Eight questions about the BBC crisis

1. Q. Can the BBC recover from this crisis?

A. Yes, probably, but that doesn't alter the fact that the quality of its journalism is declining, and has been for some time, in my view. That is probably due at least in part to budget cuts. Quality journalism costs money. They have clearly got rid of too many experienced journalists for comfort. They maybe ought to have ring-fenced the news and current affairs budget and instead made bigger cuts in the excessive layers of management bureaucracy, which have obviously burgeoned over the years, as happens in all large organisations (see Parkinson's Law). There are too many bean-counters and, as in most aspects of life today, the bean-counters have too much say. David Dimbleby was good on this point this morning in his interview with John Humphrys on the Today programme, as also on the subject of ridiculous management mumbo-jumbo. Private Eye has been banging on about that practically every fortnight for many years (see "Birtspeak 2.0"). Unfortunately, though it produces some good satirical programmes from time to time, the BBC is immune to satire about itself.

2. Q. How is morale at the BBC?

A. A statement just out from the NUJ says: "Morale is already at an all-time low". Ha ha ha ha! Every BBC person I have ever met has told me that morale was at an all-time low -- starting with my cousin in 1962, when he showed me round Bush House, where he was working as what was then called a Technical Operator. That's half a century ago. Morale is *always* at an all-time low.

3. Q. What went wrong at Newsnight?

A. My guesses:
(a) Budget cuts (see above).
(b) Experienced people too hastily "recused" because of the Savile affair.
(c) Inexperienced hacks too young to know that the incorrect McAlpine story has been around for many years and had already been gone into several times by different people and found to be completely without foundation, based as it was on mistaken identity. (It was a different McAlpine -- see this piece co-written by the excellent Bob Woffinden even though it appeared in the generally dreadful Mail On Sunday.) It was, indeed, a quite unforgivable lapse and to me an astonishing one.
(d) Clambering aboard the child-sex-abuse hysteria bandwagon in a panic, without paying enough attention to checking the details.

4. Q. What about the Jimmy Savile business?

A. I think it has all been rather overblown. Clearly the man was a nasty piece of work, but we ought to be sceptical about the individual allegations in the absence of detailed proof. As the McAlpine case neatly illustrates, you cannot just take the word of abuse victims as gospel. You have to investigate each case carefully. Some of them are mistaken or confused, some are deliberately lying, etc. In fact I am seriously worried about the extent to which many people seem to be in denial about the rather obvious fact that, even with the best will in the world, it is very easy to misremember things that happened (or didn't happen) decades ago.

5. Q. Yes, but what about the BBC's responsibility in the Savile case?

A. It seems to me preposterous to be trying in 2012 to apportion blame for alleged goings-on in the Top of the Pops studio in 1964. Was the general culture too permissive in those days? Maybe, but certainly not only at the BBC. Can anything be done about it now? No, of course not. What matters is that all sorts of procedures are nowadays in place (and I think have been for some time) to stop it happening again.

6. Q. Should the Director-General have resigned?

A. Perhaps not -- although I remain gobsmacked that he did not glance at the front pages of the serious national broadsheets every morning. I thought all important people did that in all spheres of life. Anyway, he's gone now and we are where we are.

7. Q. Should Chris Patten also resign?

A. Certainly not.

8. Q. What should politicians now be doing about all this?

A. They should all shut up and leave some space for the BBC leadership to sort things out. The same goes for the rest of the media, several of whom have an obvious vested interest in making trouble for the BBC and whose coverage of the affair is therefore highly suspect.

Aaronovitch: Beware a modern Salem over child abuse

The following piece from two days ago by David Aaronovitch is too important to hide behind a firewall:

Beware a modern Salem over child abuse - Pursuing witch hunts is as dangerous as ignoring victims. Don't launch inquiries on the back of lurid claims

This is a difficult column to write, because a lot of people won't want to hear what it's going to say and some will accuse it of saying what it doesn't. And because it's provisional. It is based on a fraction of the research that would be needed to be completely sure of the case I'm going to make anyway — which is that we are in danger right now of passing from one kind of injustice to another.

