Monday 18 June 2012

Here's a copy of an interesting article and my reply to it. I wonder whether my comment will survive - at least one other didn't!

The source is http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=6&storycode=49508&c=1

Are British journalists failing the republican minority?

18 June 2012

The BBC was heavily criticised this month over its coverage of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, which was described by one MP as “celebrity-driven drivel”.

But none of those complaints – at least not those published in the national press – suggested the coverage was lacking impartiality.

That is the claim levelled at the corporation by Graham Smith, chief executive of anti-monarchist group Republic.

In an interview with Press Gazette, Smith claimed the BBC’s relationship with the Palace was so cosy that it banned the use of footage showing the Queen knighting disgraced former RBS chief Fred Goodwin.

Smith says he was told by BBC producers that a “banned list” had been circulated that also included embarrassing footage of “It’s a Royal Knockout” from 1987.

“If anyone else asked them to do that the BBC would say, ‘Sorry but this has news value and therefore we’re going to broadcast it’.

“It’s our public broadcaster filming our head of state conferring an honour on Fred Goodwin,” he adds, “It shouldn’t be a matter of private deals between the BBC and the Palace.”

Smith believes the BBC “completely fails” in its impartiality obligation when it comes to coverage of the Royals, rarely giving voice to republican sentiments.

“It’s just incredibly, obviously pro-royal,” he says. “We have people within the BBC telling us they’re sick and tired of how the BBC operates and they’re very frustrated.

“I don’t think it’s a conspiracy, I think it’s a cultural, institutionalised bias, which they just don’t seem to realise is a problem.”

Boaden: 'One rarely pleases all the people all the time'

The Palace declined to comment on Smith’s claims, but Helen Boaden, the director of BBC News, insisted that it regularly included the views of Royal critics, including during the Jubilee celebrations and last year’s Royal wedding.

“Specifically, we reflected republican views on the main TV and radio news bulletins before the Jubilee last Friday and during live radio and television coverage of events over the weekend,” she said.

Boaden says it is “simply inaccurate to portray BBC News as unquestioningly ‘pro-royal’”, but added: “In that process one rarely pleases all the people all the time and the BBC makes no complaint about that.”

Boaden said it was wrong to claim the BBC operated a “banned list”, adding: “We don’t. But nor do we own the copyright to all the film we might like to use and, even where we do, we are often bound by complex contractual arrangements concerning re-use.

“However, there are occasions where we would use contractually restricted material in a news context if there was a strong justification – for example, we have on occasion used clips from the Grand Knockout Tournament to illustrate news stories.

“We would do so again if the story merited it.”

Smith, meanwhile, also believes the UK’s national newspapers routinely display the same kind of “institutional” bias toward the monarchy.

Polls consistently show that between 20-25 per cent of the UK population do not support the monarchy.

“That’s quite a substantial proportion, and that doesn’t really get reflected,” says Smith. “I think the key thing is that the whole coverage is incredibly superficial.”

One of Republic’s biggest gripes is the lack of scrutiny into the cost of the Royals.

The figure usually reported by the media is between £30-£37m.

But a report released by the group last year put the annual cost of funding the monarchy at £202.4m – around five times the official figure published by the Royal household.

'A fair crack at the whip'

Perhaps unsurprisingly, one man who disagrees quite strongly with Smith’s assessment of the British media is Stephen Bates, who until very recently was The Guardian’s royal editor.

“I don’t think we’re inherently biased towards the monarchy,” he insists.

“I confess to a certain degree of scepticism at Graham’s views because he sees absolutely nothing positive in the monarchy whatsoever and I think he’s frankly a bit juvenile in the way he presents Republic’s case.

“We can’t just publish stories which say that the monarchy is rubbish because A, that’s not the case and B, it’s the source of stories of interest to our readers, whether they are pro-monarchy, pro this particular queen and her family or not.

He adds: “Other papers are more slavishly pro-monarchy than the Guardian, but if there is a big event, like the Jubilee, then newspapers have a duty to report it and that’s what we’ll continue to do.”

One of those “slavishly pro-monarchy” papers that Bates refers to is probably the Daily Express.

