‘An Internal Housekeeping Matter’:1 Whitehall and the BBC Monitoring Service

For over 65 years the BBC Monitoring Service has been providing Whitehall and its diplomatic, intelligence and security communities with a rich seam of ‘open‐source’ information mined from the word's media. However, while the continued importance of this work remains undisputed, in 2003 the future of the Monitoring Service was brought into serious doubt as a result of a proposed major reduction in its government funding. The source of this problem was a decade old dispute between sponsoring government departments over where the burden of responsibility lay for the costs of the service. The ensuing deadlock led the Intelligence and Security Co‐ordinator, Sir David Omand, to commission a Review of BBC Monitoring by Sir Quentin Thomas whose recommendations formed the basis of a new funding and governance regime for the Monitoring Service. This is the story of that dispute and the means used to achieve its eventual resolution.     

Politics and television

Texts reviewed:

Jay Blumler, Michael Gurevitch and Julian Ives (1978) The Challenge of Election Broadcasting, Leeds University Press.

Tom Burns (1977) The BBC: Public Institution and Private World, Macmillan Press.

Grace Wyndham Goldie (1977) Facing the Nation: Television and Politics 1936–76, Bodley Head.

Philip Schlesinger (1978) Putting ‘reality’ together: BBC News, Constable.

Michael Tracey (1977) Producing Political Television, Routledge Direct Edition.     

A comparative analysis of Channels TV and CNN's coverage of World News

This study did an analysis of the Western and Third world coverage of World News using the broadcast stations (CNN and Channels TV) as case study. In other words, the study sought to examine if the Western and Third World nations are still guilty of imbalance, bias and distortion in their treatment of news. The findings showed that both the North and South nations are guilty of bias and imbalance in their coverage of World News and that each nation seeks to promote their interest rather than a true world interest or the interest of their counterpart nations. The study further revealed that the Third World media still depend heavily on Western media sources for its news albeit their standpoint on the News Flow debate. About 50% of the entire World News stories on Channels TV were sourced ‘outside’, while about 40% were unidentified. Only 10% were from the in‐house personnel. It was also observed that about 55 and 67% of World News coverage by Channels TV and CNN, respectively, were focused on ‘bad news’; an age‐long controversy that has bedeviled news coverage globally. In view of the foregoing, it has been recommended that there is need for the acceptance of ‘imbalance’ as a major feature of all media systems as well as a re‐evaluation of the standards and values of news evaluation. The rapid industrialization of Third World economies will also go a long way to stop the one‐way traffic in international communication which is what encourages media dependence. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

‘I can’t remember a more depressing time but I don’t blame anyone for that’: remembering and commemorating the wartime internment of enemy aliens in Britain

ABSTRACT

In October 2000, David Cesarani decried the unnecessary internment of refugees from Nazi Germany in Britain during the Second World War on the BBC Radio 4 programme Behind the Wire. Until the last few decades, little was known about the internment of enemy aliens by the British during the war. However, in recent years, novels such as David Baddiel’s The Secret Purposes, published in 2004, and exhibitions such as ‘Schwitters in Britain’ at the Tate Britain in 2013, have introduced a wider audience to this oft-forgotten part of the British wartime narrative. Some of those interned in Britain were sent to Canada and Australia, which led to the greatest tragedy of the entire internment debacle, the sinking of the Arandora Star. The year 2015 marked the seventy-fifth anniversary of this tragedy, and the memory of those who were lost lives on in the British–Italian community. However, outside those affected by the Arandora Star disaster, little is commemorated or understood by the general public. Yet the legacy of the former internees is all around us. Who has not, on visiting the British Library, walked past former internee’s Eduardo Paolozzi’s statue of Newton? What connoisseur of classical music has not enjoyed the sound of the Amadeus Quartet, perhaps the only positive outcome of internment? Pistol’s article will examine the memory of the camps and consider the differences between how internment has been remembered and commemorated by former internees and the general public.     

A Tale of Two Inquiries: Sans Everything and Ely

The government acknowledged scandalously poor care of long‐stay patients in National Health Service (NHS) hospitals in 1969. This followed the Ely Hospital inquiry, which emerged in the aftermath of revelations of abuse at seven hospitals described in Barbara Robb's book Sans Everything: A Case to Answer (1967). Allegations in Sans Everything and at Ely were similar. However, the inquiry committees which investigated, ‘disproved’ those in Sans Everything and upheld those at Ely. The Ely inquiry became pivotal to NHS policy reform for long‐stay mental illness and mental handicap hospitals, and for giving patients and their families a greater voice if they had concerns about inadequacies. This paper explains the relationship between Sans Everything and ‘Ely’ and analyses the impact of Robb's work—her high‐profile press campaign, networking, and determination to achieve improvement—which triggered revelations at Ely and elsewhere, and helped shape the course and constructive outcome of the Ely inquiry.     

