, the economy. Etc. 

It’s not that hard to see why BBC editors reach for ‘balance’ when they’re challenged on ‘impartiality’. I know, I did it often enough in my twenty odd years as the editor of PM, The World at One and Today … though, in mitigation, I always knew it was an easy evasion, a cute body swerve. 

Stop-watch balance and appearance counts are simple, quasi-objective ways of shooting down a complaint of partial coverage. But they tell no-one anything about whether or not that coverage was ‘impartial’.

Plus: ‘balance’ works upstream as well as down. To forestall complaints, editors inevitably spend time thinking how to ‘balance’ the sober conclusions of the carefully well-informed and tend to reach for their imagined opposite, especially if that opposite is loudly and emotionally articulated. Think MMR.

There’s no doubt that Faisal Islam and Simon Jack and their teams know who the charlatans are in any debate about political economy. Who to listen to and who, in any rational universe, should be ignored. Unquestionably they can sort the specious from the soundly based a mile off. But when it comes to what’s actually broadcast … ‘balance’.

After the BBC, I spent a few years teaching ethics to journalism students. Inevitably, ‘impartiality’ figured large. With all its ambiguities and practical challenges.  

I used to use – with attribution – an anecdote that my old friend Allan Little would wheel out for those who thought ‘impartiality’ and ‘balance’ and ‘neutrality’ etc were interchangeable. 

It was about a reporter telling the tale of a row between one man asserting ‘2+2=4’ and another insisting ‘2+2=5’. 

The ‘neutral’ reporter would do no more than repeat the men’s respective claims as accurately as possible. The ‘balanced’ reporter would do much the same, making sure she gave equal time and equal emphasis to both.

(The ‘objective’ reporter, incidentally – the term most favoured by American media – couldn’t report a thing since choosing English as the reporting language and base 10 as the number system would both lack objectivity.)

The ‘impartial’ reporter, though, has two main options. Dismiss the whole thing: one of the claims is patently false so there’s no real dispute. Or report that the row’s taken place (it’s vaguely interesting after all) while pointing out that one of the men is demonstrably wrong.

And that’s the key element in the ‘impartiality’ cocktail. The one that always gets forgotten. Truth … and yes, I know, I know but let’s park that one for now.

‘Impartiality’, begins and ends with truth … or at least an aspiration to come as close to the truth as possible. It’s an active process that demands the journalist goes out – figuratively if not literally – to find and examine as much of the relevant evidence as possible. And to do so as open-mindedly as possible. Weigh significances. Dismiss falsenesses. Put outliers in context.  

‘Balance’, on the other hand, is passive. It coquettishly pretends that there is no single truth. It’s content to ‘balance’ a truth with an untruth, pit evidence against emotion, place equal value on eyewitness and on spun deception. ‘Balance’ sublets the perception of significance and falseness to audiences.  

So, it's quite right to assert, as Simon does, that there is a mindset in the BBC that tends to gives anti-vaxxers the same airtime as the CMO – or at least more of a hearing than their unreason deserves – or climate change deniers the same air-time as those who actually know what they’re talking about. But the root of it isn’t an ‘impartiality’ frame, it’s a ‘balance’ frame.

‘Impartiality’ isn’t part of the problem: it’s part of the answer – and not just to the shortcomings of the BBC’s fiscal reporting.

But here’s the thing: true ‘impartiality’ takes time, effort and application … something the generalists in BBC newsrooms just don’t have. Something they’re bound to have less of as the next round of cuts slices another layer off the corporation's capacities.

More: it takes courage. The confidence to say, Trussonomics wasn't just arguably crazy … it was crazy. Or that the Brexit Quitters’ campaign wasn’t arguably a lie … it was a lie. The strength to refuse to ‘balance’ truth with another lie. To take the inevitable flak from whichever gaggle of tinfoil hatters genuine ‘impartiality’ upsets. 

For all sorts of reasons, some of which are understandable others not so much, the BBC of 2023 - unlike the BBC of the 1990s and 2000s - really doesn’t feel in a position to do any of that and reaches instead, for its good old friend ‘balance'.

There’s your second elephant.  