The Savile affair was just the latest form to be taken by a phenomenon that sometimes seems to have been endemic to postwar British society. It was in the Catholic Church (here and abroad). It was taking place in boarding schools. It was happening in care homes. On mattresses above kebab shops. In BBC dressing rooms. In people's own homes. (Above all there, actually.) Children were being abused sexually or physically, or both. When the abuse was discovered we realised that many of the victims were either too ashamed or frightened to complain, or else had their complaints dismissed by agencies and authorities who did not want to listen.

The misery of abuse was compounded by the misery of disbelief. I remember watching the Channel 4 film Chosen a couple of years back, and tears of shame — though what had I to do with a posh little prep school back in the Sixties? — ran down my face. And something of a revolution in our attitudes towards this abuse and its victims took place in the 1980s, after which it became as possible to pretend that there wasn't a problem as it was to deny that smoking was a health hazard.

But. But it seems we have had to pay an unnecessary price for our new understanding. In Cleveland in the late 1980s, alongside real abusers, completely innocent people were deprived of their children on the basis of the beliefs and a faulty diagnosis of a paediatrician and social worker. Not long afterwards there was panic on Orkney and in cities such as Rochdale and Nottingham, amid claims that there were networks of abusers using satanic rituals as a pretext for acts of abuse, including infanticide and cannibalism. Books were written, front pages were splashed, serious conferences convened, in which dark caverns and human sacrifice were earnestly discussed.

When it all collapsed, as it had to, what was left was the continuous problem of the zealous imposing new histories on the impressionable. The care workers — sometimes the police — had implanted and rewarded the telling of fantasies. It wasn't exactly a new thing. "I saw Goody Osburn with the devil," says a child in Arthur Miller's The Crucible. When the Newcastle nursery workers Dawn Reed and Christopher Lillie won their libel case against an official inquiry team that had accused them of scores of acts of child abuse on the flimsiest of evidence, what emerged was a modern Salem of one accusation breeding the next.

The unattractive (because complicating) truth is that sometimes people do lie about being abused. Sometimes it's for money, sometimes for attention, sometimes because that's what they infer their listeners want to hear. Or they're genuinely mistaken. Or fantasy has become solidified as fact, the dream as daylight. Now there are elaborate protocols to make sure that the testimony of children is uncontaminated by the prior judgment of adults. But for someone who may have created their story years ago, no such safeguard can exist.

So we must not dismiss allegations, but they can never be taken or repeated with anything other than the most tedious sobriety. And that, if you like, is a generic rule applying to all situations. This week's specific horror concerns child abuse in care homes in North Wales. For this, there is a second thing that needs saying. One fairly persistent modern meme in conspiracy theories is the idea of the paedophile network of powerful men. I say this not because such an accusation must always be false, but just to point out that the idea is somehow attractive. It unties some knots for us. And I know of no case where it has turned out to be true.

On Tuesday night, the Channel 4 News anchor Cathy Newman asked a Conservative MP about the accusation that there had been a hidden political dimension to child abuse in the 1970s and 80s. This had been claimed by Steven Messham on Newsnight days earlier and raised at a Prime Minister's Questions last month by the Labour MP Tom Watson. Was there, she asked, "danger for the Conservative Party that these allegations may not concern isolated figures in the party?" A paedo network, in other words.

That morning I'd spoken to a senior journalist at the BBC who'd covered the North Wales care home abuse story in the early 1990s. He had heard the Messham allegations several times over the past 20 years, was deeply sceptical about them and could not see what had suddenly impelled Newsnight to put them on air. Or rather, he thought he could see: Savile.

Nevertheless, based, as far as I can see, solely on Mr Messham's appearance, the Government on Tuesday announced what was, in effect, a re-inquiry into the exhaustive Waterhouse Inquiry into abuse in North Wales care homes, which had reported in 2000. The announcement repeated Mr Messham's solicitor's line that Waterhouse had had too limited a remit to inquire properly into the idea of an abuse network.

I have to say that having read chapter 52 of the report I find it quite hard to accept that claim. I also note that John Jillings, who chaired the first local inquiry, in the early 1990s, into abuse in North Wales, had no recollection of Mr Messham claiming that a senior political figure was one of the abusers. Mr Messham has claimed abuse at the hands of many, many people.

