I am a history buff. As such I find libraries and the smell of old history books seriously exciting. During a recent visit to Northumberland (Reuben would not approve) I spent several wonderful hours exploring the history section of the reasonably famous Barter Books in Alnwick. (See here: http://bit.ly/9D7xvL). I’m a vegetarian, but enormous books on the Reformation, printed like ornate bibles, more than justify the cows killed for their leather to craft the book covers. I found the older history books to be of two kinds: the first, hopelessly specialised volumes on, for instance, the history of land ownership in Kent in the mid-15th Century (these books are unreadable); the second, books that attempt in one go to explain the entire course of the history of Europe, say, or democratic government, starting with the Greeks.

Stephen Fry once cited the library as something wholly without flaw. Libraries are, he explained, almost ‘sexually exciting’ places, as they are ‘powerhouses of knowledge’. This applies to books in general, but history books in particular. Enclosed in the most pedestrian-looking books you can find the whole sweep of human experience. You can follow Alexander the Great through Persia, watch monarchies fall to revolution, or ponder the disappearance of hats in mens’ fashion in the 1960s. A.J.P Taylor put it very well, as he often did:

History is the one way in which you can experience at second hand all kinds of varieties of human behaviour, and after all the greatest problem in life is to understand how other people behave, and this is what history enables us to do: to see people in all kinds of situations and in all kinds of walks of life…It makes the reader, and to a certain extent the historian too, aware of a fuller, much wider life than somebody could possibly have merely by his own private experience. [though I'm sure he'd agree that leaving the house is often a good idea].

Immersing yourself in history from afar with books is one thing, seeing it happen is another. When we’re old and ugly and not as mobile as we used to be, we’ll likely be asked where we were on 9/11, as we ask people where they were when Kennedy was killed. (I was in year 6 at the time; my friend Nick was staying at my house for after-school games and neon coloured food. I’ll make the story more interesting later). Likewise I’ll always remember being called down in 2003 to watch the chimp President himself announce the invasion of Iraq to the world on TV as my Dad did the ironing. Such moments of ‘we interrupt our regular programming…’ punctuate the 20th Century: people learned of war or crisis from the television, which provided memorable viewing (think of Walter Cronkite choking up like a girlie liberal in Nov. 1963); earlier they sat by the wireless, fretting.

Which brings me to the BBC Archive. Museums must house pots and bits of metal for the benefit of historical memory, and likewise our country needs a class of archive minions to sit in the presumably dark, dank bowels of the BBC and sort through their thousands of hours of broadcasting, and provide it for the public. This civilisational achievement you can enjoy by clicking here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/.

Modern British history is made clickable on this thing. Election coverage, interviews with statesman, public scandals of yore, plus more hours of quality programming than a human being could watch in a lifetime. When Nicolas Sarkozy first took power, one of his first public statements expressed the desire to make French public broadcasting as good as the kind les rostbiffs enjoy for £2.60 a week. Here, you can see why.

The site has a ‘Today’s Choice’ box on the homepage, with a video or radio broadcast of note. Today’s is from 3rd September, 1939. It is highly likely that today you will spend slightly more than 12.38 minutes on your computer either mindlessly youtubing, embarking on a blue-link adventure on Wikipedia, looking up ridiculous sexual activities on Urban Dictionary or masturbating for the third time today (just to prove you can). I would encourage you to forgo such things and listen to this broadcast, preferably in a dark room.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/ww2outbreak/7917.shtml

Nine years after Oldham burned in horrific race-riots, we’re finally getting round to the only workable solution to racial segregation. The report into the incident concluded that de facto segregation in the community was a root cause of the incident, and a more recent report stated that “Segregation and divisions between Oldham’s communities is still deeply entrenched”. Now, two schools – one 90+% white, one 90+% asian – are to be merged next month in a dramatic effort to ease racial tension in an area in which proximity is no guarantee of community.

This is the subject of a Newsnight series entitled ‘Crossing the Line’, and the report aired last night shows something quite revealing about race relations in some parts of our country. (You can watch it here, if you can sit through ten minutes of thick northern accents).

In the report we meet Jean as she drops her thirteen year old daughter, Hannah, off to drama club (which requries a commute through the predominantly asian part of the town). Jean admits that she feels ‘uncomfortable’ doing this, even for a few minutes when shielded in a large metal box on wheels. ‘In Oldham there isn’t a community anymore’, she says.

Hannah’s views are a bit more strident. “People have been saying that they’re going to build better houses for asians an’ that, immigrants an’ that. It’s like they can just come into the country and get treated like they’re kings and queens…and we get treated like we’re nothing”.

This is a common view, especially, it seems, among the young. Said one boy from the majority-white school, ‘Over there, it’s like totally different; it’s, like, Muslim culture’. The feelings are returned, certainly, and the animosity of the ‘other’ side forms the worldview of the very young. One asian girl, about ten, said simply, ‘They don’t like us asians’. Impressions formed the in the minds of the young can hard to dislodge.