  

Another small stone on the mountain

I've hesitated before adding to the post-Chilcot comment mountain.
But there are a couple of things that strike me - especially since I was fretting about Chilcot four years ago when I was writing Stumbling Over Truth.
There was the chance then that Chilcot would crash into my more modest volume.
But that didn't happen. And I've wondered ever since whether Chilcot would answer the only question about Tony Blair and the Iraq war that we didn't have an answer to.
Why?
We've known the what ... and the how ... and, obviously, the when for a long time.
But not the 'why'.
Answers?
Has Chilcot answered that?
Sort-of. Though in truth, Tony Blair's lengthy and emotional news conference on Wednesday 7 July and his interview on BBC Today on Thursday 9 July did more to answer the question 'why' than the report itself.
In both of those, but especially in his penitential news conference, the former Prime Minister showed with more clarity and emotional commentary what was in his mind as he strode to war.
And reassuringly - for me, at least - confirmed something I'd concluded in my book.
Creating the 'truth'
I've always rejected the simple formula that Tony Blair 'lied' to take the country to war - I explain it at length in the book.
Put simply, you don't have to spend too long with all the evidence to realise that he didn't lie about Iraq in the strict sense of saying what he knew to be untrue with what lawyers call a mens rea - a guilty mind.
No, it was something worse. The striking thing is that he sincerely believed that whatever it was he was thinking or saying at the time he was thinking or saying it was true.
Worse still, he was - is still - adept at holding several contradictory truths at one and the same time.
Constrained
That's worrying enough.
But Sir John also confirms that No10 - not just the former Prime Minister but those within his inner circle, too - narrowed their range of policy options beyond what was wise and did so almost immediately after 9/11.
He confirms, too, that as time went on, that range became ever more constrained. Which was why neither Tony Blair nor those close to him thought to challenge the meagre, patchy and suspect intelligence they had in front of them.
And why they couldn't or wouldn't see the significance of Hans Blix's report in the winter of 2003, for example.
As it happens, that narrow focus was even further straitened by the energetic No10 operation to 'create the truth' to get over key bumps in the political road - including the mendacious September 2002 dossier and the risible - aka 'dodgy' - January/February 2003 confection.
Putting a misleading script in front of a man who sincerely believes what he is saying at any one time is not a recipe for serious and considered policymaking.
Especially if that man has already secretly sub-let British foreign and security policy to the White House.
Apologists 
And the 'truth creation goes on even now.
In the 24 hours or so after Sir John reported, we saw a few nips and tucks intended to re-frame what he actually said.
His report says the decision to go to war in Iraq was "based on flawed intelligence and assessments" (my italics).
Listen carefully to the apologists for No10's conduct in 2002/3. And note how they tend to drop the words "and assessments".
In other words ... "it was all MI6's fault - the intelligence was crap."
Now, that's true - but then, intelligence often is crap. Or at best a bit smelly. That's why - as Lord Butler pointed out in his 2004 report - no sane policymaker should ever take raw intelligence at face value.
It's the assessment that matters - and that was done, effectively, in house; in No10.
Flawed assessment of flawed intelligence isn't a great thing to put in front of a Prime Minister who believes whatever he is thinking and saying at any one time is the truth.
The head of MI6 at the time, Richard Dearlove, met regularly with the Prime Minister and apparently scared him witless with raw intelligence. Intelligence the spy chief knew had multiple limitations.
And the Chairman of the JIC, John Scarlett - the man who nominally 'owned' the intelligence - was more or less a lodger in Downing Street. Even the otherwise blandishing Hutton Inquiry found that No10 had "subconsciously influenced" him in his assessments.
Trusted voices
The problem for the No10 apologists is that there were, as we know, trusted voices inside the intelligence community screaming that the intelligence was flawed. That it needed surrounding with - some thought suffocating with - trucksfull of caveats and cautions.
Not just in publications such as the September dossier but in policymaking too.
Those voices offered the very challenge that Sir John found lacking in Downing Street. But they weren't saying what Downing Street wanted to believe. And so, weren't so much ignored as not heard.
So ...
Do we now know why?
Probably.
In his confessional news conference, Tony Blair more or less begged for our understanding and, perhaps, absolution.
'I truly believed at the time what I was thinking and saying ... and though I was wrong, isn't the world a better place now, anyway' ... was the top and bottom of it.
It's as mundane as that.

