Re: [A-List] Colin Leys on the BBC after the Hutton Inquiry

["Salaam Blackmore" <blackmore@xxxxxxxxx>]

Michael

I agree with much of what you say, but it is a trifle pessimistic to suggest
that direct elections for a reconstituted BBC board of management would
"descend into a party political charade".

This certainly may happen, but I don't think it is inevitable. I don't think
it is inevitable, because politics in Britain is in the process of deep
structural change. The future may not be same as the past. The old
certainties have gone. The ground is moving beneath our feet, so we have to
move to stay upright. Where and how we move - that is the question...

Do the established political parties in the UK reflect the way that people
think? I doubt it, yet people still want to do something, say something,
share something...after all, that is why some of us hang out on this List.

The concept of direct elections for a BBC board of management could be
extended into the fields of strategy and programme content, thus offering a
fluid and creative pathway for people's feelings and ideas in general.
Interactive electronic voting is on the way - you can already vote on the
Net in Geneva...People want to share and to do things, but the gatekeepers
of the established political process shuts most of us out.

Yes - OK - this sounds like a romantic dream - but if, let us say, an
organisation as self-absorbed and narcissistic as the Corporation could ever
genuinely become subject to the "people's will" - well, next stop,
Westminster!

half in hope, half in jest

Salaam




----- Original Message -----
From: "Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>
To: "The A-List" <a-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Monday, February 09, 2004 3:15 PM
Subject: Re: [A-List] Colin Leys on the BBC after the Hutton Inquiry


...Salaam's points are well made, but it's hard to see the cooperative
option
being taken up unless it was a rump left over from those parts that had been
hived off (and the hiving off of these would also undermine the case for the
licence fee, and thus the mutuality of the reformed institution). And the
introduction of direct elections for the director positions is no guarantee
of the public interest -- it would soon descend into a party political
charade and thereby further guarantee the propagation of the conventional
wisdom, perhaps even moreso than at present, since at least the current lot
have to pretend to be impartial.

The best we can do in the meantime is to work to expose the authoritarianism
of the government and the pathetic state of the mainstream opposition.
Campaign to reinstate Dyke and for the protection of the BBC from government
intereference in its charter renewal process as a matter of course, but
simultaneously recognise the need for a much more thoroughgoing,
comprehensive and ongoing critique of the news and entertainment media as
part of the ideological struggle. It is the lack of such a thing that has
exposed us all -- if the BBC really is the last hope for democracy, then we
are all deeply in the shit.

Michael Keaney