These impressions can only be maintained with extreme seperateness. (Remember, the BNP performs best in areas with little or no immigration).

There have been concerns that the students to be integrated are too old, and that the project will backfire. These concerns I won’t address. What I would like to focus on is the vacuous little objection always raised whenever a humane policy is proposed. The accusation is that the government is just engaging in ‘Social Engineering’

Let’s examine this twaddle.

It might seem to make sense at first. The governemt – cynically, we can presume – is engaging in policies to force certain people in society into different positions etc. (‘Ticking boxes’ one person called it in the above case.) It does this to produce certain politically correct goals, and in callous disregard for the people involved.

Picture it: There he is, the faceless, ‘rationalising’ bureaucrat, manipulating people against their will to satisfy some politically expedient goal, and to make liberals and vegetarians feel better.

Do people realise what they’re saying when they make these kinds of hollow objections, use these hollow words? Society is not a ‘natural’ thing. It is based on human institutions and human agreements which we can control. If we deem equality to be a good thing, we can implement policies to encourage equality; just as we can pursue policies to produce more millionaires. Each produces dramatic social consequences. The abolition of slavery and the enfranchisement of women could be described in this manner, but would we call them ‘social engineering’? We should never tolerate the idea that social relations are the outcome of human nature; more often than not they are the result of some design.

So the definition I’ve come to is this:

Social Engineering: Humane policies with which I disagree, and to which I have no morally acceptable objection.

This cry of ‘Social Engineering!’ carries with it, I think, a rather depressing worldview in which we cannot attempt to change society for the better without government failure and ill effect. Nonsense – society should be ours to engineer.

Let’s hope for the success of this schools program, and look forward to the communities of Oldham coming together in the light of day to see their common humanity. And from that glorious point on they can address their real problem: the fact that they live in Oldham.

The BBC’s latest offering to the sitcom gods is Rev, the usual half hour, oh-they’re-in-a-pickle-now kinda thing, with the twist being that it’s not just about a vicar, but about an inner city vicar. It’s been hammered home by the BBC that this is a chance to move away from everyone’s favourite fat theological. Gone is the twee image of the countryside – instead, the writers are forcing themselves to deal with the issues.

The move away from Dibley and the countryside and into the city is taken to the ends of the East London – one of the most deprived areas in the country, lest we forget – and the first episode delved straight into the pressing matters of our time: vandalism, faith schools and small church congregations. (Okay, some of these are more pressing than others).

To sum up: the vicar, Adam, has just moved into his new parish, St Saviours on the Marshes. In the first week, the stained glass window is broken, and vandalism is suspected. In order to raise money to pay for the damages, the vicar is encouraged (by his church superior and his inner self) to accept money from the local MP in exchange for his kid to go to the church school, even though the kid’s family don’t really go to church. Eventually the vicar has a chat with god (overdubbed – no response from God booming through my speakers, I’m glad to say), has a bout of conscience, refuses the money, and settles for the broken window instead. The vandalism also turns out to be by one of the church regulars, an amicable drunk, and entirely by accident.

In the midst of this we have some casual racism (the only black character is a ‘cassock-chaser’ who orgasms during sermons, a clear dig at Pentecostalism), and the only asian character is a pervy chiropractor who inappropriately feels up the vicar’s wife.

Importantly, the countryside is also held up as a paradise in its absence – the vicar (originally from a small parish church in Suffolk) has a terrible time cycling in the godforsaken city, and is surrounded by ‘church whores’ who only pray in order to get their kids into the local church school. When the amicable drunk is having a crisis of faith, ranting about Richard Dawkins, the vicar takes the example of a snail shell as proof of God’s existence, something in nature (in the unchanging, green and pleasant sense) being beautiful, even though it doesn’t have to be.

But, despite the continuing distinction between countryside and city in that unhelpful, English way (and the casual racism), I think there’s definitely some redemption in the show. It displays religion as a working, functioning thing, albeit something which doesn’t necessarily do good things even when it’s functioning well.

If you’re an atheist like me (and I suspect that most readers of this blog are), then the scene of the vicar relishing the thought of setting prospective parents a Bible quiz in order to allow their kids into the Church school is scary and a bit sickening – but I think it’s also accurate, showing the close ties between money, property, class and religion which dominate the contemporary church. And it’s brave of the writers to broadcast this. (Interestingly, the mere presence of Olivia Colman from The Office and Peep Show, means that it all feels very ironic and sinister).

Religion is still big, and I think it would be a mistake to dismiss all progressive politics within it simply because the expression invokes God rather than ‘the people’ or some other transcendent being. Of course I’d rather that we got rid of transcendence altogether, but in the meanwhile I’m not going to pretend as if I/we have. Anarchists like David Graeber definitely rely on the imagination in the same way that Renaissance theologians use the soul, but this doesn’t mean there isn’t a hell of a lot of good politics and ideas going on in his writing. And the same goes for other radical transcendentalists like Christian anarchists and progressive Muslims.