Saturday 25 September 1915

This is an extract from 'Dust'. It is taken from the chapter entitled 'Saturday 25 September 1915'. 
'Dust' is the story of one young working class man, almost invisible to history, who died on the first morning of the Battle of Loos. Nothing of him was ever found. 
One photograph and three hastily scribbled postcards written a few days before the battle are all we have to begin to tell his life.

***  

It is 5 am. 

The rain of the past two days, at times torrential, has eased to a thick drizzle. The earth is sodden. Water lies in pools in the pocks and tracks in the open land. It covers the bottom of the trenches. It is ankle deep. There is barely any wind. 

There is no silence. For almost 100 hours, British guns have tossed tons of high explosives and shrapnel onto German lines. Those lines are no more than 400 yards from where Lance Corporal James Airton is standing. Sitting. Leaning. Talking. Waiting.  

It is 5 am and no-one knows what is to happen next. 

Perhaps the first plan. Perhaps they will release thousands of tons of chlorine gas into the still, damp air. The ‘utility’. The ‘accessory’. Perhaps a five mile line of 60,000 men will rise as one out of the trenches to charge and slide and slip and fall in the dense clay. 

Perhaps the other plan. There are two plans. Perhaps they will not let the gas go. Perhaps just 20,000 men will do what they can along a shortened line of two miles or so. Their flanks naked to the German machine gunners. Knowing they cannot do what their orders say they must.     

It is 5 am and the biggest infantry battle in the history of Europe is perhaps an hour and a half away. Or perhaps it is not. Perhaps it will not happen at all. 

Lance Corporal James Airton,
6th King's Own Scottish Borderers

Jim and the rest of the 6th Battalion of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers have been back in the front line trenches for less than 24 hours. 

It is 5 am. Now they are in the front line. Waiting. If they are to go, theirs will be the hardest task in this unwanted battle.

Jim and his battalion hold the section of trench that cuts the road from Vermelles to Auchy Les Mines. Or what remains of them. A man foolish enough to peer over the parapet would look north east. Some 400 yards away, the German front line trench. The Madagascar Trench. 

Straight ahead, the battalion’s first obstacle and objective. ‘Mad Point’. A machine gun post that controls the Vermelles-Auchy road and stands in front of the remnants of Madagascar village, the Corons de Maroc and Corons de Pekin. Their exotic names belie their drab reality. Smashed shells of what were once rows of miners’ terraced houses. 

To their right, one of the strongest strongpoints  of the German front. The Hohenzollern Redoubt. It bulges 600 yards from the German line. Its nose no more than 250 yards from the British line. It is a fortress with innards of steel and concrete driven onto and into a low slagheap that for all its modest height dominates the low, flat, sodden land around. Its surface a bristling skin of half buried machine guns. They have an uninterrupted, 270 degree field of fire. Behind them, a rash of trenches speed ammunition and reserves to the front. No-man’s land here is “as nasty a bit of ground as any on the battlefield”.

***

It is 5 am and no-one knows what is to happen next. It depends on the wind. Partly on the wind. 

Gas is a gamble. A grim game. An aetherial game of chance. Gas  debilitates, demoralises and destroys. It destroys, burns and corrodes men and machines. But it can not be aimed. It is the caprice of nature that decides whether it kills, blinds or burns your own men or the enemy. The strength and direction of the wind. The only moment of human control is the moment of decision.  Whether to open the taps or not. 

It is 5 am. Jim waits. Waits for that decision and all that will follow.

Gas can not do all that artillery can. It can not uproot and cut the tangles of barbed wire that slow or halt an advancing soldier. That force each man into a high-stepping, macabre dance. That turn him into a standing target. Nor can it excavate the booby traps, the pits lined with spikes.

***

It is 5.40. Haig persuades himself the wind is stronger. The leaves of a poplar tree whisper in the lightest of breezes. It is, he decides, ‘satisfactory’:

“ … but what a risk I must run of gas blowing back upon our dense mass of troops” 

At the northern end of the line, next to the La Bassée canal, facing Auchy les Mines, the air is still. 