A second inquiry will look into previous police investigations into child sexual abuse — which may be more appropriate but seems to have been dreamt up on the hoof. Meanwhile the net buzzes with speculation fed by the Messham and Watson appearances as to who these evil Tories may be. Some of these sites are lurid and preposterous. But then, in Parliament on Tuesday Mr Watson, having made claims about paedophile links to No 10 and in government, suddenly raised the bar to refer to child "rape and torture" in Whitehall.

This was worrying. But more worrying still was a line in a letter Mr Watson sent to Mr Cameron before the inquiries were announced. "Your advisers will tell you to be wary of 'opening the floodgates'," he wrote. "They are wrong. Their decorous caution is the friend of the paedophile."

That's what you become if you don't join in the clamour, but ask first for the evidence — "the friend of the paedophile". I saw Goody Aaronovitch with the devil.

Poetry corner

So. Farewell then
Matthew Parris and David Aaronovitch
and Peter Riddell
and TV's Danny the Fink.
I shall not be reading
your columns anymore
unless I happen to find a copy of The Times
discarded on a train.
Because the Times website is going behind
a paywall
and I am certainly not paying two quid a week
to Rupert Murdoch.

P.Z. Thribb (61½)

Pointless helicopters

Am I alone in getting irritated by the broadcasters' use of helicopters? The Prime Minister goes to Buckingham Palace to ask the Queen for a dissolution, and his motorcade through central London is covered live on TV via a helicopter. I suppose at least you could say that is a way of visualising a constitutional ritual. But then he sets off to St Pancras to get on a train, and we have to watch that journey from a helicopter as well. It is of no conceivable interest, except perhaps to notice in passing how many one-way streets the PM is allowed to go the wrong way down. It is wasteful of BBC licence-payers' money, exceedingly un-green in fuel terms, and damned noisy to boot, if you happen to be in the streets concerned.

Putting ill-informed people right

It can get rather dispiriting sometimes, the frequency with which people write such ignorant tosh that one feels obliged to write in with a correction.

The Economist website has a new (rather superficial) piece comparing the commuting experience in four world cities. The London section of the report includes this:

(.....) "bendy buses", an incomprehensible waste of precious road real estate (.....)

I wrote in the comments section as follows:

Absolutely wrong. The bendy bus is very suitable for certain high-density routes, where it uses the road space very efficiently. Having three wide doors, it can empty and load large numbers of passengers quickly. With a low floor and no stairs to climb, it is also much more accessible than a double-decker, especially for anyone with impaired mobility or who has luggage, pushchairs, etc. They carry considerably more people than ordinary buses, saving on operating costs. London TravelWatch calculates that the number of ordinary buses needed to match the capacity of bendy buses would be so much greater that the road space taken up in total, if bendy buses were withdrawn from the routes they currently operate, would be more, not less. See London TravelWatch's response to Transport for London's consultation at http://www.londontravelwatch.org.uk/document/3530/get

On a different topic, someone else wrote in the comments:

"...the train was repeatedly delayed for days on end due to leaves on the tracks. And by delayed I mean it took three hours to make the journey. LEAVES on the track? What century are we living in?????..."

After all these years in which this silly canard has been repeated and rebutted, wouldn't you think people would have got the message by now? (I largely blame dim-witted hacks in the gutter press.) I wrote in as follows:

Leaf mulch, actually. Leaves fall; rain falls; the leaves get wet; the train wheels grind the wet leaves into a sticky mush, which makes the tracks very slippery. So the wheels slide and the train can get going only very slowly. Once it is going again, the driver has to make sure the train doesn't skid. So he/she goes slowly and the train is further delayed. Not at all peculiar to Britain, in fact. It happens every autumn wherever there are deciduous trees next to railway lines. This has been explained so many times, yet people still won't believe it.

I wish there was a law against writing nonsense.

Worth checking out

Some interesting stuff that has caught my eye recently:

Broadcasting guru Richard Rubin has a wise and thoughtful piece about dodgy BBC outsourcing, the Ross/Brand affair (expressing exactly my own thoughts about how this was just a particularly ghastly example of what has become a "nasty, cruel and very regrettable" aspect of British popular culture), and how TV stars can get radio wrong. Also fond memories of meeting Kenny Everett and Keith Skues.