I think our mistake too much of the time is to pretend as if the political ideology which causes the back-room deals of the MP trying to get his kid into a faith school is structurally different from the theological ideology which makes the vicar talk to God and expect a response.

Once you accept that we’re all living a lie of one kind or another, the point stops being about how good the lie is, but how progressive the results are. Mind you, I didn’t even get onto writing about the generalised sexism in the show…

It’s quite extraordinary, given how offensive some of their content is, what the BBC chooses to apologise for. Invite a fascist on flagship programming; proud commitment to free speech. Let a comedian tell a joke about appalling human rights violations; a step too far.

So three cheers for Frankie Boyle for not just objecting, in eloquent and passionate terms, but using the opportunity to raise the plite of the Palestinian people.

In case you missed it, the jokes in question are: ‘I’ve been studying Israeli Army Martial Arts. I now know 16 ways to kick a Palestinian woman in the back. People think that the Middle East is very complex but I have an analogy that sums it up quite well. If you imagine that Palestine is a big cake, well…that cake is being punched to pieces by a very angry Jew.’

The situation in Palestine seems to be, in essence, apartheid. I grew up with the anti apartheid thing being a huge focus of debate. It really seemed to matter to everybody that other human beings were being treated in that way. We didn’t just talk about it, we did things, I remember boycotts and marches and demos all being held because we couldn’t bear that people were being treated like that.

This is a guest post by Francesca Rose Lewis.

Much has been written recently on the malaise (if not quite death) of feminism. In 2006 Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs bemoaned the desire of women to become sex objects in a perverse re-reading of female power. Germaine Greer went on Celebrity Big Brother, and, in the popularity stakes, Girls Gone Wild would have won any contest. Last month, Natasha Walter’s new book Living Dolls arrived, restating the argument that feminism has decayed and that a new generation of women have chosen to ignore the years of struggle for women’s rights and the shattering of the glass ceiling. My generation has, apparently, blithely thrown it all away for the right to emulate a character from Sex and the City, and drive men wild with just the right tight dress.

Walter is a spokesperson (ahem) for that very group of women who feel betrayed by skimpily attired neophytes; who rage against the encroachment of raunch culture and the neglect of the fight for women’s advancement. While their reading of the situation may be narrow, there’s no doubt that something is stirring within that original women’s movement. It seems, amazingly, that many of those who first broke through the glass ceiling have hit another, impenetrable, barrier: the grey ceiling.

This is not just a feminist issue. People have been losing their jobs for no good reason other than their age for a long time in Britain. In Germany, lawyers and politicians continue to work until they choose to retire – gerontocracy rules. Yet, in this country, many corporations have compulsory retirement ages. This allows the young to be promoted, but it also robs companies of experienced and knowledgeable employees. And when it comes to high profile roles where image (gasp!) might play a factor, the first to go are always the women. First Moira Stewart and Arlene Phillips, and now Miriam O’Reilly – a presenter of Countryfile, a programme I admit I didn’t even know existed. All of these women work or worked for the BBC, a corporation committed to representing all of British life and culture… except when that life is female and over forty.

O’Reilly’s case is particularly interesting because she is the first to take the BBC to a London Employment Tribunal, alleging that she has been on the receiving end of discrimination and victimisation on the grounds of age and sex. O’Reilly has worked for the BBC for 25 years, including stints on Women’s Hour and File on 4, and is the recipient of several broadcasting awards: the British Environment Media Award for Best Environmental Story; the Foreign Press Award and the Royal Television Society Award for Best Documentary. When Countryfile was moved to a new primetime slot, O’Reilly and the other three female presenters (all over forty) were told to pack their bags. The male presenters were kept on.

It all comes down to image. Our television screens are full of greyly distinguished men, with Huw Edwards and Jeremy Paxman leading the pack of silver foxes. According to O’Reilly, the ideal BBC woman is “a size eight, unlined and with a taut neck. You cannot have a saggy chin and wrinkles under your eyes, like normal women”. Her last years at the Corporation were full of snide remarks about wrinkles being more visible in high-definition, and that she was a ‘rare breed’ still allowed to broadcast.

After the sacking of Arlene Phillips from the judging panel of Strictly Come Dancing, stories began to appear alleging that a culture of ageism was endemic at the BBC. O’Reilly was suspected of starting the stories, and her participation in almost all other BBC projects was quickly curtailed, with no explanation. A senior male executive telephoned to admit that, for the first time, he felt ashamed of the BBC.

There is definitely something wrong with the way we perceive older women. O’Reilly wrote a stirring defence of her choice to take the BBC on in the ‘FeMail’ section of the Daily Mail. Her story was interspersed with links to other stories in the same section: “Botox in a bottle: The £125 moisturiser that promises to freeze time… by mimicking the paralysing effects of snake venom”; “Time to look pale and interesting… whatever your age”; and last but not least, “Can a haircut make YOU look younger?”