One of the men whose job it is to release the gas hesitates. Another man, a senior officer, hesitates, too. He wants to stop the release. He calls Divisional HQ. He tells General Horne:

“The wind is unfavourable and I don’t think I should release”, 

Horne is firm:

“The order is to turn on the gas”

The officer tells General Horne that the man whose job it is to turn on the tap is refusing to do it.

Hornes’ final words are curt: 

“Then shoot the bastard”.

*** 

It is 6.30 am. The noise is unbearable. However much we try we can not imagine it or anything like it today. The closest is an intense spell of sheet lightning but that is a pale, temporary imitation.

There is the smell of wet earth. Of shit and rot and death. Of burnt explosives. Of smoke and gas. 

It is 6.30 am. Whistles blow. Along the five miles of the line. Their shrill soprano cuts through the basso profundo of both sides’ bombardments . The first of 60,000 men heave themselves, their half hundredweight packs, their rifles, wire cutters, spades and other kit over the parapets and out into no-man’s-land. 

It is 6.30 am. Pipe Major Robert Mackenzie hears the whistles. He waits in the centre of the Borderers’ trench. He is 60 years old. At least 60 years old. Perhaps more. No-one knows for sure. He is a legend. He breathes deeply and blows hard into his chanter. Once, Twice. Again. The drones wake. He rises with the first men. Steps over parapet and into the open. His fingers pick out the tune. Men pass him and stride towards Mad Point. He is hit. He plays. He is hit. He plays and walks until bullet after bullet smashes his legs from under him. The German machine gunners are aiming at his pipes.  He stops. He can go no further. He is dragged back.

Pipe Major McKenzie’s wounds will kill him. He will be awarded the Victoria Cross.

***

The laconic battalion diary records those first moments like this:

“Battalion assaulted German trenches at MAD POINT & SE of MADAGASCAR trench at 6.30 am. The position was reached and at some points entered. Severe machine gun fire chiefly from flanks, undestroyed obstacles and uncertain effects of gas caused severe losses and prevented the attack from succeeding.”

*** 

The wire and the booby trap are holding up the men. Those behind, those in the second wave, catch up. They are bunched now, close to the wire. The German machine guns at Strong Point open up. Conan Doyle described it like this:

“Every accumulation of evil which can appall the stoutest heart was heaped upon this brigade … the gas hung thickly about the trenches, and all the troops … suffered from it … The chief cause of the slaughter, however, was the uncut wire, which held up the brigade while the German rifle and machine-gun fire shot them down in heaps.”

Some struggle back to their trenches. A handful. Nine officers remain of the 29 who began the day. Of the men, some 300 still stand of the 924 who stood-to just before dawn. Lance Corporal James Airton is not among those still standing. He is one of the 630 men killed, wounded, gassed or missing.
It begins to rain. Heavy rain.

***

There are no words. Or if there are, they are few.

Captain Stair Gillon, an officer of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers, had these a dozen years after that morning’s slaughter. 

“It was all over in a few minutes. The wonderful product of months of zeal, energy, and patriotism was ‘knocked out’ without opportunity of doing more than set an example to posterity by their bravery.”

Are we nearly there yet ...?