In Ross's case, there can be little doubt that the negative coverage was partly prompted by his outrageous but seemingly sincere belief that his £6,000,000 a year contract with the Corporation was "worth a thousand journalists". It was that remark that prompted me to stop listening to him -- I rarely watched him, in any case -- because the BBC must have, as its irreducible core, robust, well funded and well staffed journalism, and the thought that, at a time when it was cutting journalist posts, such cuts were helping to pay this grossly overcompensated 'star' was offensive, to say the least.

There is a new edition of Joel Crawford's online mag Carfree Times. Among other things, he puts forward An Agenda for President Obama. Nothing less than the fate of the Earth is at stake, he says:

It has become apparent that we simply cannot continue growth in the manner prescribed by the World Bank and the IMF. Unfettered capitalism is the road to vast riches for a very few people, a better standard of living for many, but not all, people, and massive damage to the ecosystems that sustain life on Earth.

The only solution is a completely different approach. We must focus not on material standards of living but on quality of life. (.....) Rising material standards of living have led, in the main, to a falling quality of life. We must focus not on goods, the manufacture of which is nearly always accompanied by damage to the environment, but on services, which can provide a livelihood to enormous numbers of people while improving the quality of life and protecting the environment. One service in desperate need is indeed the repair of damage we have already done to the environment ..... 

He goes on to deal with the transport and energy implications in particular. With the aim of ending dependence on fossil fuels as rapidly as possible, he calls of course for a national system of renewable electricity generation, but also, in the short to medium term, for an urgent large-scale programme to reduce energy consumption in all buildings (labour-intensive work which will provide many jobs), an end to new housing in rural areas and distant suburbs, a new tax on air tickets, a ban on all airport expansion, and heavy public investment in the railway network. The article focuses on the USA but most of what he says applies everywhere, and it is well worth reading in detail.

Progressive London is a new website designed to keep alive the progressive policies of Ken Livingstone. It is cross-party, not a purely Labour affair. It is campaigning on various fronts, including a petition against the latest above-inflation fare increases.

Intriguing revelations from Christian Wolmar, who claims that the Cabinet is deeply split over transport policy:

On transport, it is clear that Geoff Hoon has little truck with the environmental agenda. He is a definite supporter of the third runway at Heathrow, the touchstone issue in this debate. A host of younger Cabinet members, such as the Millibands, more tuned into the Green agenda, are ranged against him. Gordon Brown's instincts are to side with the arguments in favour of economic development and I suspect that means the third runway will get the go ahead in the New Year. 

Bendy buses revisited: following my posts in March and September, London Travelwatch has given its attention to TfL's proposal to abandon bendy buses on, in the first instance, routes 38, 507 and 521. I am happy to say they wholly agree with me that this is a stupid idea:

London TravelWatch believes that there are overwhelming advantages in terms of accessibility, manoeuvrability in limited roadspace, loading and dwell times at stops, and economies of operation to the use of articulated buses on routes with high volumes of passengers. In particular these are very suitable for use on routes which serve main line railway termini where large volumes of passengers often arrive at stops in very short spaces of time from arriving rail services.

Congratulations also to Dave Cole, who has been following this issue as well, and has managed to extract some information from TfL. One commenter on his blog points out that the proposed replacements for the Red Arrow routes (507 and 521) will lead to a net increase in the amount of road space required of 21% and an increase in the number of drivers required of 82%.

And finally, European socialism is back, according to Neil Clark in the Staggers and Naggers:

Across the continent, there is a definite trend in which long-established parties of the centre left that bought in to globalisation and neoliberalism are seeing their electoral dominance challenged by unequivocally socialist parties which have not.

Total Politics: that review in full

In a rash moment the other week, I bought a year's subscription to the new monthly magazine Total Politics. My copy of the first issue has now turned up, after a delay.

It's published by Tory activist and blogger Iain Dale, but it aims to be politically neutral. To guarantee this, it has an all-party/non-party editorial board including Paddy Ashdown, Chris Huhne, Denis MacShane, Shami Chakrabarti, Caroline Lucas and David Trimble. The editor is one Sarah MacKinlay, whose only previous claim to fame, as far as I can discover from Google, is that she is the daughter of a Labour MP.

