BBC, Teachers' Pay, Headphones, Exercise Cygnus, Cleopatra, Mis-Speaking

... In recent months the audience for the BBC's international channel, BBC World News, has grown by 12 million to 112 million. It has grown 50 per cent year-on-year in the United States, where it benefits from a society polarised in its politics and attitudes to media. Americans, as a whole, see the BBC as more reliable than any other national or international news brand and second in trust only to local TV.

News From Abroad
Carlton Alfred Smith (1853-1946)
Photo Credit: Sunderland Museum and Winter Gardens [CC BY-NC] 

But the BBC World News channel is in peril, according to a recently written letter by James Angus who oversees it. World news is "wholly commercially funded, and arguably not sustainable in its current form", says the note, passed to me by a concerned party.

The advertising market on which this channel depends has collapsed in the face of the pandemic. But the BBC's state-backed global rivals do not relent. Beijing generously funds CGTN; the Kremlin bankrolls RT; and Qatari petrodollars underwrite Al Jazeera.

... As Prime Minister, Johnson has ordered a review of BBC funding and told ministers to boycott the Today programme. Veteran broadcaster David Dimbleby recently told The Times:

"I am very dismayed by the Johnson attacks on the institution. I think they are crowd-pleasing. I think they are quite dangerous. I don't think they will work."

One reason he is right is that the BBC is fundamental to Britain's global standing, reaching 468 million people every week worldwide. Its aim is one billion by the end of the decade. That's an attainable target that offers the prospect of a huge chunk of the world's adult population having a signed-in relationship with a British institution.

(Ian Burrell. The i, 2020)

For all its faults, the BBC is an admired institution and, in my view, deservedly so. Let's not forget, also, the BBC's World Service which reaches, on average, 210 million people a week. 

*...The institution embodies excellence, imaginativeness and truthfulness and is one of the golden threads that binds us... There is something for everybody across the national and local outlets. Ninety-nine per cent of us look at its website or watch or listen to some item each week.

It is truly world-beating when it comes to creativity and reach. The culture watcher Peter York writes: "[The BBC] does all those things Brits are unaccountably good at and manage to sell around the world."...

I rail often against the BBC's decisions and behaviours, its record on diversity and equality, fees paid to stars, its unsustainable commitment to balance and impartiality, its trembling fear of tabloids. But I still love and respect this great institution and fear it may not survive.

The novelist Nick Hornby wrote this recently:

Heaven help the politicians who try to cut anything anywhere in the NHS. I would like to think that the BBC's service, its calm intelligence and dedication to our health and our ability to cope with what 2020 has thrown at us, might make it similarly untouchable."

Not at all. The illiberal elites in power are gunning for the broadcaster, to paralyse, then finish it off. Without the BBC, Britishness will be soulless, heartless and mindless. Is that what you want?

(Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, The i, 2020)  

Teachers' Pay

The starting salary of a primary school teacher is given in red and one of 15 years experience is given in blue.

The Incorrigible
John Burr (1832-1893)
Photo Credit: Manchester Art Gallery [CC BY-NC-ND]

Luxembourg    £54,127     £79,025

Germany          £48,708      £59,781

Canada             £31,188      £54,437

Australia           £34,816     £ 49,993

Netherlands      £32,057     £ 49,948

Ireland              £28,464     £47,878

England            £24,373     £40,490

Scotland           £26,697     £40,206

N. Ireland        £23,199      £39,498

Wales              £23,720      £39,406

(The i, 2020) ( Sources: oecd, nasuwt, eis.) 

On the face of it the UK doesn't seem to value its primary school teachers as much as other nations.

Headphones

Gardeners' World presenter ... Monty Don has told the BBC News that whenever he is in a city, "the thing I notice most - and what shocks me most - is how many people are walking along with headphones in, looking at a phone... They're not noticing anything at all - the weather, the sky, any other sounds. And that has to be bad for you."

...There is no feeling like moving around a city, with the perfect song playing in your headphones at the perfect moment, but now, mostly, I walk in silence. I can't get through a day without taking the dog out for at least an hour, while I used to think it would be a good time to catch up on podcasts or new albums.

But I leave my headphones at home and try, as much as I can, not to look at my phone. It gives me time to think and time to notice. It has done what no app has managed and made me understand mindfulness. It is an hour of calm and peace.

(Rebecca Nicholson, The Observer, 2020)

Well why not go the extra mile by leaving your phone at home when you walk the dog for an hour?  Wouldn't that give you even more time to think and notice things?

Exercise Cygnus

A Cob Mute Swan
unknown artist
Photo Credit: The Amelia [CC BY-NC]

The government is on a collision course with the information commissioner over its refusal to publish a confidential report warning that the UK's health system could not cope in a pandemic.

In a dramatic move, the Information Commissioner's Office has ordered the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) to hand over the report into Exercise Cygnus, or explain its decision for refusing, by 23 October.