Yet its Royal editor, Richard Palmer, sympathises with Republic and says it fulfils an important function by “raising issues that do need airing”.

“I think one of the things we try to do is examine how they spend public money,” says Palmer.

“And one of the points that Republic has made quite eloquently, I feel, is that the figure that the Palace gives each year for the cost of the Royal family – and they always do it by the average cost per person – is really only one part of the picture.”

He adds: “I think it’s useful to maintain dialogue with anti-monarchy groups because they do raise some important issues. And personally I’ve got some sympathy with them when they say the broadcasters aren’t giving them a fair crack at the whip.”

This article was first featureed in Press Gazette Journalism Weekly.

COMMENTS

Showing 1 comments

Joe Eldren

I agree with both Stephen Bates and Richard Palmer. Yes, there is and should always be a place for public scrutiny of the monarchy as part of our system of government. However, the nature of that scrutiny needs to be much more grown up. One has only to see the articles carried daily it seems by the Express and Mail - which I suspect are produced only because of the click-though interest they attract - to see the level of criticism, most of which consists of denouncements of wealth, inheritance, 'privilege' and 'deferment' (whatever those are supposed to mean). Where are the serious articles considering the constitutional issues behind where we are today? Answer: nowhere. I accept of course the general reader may not care to read a lengthy tome by an expert over their morning coffee and this is where Graham Smith seeks the low ground, by pushing populist nonsense in the hope that an overly simplistic analysis will strike some sort of chord with the disaffected.

The report referred to, costing the monarchy at over £200 million annually, is fundamentally flawed by egregious assumptions and multiplying one-off costs across a whole set of circumstances; no decent media outlet bothers to repeat it - in fact it was severely criticised in the Express last year. It HAS however been picked up by the virulently anti-British Iranian PressTV which continues to attract sharing and positive comment from Republic Campaign's Facebook supporters.

Perhaps the most juvenile of Mr Smith's claims is the level of support of republicanism he continues to repeat ad nauseam in the face of all evidence to the contrary. Both Ipsos MORI and ICM (the latter used by both Republic Campaign and the Guardian) have shown a year on year fall in support of republicanism in the UK; funnily enough this fall coincides precisely with the redesign of the Campaign to become a more active group. One might think there is a lesson is this. Ipsos Mori very recently published its annual research results - part of a multi-year survey - which showed that support for republicanism had dropped to around 13%. However, only today and in response, a writer for the Campaign intoned that "Republic's position is that the baseline support for electing the head of state varies between 20 and 25 percent with blips either way and has been very stable over very many polls so we don't get over excited about the odd poll that is below this level. Republic thinks that the real majority position in the country is disinterest and passive acceptance" It is hard to see how one can deal with such hard-headed intransigence and denial of real-life actualite other than by dismissal.

There are also serious questions to be asked of Mr Smith - which have been asked, but never answered - about some other claims of his, such as the actual number of members of Republic Campaign. Only last year he stated that the number of 'supporters' exceeded 18,000, yet later admitted this figure included 12,000 Facebook 'Likes' and a supposed 2000+ turnout at their street party. They now claim over 20,000 'members' although I have seen elsewhere in the press that the number of actual paying subscriptions is more like 10,000 or so. It may well be that they have doubled their paying membership, but why not just say so? What have they to hide?The answer and perhaps the most troubling question lies in their stated purpose. On the one hand the Campaign's stated objective is to be a non-political force for change. Fair enough. However, their current crop of directors - indeed, nearly all their previous ones - are mostly seriously left-wing political activists (e.g. the president of the Campaign has written a book about the Communist Party of Great Britain) and their support base is seriously skewed to the left - one can frequently find comments on Facebook (the Campaign's website is closed to comments) such as "there can be no republic without it being a socialist republic" - along with the usual nonsensical exhortations to reclaim "the land/money/etc that was stolen from us". The occasional republican Tory is dragged out and feted as an example of how non-partisan they are and it makes a sorry sight indeed. As one commentator noted the other day, "there is an air of intellectual dishonesty about the Campaign" and they "have made a soapbox but built it on quicksand".

