We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Incoming from Alex Singleton:
I know you’ve described Noam Chomsky as “a monster” before now, so I thought you might be interested in a review that I have written of his book Manufacturing Consent.
Singleton’s review is entitled “Manufacturing Consent by Chomsky and Herman isn’t just wrong: it is ludicrous”. Chomsky argues that multinational corporations have it all their own way in the mainstream media. Singleton argues otherwise:
As Herb Schmertz, former VP at Mobil Oil, put it in a 1986 book: “[Many people are] under the false impression that the wealthier the organization, the more seriously its views are taken. I wish that were true! If anyone still believes that old canard, I invite them to spend a month working for a major oil company during the next fuel shortage.”
Indeed.
Having worked in the media himself, Alex Singleton now earns his living advising organisations, big and small, about how to handle the media. So, if you run a wealthy organisation, and you are facing some sort of crisis and consequently are liable to get a media beating, why not give Singleton a call? Maybe he could manufacture some consent for you.
For more coverage on The Onion’s Sexiest Man Alive 2012, Kim Jong-Un, please visit our friends at the People’s Daily in China, a proud Communist subsidiary of The Onion, Inc. Exemplary reportage, comrades.
– The Onion adds an update to its story of November 14th. Mick Hartley explains.
I left the following comment (that I have expanded slightly) on Natalie’s earlier post, in response to reader Alisa’s surprise at my observation in passing that other British television stations are owned by the government, besides the BBC. I have written about the weird history of British television before, but it is so weird that it deserves a small repeat
Roughly: The BBC had some experimental pre-war broadcasts but launched its permanent service in 1946. This was and is government owned and supported by the licence fee.
In 1955, a second, advertising funded television network came into being called ITV. This was supposedly not owned by the government but had a highly complex ownership structure. Britain was divided into a large number of regions, and the local television station was franchised to a different private owner in each place. (In larger cities, different companies had the right to broadcast on different days of the week and later different times of day). Much programming was national, but a government body was set up to decide which programming was allowed to be broadcast on a national basis. Private companies’ licenses were for seven years only, after which the government held a review and could and sometimes did take their licenses away if they did not satisfy a government defined “quality” threshold. In essence, the private companies controlled the sale of advertising but did not control their own programming.
This arrangement of two channels led to a peculiar piece of British English, in which people will talk about “switching to the other side” when they mean change the channel. TV was perceived as akin to an LP record, with the BBC on one side and ITV on another.
In 1964, the BBC gained a second channel, which was funded by the licence fee just like the first.
In 1982, Channel 4 (and the Welsh version S4C) were created. This channel was and is owned by the government, but is funded by advertising. The channel had an ambit not to cater to the largest audiences but to cater to audiences that were not adequately served (as defined by the government) by existing services. In order to not upset the existing ITV companies, the ITV companies got to sell the advertising for Channel 4, and if Channel 4’s advertising revenues exceeded a certain point as defined by (you guessed it) the government, the ITV companies and not Channel 4 kept the money.
Thus Britain managed to find two largely different models by which advertising funded television networks could be created that did not compete with the BBC and which were controlled by the government.
Rupert Murdoch launched Sky in 1989 (and almost sent himself bankrupt doing it), but it only really became successful in about 1994-5 when it got going with television rights to the English Premier League soccer. This was the first genuine competition that the BBC had ever faced. This, ultimately, is why the establishment in Britain hate Rupert Murdoch so much. He had the audacity to compete with the BBC and to succeed. They will never forgive him this.
As a brief summary of British television since. A fifth analogue terrestrial channel (Channel 5) launched in 1995, after the relevant government bureaucracy expressed great reluctance to issue the licence (refusing to do so the first time it was theoretically put out to tender). This was the first genuinely national and privately owned terrestrial television network in the UK. The various mid 1990s ITV companies were gradually allowed more control over their own businesses and to merge with each other (and the finite life of franchises eventually went away too), a process that finished with the merger of Carlton and Granada in 2004. So as of 2004, Britain had two, privately owned, national television networks, but (for various reasons) neither of them had any money. In a normal market, you would have large, well funded commercial terrestrial television networks that could compete with other companies, but the companies in Britain were so emaciated (deliberately) by the history of regulation that the only real competitor to the BBC was Sky.