When I’m asked if I am a feminist, I hesitate. It is as if admitting to that tendency presupposes a kind of militancy, which I think is outdated. Feminism should not be about getting ahead of men – it should be about equality. Miriam O’Reilly’s case demonstrates that such equality is still outside our grasp. So girls, it might be time to put down the five-inch heels – and support the women who fought for the opportunities that we now take for granted. Otherwise we risk a lot, and gain only a little.

Following our review of his new film, Starsuckers, we caught up with BAFTA-nominated director, Chris Atkins. Atkins made his name with the much admired Taking Liberties, a documentary on the erosion of civil liberties in Blair’s Britain. His latest offering, which premiered this year at the 53rd London Film Festival, is an exposé of the cult of celebrity and media misinformation. Talking to him about celebrity, media and politics, we found out why he finds Tony Blair a terrific liar and just why Simon Cowell would be a terrifying Prime Minister.

The Third Estate: So tell us about your new film.

Chris Atkins: In PR speak: it’s a romp through all the reasons we’re hooked on fame and then an expose of the people who are dealing it to us. I think that’s what I settled on. It a thesis led movie. I wanted to look at why we’re attracted to something so blatantly harmful and to look at the real reasons behind that from a scientific point of view. Then to look behind the curtain of the media, not celebrities themselves but the institutions and individuals who profit from it.

The Third Estate: I was thinking about that. There struck me as being two strands to the film: why we’re affected by fame and how the media manipulate us by abusing this knowledge ― but I wasn’t always clear on the connection. It seemed to have a lot of targets – the public are a target for being gullible. Celebrities for being stupid. The media for doing several things wrong – not reporting hard news, creating a myth of celebrity, giving into PR on the one hand but toppling governments on the other…

Chris Atkins: Yes, it’s a complex, messy area, so to paint an honest picture, you need a complex messy film. My last film, Taking Liberties, people seemed to get more, although Taking Liberties wasn’t a particularly honest picture. It was an argument about how the government, specifically Tony Blair, had taken away our liberties. But that isn’t the case; it’s a very simplified image. In Starsuckers I wanted to be more honest. The problem is it’s very complex. I wanted to build up a thesis to say there are a group of individuals holding the cards here. They pretend they have our better interests at heart but they don’t. That’s the core of it really.

The Third Estate: You do believe there’s almost a cabal of individuals then?

Chris Atkins: No, it’s not in the standard conspiracy theorist sense at all. It’s more of a kind of attitude than a secret society or anything as clear cut as that. A contract should exist between the media and the public. The public trust news media to have their interests at heart ― and they fundamentally don’t. They don’t care about the public; they don’t really care about the truth. And I say this as an insider: I’ve worked in the media for twelve years and we certainly don’t give a stuff about the public. We give a stuff about our wallets and having a jolly good time. Which is fine if you’re honest about it. But if you’re not honest about it, which most of the news media isn’t, they still have this facade of requiring trust and they don’t repay that trust.

The Third Estate: Much of the film reminded me of an aside in Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent where he talks about sports programmes as being a deliberate irrelevance people get sidetracked into so that they aren’t more politically engaged. But isn’t the truth about celebrity less sinister? Isn’t it simply cheaper to report, a by-product of an economic shift in the media?

Chris Atkins: Absolutely. It’s all economic. Well no, it’s initially economic, without question. It’s cheap, it’s reliable, it’s not controversial and it sells papers. People watch it for the reasons we list in the film and it starts delivering that media to us in a very predictable and affordable way. It’s almost replacing content. When you talk to commissioners the first thing they ask is what celebrity is in this television programme ― before they ask you what the programme is about. The celebrity is more important than what they’re surrounded by. That’s a wholesale shift in the way the media is generated. That’s happened in the last five years in both commercial channels and sadly the BBC as well. Yes, it’s initially commercial but once it starts being used for political reasons, for charities and activism, it starts becoming a real problem. It’s not just – here are some entertaining people doing some entertaining things – yes they’ve completely devalued truth in news – some people don’t seem to have a problem with that, I do – but when that moves into the political sphere, good causes, charities ― you’re in a whole heap of shit. Because what people are basically saying is that when celebrities are involved, truth doesn’t matter. Those are the dots we try to join together.

The Third Estate: I was just wondering; you say five years ago ― I’m sorry I’m looking at your Taking Liberties poster – and I’m reminded of the Gilligan affair. Was that perhaps the turning point for news reporting?

Chris Atkins: It certainly was a turning point, but I don’t see that it sits immediately inside this argument. Still it was a turning point on both sides. Gilligan didn’t check his facts. He went out on a limb, made something up. One thing out of 99 other things that were rock solid and they pulled him apart on it. I always look at Gilligan whenever I tempted to guild the lily, which is extremely frequently. So our Live 8 sequence – everything in that is bullet proof – because every night you think Gilligan: the entire argument could be pulled apart by one loose fact or slip of the tongue.