Representations of intergenerational care on BBC children’s television

This paper contributes to research on media representations of care with a textual analysis of BBC children’s television. As a public service broadcaster, the BBC is tasked with the fostering and sustaining of citizenship. This paper argues that representations of care are an important way by which the BBC can potentially meet its remit and inform children’s perceptions of informal care. It takes a focused look at the portrayal of grandparent–grandchild relationships of care in three programmes: Mr Alzheimer’s and Me, Katie Morag and Topsy and Tim. All three programmes show narrative moments which map onto Tronto’s concept of good care, including attentiveness, responsibility, competence, responsiveness, solidarity and trust. Grandparents and grandchildren are shown to be caring for each other. However, programmes do not challenge the inequalities which continue to structure the realities of informal care work. Neither the inequalities of power between carers and care receivers, nor the lack of public and government support for carers is addressed, and adult informal care is gendered. This paper argues that while BBC children’s programmes provide important opportunities for children to learn the meaning of good care, in order for it to meet its public service remit, it should also provide opportunities to learn about the relationships of power that structure informal care.     

Squaring the Virtuous Circle: Exploring the Potential of the ‘Five Cs’

During his May 2014 visit to Australia Pascal Lamy, former Director General of the World Trade Organization, urged ‘public institutions, civil society, and global businesses’ to forge ‘creative coalitions’ for the purpose of engaging constructively and positively with the complex problems standing in the way of achieving social and economic sustainability. Lamy's visit was but the first of several occasions during 2014 in which intense public discussion erupted about the need for government, business, and civil society to pool their capacities in boundary‐spanning efforts to address complex policy problems. This article investigates whether the public discussion portends a heightened policy focus on the ‘five Cs’: co‐production, co‐design, corporate social responsibility, collective impact, and Lamy's creative coalitions.     

Response to Peter Shergold

Andrew Podger wrote an article in the June 2007 AJPA entitled ‘What Really Happens: Department Secretary Appointments, Contracts and Performance Pay in the Australian Public Service’. Dr Peter Shergold replied to his criticisms in the September issue of AJPA. This short response from Podger is the final rejoinder. In a second paper following this rejoinder the present Australian Public Service Commissioner comments on public service independence today.     

A Soiled Password: Democracy,the Word and Democracy,the Thing

The word‘democracy’ to be distinguished from the thing‘democracy.’ Removal by the Italian parliament of a corrupt and scandalous Premier for a respected, honest technician and a form of civil service government does not infringe the second category. Referendums give strength to a handful of already overmighty rich men controlling media outlets. Witness Fox Radio and TV and the poison of Glen Beck, also the virulent nationalism of the Murdoch and Desmond papers. Note the fifty plus year lag in enfranchising women in Switzerland, a self‐evident democratic advance held back by ‘the voice of the people’ in successive referendums. Government should be free from populism and be run by educated, intelligent people both in parliament and the Civil Service. ‘Yes Minister,’ however amusing, has done us a disservice. I would trust a senior civil servant above a press lord any day of the week. Witness the good sense of the Upper House in its current informed and experienced composition. The Lords blocked Tony Blair's plans to by‐pass Habeas Gorpus, refusing authoritarian government to an elected Premier with no sense of the rule of law or constitutional principle.     

Machinery of government and standards in public service: teaching new dogs old tricks

Abstract

For much of the last thirty years the main leitmotif animating Civil Service reform in the UK has been that efficiency and effectiveness in public services can be achieved by adapting management methods and practices derived from commercial enterprise. In the process of making the dreams and schemes of that plural singularity we have come to call ‘managerialism’ operational though, something valuable appears to have been lost, and that something is the Civil Service as a unified ‘constitutional bureaucracy’. In this article I explore some of the unfortunate governmental and administrative consequences of these managerially minded reforms. In particular, I seek to highlight the continuing relevance of what have been routinely characterized as outmoded and anachronistic machineries of government, and to stress the importance of the increasingly forgotten core business of public administration: the running of a state and of a constitution.     