A digital terrestrial platform (OnDigital, subsequently ITV digital) was launched in 1998. This featured various channels from ITV, Sky, and other commercial providers, but it went bust in 2002, due to a combination of restrictive regulation – Sky had initially been a co-owner of the consortium, but was forced out from it on supposed competition grounds after the consortium won the licence but before it started broadcasting, and was subsequently required to provide certain programming for it without being able to profit from it in a serious way – and (to be fair) terrible management. This was subsequently replaced by Freeview, which is run and controlled by the BBC, who were refused the licence to run digital terrestrial in 1998, but were allowed to do so in 2003 due to the failure of the previous private option, which was largely caused by BBC friendly regulators.
So non-BBC television is either owned by Rupert Murdoch, owned by the government, or doesn’t have any capital. such as ITV, Channel 5, and various other organisations who broadcast on Freeview.
On top of that, one must observe that S4C is a very weird beast, even in a world of weird beasts. It was set up as the “Welsh” television channel at the time that Channel 4 was introduced in the rest of the UK, and is funded by a mixture of advertising revenue, Welsh specific cultural subsidy, and indirectly via the BBC licence fee. (The BBC has an ambit to produce some Welsh language programming, which it does and then provides to S4C without charge). For many years Wales received this channel instead of the Britain wide Channel 4, whether the Welsh liked it or not. In these days of digital, all of Wales received both channels.
And as for Murdoch, he became powerful because it took as ferocious a competitor as he to find a place within the ferociously anti-competition regulatory framework of the UK. He bet everything to do this and almost lost the bet – in the early 1990s his banks were at one point in the weeks away from calling in receivers. Having won a place inside that regulatory framework, he benefits from the way in which it repels further competitors. One can only console oneself with the thought that the BBC media establishment has the competitor that it deserves. One can also note that Sky’s customers pay a significantly larger sum in total subscription fees than do the BBCs licence fee holders.
Also Sky’s subscribers pay their subscription fees voluntarily, whereas the BBC’s have the money extracted from them by force. (Plus of course, one must pay the BBC’s fee as well before one is allowed to buy Sky’s channels). I won’t comment on which of these things may be more moral.
“And may I say that the exaggerated outrage over the “phone hacking” scandal is particularly hypocritical given the culture of pervasive surveillance of citizens that the British government — ahead even of our own — has established over the past decade or two. Those criticizing the press here are in no position to complain about invasions of privacy.”
Glenn Reynolds weighs in on the the Leveson Report’s recommendation to regulate the UK media. Being a good American living in a land that has a First Amendment – not always well observed – Reynolds is distinctly unimpressed by Leveson. And we Brits should well remember how, if the UK media – or bits of it – are subjected to control, how this will lend some encouragement to authortarians the world over. (This is a fact that some members of the present government, such as William Hague, the foreign secretary, have grasped).
I am not often found defending the BBC or its offshoots, but this is just out of order.
The Welsh Government (for so the lads with the office on the fifth floor of Tŷ Hywel have styled themselves since May 2011 – there’s posh for you) demanded that the Welsh-language TV station S4C give the government a right of reply and refrain from ever repeating an episode of the soap opera Pobol y Cwm because a fictional character said the Welsh government “doesn’t have the backbone” to cull badgers.
Quite rightly, S4C repeated the programme as scheduled.
Like anyone else, the Welsh government has the right to complain if it believes that the BBC has failed in its statutory duty of impartiality as a tax-funded broadcaster, and that includes complaining about fiction. I did so to the point of exhaustion here. But what gave the Welsh Government the impression that it could try to impose impartiality right down to the level of re-writing the script for a particular actress in a soap opera?