Thursday 7 June 2012

Shattering the myth of Republic Campaign's credibility

This article originally appeared in the Daily Telegraph and was written by:

Brendan O'Neill

Brendan O'Neill is the editor of spiked, an independent online phenomenon dedicated to raising the horizons of humanity by waging a culture war of words against misanthropy, priggishness, prejudice, luddism, illiberalism and irrationalism in all their ancient and modern forms.

My hero Thomas Paine must be spinning in his grave. No, not necessarily because there is still a monarchy in Britain, something he was fighting tooth-and-catapult against 250 years ago. But because the political creed that he espoused with such vigour and clarity – republicanism – has now been co-opted by the most miserabilist, misanthropic, killjoyish sections of society who wouldn’t recognise a political principle if they were accosted by one in an alleyway. Once upon a time, being a republican meant trusting in the people, seeing in the mass of society the potential for reason and self-governance. Now it means precisely the opposite: distrusting the people, sneering at them for being an easily brainwashable mob of forelock-tugging freaks.

The great irony of the Diamond Jubilee celebrations is that the most overt snobbery emanated, not from the House of Windsor or its posh cheerleaders in political and media circles, but from so-called republicans. It was them, these embarrassments to Tom Paine, who looked with horror and derision upon the great hordes of modern Britain. They pronounced themselves “aghast” at all the little people “happily buying Union Jack cups and bunting”. They mocked the masses for obediently heeding the “message from on high” telling them “not to worry about increasing inequality and its accompanying social problems, but to clap your hands, smile and applaud”, like good little children.

They railed against the “infantile emotions” of the public, who apparently squeal: “Oh look here is the Queen! In yellow! In a hat!” They told us that“never are the peasants more revolting than when tugging their forelocks”. They informed us that certain groups of people – rough translation: the thick and uncultured – have been swallowed up by an“orgy of deference” to the Queen. And these thickos don't even understand that the Queen-oriented “cult of personality” has been sinisterly designed as a “diversion from more serious issues”, like the recession. What the dainty-minded ordinary people fundamentally don’t get, apparently, is that royal events like this are, in the words of a Mirror columnist, “magnificent pleb-pleasing distractions”, “psycho-spectacles”designed to make the “plebs” forget about their hardships. And the reason these plebs can so easily be made to forget that they are poor and wretched and downtrodden is because they have been“brainwashed on an Orwellian scale” into loving royalty.

What an historic turnaround. Today it isn’t royalists who look down their noses at everyday folk, viewing them as a malleable mob without a brain cell between them. Rather it is republicans, or “republicans”, who do that. In their very elitism, they reveal that they aren’t real republicans at all, for republicanism is about believing that the public is capable of great and wondrous political things. All that these shallow republicans believe with any intensity is that the public are “infantile” and “brainwashed” and easily swayed by “psycho spectacles”, and as a consequence are beyond both reason and hope. They sound less like Paine and more like his nemesis Edmund Burke, who described the people as a “swinish multitude”.

~o0o~

What is most amusing is the reaction of those same "miserabilist, misanthropic, killjoyish sections of society who wouldn’t recognise a political principle if they were accosted by one in an alleyway" - here's an extract discussing the article from Facebook on 6 June 2012:

Republic Campaign ... We are not the ones whe believe this is an issue only for elitist chattering classes, that is the likes of O'Neill. He is being hypocritical and snobbish himself. He is also clearly ignorant of the issues at hand...
Conrad Brunstrom O'Neill lazily misquotes Burke, who never described "the people" in general as a "swinish multitude" - only that "swinish multitudes" do sometimes exist. As a full time eighteenth-centuryist, I'm professionally obligated to point that out.

The Burke misquote is typical of a very lazy piece of writing. Without having met us, or spoken to us, he describes us as "miserabilist". Now I'm not miserable at all. I'm jolly and upbeat to believe that Britain deserves (and will get) something less tedious and undemocratic as the hereditary principle to express its own sense of sovereign identity.

It was important that Republic demonstrate by the Thames because the media constantly talk about the nation being "united" in its monarchism - that "everyone" is celebrating the monarchy. Republic would have been failing in its most obvious responsibilities if it hadn't organised some sort of visible refutation of this fallacy.
Republic Campaign ... O'Neill is appallingly hypocritical, suggesting that 'real' republicans have to be quoting from Paine and limiting their views to the chattering classes, then calls us snobs. His article has no credibility and is entirely predictable and typical of his writing.