The first thing to be said is that, in terms of design and presentation, the magazine certainly looks good. But so do lots of glossy mags, some of which look better than they actually are (think dentists' waiting-room fodder or in-flight airline mags). Does the content of Total Politics, on closer inspection, match up to the first impression?

Well, up to a point, Lord Copper. You could divide political journalism into perhaps four broad categories:

(1) Debate about policies themselves, or "policy wonkery": what are the issues, and what should be the policies to tackle them?

This is a pretty saturated area, and it's hard to see that there is any room in the market for more. For instance, all the posh dailies and Sundays have plenty of this kind of stuff, and if that's not enough there is the Staggers, the Speccie, Prospect, Progress, Tribune, the Economist, the LRB, etc. etc. There is no shortage of opinions about policy. In fact, in my view there is already far more of this than anyone can cope with. What's lacking is a consensus, on almost any subject you care to name. But we knew that already, and perhaps it was ever thus.

The main example in this issue is a head-to-head on the smoking ban, one year on. It's certainly good to look at past reforms and take stock of how they worked out in practice, and we could do with a lot more of that. I always think there is not enough learning from past experience. (Railway privatisation, anyone?) The protagonists in this (smoking ban) case are Madsen Pirie, long a leading member of the "revolving bow-tie" wing of the loony far right, and Polly Toynbee, high priestess of the social-democratic nanny state. These are two old pros, and Ms Toynbee's piece in particular is probably the best-written slab of text in the whole mag. No surprise there -- not for nothing is she the top columnist on a big newspaper.

The trouble is, there can hardly be anyone out there who can't guess exactly what both these writers are going to say, before they have even read a word. It would have been much more interesting to find somebody less predictable to comment on this issue. This piece could perfectly well have appeared in the Mail, and for all I know it probably has.

The other significant policy-wonk item is a rather partisan article by Labour MP Denis MacShane, arguing that the Tories currently lack a coherent foreign policy.

(2) "How to do politics", and discussions of the machinery and processes of parties and the political system.

This is potentially much more interesting and useful, and there is quite a lot of it. Some of this is the kind of thing Alan Watkins and Anthony Howard often write about, with a valuable historical perspective. (We need old men to remind us that there is nothing new under the sun.) But there is also stuff here you might not easily find elsewhere, which could be very handy, less perhaps to sitting MPs than to those who hope to be elected some time soon: Tory spin-doctor Lynton Crosby on how Boris won in London, how to handle negative campaigning, what to do about your internet presence, tips for making good speeches (though these could surely be found in any of dozens of self-help paperbacks in your local WH Smith), how to choose the right PR outfit, and more.

There is also a moderately interesting article about the armed forces and the little-considered question of their voting rights and voting behaviour.

(3) Psephology, in its broad sense.

Under this heading we have such items as Professors Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher on the relationship between local and national elections; and Andrew Hawkins of pollsters ComRes on the parallels between 1997 and now. This is all good, interesting, workmanlike stuff, though again there is little here that one would be surprised to find in any of the broadsheets or the political weeklies.

(4) Who's up and who's down, gossip about personalities, the lifestyles of politicians, where are they now .....

TP contains a good deal of this much more superficial material, and most of it I can take or leave. There are the obligatory gobbets of unfunny "humour", mercifully confined to about three pages in total. There is a little bit of intriguing history: I never knew Sir Francis Drake was an MP. The diary page, by somebody called Clemency Burton-Hill, is actually quite sharply written, and ably captures the essence of the current mood in the Westminster bubble, except that one paragraph of it has got completely garbled, presumably at the production stage.

Most interesting to me, no doubt because this is a hobby-horse of mine, is an article by a David Seymour (who he? we are not told) arguing that the political world in this country has become far too fixated on youth, and that we ought to give older contenders more credit for their accumulated wisdom and experience. Amen to that, say I.

Two items I could very happily have done without are (a) how to buy a good suit, as if anyone would look to a political magazine for such advice -- for heaven's sake, do please leave out this dreary "lifestyle" crap: we are all drowning in it everywhere we turn -- and (b) two whole pages of vapid Clarksonesque guff about various politicians' favourite cars (why is it taken as read that everyone has a car, and who gives a toss anyway?). Incidentally, the article about suits includes Alan Duncan telling us to "wear braces only if you want to look like a twit" -- so presumably we can now expect a certain froideur between Duncan and his Tory front-bench colleague Eric Pickles, who has proved such a star recently, his braces notwithstanding.