The Leveson Report, probably.
Conservative MP Dominic Raab has some good sense on the case against regulating the press here. (Again, non-UK readers should be aware that they might not be able to read this in full). Excerpt:
On Thursday, Lord Justice Leveson will report on press standards. If, as Churchill declared, “a free press is the unsleeping guardian of every other right that free men prize” then statutory regulation is an insidious sedative that threatens our democracy. We take for granted investigative journalism that speaks truth to power – from the exposé of Stephen Lawrence’s killers to the revelation of MPs’ expenses. But, look to France to see what a state-regulated press means. It left Dominique Strauss-Kahn to walk through the raindrops to the cusp of the presidency, despite a string of ugly reports of sexual violence. It allowed Jacques Barrot to be appointed European Commissioner, despite a conviction for embezzlement masked by law. From Hungary to Russia, regulating journalists has inevitably stifled media freedoms.
Sometimes I overcome my squeamishness and read the comment sections on pieces like this. Here, below the article above, is an example from a guy called Keith Meldrum of why I sometimes wonder whether I should regard some of my fellow Brits with pity or contempt:
“It appears that 80% of the British public want greater press regulation. That 80% still holds with readers of the Telegraph and Daily Mail. The complaints of journalists and newspapers that they are sorry and they will not do it again remind me of my children. Although I’m sure the protestations are sincere, I find them hard to believe.”
Well no doubt Mr Meldrum can assume what he likes, but I notice no horror here from him as to the fact that such a high percentage of the UK public are fine and dandy with taking this country back 300+ years in terms of freedom of the press. I guess he regards such ideas as “hopelessly out of date”, rather as how former UK prime minister Tony Blair, in a disgusting speech a few years ago, referred to a concern for such “19th Century values” as the presumption of innocence in criminal cases, habeas corpus, respect for privacy, and so on.
And then there is this creature, by the name of “Celtictaff”:
“What’s so special about the press, they have always worked hand in glove with politicians. The people of Britain don’t have free speech, that freedom has been slowly eroded for years. There are subjects that affect the very future and stability of our country, which are far too anti-diversity and PC to even discuss, our country is being stolen from us, and we are not allowed even a whimper of protest. Couple that with the constant barage of propaganda from the MSM. The press deserve all they get.”
In other words, because the MSM have behaved like berks at times – and they have – we won’t be missing much if the media are regulated like doctors or whatever. Great. This is classic dog-in-the-manger thinking: Other people don’t have liberty, so why should you? This is dangerously short-sighted and foolish. The proper response, of course, is to demand equality before the law and repeal the current restrictions of freedom of speech that now exist, by copying the US First Amendment and enforcing it.
Instead, like bitter, sad people in despair, we lash out at a decent argument for free speech because of the imperfections of this world. It is a classic case of the best being the enemy of the good. We are not going to achieve a perfectly free society soon, but let’s surely fight to protect what liberties are left.
And remember, as the playwright Tom Stoppard said some years ago, you can tell we have a free press in this country because of the amount of crap that gets printed. Inevitably, a lot of what we read and see in the press and TV will be mediocre at best, or sensationalist rubbish, at worst. But that no more invalidates media freedom than it would justify state regulation of party clothing on a Saturday night because most Britons have the style sense of a toad. The point is that a free press, unshackled by the chilling effects of regulation, has the potential to do good and useful things.
Of course, when the UK media is so dominated in the terrestrial broadcasting sense by a state-financed broadcaster such as the BBC, any idea that we operate a full free market in media and broadcasting needs to be hedged with a bit of a qualification anyway.
An organisation that ought to be regarded with suspicion is the National Union of Journalists, which says that regulation of the media is okay. The NUJ must surely know that the next, almost inevitable step would be state licencing of journalists, something that the NUJ, no doubt keen to enforce a closed shop on journalism, would see as bolstering its power.