The Third Estate: Which reminds of the question I meant to ask at the start – how are the lawsuits going?

Chris Atkins: We’re in Private Eye this week. We’re front of media news. We had two Guardian front covers that doesn’t mean anything – Private Eye ― front of media news… We haven’t been sued by anyone this week. The whole Carter-Ruck thing was absolutely hilarious. At the time I was half-laughing, half-screaming. They shot themselves in the foot on various levels, one they’re wrong in law, two they managed to pick the world’s most unpopular law firm to initiate the injunction and three, most importantly, they managed to get the timing of the screening wrong. So they started trying to bring an injunction, not realising the press screening had already begun. We had to tell them ‘that’s happening now, 250 journalists are watching your client who’s 50 foot high in a Leicester Square cinema at this moment in time. The cat’s slightly out the bag.’

The Third Estate: So you’re not allowed to reveal anything that was bleeped out during the Max Clifford sequence?

Chris Atkins: No, absolutely not. For two reasons – one is obviously a libel point of view. I can’t back it up. I don’t know if it’s true or not. It’s Max rambling. Secondly, more importantly, I don’t want the film to become a source of celebrity gossip as we are critiquing sources of salacious, celebrity gossip. We would have been quite rightly burned by the critics if we had. The purpose of that sequence is to show what Max Clifford is prepared to do to protect his critics, which is contrary to the chubby nice guy image he portrays in the media.

The Third Estate: On matters litigious: you take a small shot at the Press Complaints Commission…

Chris Atkins: I’d hoped it was as big a shot as I could, but…

The Third Estate: Sorry. I noticed that one of your contributors, Nick Davies, was in the news recently. The News of the World has just beaten off the story he published in the Guardian about their phone tapping techniques after a PCC investigation?

Chris Atkins: Well they would, wouldn’t they? An organisation controlled by newspaper editors comes down on the side of newspaper editors.

The Third Estate: So would you support a state run PCC?

Chris Atkins: No, I’d support an independent run PCC. We manage to have these for all sorts of things; we have an independent police complaints commission. We’re about to have something independent for MPs and banks. Why not for the Press? Why can’t you and I do it? This is what the newspapers are terrified of. The PCC is purportedly there to protect the public from the press. It’s not. Everyone knows it’s not. It’s there to protect the press. As always the public suffers. You have newspaper editors winding up to tell you how scared they are by the adjudication of the PCC and reporters on the ground flatly contradicting that. We’ve not heard anything from the PCC about the revelations in the film and I think that proves our point.

The Third Estate: Going back a bit: you mentioned the character of the film. A lot of the character of the film comes from your voiceover, which is slightly grating – the kind of voice that you associate with voices that are deliberately patronising you.

Chris Atkins: Yes, that was actually deliberate.

The Third Estate: I guessed, but I was wondering whether you were trying to anger your audience into reacting? What was the thinking?

Chris Atkins: It’s a fair point. People have said he’s patronising, he’s glib and annoying and yes that was all quite deliberate. Whether I would make those deliberate choices again, I don’t know. What I was trying to do was create a Tony Blair. I needed a central villain. I didn’t want it to be about any one media corporation; or about Rupert Murdoch or Viacom or Max Clifford. I wanted it to be about all of them and none of them. So I created a satirical, ironic entity to bind them all together. He’s not there to be liked. There’s an artistic question opened up as to whether that’s a sensible thing to do: to have a central narrator you’re supposed to hate. That happens all the time in literature, in fiction. I’ve never seen it done before in a doc. Some people like the concept, some people absolutely hate it. I had a situation where I was trying to pull together a thesis about something most people believe they know a lot about. If I was to present it in a straight way – ‘I’m Chris Atkins I think celebrity culture’s bad’ – that would be absolutely ghastly. Who am I to tell people not to trust the media? So I wanted to turn it on its head and make it flippant. The voice encapsulates the editor of The Sun, the editor of the BBC News website when he puts up an article on Cheryl Cole rather than a news article.

The Third Estate: After the press screening, you mentioned that the material for the film lacked a top or bottom and I was wondering if, say, a Marxist had come along they would say ‘Well there is a bottom, it’s embedded power structures etc, etc’ but you’re not heading down that line?

Chris Atkins: When I said it didn’t have a top or bottom, I felt that was more to do with a creative film making problem. We had ten points in the thesis so it was deciding in which order do they come? Actually the order is quite straight forward. It’s where the fuck do you start, where the fuck do you end? That’s what I meant. In terms of ‘embedded in power structures’ ― celebrity is the face of capitalism. That’s a given. It is a mechanism for selling and giving an illusion of contentment. I believe all the arguments we gave on how celebrity is a means of control are essentially reheating the same argument that capitalism and money are a means of control. So yes I would concur that it has a starting point in the ability of those with power to control those without.