Four years late - that's quite an achievement.
But that's how long overdue the Chilcot report is according to Bernard Jenkin, chairman of the Public Administration Select Committee.
And the thing that's holding it up is the only thing that matters now. The answer to the question 'why?'
We've known 'what' and 'how' for a long time. And the Chilcot panel's often idiosyncratic questioning hasn't, in all truth, added very much to either. Partly because when you read the witnesses' testimony, you find yourself marvelling at the patina that betrays years of burnishing between events and inquiry.
Two years ago, I was fretting over Chilcot. I was writing Stumbling Over Truth. As the cover helpfully tells you, 'the inside story of the sexed-up dossier, Hutton and the BBC'.
And there was the strong expectation then that Chilcot would report a few weeks after my book was due to be published on the 10th anniversary of the September dossier.
That could have been bad news. Not because it would undermine the book but because it would - might - answer the question neither I or anyone else could at that time. 'Why?'
For all the mountain range of evidence that was out there thanks to leaks and the FOI Act, no-one on the outside knew what Tony Blair and George Bush had said or written to each other in private. What, if any, secret understandings or agreements they'd come to.
And the risk to the book was that I'd made it clear that I didn't believe the evidence was there to do what many did. Call Tony Blair a "liar".
Guilty mind
I couldn't see any evidence of what lawyers call a mens rea - for the simple reason that I concluded he truly believed whatever he was saying at the time he was saying it. Even if that meant holding incompatible or even contradictory views at one and the same time.
That doesn't let the former Prime Minister off the hook, however. We know the lengths he and Downing Street went to to 'create the truth'. How those around him nipped and tucked intelligence to make it fit the policy. And how any warning - however authoritative - that he was wrong about Saddam's WMD went into the bin.
New inferences
Two years on and its hard not to make new inferences.
As reported, it's those private messages and, possibly, agreements between PM and President that's holding up Chilcot and has been for some time.
And that's the thing. The longer Chilcot is delayed - and yet again today, we're promised he'll report 'by the end of the year' aka 'not until the end of the year' - the harder it is to avoid the conclusion that those private messages tend to suggest Tony Blair's mens might have been rea after all.
That the 2002/3 exercise in 'creating the truth' wasn't just another example of the cynical and contemptuous way New Labour did its politics day in, day out for a decade. That it was something much more sinister.  
Another seven months of mandarinisation will only persuade us that Chilcot, when he finally reports, has hidden more than he's revealed.
And the test is whether he produces an answer to that question, 'why?'

What's this 'channel' thing anyway?

That decision to shift BBC3 to iPlayer is one of the most important DG Tony Hall has made.
Possibly, the most important he'll make in his time at the top of the BBC.
Why? After all, BBC3 is a niche channel - though, according to BARB's February figures, it's no small niche, outperforming Sky 1 for example.
Nor is it especially cheap - an all-up cost of around £120m. Slightly less than the cost of all Local Radio.
It's had question marks over it since its launch 11 years ago. Some were justified - should the BBC really be commissioning programmes called 'F*ck off, I'm fat/ginger/a hairy woman' many of us wondered. And what about those Eastenders repeats? Did 16-35 year olds really not watch the soap first time round on BBC1?
It was easy for the BBC's many detractors to dismiss it as Auntie's metro-yuff g-string. A 'look-at-me' come charter renewal.
So why's it such an important decision? Who cares whether yuff have to watch the shows they want on their iPads? When they want? How they want?
Pipes and stuff
It's important because it's the the first sizeable wedge the BBC has driven into the whole idea of 'channels'.
That decision a while ago to put some content on iPlayer before it went out on the 'telly' was a tentative tap on the same wedge. So was the, frankly, amazing Olympics service.
But moving a whole channel is the first big hammer blow. It won't be the last.
Tony Hall knows - and it's something the BBC has been saying to itself and to anyone who cared to listen for over two decades - that the corporation's value lies in its content, the stuff it makes, the stuff it commissions and the stuff it chooses to buy. Not in 'channels'.
Now it's true that most of us still watch our programmes live and on a 'channel'. But fewer of us and fewer of them. And the trend is in one direction only.
Who are you?
Channels made sense when there was only a handful. When we were schedulers' more or less happy prisoners. Viewers in my generation part-identified themselves by the channel their family watched most on the single TV set in their home.
Were you Blue Peter or Magpie? Grandstand or World of Sport? 
And when BBC2 came along, did you tweak your set to watch it or, like my parents, not bother because it wasn't "for people like us".
We still see vestiges of this kind of thinking now. The debate over Scandidramas - should The Bridge and The Killing have been on BBC2 or BBC4? Or those angry blasts in the TV pages during the 2012 Olympics that this or that event - usually where a Brit was heading for a medal - should have been switched to BBC1.
Yet it's hard to see what it is about Line of Duty that makes it obviously BBC2 and what it is about Shetland that makes it equally obviously BBC1. Nor where the dividing line comes between BBC2 and BBC4 commissions.
But then, these questions only matter if you believe 'channels' do.
In and out of the box
If there's anyone still alive who turns the TV onto "their" channel at six-thirty and watches it and only it 'til bedtime, they're very few in number and more likely to be my generation than younger.
As it happens, I've seen most of the BBC3 landmark programmes - Gavin and Stacey, Boosh, Good News etc etc ... but not one of them as they went out live on that channel. Nor the first time around.
The length of a programme's tail is key these days and where/when you watch is as important as you want to make it.
And we're more and more used to vertical viewing - binging on box sets. That's how I watched West Wing and Family Guy. I'm still watching House of Cards via Netflix - a box set by other means. And recorded the Scandidramas and watched them on successive days not successive weeks - a kind of home made box set. Oh, and it annoys the hell out of me that I'm having to defer to the BBC2 scheduler and wait seven days for the next episode of Line of Duty.
But that's me.
The point is, though, we all have increasingly personal viewing habits which are an increasingly poor fit with the idea of the traditional 'channel'.
Test
The BBC3 move came earlier than Tony Hall would have liked. And under pressure to save yet another £100m or so ... which, incidentally, the move will not do.
But it's not a move he was reluctant to make in principle. Nor, if it's well managed, will it be the last.
It makes sense to tackle BBC3 first. The target audience is the one that's already most adjusted to multiple devices. The one that's most likely to be able to navigate different ways of finding the content it wants. And, of course, the one that'll grow up with those new habits as second nature.
The language, though, is limiting.
Inevitably, it's a 'channel' being downgraded to 'online'. Auntie abandoning its kids. And that leads inevitably to the fear that none of the type of content made and bought for BBC3 will now see the light of day.
Tony Hall knows that if that happens it will be a disaster. Not just for the lost talent - which is a loss of quality by other means - but because it would sink or at least delay and make more hazardous the corporation's medium-term strategy.
It's vital the new BBC3's commissioning and buying is a success and is seen to be a success - and that means holding onto the channel's identity as a fast-track to the mainstream for new talent with new ideas.
Numbers will matter too. And that's why getting iPlayer audiences measured properly and in a way that can be compared sensibly with traditional viewing is so important.
Time
It's not impossible to foresee a time when an iPlayer like 'homepage' will be the main route into BBC programmes and content. If you've never seen the current iPlayer landing page, it's worth a visit to look at the possibilities. And, incidentally, where the 'channels' are positioned on that page.
It doesn't take much imagination to see that there are many, many more ways of bundling programmes and other content together than a handful of 'channels' none of which is as defining as some would like to argue.
And in those bundles, whether and when a programme or a series or whatever went out for the first time on TV will matter not at all.
That's where the BBC has to go. Whether it will be able to at its own pace and in its own way depends on that BBC3 wedge.
Whether it opens up the possibilities Tony Hall hopes. Or cracks the whole bloody edifice.