= = = =

Not really fitting into any of the above four categories is the cover feature, an interview with Gordon Brown. I suppose if you ask for, and unexpectedly get, an interview with the Prime Minister, you are more or less obliged to make it your cover story. Unfortunately it turns out to be not very interesting. Brown tells us nothing we didn't already know. The mag tries to sell us the idea that it got a scoop when Brown makes what can be seen as a veiled criticism of Tony Blair's style. But he said something more or less identical to this the day he took office a year ago, and it was widely reported at the time.

There is a breathless, schoolgirlish sidebar by the editor in which she tells us how thrilled she was at being let into 10 Downing Street. Bit of a giveaway, that: plainly these people are not the experienced journalists one might expect a serious magazine to employ.

A couple of minor quibbles on layout and design: some of the articles look like advertisements, and I almost turned the page without reading them. Don't set the body text of editorial in a condensed sans-serif face. Don't use white text on a black background -- it's much too tiring to read.

Less minor quibbles of a general nature: this magazine urgently needs a decent subeditor who understands about syntax and punctuation, and especially how to use commas. I'm afraid the editor herself clearly doesn't. There are dozens of missing commas. To quote only one example:

"All the more surprising then that he arrives for the interview, flanked by his special press advisor in a relaxed frame of mind."

This means that (a) it was surprising that he arrived for the interview at all, and (b) his press advisor was in a relaxed frame of mind.

I also noticed, just in the first half of the magazine until I got tired of counting, at least ten phrases whose sense would have been helped by the insertion of a hyphen ("create a two way dialogue", "thought provoking articles", and so on).

Having got that out of the way, I come to my one BIG complaint. There is an enormous elephant in the room, and it is this: You would never guess from this magazine that Britain is a key part of the EU, and has been for 36 years. There are some 30-plus articles in this issue, and in only one of them could I find any mention of the European Parliament, even in passing. That comes in the aforementioned Denis MacShane article about Tory foreign policy, and one could hardly imagine MacShane writing anything that was not at least partly about the EU, given his background; but even there, it is not really the main point of his piece.

As someone who worked for years in Europe as well as at Westminster, I find this lapse quite astonishing. I can only suppose that it stems, unconsciously perhaps, from Iain Dale's blinkered Eurosceptic mindset. But to any of the thousands of Brits working in politics in Brussels, it will seem utterly bizarre.

I note that there is one MEP (Caroline Lucas) on the editorial board, and MacShane himself is on it too. I trust that they will bang the table about this.

The net effect is to make the magazine seem terribly parochial. There are a couple of items to do with "abroad" - but both of them are about America, from which we all hear far too much already. The recruitment of somebody like Timothy Garton Ash or John Palmer or Mark Leonard is urgently indicated.

Tories ARE still the nasty party

We have been led to believe in recent times that the Conservative Party has ceased to be "the nasty party" (in the words of Tory MP Theresa May), and is now thoroughly nice.

This may or may not be true of the party leadership, but if anyone thinks it might be true of Tory party activists, just have a look at Vote Tory and bankrupt The Guardian on the ConservativeHome website.

See the true character of the Tories. Such unpleasant, intemperate spleen. Don't they realise that non-Tories can read their spiteful ramblings?

And how revealing it is that, when they already have most of the press on their side anyway, and always have had, they should be looking for ways of destroying one of the few bits of the media that is not on the far right. Freedom of speech? Forget it.

Farewell then, Charles Wheeler

I must pay tribute to Charles Wheeler, who died today aged 85. I always thought he was just about the best radio/TV reporter ever.

I saw him only a year or so ago in a library, still beavering away at some research.

My boyf worked with him at the BBC in the 1970s and says not only was he six times better than any other journalist around, he was also a jolly decent chap. They don't make them like that any more.

By-election news

This is getting silly. There are no fewer than 25 candidates standing against David Davis in his by-election. Of these, the only serious one is the Green Party candidate, and if I were an elector in Haltemprice I should certainly vote for them.

I still think Nick Clegg has made a tactical error in agreeing that no Lib Dem will stand.

