Tuesday, December 21, 2004

A day when everyone is wrong

See BBC NEWS | England | West Midlands | Theatre ends play in Sikh protest

There are no winners out of the stand-off between the Birmingham Rep and the Sikh community. Only losers. Sikhs have lost their reputation for calm and common-sense - at least for the time being in Birmingham. Instead, they have positioned themselves just where groups such as the BNP and the National Front would like them to be - with the extremists, on the wrong side of the law.

The Birmingham Rep has certainly lost out. In all my years of involvement with the Rep, I cannot think of an occasion when a play has been closed because of public protest. By giving into mob law, they have failed to live up to their artistic convictions. But they were probably wrong to stage it in the first place. It is very difficult to see how staging a production with this kind of theme set explicitly in a religious and ethnic minority community could do anything but end up in the way it has done.

It reveals how very out of touch the 'arts' are with popular feeling. And this is not simply in spite of but probably because of the relentless (and tedious) addiction to political correctness which pays lip service to ethnic inclusiveness but only in terms of changing the words we use to describe things, not setting out to learn what people really think.

There is much to applaud in what the Rep has been doing over the last few years. From 'Frozen' onwards, which put child-rape and child-murder onto the stage while the Fred West killings were still in the news, the Rep has been trying to commission challenging new drama which could rival the scope and daring of the best of London theatre.

Birmingham has lost out, marred with more ethnic minority violence less than two years after the murder of Letitia Shakespeare and Charmaine Ellis on New Year's Day 2003.

Where do we go from here? Back to free speech balanced with the free speaker's responsibility to guard the dignity of others? If only. Instead, the story becomes grist for the mill in the 'Inciting Religious Hatred' debate. We are led inexorably onward to the nanny state.

Sunday, December 12, 2004

Enough of the spin: Big Lottery needs to own up

See BBC NEWS | UK | Nine held in Lottery fraud probe.

Sometimes I'm astonished by the BBC. But they, and Sky News, and the Sunday Express, and the Observer, all seem to have swallowed whole a press release put out by 'The Big Lottery Fund'. The Big Lottery Fund, for those who haven't been watching carefully, is the latest incarnation of the distribution arm of the national lottery for about half of the good causes.

The substance of the story is that nine men have been arrested for false grant applications. The press release says 'false grant applications were used to defraud charities', which may have included Children in Need, Barnardo's and Comic Relief.

So far so good, but, in fact, this is actually a story about a lottery distributor's incompetence. We should take it as read that there are people out there who see every grant giving body as a chance for free cash with no strings attached. It's sad, but that's the way things are.

This is why distributors are responsible to make their grant schemes watertight so that there is no possibility of fraud. Do I sound harsh? This is hardly rocket science. There are thousands of grant schemes run in the UK, and the underlying principles are well established. The larger and more public the scheme, the more the risk that someone will try for a quick buck, and so the more stringent the regulations.

The Big Lottery is actually by no means the biggest. European Objective 2 funding makes absolutely enormous awards. And you can bet your bottom -- erm -- pound that if they made a mistake like this, it would never be forgotten.

The Big Lottery Fund has failed to do the one thing it was supposed to do -- distribute money where it was most needed. Rather than do the decent thing and admit it, they have put out a story that blames criminals for being bad people (they are, but that doesn't excuse BLF), and milks the sympathy vote by naming high profile charities as the losers.

Was this their own idea, I wonder, or were they leaned on by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport? Coming up to an election, this is a scandal that the government can well do without.

Sunday, December 05, 2004

Why it does matter about Blunkett

See BBC NEWS | Politics | Blunkett 'must go' if claims true

If this was France, the revelation that a government minister had given a train ticket to his girlfriend would probably not have made the headlines. And the allegation about the visa would never have got beyond an allegation. In fact, Le Monde's conclusion is: "Nul n'échappe, en Grande-Bretagne, à la curiosité, un rien perverse, d'une presse toujours prête à lever le voile sur la vie privée des personnages en vue" - in other words, nothing no matter how trivial escapes the curiosity of the British press when it comes to gossip about celebrities.

But it isn't France, and it does matter.

This, of course, has been a very frustrating week for the Tories. If Blunkett had been a Tory, and if we were back in the days of John Major's 'Back to Basics' campaign, then his head would already be on the block. But Blunkett has survived the initial melee, and, increasingly, it looks like he will probably survive with his portfolio intact.

Sleaze had - and still has - a very particular way of sticking to the Tories. By comparison, everyone else is Teflon coated (though, like most Teflon, it does rub off if you clean it with abrasive materials).

This being the season before the General Election, the Tories are desperate for anything, and clearly thought they had found something in this story.

Of course, what it is really about is the Tories bringing to the attention of the world that a Labour cabinet minister has had an affair with a married woman. If it had been his niece's nanny's visa application, they would not have bothered, nor would they have complained if he had given a rail ticket to a stranger.

This is prudery without morality, a delight in parading the misdemeanours of others in the hope that it will hide their own history.

And yet, and yet, and yet, it does matter.

It doesn't perhaps matter enough for Blair to dismiss Blunkett. But it is an error of judgement. Perhaps it does matter enough for Blunkett, on his own account, to do the decent thing and step away from the front bench, at least for a while.

Who knows. If he did, he might make European Commissioner.