The wrong people in the room?

This Chatham House paper by James de Waal published today, 21 November, is worth reading. And thinking about.
DeWaal is no lightweight - he's a visiting fellow at the RIIA and has a distinguished background in the MoD and the Diplomatic Service. His short paper is a study not of the political decisions to get involved in Afghanistan and Iraq – we know that the first of those was spasm, the second a deception – but how the Blair government managed to make such a Horlicks of military deployments both during and in the long years after the conflicts.
At its most political, it condemns Tony Blair’s Downing Street and its ‘sofa government’:

“Blair’s tenure as prime minister was noted for the practice of decision-making in small circles of selected (and therefore supposedly tight-lipped) advisers – an approach condemned by, among others, the Butler Review of intelligence on weapons of mass destruction.” 

A style that Blair’s Chief of Staff, Jonathan Powell, defended as a system that produced good decisions so long as you had “the right people in the room” - from which deWaal takes his title.
Obsession
The problem was, de Waal argues, that “the right people” didn’t have quite the right attitude to managing the military:

“Politicians and civil servants did not wish to be accused of interfering with military planning, and so did little to ensure that military action supported political aims.” 

And Downing Street’s infamous obsession with the next day’s headlines led to astonishing recklessness:

“In 2002–03, Britain decided to make a ground force contribution to the invasion of Iraq …" 

That’s to say, the decision on the type of intervention, ‘boots on the ground’ not the decision per se to oust Saddam by military force – that had already been taken on the false premise we now know it to have been:

 “… with implicit responsibility for post-war security in that country’s southern provinces, primarily because politicians feared they would have problems with the British army if it was left out, and that these problems would find their way into the media.” 