Among all the other candidates, a colourful variety of cryptofascists, anoraks and crackpots, we find Ronnie Carroll -- Yes! the Ronnie Carroll, now aged 74 (younger readers may need to be told that he was famous as a popular singer in the 1950s).

He is standing in the "Make Politicians History" interest. Is this not rather depressing? We have apparently reached the point where politicians -- all politicans, apparently, of whatever creed or ideology or standing -- are now to be regarded as evil and to be done away with if at all possible.

According to Wikipedia (admittedly not always a reliable source), Make Politicians History actually exists as a party, and its policy is nothing less than the complete abolition of Parliament, to be replaced by decision-making by referendum.

Well, of course all this may well be meant as a joke, to be taken no more seriously than the Monster Raving Loony Party, but it feeds into the enormous cynicism about the whole political process that is now so widepread, even amongst some supposedly respectable commentators. I'm sure this is mainly fuelled by the tabloid press, which is now in permanent attack mode in this country. I believe it is terribly damaging to democracy as a whole, and that the majority of politicians do not deserve it.

Have people stopped to think what would actually happen if we did not have a parliamentary democracy, and everything was decided by referenda? You have only to look at the Irish vote the other day to see that this is not a sensible way of making decisions, as I wrote in my comment on the Irish result entitled Why referenda are a bad idea.

I was rather pleased with a Labour MP called Chris Bryant the other day on BBC TV's Daily Politics, who took Andrew Neil to task rather sharply for his relentless cynicism about MPs and their expenses. Neil, who privately must know better, was pushing the gutter-press Poujadiste line that they are all just in it for themselves, "snouts in the trough", etc. Everyone who has had even a passing involvement in politics knows that this is not just nonsense but dangerous nonsense: nobody hoping to get rich quick would think of entering politics.

Steve Richards produced a thoughtful piece the other day entitled Don't be fooled – these 'heroic campaigns' only make our democracy even more fragile, pointing out that both the David Davis by-election and the Irish referendum outcome were symptoms of a disaffection with established politics that has been whipped up by irresponsible and/or thoughtless forces with media access. Of Davis, Richards writes:

Cleverly, Mr Davis portrays his move as one that chimes with voters compared with the timid, insular preoccupations of the "Westminster village", always a location viewed with a lazy disdain.

In doing so, he fuels the stupid and dangerous "plague on all their houses" culture. Politics is a tough old business. It is about the resolution of disagreement through debate, manoeuvring, winning votes in parliament, persuading voters and the media to come on board. This may not sound especially romantic, but the alternative to resolution of dispute through politics is the use of force. Politics is better.

I agree with this, and I think the great majority of politicians -- those who are honestly engaged in trying to make the world a better place, according to their lights -- need to be much more aggressive and upfront about the purposes of politics and its importance as the only alternative to tyranny.

Respectable journalists, too, ought to be taking their more reckless colleagues to task. Apart from Steve Richards in the piece mentioned above, most hacks -- with the honourable and long-standing exception of Polly Toynbee, who often rails against the irresponsibility of the Murdoch, Mail and Telegraph presses -- seem inclined to play the game whereby dog is not supposed to eat dog.

The gay vote in London (contd.)

Further to my "Gays for Paddick?" post yesterday, Johann Hari has interviewed the three main candidates and wrote about it in yesterday's Independent. His piece says everything we need to know.

Things I am sick of hearing/reading about

(1) House prices. House prices are whatever they are. I propose to live in this house until I drop dead, so I don't want to know about any other houses.

(2) The McCanns. A tragedy for them, but why is it of any interest to anyone else?

(3) So-called "celebrities", most of whom I have never heard of. TheLondonPaper is a particularly egregious offender here, but even the proper press seems to be obsessed.

(3) Motorcars. Completely unnecessary if you live in a city; indeed, a positive liability. I have enjoyed not having a car for 28 years now.

(4) Cookery. Food is nice, but does every other TV programme have to be about it? Do any real people actually do all this cooking?

(5) Crime. About 70% of cinema and TV fiction seems to be about criminals and detectives. This gives a wildly false impression of life, as also does the gutter press every time it makes a big splash about actual crimes. People end up thinking crime is much worse than it is.