Oooooh! Catfight! LOL

Just goes to show how Republic's "campaign" has backfired on them disastrously. They were desperately looking for any avenue to up their public profile from the occasional articles in the Grauniad and other left-wing publications. But having become a focus for wider attention, their widely-held fantasy that the media and the population at large would simply fall into line behind the standard bearers of "democracy", when they can't even use the word in the same way as the rest of the world, has proved to be hollow. Some of us knew that all along, of course!

Saturday 2 June 2012

British Republicanism Captured- to a 'T'

I'm copying here the text of an online blog post (http://www.ybf.org.uk/2012/06/guest-blog-monarchists-should-be-grateful-for-republicans/) which appeared recently on the Young Britons' Foundation site. Excellent article!

"YBF Research Fellow Nick Hallett has written a very sound blog to commemorate the Jubilee celebrations

Now it’s time for the Diamond Jubilee, I’m reminded of the common cliché that during the Civil War the cavaliers were wrong but romantic and the roundheads were right but repulsive. Looking at those who call themselves republicans these days, I’m tempted to agree with Professor Kenneth Minogue that they embody the worst aspects of each side: they are wrong and repulsive.

Alongside the popularity and dignity of the current monarch, one thing monarchists should be eternally grateful for is the modern republican movement. A shambolic collection of hard-line leftists, north London chattering-class liberals and various other cranks and eccentrics, they are a movement for the excessively ideological, the overbearingly rationalist and the eternally miserable.

All of this shows through in their campaigns. When the government announced a public holiday to celebrate William and Kate’s wedding, republicans called for it to be scrapped. When the Duchess of Cornwall launched ‘Cook for the Queen’, an attempt to get primary school children baking and thus teach them cookery skills, republicans called it indoctrination. And whenever the celebrations come round, a gaggle of self-satisfied leftist commentators invariably indulge themselves in denigrating the event and mocking the people who turn out to celebrate.

In fact, you may notice some this weekend, holding their placards and maybe shouting their slogans. Sullen, angry faces among crowds of joy. They may occasionally manage a smile, but it will only be a sneering one. The group Republic are even organising a protest against the jubilee flotilla, no doubt shouting political clichés and angry bile at the gathered crowds.

Telling the public they shouldn’t have a day off work, telling schoolchildren they shouldn’t bake cakes, protesting against a national celebration and insulting the intelligence of all those who join in with that celebration: the bad PR just writes itself!

None of this should surprise us, however. Republicanism borrows heavily from its cousin, Marxism. In particular, modern republicans have adopted the idea of “false consciousness”; just as the proletariat are indoctrinated by their bourgeois masters into loving the capitalist system, so the masses are indoctrinated by the media and institutions into loving the monarchy. If only this indoctrination were removed, everyone would see how “unequal”, “irrational” and “anachronistic” it all is.

This idea is astonishingly insulting. It assumes ordinary people have absolutely no critical thinking skills, and are just passive receptors of whatever propaganda is thrown their way. The word “sheeple” is often used. This view is ironically elitist, and it also undermines one of the key pillars of republicanism: if the general public are really that stupid, why on Earth would you trust them voting for a president?

A further irony is that the only method republicans have of remedying this is their own propaganda. The difference is, very few people are enthused by shouty, grumpy, holier-than-thou campaigning. Can anyone remember a successful political campaign that preached at and insulted the electorate?

The words of C.S. Lewis are most appropriate here:

“A man’s reaction to Monarchy is a kind of test. Monarchy can easily be “debunked”; but watch the faces, mark well the accents, of the debunkers. These are the men whose tap-root in Eden has been cut: whom no rumour of the polyphony, the dance, can reach – men to whom pebbles laid in a row are more beautiful than an arch. Yet even if they desire mere equality they cannot reach it. Where men are forbidden to honour a king they honour millionaires, athletes, or film-stars instead: even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison.”

Perhaps one day, if the popularity of the monarchy decreases, people may be open to republican ideas expressed calmly and sensibly. Until then, the best thing republicans can do for their cause is just keep quiet."

I wish!