Later, in another part of the forest:

“In 2009, Downing Street was not convinced of the military need to send reinforcements to Afghanistan, but agreed to do so because it wanted to prevent hostile press briefings by the military.”

The explanation? Well, the obvious. But also the …

 “incoherence, inconsistency and opacity …” 

 … of Downing Street’s “model” for working with the military. No10 was:

“apprehensive of the close relationship between the armed forces and the media, and were therefore reluctant to challenge military opinion.” 

And as a result, did nothing at all to query the plans of those senior officers who:

“felt their role was principally to support the institutional interests of their branch of the armed forces.”

"Poor judgment"
De Waal’s main focus isn’t to explain, condemn or excuse political decisions - though some Blair apologists read it as such. That's odd. In measured language - ever the diplomat, perhaps - his judgment is scathing:

“It seems reasonable to accuse Blair of poor judgment – at the very least – in overestimating both the threat from Saddam Hussein’s regime and the prospects of installing a viable replacement in Iraq.” 

And he recalls the admission of political misjudgment that Sir David Omand shared with the Chilcot inquiry. The admission that the immediate pre-war political strategy failed catastrophically in the case of Iraq:

“He cited the chess concept of Zugzwang, ‘where you force your opponent into a position where they have to move and every move they can make will worsen their position’, and showed how ‘instead of putting Saddam in that position, we turned out to be in that position ourselves because we were forced to […] get the [UN] inspectors to look for the smoking gun in double quick time before the window for invasion closed’.” 

Makes you wonder how serious the UN/weapons inspectors’ route really was – and how much Blair was, contrary to his assertions at the time, wholly governed by the military timetable.
Code
De Waal ends recommending a new code to circumscribe governments’ decision making on the use of force – not a bad idea since that decision, peace or war, is the most grave a democratic government can take.
And the code’s aim - he suggests it should be approved by parliament - wouldn't be to constrain a government's proper and legal use of force. It would be to ensure that political and military decisions were aligned and supported each other - as they self-evidently did not in the first decade of this century.
He draws on the American model where:

“the stronger tradition of political-military debate and a clear legislative framework give the United States assets in this area that are not yet available to the United Kingdom.”

Like I say. Worth reading - the paper itself, that is, and not the gloss Tony Blair's apologists would like to put on it.

Choose your mammal

Rat or ferret - you choose

I don’t know if I’m allowed to talk about the letter I got on Friday. 

I don’t know because a few days before I left the BBC back in March 2011, I signed a confidentiality agreement. And I've no intention of breaching it. Here or anywhere else.
Funny how things turn out, though. 

What I think I can say is that none of the former BBC colleagues I’ve spoken to in the past 48 hours is prepared to agree to the details of his or her severance package being passed on to the MPs on the Public Accounts Committee.
"Why are we being dragged into this?" one said.

There’s talk of lawyers, actions for breach of confidence and judicial reviews.
The whole BBC pay-off story has been bloody. And whether your preferred mammal-in-a-sack is rat or ferret … expect it to get bloodier.

Buried rot

It’s not entirely clear why the MPs want name, rank and numbers of the 150 or so ‘senior managers’ who took redundancy or some other form of severance between 2010 and 2012. "Surely anonymous data will do the job" one former 'senior manager' told me.  

But perhaps they believe that the National Audit Office report and their own inquiries back in July revealed only the tip of some vast rot, buried deep in the corporation. And that a bit of naming and shaming is now in order.

Certainly the BBC’s performance at the committee can’t have given them confidence that public money had been carefully and judiciously spent.

The niff of something not quite wholesome is there in that NAO report. They looked at a sample of 60 deals between December 2009 and December 2010. And their inquiries threw up any number of anomalies in the severance deals of a handful of executives on stratospheric salaries.

Payments in lieu of notice … even when the executive worked the notice period. Payments for unused leave … even though leave policy in the BBC is ‘use it or lose it’. Discretionary payments and sweetheart deals.  

Worse, rules had been broken; procedures hadn’t been followed; paperwork wasn’t complete; deals were signed off in a way that left the BBC unable to show that it had handled public money wisely.