The Third Estate: A section of the film talks about celebrities in the Lithuanian parliament. I was just wondering if you could comment on that part of the film, and whether the true message of the film isn’t that people should be wary of celebrities entering politics, but that socially conscience people need to turn themselves into celebrities in order to affect change?

Chris Atkins: I think we just need to treat celebrities as dangerous. Just as 20 cups of coffee in a day is dangerous. Celebrities have a place we need to be extremely wary of allowing them to move spheres. I know that’s stating the obvious, but it’s happening a lot. In Lithuania you had a situation where, in young democracy, which at the same time was discovering new media – it was in a sense natural that entertainers quickly entered politics. Reality television was a massive success there, partly because voting was new to them. Voting for politicians and voting on reality shows seemed similar and in fact became one and the same thing. It became natural for celebrities in reality shows to stand for government. So they formed a party, became part of a government coalition and it’s a disaster. Their popularity rating has gone through the floor. It’s a kind of metaphor for what could, and I think may well, happen in the West. Consider the poll among young people taken recently about who they’d most like to see as Prime Minister: Simon Cowell came top of the list.

The Third Estate: That’s terrifying.

Chris Atkins: So people say, well it’s crazy ― those crazy Lithuanians, but it is happening here. Once you put celebrities into this sphere, damaging things happen. But nobody in the media questions it. The media are trained to be nice to celebrities and not question them. When we got our passes to film on red carpets, we were briefed not to ask celebrities anything challenging. So when they go into politics, with the level of scrutiny politicians receive, there’s a fundamental contradiction.

The Third Estate: So your message to celebrities would be to stay out of politics?

Chris Atkins: No, celebrities are irrelevant to the whole thing. If I was a celebrity being paid five million pounds a movie with people telling me I was brilliant every day, I would think I could change the world. That’s natural, the human mind does that to anyone. It’s called Acquired Narcissism Syndrome. I don’t blame the celebrities from thinking they can stop wars. That’s just natural; they’re cretins. The problem I have is when the media doesn’t challenge that. It doesn’t stand there and go ‘hang on a fricking minute what the hell is Angelina Jolie doing in Iraq?’

The Third Estate: To play devil’s advocate there’s an argument which I think is well expressed in a Kundera novel – there’s a march in Cambodia against land mines. An American actress goes along with what are mainly a group of French academics one of whom challenges her ‘what are you doing here? This isn’t a beauty parade.’ The actress replies that it is her social duty. Without her, the academics aren’t going to attract any attention to the problem and so she has to be seen there.

Chris Atkins: That’s a common argument. The problem again is the media. Why do the media only cover something if there’s some airhead blonde fronting it? Why don’t they cover it anyway? The celebrity is like a band aid, a much deeper problem with our media. For the celebrity to say I alone can change this problem is again part of this Acquired Narcissism Syndrome. This happened to Tony Blair a lot – my being somewhere will change things just by my presence. I’ve worked with actors for a decade. That’s how they feel, as if they’re the centre of the universe. It’s natural for them to get on a plane once a year and go somewhere a bit cold and pretend they’re making a difference. The problem is where the media follow in droves and repeat their banal state-the-bleeding-obvious points without question, but don’t go there when the celebrities aren’t around.

The Third Estate: If God is dead, Communism is the God that’s failed, we don’t believe in progress any more, Capitalism is on its knees and the American Dream has turned nightmare – isn’t celebrity all we have left to believe in? What’s the alternative?

Chris Atkins: God knows. I certainly would concur there’s a deep seated need for it to the extent it’s genetic, that we have behavioural urges to congregate around strong figures. In terms of what we do instead? When you have a world evermore mediatised and celebrity is the best way of delivering it; celebrity is here to stay. I think we need people to be more honest or more responsible. If the media said ― what you’re about to read is harmful and very little of it is true – I would have no problem. But we’re coming to a stage where media corporations are as powerful, if not more powerful, than governments.

The Third Estate: Which is strange when so much of the media is shrinking.

Chris Atkins: Well it is and it isn’t. Traditional structures are falling apart and in a sense all that remains is celebrity driven entertainment news. That’s doing well. Hard news is falling by the wayside and we’re left with a homogenised celebrity entertainment ether, which is everywhere but says nothing.

The Third Estate: Someone at the premiere asked a question about whether you’d prefer a weaker media – and argued, going back somewhat, that Anthony Eden, for example, would simply refuse to answer questions he wasn’t interested in. Surely that’s not preferable?