Finally, if the letter-writers to the DT and other places think the media needs to be regulated by the sort of people who have done such a splendid job regulating financial services, for example, then they might want to emigrate to a place more to their liking, such as North Korea. Or maybe they should choose France, which operates under a draconian privacy law as Raab points out. Given that many French people are fleeing France due to its high taxes, though, there may not be many takers for this idea, however delightful that country is in many other respects.
Blogger Tony Newbery of Harmless Sky tried to use the Freedom of Information Act to get the BBC to reveal who were the people present at a certain seminar whose advice led the BBC to decide to adopt a pro-AGW stance. The BBC described this decisive seminar as being graced by ‘some of the best scientific experts’. Newbery had a suspicion that there were many fewer experts and many more activists than the BBC made out. One out of the few – and I think that means one out of the one – people present at the seminar with views outside the consensus, Richard D North, said as much. Presumably North either had kept no record of the exact attendance list or had an obligation to keep it confidential.
The BBC really did not want to say. Representing himself, up against the BBC’s six lawyers, Newbery, not surprisingly, lost his case at the Information Tribunal. The fact that one of the lay judges had strong views against “deniers” probably didn’t help.
Though he had started an appeal, the point became moot when Maurizio Morabito of Omnologos found the list anyway by clever use of the Wayback Machine.
Watts Up With That, Bishop Hill, and Guido all have posts. Summary: Newbery was right.
They’re all there; Greenpeace, the New Economics Foundation, the Gaian branch of the Church of England, someone from Greenpeace China, bods from Stop Climate Chaos and Tearfund, Jon Plowman, Head of Comedy…
What? Head of Comedy? Yes. One of the aims of this series of seminars was to “take this coverage [international affairs, including climate change] out of the box of news and current affairs, so that the lives of people in the rest of the world, and the issues which affect them, become a regular feature of a much wider range of BBC programmes, for example dramas and features.”
Note that even some of the sciency sounding names and job titles listed are not exactly the hardest of the hard. According to the comments at Bishop Hill among the list there is a Senior Lecturer from the OU focussing on environmentalism and politics, a Geography PhD with an interest in conservation and human rights and a lucky undergraduate from Harvard specialising in documentary film making.
Why it matters.
Fun fact: all the four big-name resignations from the BBC over the last few days (Peter Rippon, Steve Mitchell, Helen Boaden and George Enwistle) were present. Someone somewhere (I’ve lost the link, I’m afraid) mentioned the Private Eye occasional feature “Curse of Gnome”.
Balen Report next, then!
This article by Richard Webster was published in the New Statesman on 19 February 1999. I found it via this comment by TomGamble to a Guardian article by Tariq Ali on the future of the BBC published yesterday. I am astonished that both this article and the 1999 BBC programme on child abuse it criticises have scarcely been mentioned in the present scandal, since most of the same people, events and institutions are being discussed now as were discussed then. Some quotes from Richard Webster’s article follow:
On Monday 25 January 1999, immediately after Newsnight, BBC2 broadcast a documentary, A Place of Safety, about sexual and physical abuse in children’s homes in North Wales. Many who saw it found it one of the most harrowing programmes about abuse they had ever watched.
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What the BBC did not tell us was that Brian Roberts only made his allegation of sexual abuse after watching a television programme about Bryn Estyn in 1997. This programme, which dealt with the setting up of the North Wales Tribunal, had mentioned the conviction of Peter Howarth, the deputy head of Bryn Estyn, for sexually abusing adolescents in his care. (It did not mention that Howarth, now dead, always protested his innocence, or that some of his former colleagues still believe he was wrongly convicted.)
Roberts immediately contacted the tribunal and told them that he, too, had been sexually abused by Howarth. He then made a formal statement to this effect. At this stage it was pointed out to him that Howarth had not begun working at the school until November 1973, three years after he had left. Far from being sexually abused by Howarth, Roberts had never met him.