“The BBC has breached its own policies on severance too often without good reason. This has resulted in payments that have not served the best interests of licence fee payers. Weak governance arrangements have led to payments that exceeded contractual entitlements and put public trust at risk. The severance payments for senior BBC managers have, therefore, provided poor value for money for licence fee payers.”

It wouldn't be surprising, then, if MPs thought that was the story with all the BBC's redundancy and severance deals. Cronyism, snouts in the trough etc etc.

They'd be wrong to think that. Here’s why.

Irony

The phrases ‘senior managers’ and ‘executives’ don't quite mean what they seem. They conjure up ranks of pampered desk pilots on annual salaries approaching sums that many licence-fee payers won’t earn in a decade or more.

That’s way off the mark.

It’s true that during the 2000s, pay at the very top of the BBC went crazy. And that craziness is at the heart of this severance row.

That’s not without irony, incidentally. The very people who were so essential to the BBC in the early 2000s that they had to be attracted and motivated by boggling amounts of cash became, by the second half of the decade, among the most easily disposable. Though they had to be motivated once again by boggling amounts of cash. This time to go away.  

As former Newsnight reporter Liz McKean told the Edinburgh TV festival, those inflated salaries at the very top of the BBC created an …

“officer class … that seems to fly in the face of the principles of public service broadcasting … the corporation has been treated as a get-rich scheme …”

But those crazy salaries never reached very far down the corporation. And that created at the time something more than dismay in the BBC’s production offices, regional stations and newsrooms.
Wide range

‘Senior managers’ in the BBC means a very wide range of staff on a very wide range of salaries. 

At the apex, the five ‘executive directors’. 

Below that, team leaders, newsroom editors, programme editors and so on, all on two grades called SMS; the higher, SMS1, the lower, SMS2.

At the top end, heads of this and controllers of that on those £300k, £400k salaries.
At the other end, men and women at the BBC’s sharp end – in charge of projects or putting programmes and news bulletins on air – often on salaries around £60k-70k. Not shabby by any means. But not extravagant riches either.

Many of the 150 ‘senior managers’ whose details the PAC is now demanding are in the latter category. Broadcasters with twenty or thirty years experience, overseeing programmes or editing strands of the News Channel or TV and radio news bulletins with audiences of three or four million. 

And who, when they were told their jobs were closing, were offered the minimum deal their contracts allowed: a month’s salary for every year of service, capped at 24 months; no payment in lieu of notice – many, I understand, were asked to sign away the right even when they were expected to be out of the door within days; no sweeteners, no cash for annual leave not taken years ago.

Fishing trips

All the former colleagues I’ve spoken to have no complaint about their severance deals. None went beyond their contractual entitlement. None feels hard done by, even in the light of those NAO revelations.
None joined the BBC to get rich, either. But of course, a redundancy package of, say, £150k looks a lot of money – even though it’s entirely within the rules for someone leaving on a salary of £70k after twenty-five years.

“The tabloids will just go on fishing trips” a former current affairs editor told me. “They’ll try to make us all look greedy bastards.”

One former news editor added another worry: “We don’t know how they’re going to use this information … we know they’ll stitch us up.” It wasn’t clear who the ‘they’ were in that sentence. “I thought all this was supposed to be confidential” he went on.

Indeed so.
Big beasts
Something else, though, something rather more important sticks in the craw of many former colleagues - including those who are still working for the corporation.
That the cage-fight to the death between former DG Mark Thompson and Trust chairman Lord Patten is yet another gift to those who just don't get public service let alone public service broadcasting.
Precisely who knew what and when about a handful of extravagant pay-offs is slightly beside the point. What really matters is that they could happen at all. That, for a few years, a culture and mindset existed at the very top that thought it was OK.
Former colleagues, including those who've found their current salaries and future prospects capped by the current DG Tony Hall, welcome the way he's rooting out that culture and mindset. And want him to continue. Clearing up the mistakes of the past, like the DMI fiasco. Trying to lead the BBC back to the public service values it aspired to before misguided voices persuaded it to look more like a business ... with executive pay and boardroom habits to match.
It's turning out to be a dirty business - some of the dirt splashing over Hall himself. It'll no doubt get muckier.
But one thing matters more than anything else. Once this is over, Hall is left to finish what he started.