Enoch Powell's appeal to the left

The campaign against the so‐called ‘ritual slaughter’ of animals has been hijacked by right‐wing extremists, including members of the National Front, in a bid to incite racial intolerance of Muslims and Jews. The arguments and the terminology used by some animal rights supporters, including the well‐known national organization, Compassion in World Farming, tend to encourage xenophobia and racism, engendering an ‘us’ and ‘them’ approach to the animal rights debate.     

Thinking strategically about ASEM: The subsidiarity question

Abstract

Aficionados of arcane European Union politics will know the importance of the term ‘subsidiarity’, for it relates to perhaps the most fundamental question facing any federal enterprise. Subsidiarity is supposed to be simple ‐ the notion that issues should be handled at the most effective level of authority ‐ but the devil is in the debate about what is ‘most effective’. The notion of subsidiarity, in all its complexity, is in fact most appropriate for those considering the shape of the agenda for the next Asia‐Europe Meeting (ASEM) in London in 1998. With the proliferation of meetings and organizations devoted to the next ASEM agenda, the time has come to pose and begin to answer the subsidiarity question. That question for ASEM would ask, ‘what is best done at the ASEM level’, as opposed to at a global, other regional, national, or even corporate, local or individual level? If officials and analysts feel that such a question is too tough for the ASEM process, perhaps they would be happier with a subsidiary subsidiarity question: ‘what can also be usefully done at the ASEM level'? If there are good answers to the main question, there is a good basis on which to engage in the ASEM process. If there are only good answers to the subsidiary question, the ASEM agenda will be less ambitious and perhaps even appear contrived.     

Deleuze,cinema, Bergson

In the Cinema books, Deleuze integrated his ‘counter‐history’ of philosophy and arrived at a philosophy of art. For him, the artist is a ‘creator of truth’ because truth is not to be achieved, formed, or reproduced; it has to be created’ (Cinema 2 1985: 146). Stressing the pre‐eminent importance of the ‘creation of the New’, Deleuze calls on us to reread and rethink with him the works of Bergson, whom he views as indispensable to the ‘pure semiotics’ of cinema.     

The search for the centre: Pivot parties in West European party systems

The central question is whether or not in multiparty systems the so‐called parties of the ‘centre’ can be defined and observed in isolation. We start from the assumption that party‐life in the centre‐space of a political system has distinctive features. Centre parties must therefore be conceptualised and analysed as phenomena sui generis and do not belong to either the left‐wing or the right‐wing of a party system. The second assumption is that every party in a parliamentary democracy is a vote seeking and policy guided actor. This means that a centre party depends on its capacity to compete with both ‘wings’ of a party system whilst occupying the centre‐space. It is then capable of becoming the ‘pivot’ of the system: its ‘centrality’ and ‘dominance’ represent ideological distinctiveness and electoral/legislative weight. The cross‐national analysis demonstrates that only a few parties are genuine pivot parties. The paper concludes with a discussion about the issue whether or not the existence of a pivot party is a blessing in disguise for the working of a democracy.     

The technique of finding hostages

Most of the Austrian press was uniformly indignant about what it saw as ‘unjustified interference’ by the World Jewish Congress in the domestic affairs of Austria. The neo‐Nazi German press agreed. Elsewhere, the major newspapers and weeklies had no sympathy for the willingness of Austrians to hide from the consequences of Kurt Waldheim's deceptions.     

The ‘Othering’ of ‘Red Ed’, or How the Daily Mail ‘Framed’ the British Labour Leader

This article takes as its starting point the attack on the late Ralph Miliband, the left‐wing intellectual and father of the current Labour leader Ed Miliband, by the Daily Mail in late 2013. It argues that this attack was a response by the Mail to its failed campaign to dub the Labour leader ‘Red Ed’. The article demonstrates that ever since Miliband won the Labour leadership in 2009, the Mail has sought to ‘other’ him by presenting him as ‘alien’—this by constant references to his Jewish background, his upbringing in a wealthy North London intellectual milieu, his supposed extreme left‐wing views and his ineffable ‘oddness’—at least, an oddness as characterised by the newspaper. The paper will conclude by asking why the Daily Mail's ‘Red Ed’ moniker failed to catch on, while noting that their ‘Odd Ed’ moniker seems to have had more resonance.     