The next witnesses to appear on the programme were Keith and Tony Gregory. Tony described a regime where physical abuse was commonplace. He said: “You’d let it happen to you. You’d let the staff punch you in the face, or in the stomach, or throw things at you.” He went on to make even more serious claims, including that he had seen Peter Howarth sexually abusing one of the residents.
What the BBC did not tell us was that Tony Gregory had also given evidence to the North Wales Tribunal. One of the allegations he had made concerned a Mr Clutton who, he said, had thrown a leather football at his face so hard that it had almost broken his nose. During cross-examination it was pointed out that, although there had been a Mr Clutton on the staff of Bryn Estyn, he had left in 1974, three years before Tony Gregory had arrived.
The next witness to appear on the programme was Steven Messham. He said that on one occasion, when he had been in the sick-bay with blood pouring from his mouth, he had been buggered by Howarth as he lay in bed. He said that on another occasion he was asked to take a hamper of food to Howarth’s flat, where he was buggered by Howarth over the kitchen table.
What the BBC did not tell us was that Messham claims he was sexually abused by no less than 49 different people. He also says he has been physically abused by 26 people. In 1994 the Crown Prosecution Service declined to bring his allegations against Howarth to court. None of his allegations has ever resulted in a conviction. In 1995 one of his most serious sexual allegations was rejected by a jury after barristers argued that it was a transparent fabrication.
ADDED LATER: In fairness to Mr Messham, I would like to say that I have no doubt that he was abused when living at Bryn Estyn,and my impression is that he is not a deliberate fabricator as the late Mr Webster implied he was in this article. Unfortunately I don’t believe that Mr Messham can distinguish between true and false memories any more. My point in posting about this article is that the BBC’s recent failure in due diligence when reporting abuse claims by Mr Messham and other former residents of Bryn Estyn is the second time this has happened.
The media’s reckless haste to say that a senior Tory was a paedophile and its decade-long reluctance, until the Times broke ranks and the story, to report the grooming gangs of Pakistani descent that were operating in South Yorkshire both have the same root cause.
The BBC is like a drunk zig-zagging down the street, throwing up on the left because last time he threw up on the right.
It declined to run a Newsnight programme alleging that one of its own dead stars, Jimmy Savile, carried out multiple acts of child sexual abuse, on grounds of insufficient evidence. The evidence was sufficient for ITV, which broke the story.
Facing criticism for its timidity from all sides someone at the BBC had a really great idea about how to make amends… run a Newsnight programme alleging that someone else carried out multiple acts of child sexual abuse, and do it on near as dammit no attempt to gather evidence whatsoever. And this time pick someone still alive and able to sue because it’s more glorious that way. The makers of the programme seem to have thought that by not actually naming Alistair McAlpine in so many words they would be immune from the laws of libel. You would think that the training of journalists (the BBC’s is meant to be world class) would include the fact that any indirect statement capable of being understood by the average reader is by that very fact capable of bearing a defamatory imputation.
The left wing Guardian comes out better than most in this affair; it said on November 9th that this was a case of mistaken identity.
One can see the appeal of this story from the BBC’s point of view. Third, it would be a belated show of anti-paedo crusading zeal; second it would add weight to the BBC’s “everybody was at it in the 70s” defence of its record in allowing Savile to get away with his crimes for decades, despite persistent rumours and allegations; and first, oh, very much first, Lord McAlpine was a senior Tory from the Thatcher era. That made the story too good to check. Specifically, to good to waste time either with contacting Lord McAlpine, who might have mentioned if asked that he lived in the South of England during the period in which he was alleged to be regularly abusing boys in North Wales, or with showing a picture of Lord McAlpine to the man who claimed to have been abused by him, Steve Messham. Having now seen a picture, Mr Mesham has stated that Lord McAlpine was not the man whom he alleges abused him.