Chris Atkins: No, I’m not sitting here saying the media’s a terrible thing. Certainly from a political perspective we have this fantastic scrutiny, so that Twitter and blogs are able to protect the Houses of Parliament from a bloody law firm. It was absolutely astonishing. I was in the Guardian when all that kicked off. The whole Little Brother thing, the way people can take photographs of police beating newspaper vendors ― of course the media can protect us and scrutinise those in power more than they ever could. I would be the last person to try and roll any of that back. But it also means that the News of the World, with all the terrible ghastly things it does, hides behind the freedom of speech argument. It’s used as a shield for all kinds of illicit practices.

The Third Estate: I was struck by the Eden comment because, although he may have ignored the press, he ultimately fell on a lie. By comparison Blair lied continuously, and was caught out lying, but he survived. Doesn’t that suggest there’s too much competing media perhaps – the cacophony argument?

Chris Atkins: Well no, Blair just lied better. He used the media better. He changed how Downing Street briefings were done, by using that fantastic tool of celebrity PR – access. If you toed the line, ran the report the way the government wanted you to, you would get photos of Tony and Cherie. But if you didn’t and you ran an article asking ‘Where the fuck are these weapons of mass destruction?’ you’d be shut out of the briefing. No copy and as a journalist you’ll be in shit. That’s why Blair could get away with everything. It was a Max Clifford technique – there’s very little difference between Max Clifford and Alistair Campbell. Both in getting things written they want written, and stopping the publication of things they don’t want to see. It’s a celebrity PR trick.

The Third Estate: I can see some media commentators arguing that perhaps we don’t mind having liars at the top, culture has shifted. Rather than the media leading the public up the garden path, the media is simply reflective of contemporary mores.

Chris Atkins: Personally, I don’t want to think that’s true. Maybe it is true, in which case it’s a sad state of affairs if we’ve become desensitised to the idea of liars in office. I like the idea people trusted Tony Blair and that trust was simply misplaced. But people can get very angry: look at the row over MPs expenses. That was unheard of, certainly in all the time I’ve been watching politics. They were fiddling just a few grand.

The Third Estate: Compared to the bankers.

Chris Atkins: Compared to the bankers billions, yes. But I think it was more about trust and honesty than the money. Yes, it’s very annoying it happened in a recession – but literally more got written about that duck house than about RBS. We as people want to trust our leaders. We get very angry when our trust is abused. Celebrity reporting, PR spin coming from the world of entertainment into politics, brings with it this unbearably toxic effect.

The Third Estate: Where should people go for their news?

Chris Atkins: I get asked this all the time. I don’t have any particular answer. It’s interesting how many news outlets just recycle newswire. I’d say cut out the middle man, go to PA and Reuters. But I really don’t know. Hopefully out of this catastrophe in news people will come who want to invest in investigative journalism. Journalists who take their time to generate copy and charge for it, so that people go to those suppliers in a way that people go to a good brand. A lot of brands are in trouble at the moment. I read the Guardian but they run a lot of PR nonsense as well ―they ran our stories! Not that there wasn’t news value in that but we were essentially trying to sell our movie. Ultimately I don’t have a good answer.

The Third Estate: Why have you chosen to put this documentary into cinema ahead of television?

Chris Atkins: From our point of view, there’s no way this would be made for TV. Look at TV docs ― Dispatches: reporter in a taxi shouting at the camera. Panorama: Jeremy Vine shouting at the camera. Investigative journalism in television is pretty much dead. Certainly making a stand and taking on something as powerful as the tabloid press wouldn’t be thought of. Television makes things like Jeremy Clarkson going on a wine tasting course or Ross Kemp in Afghanistan, except he’s only a hundred miles away from the actual fighting. If you want to do something ballsy and revelatory in Britain it has to be done for the cinema. Then once it’s been out in the cinema, we’ve got our 4* reviews and people have tried to sue and failed, television comes sheepishly crawling in saying this is far more exciting than anything we’ve put on this year. Please can we buy it from you and start it with a big caveat saying ‘this is nothing to do with Channel 4, we’ve just bought, we didn’t make it, this is not our opinion’. That happened with Taking Liberties and will happen with this.

The Third Estate: You’re selling to Channel 4 rather than the BBC?

Chris Atkins: Yes. The BBC feature quite prominently in it. No one else picked up on this, but in fact the guy who commissioned the Live 8 documentaries, we feature as Bob Geldof basically rewriting history, is Richard Klein. He’s head of BBC 4. If we were going to sell to the BBC, he’d be the person buying.

The Third Estate: What would you say to people who want to make this kind of film?