Abstracts section

The theme of poverty eradication is now again at the top of the development policy agenda. In November 2000 the UK Department for International Development (DfID) published an important White Paper on International Development with the title Eliminating world poverty: a challenge for the 21st century. The World Bank World Development Report for 2000/2001 also takes poverty as its theme with the title Attacking poverty. It is interesting to note that the World Bank has bracketed the decade of the 1990s with the 1990 World Development Report simply entitled Poverty. After many conflicting theories of economic development, the basic problem of poverty in developing countries is now being addressed in a much more holistic way, as is exemplified in the following articles. It should be noted that two of these act as introductory articles to a special issue of a journal on this topic. The article by Lustig and Stern introduces the December 2000 issue of Finance and Development whose overall title is ‘How we can help the poor’ and the article by Baulch and Hoddinott introduces the August 2000 issue of the Journal of Development Studies entitled ‘Economic mobility and poverty dynamics in developing countries’. These special issues contain articles on poverty in addition to the ones abstracted here. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Public sector reform in Sub‐Saharan Africa: what can be learnt from the civil service performance improvement programme in Ghana?

This paper focuses on public sector management reform ‘best‐practice’ case experience from Sub‐Sahara African (SSA). Given that ‘best‐practice’ is a relative concept and often debatable, the paper uses the Ghana Civil Service Performance Improvement Programme (GCSPIP) experience as rather a ‘good‐practice’ case with the view to sharing the outcome and lessons to encourage collaborative‐learning. It seeks to share the outcome and lessons learnt by the Ghana civil service reform with future public service reformers and to contribute to the literature. The paper concludes with an adaptable three‐dimensional framework. The framework argues that successful future public service reform (PSR) should consider three broad issues: first, are the ‘critical success factors’, including wholehearted political leadership commitment; wholehearted bureaucratic leadership commitment; thoughtful synergistic planning/preparation; patience for implementation and evaluation; capacity to convince; neutralise and accommodate reform‐phobias and critics; sustainable financial and technical resource availability and conscious nurturing of general public support. Second, is the need for reformers to appreciate the concerns of the public and the civil society scepticism of public ‘institutions’ and its ‘operatives’ and finally placing any reform programme in a country‐specific context, including understanding its history, culture, politics, economy, sociology, ideology and values. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Politicisation of Senior Appointments in the Australian Public Service

The vexed question of politicisation and patronage in the Australian Public Service is explored in this article. Recent dismissals and appointments of department secretaries have raised concerns about political convenience, trends towards partisanship and the erosion of ‘frank and fearless’ advice. Alternatively, governments have come to insist on ‘partnership’ arrangements between ministers and secretaries, to enhance ‘political accountability’ and install new management teams to better implement government policy. But do such forms of politicisation risk drifting toward a new ‘spoils system’ most would want to avoid?     

The brown decades

Current positive attitudes towards the historic Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas decision are likely to mislead us into thinking that it was welcomed when announced in 1954. Beyond that, Chief Justice Warren's opinion seemed to announce two separate justifications for ruling school segregation unconstitutional: the Fourteenth Amendment principle of ‘equal protection of the laws’ and the negative effects of segregation on the self-image and self-respect of black schoolchildren. These two lines of reasoning were both important in the context of the emergence of a new ‘universalist’ way of thinking about race after the Second World War. By the late 1960s, however, this colour-blind universalism had given way to a race-conscious particularism. By that same period, the federal court system was moving to embrace race-conscious measures to insure school integration and not just desegregation, and then to allow affirmative action rather than merely requiring the abolition of racial discrimination. Thus the conflicting logics of Brown were present in the racial jurisprudence and politics of the last fifty years. Another question raised by Brown is also important: how did it comport with the progressive tradition of jurisprudence called ‘legal realism’ that was dominant up to the end of the Second World War? Surprisingly little attention has been devoted to this problem in the intellectual history of constitutional thought. One thing is clear, however: legal realism has a different origin and orientation than the ‘race and rights’ tradition that the Warren Court initiated with the Brown decision. Again, the conflicting logics of Brown reflect the two traditions of legal reasoning: one based on an appeal to rights and principles and one grounded in experience. Finally, reflection upon the half-century history of Brown reveals considerable progress in abolishing legal and political racial discrimination, although ironically more progress in integrating schools has been made in the South than the North. Moreover, such progress has come at a certain cost to black institutions in both regions of the United States. That said, there is still much to be done to overcome the effects of over a century of racial segregation.