So now Entwistle’s gone. ITV would be looking good in comparison were it not for the efforts of Phillip “Paedofinder General” Schofield. Really, one would expect no better from the BBC’s top investigative team but what is the world coming to when you can’t even trust ex-children’s TV presenters to back up their allegations? While it is true that the internet has made it quicker to research a story, three minutes is even now not usually considered quite time enough.
The BBC and ITV have made what may turn out to be a very expensive mistake (and I doubt that the Guardian’s George Monbiot has slept well these last few nights), but it would be unfair to lambaste the media and let their audience off scot-free. Why do so many people seem to flip between denial and paranoia with no intervening pause for thought? What is it about the human mind that seems to prefer any extreme to the idea of judging each individual case on its individual facts?
This story has suddenly hit the attention of the Big Media – there were several reports about in the weekend – and it is true that the outbreak of a disease that kills ash trees is alarming. As a reminder of how virulent such diseases are, the UK was once full of elm trees and then the Dutch Elm Disease outbreak wiped them out, although some species of elm can, it is hoped, be bred to resist it. (Elm is a wood once used in things such as rudders and keels of boats). Ash has considerable uses in the furniture trades; the prospect of thousands of trees being wiped out is alarming enough.
Charles Moore, writing in one of his regular berths, the Spectator, makes a point about what he sees as the ineffectual performance of Britain’s state-owned Forestry Commission. (The UK government tried to privatise it, but caved in when the FC and its supporters claimed this would bring the End of Civilisation as We Know It a bit nearer.) He has a point, and this quote caught my eye: “A friend of mine who owns an extremely rare ash forest in Scotland (a fraction of one which the Forestry Commission destroyed in the 1950s) tells he has received no alert at all from the Commission before or during the present crisis.” Moore says his own efforts to research the ash issue on the FC website has carried very little useful data on it. When I click on it, there is an item on the disease.
By coincidence, the Forestry Commission’s performance comes under separate attack, in the same edition of the Spectator, by Matt Ridley. He blames it for spending more time on AGW alarmism than in dealing with the issue of imported bugs and diseases.
This leads me to a broader point. These last few weeks have provided plenty of evidence that state-run organisations tend to be jealous of their own privileges to the detriment of the public interest they are supposed to serve. The BBC, allegedly, has employed a sexual predator against young children (Jimmy Savile) for decades, and when this was pointed out after the man died, the BBC pulled a documentary about this fact and chose to air some crummy “tribute” to the old creep instead. Then there is the National Health Service, that symbol of 1940s infatuation with central planning and anti-market prejudice. It allowed Savile to roam around at least one hospital, for many years. By a strange twist, it appears one reason why the whole issue was tamely covered were fears, so it is said, by journalists that their industry could be regulated if the UK government accepts recommendations by Lord Leveson, who has carried out an enormous and expensive enquiry into the phone hacking scandal. And in the same edition of the Spectator, the actor Hugh Grant comes out with this piece of statist-leaning rubbish:
“We don’t know what Leveson will -recommend. But let’s assume he won’t back yet another helping of self-regulation (the so-called Hunt/Black plan). Let’s say he proposes a new regulator, independent both of the industry and of government, and with the minimum statutory underpinning to make it effective. According to a recent YouGov poll, that would be supported by 77 per cent of the UK population. Many of the national newspapers, on the other hand, say it will be the end of freedom of the press. But will it really?”
It won’t end it, but it will be a step in the wrong direction. The fact that 77 per cent of the UK population want X is no more proof of the wisdom of state regulation than it would have been proof of the existence of witches or intelligent life on Mars.
“It’s similar to how the judiciary, lawyers and doctors are regulated in this country. And none wanted to be regulated, but they’re fine with it now. In terms of regulation it would be nothing in comparison to how Ofcom or the BBC Trust regulate the broadcasting industries, and it’s hard to find a broadcast journalist who complains of being chilled or constrained.”