Cygnus, a three-day simulation exercise in 2016, assessed the UK's ability to cope with an influenza pandemic, but its findings are pertinent to the current coronavirus crisis.

... One former government source familiar with the exercise told The Daily Telegraph that officials were reluctant to discuss what Cygnus had revealed as it was "terrifying".

... The DHSC declined to comment but it is understood to be preparing its response in due course.

(Jamie Doward, The Observer, 2020)

At present, the government, like the swan, remains somewhat mute.

*The government's main defence of its decision to award lucrative contracts in order to source protective equipment at great expense to the taxpayer and profit to its chums is deceitful and disingenuous. It repeats the word "unprecedented" ad nauseam but the reality is that pandemics occur at least once a century, and this one was predicted as the greatest threat to the health and wealth of the UK as long ago as 2002.

Plans were drawn up for a possible influenza pandemic in 2011 and the Cygnus exercise, testing the UK's pandemic preparedness, occurred in 2016. While the government refuses to publish the Cygnus report, we doctors know that it highlighted a lack of readiness, especially in terms of PPE, ventilators and hospital beds.

Not only did the government fail to address these issues, it allowed stocks to dwindle even further between 2016 and 2020, and made inadequate contingency plans for their procurement in the event of a pandemic. The excuse that the emergency nature of the pandemic meant that normal processes couldn't be followed is simply not credible. There was plenty of warning and time to prepare but they chose not to.

(Dr Austin Connor, Southcott, Devon, The Guardian, 2020)

Culture War over new Cleopatra film

Maria Mancini as Cleopatra
Jakob Ferdinand Voet (1639-c. 1700) (after)
Photo Credit: Royal Scottish Academy of Art & Architecture
[CC BY-NC-ND]

... The journalist Sameera Khan held that Cleopatra was Greek and Berber, but lamented that an Arab actress had not been cast. She accused Gadot (The Israeli actress Gal Gadot) of cultural imperialism.

"Your country steals Arab land and you're stealing their movie roles," she wrote.

... Yet the Gal Gadot Cleopatra has arrived in an era when portraying people from another place has become more complicated. Last year the actor Ralph Fiennes said he thought that a British actor putting on a German accent would soon be regarded as outdated.

(Will Pavia, The Times, 2020)

What have we come to if actors can only play people from their own country? Utter nonsense.

*Authors should be free to write about characters from different racial backgrounds from their own, Dawn French has said...

Asked whether a writer should have to be black themselves in order to create black characters, French told the BBC's The Andrew Marr Show that she disagreed.

She said it would be a "very sorry state of affairs if we couldn't imagine anyone we liked when you were writing."

She added: "If we started to police who you can write in fiction, I think that is a hiding to nowhere, really."

... She added that she frequently saw her ex-husband [Lenny Henry] being subjected to racism and that she also worried about comedy's "cancel culture".

In comedy you need to "live on the edges of propriety, you need to offend a  tiny bit to work out what's funny", she said.

(Tom Horton, The i, 2020)

Mis-speaking

Illusions
Annie Louisa Swynnerton (1844-1933)
Photo Credit: Manchester Art Gallery [CC BY-NC-ND]

... People have been mis-speaking all over the place recently. Boris Johnson "mis-spoke" about coronavirus restrictions. Donald Trump's doctor "mis-spoke" about the timing of the President's diagnosis.

The term is not all that new. In the early 70s, one Richard Nixon presided over an era of creeping euphemism. Wars waged in distant places were sanitised for domestic consumption by the use of words such as "ordnance" for bombs, and "collateral damage" for civilian deaths. Remarkably, Mr Nixon never did anything wrong (or never confessed to that), he made mistakes. Some of these were fairly serious, but they were, in his view, just mistakes. He also made popular an expression that continues to haunt the political landscape - the Nixonian verb to mis-speak.

"I mis-spoke myself," he said in his compelling grizzly voice. Effectively it was to become a euphemism for lying. It could also be a way of saying that one has made a mistake. Both lie and mistake are perfectly simple words, but they carry potential opprobrium, even if many mistakes are completely excusable.

Mis-speaking may also be used to cover a reversal of policy... rather than say "I got it wrong", or "we have changed our mind", the phrase "I mis-spoke does all the necessary work. It corrects our understanding of the situation without accepting any responsibility for misleading people.

We have yet to see "mis-wrote", but that will no doubt appear in due course. Authors should look forward to the more widespread availability of that expression, as it will cover a multitude of what used to be called sins, now mis-actions (misdeeds is an old, judgemental word). Getting something completely wrong may be explained as simple mis-writing. In an extreme case, it may also be possible to refer to an egregious error not just as mis-writing but an alternative fact.

(Alexander McCall Smith, The i, 2020)

Are you saying that mis-speaking is being ethically disorientated or economical with the truth? Or do you mean that someone who prevaricates, equivocates, or is mendacious or conceptually confused is a mis-speaker?  Read what Hilaire Belloc wrote on the subject in Matilda.