Oh great. Just what we need. So how does Mr Grant imagine that, say, an internet-based blogger, or chatshow host, or whatever, is going to be regulated? If only qualified journalists (qualified where, and in what ways, and by whom?) are allowed, then a lot of people who have jobs in the media are going to either retrain, at cost and inconvenience, or leave. And does Mr Grant not imagine that the whole world of non-mainstream media is going to be affected by this? (Also, it is nonsense to suggest that broadcasters are not feeling constrained: the people who made the abandoned Savile documentary certainly were, and I believe, were constrained to an extent by what the BBC is.)
Anyway, the reason why I don’t want the media to be regulated in the way that Grant wants is to avoid yet more parts of this country’s affairs succumbing to the same smug, inward-looking mentality that we see at the BBC, the NHS, a state forestry organisation, or whatever. The sins of the British media, such as the newspapers, are well known. What Grant does not seem to mention is that the UK also operates some of the most ferocious libel laws; this country does not have anything like the US First Amendment; and if there are serious wrongs (and hacking phones is wrong), there are already plenty of laws to prevent that from happening, or punishing those when caught.
From dead ash trees to a British actor. We cover a lot of ground on this blog.
You may have heard that the Yanks are having some sort of election.
You may have even heard that a minor celebrity called Lena Dunham made a political advertisement in support of the candidacy of Mr Obama. This production gave rise to hostile comment from Mr Romney’s supporters, which the Democrats claim was motivated by prudery but the Republicans claim was motivated by disquiet at Ms Dunham’s apparent assumption that the main hope of American maidens is to receive their lord’s seigneurial favour and be kept by him thereafter.
Admit it, though, the ad is funny. She has great comic timing, and the way she rattles out her spiel at speed while still managing to do recognizable parodies of the way people really talk shows she has all the observational skills one would expect from a talented scriptwriter. That is an aspect of the ad which has received less attention than it should. Ms Dunham’s particular gift is meant to be that she can write a script that reflects how women live today, on the understanding that ‘women’ means urban American women of her own class and race.
So Lena Dunham the great observer went out and observed this. Listen from 0:30 for the next five seconds:
It’s a fun game to say, “who are you voting for?” and they say, “I don’t want to tell you,” and you say, “No, who are you voting for?” and they go, “Guess.”
So even among the sort of people who Lena talks to there are enough Romney voters who don’t want to say so for her to find that coy response worth parodying? That could explain certain oddities in the polls.
From an auctioneers’ website:
lot details
lot no 305
description
A silver rectangular medallion, London 1977, applied with ‘WE FIX’D IT FOR JIM’ and ‘NATIONAL VALA 1977’, 4.2cm high, with a suspension loop, on a belcher link chain, the ring catch stamped ‘STER’
The National Viewers’ And Listeners’ Association (National VALA) was founded by Mary Whitehouse, CBE (1910-2001) in 1965.
Provenance: From the estate of Sir Jimmy Savile. OBE, KCSG, LLD (1926-2011)
It would be ridiculous to attempt to extract some moral from the existence of a medallion apparently issued by the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association, 1970s campaigners against obscenity, particularly obscenity on the BBC, and the late Jimmy Savile, 1970s BBC DJ and TV host, now alleged (credibly alleged, despite the inevitable swarm of bandwagoneers) to have been a sexual predator with no regard for gender, age, vulnerability or consent. Any competent hack could whip up two think-pieces with mutually exclusive morals in one hour flat and bank his cheques from the Mail and the Guardian in the morning.
It was just an odd thing I found on the internet.
Just to add to the oddity, the auction was held in Saviles Hall. It is no longer possible to Google for the origin of that name.
The medallion went for £220, somewhat below the estimate. Wonder what it’s worth now?
Yes, I think I am avoiding talking about the Savile case. You can remedy that below. The case, as opposed to the medallion, throws up so many questions and points for discussion that I was hard put to keep the number of categories for this post under half a dozen. Please bear the laws of libel in mind if referring to living persons.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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