Chris Atkins: Well you can’t ― that’s the problem. You can’t go to the BBC because they were part of it. Richard Curtis is a god at the BBC. Look at Comic Relief. People at 4 buy stuff from Brook Lapping which is Bob Geldof’s company. They’re all mates. It’s part of the problem. When you start to do something that criticises the media it becomes almost impossible. You need them to help. You say ‘there’s this oil company I want to doc on’, they say go ‘ahead here’s some cash’. You say, ‘there’s this media company I want to examine’, they say ‘my wife works there’. You have to lock the doors and do it independently.

www.starsuckersmovie.com

Tomorrow, for the first time, the leader of a fascist party will appear on the panel of a televised national debate. Nick Griffin’s appearance on Question Time has caused quite a stir in the mainstream media and in the blogosphere. Some, remaining steadfast to the principle of no platform, have campaigned vigorously against the BBC’s decision. Others, like Liz Stephens on The Third Estate, argued that Griffin should be allowed on the programme and given just enough rope to hang himself with. And there will always be the BNP supporters who claim that it is their right to have their views aired alongside the other, more paletable parties. In most cases, however, the question has been framed in terms of the dichotomy between freedom of speech and opposition to racism.

I was, then, extremely interested to be sent this article by Anthony Barnett for Our Kingdom. Barnett takes a completely fresh look at the issue, setting aside the debate on free speech, and making the case that the BBC, as part of the larger political elite that has been thoroughly discredited in recent months, is attempting to show that the very public that is up in arms about expenses, is a breeding ground for fascist thought by allowing Nick Griffin to spew his bile.

The Convention [on Modern Liberty] showed that there is a smart public that does not want to be patronised and wants to think about how we are being governed. This same attitude emerged again more strongly with the expenses crisis. A true public service broadcaster as opposed to a regime service broadcaster would welcome this, probing the strength and vitality of the concerns. This should be the duty of the BBC. Instead…it broadcasts fascists.

Why? Because it is in the interests of the regime service broadcaster to project public opinion as dangerous and potentially racist. Responsible democratic opposition is squished and deprived of ‘oxygen’. But if you can show that beneath the veneer the public are worse than unwashed they are proto-fascist, why then, we will indeed need the BBC to protect us, won’t we?

It’s a startlingly cynical point and one that almost borders on conspiracy theory, but it is well worth a read and certainly worth debating. Whilst I personally can’t subscribe to its conclusions, the fact that they have been reached in itself demonstrates the level of distrust currently felt towards political and media elites. And it is this distrust which has helped turn a small group of racist thugs into a national political party with two MEPs, almost a million voters and a slot on Question Time.

Labour are warning that the far right are becoming more dangerous – perhaps it’s time for them to stop being complacent.

John Denham announced a new government initiative on the weekend to address the concerns of the white working classes who he said had been “exploited” by the far right. The government, it seems, has finally taken its head, ostrich-like, out of the sand of middle class suburbia and realised that in their absence the right wing have filled the void that their disinterest in traditional Labour heartlands has created.

As secretary of state for communities and local government, Mr Denham has actually helped to deepen the class divide that has led to traditional Labour areas becoming a breeding ground for racists. In a speech he gave to the Fabian Society only a few months ago – a speech, aimed at wooing the middle ground of voters – Mr Denham said that the old ideal of egalitarianism that had “dominated much left-liberal thinking since the 1960s” was over. In other words people were now willing to accept disparities in wealth and we should stop kicking against the system. This is sort of the political theory equivalent of “shit happens”. He also said:

“If you think you are in the middle, policies and language aimed at ‘the poor’ leave you out. And if you are in the middle, you are more likely to be concerned about whether ‘the top’ is doing better than you, than you are about ‘the bottom’.”

Well, guess what John? Those people at ‘the bottom’ are now in danger of becoming a major thorn in the side of the Home Counties voters New Labour has been so busy attracting for the last 12 years.

The far right are making gains, they aren’t large gains yet – they are, however, getting a lot of publicity. In the vacuum of any decent opposition to them on the ground, that publicity is starting to win people over to their crude and ignorant ideologies. Every time the media shows someone from the BNP or the English Defence League on TV they are in isolation. If anyone from any of the major political parties deigns to even comment on them, it is usually from the despatch box at Westminster. The logic being: “you are ‘down there’ and we are ‘up here’”. Unfortunately, ‘down there’ is in the grass roots of the constituencies – i.e. where the voters are. A good, if maverick, example of how this optical illusion works can be seen in Shakespeare’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’ (bear with me). When Romeo talks about how attractive his latest crush Rosaline is, his friend Benvolio says to him:

“Tut, you saw her fair, none else being by,

Herself poised with herself in either eye”.

In other words, in the absence of any comparison, she looked like a good thing. So it is with the BNP. Those who say that Nick Griffin should not be given the platform of a respected programme such as Question Time to air his racist opinions are missing the point. It is exactly the platform that they need to be seen on. They need to be engaged with in a respectable environment so they can be compared to mainstream politicians – and completely annihilated.

Ignoring the problem has not and never will make it go away – just as ignoring working class voters, your own traditional constituency, will only make them turn against you. Complacency, combined with a recession that has hit the poorest and most marginalised in our society the hardest, is the ideal breeding ground for fascism. Necessity is the mother of all reinvention. Labour may lose the next election, but for the good of the country as a whole they need to remember who they are and win back the working class.

Nick Davies is the award-winning investigative journalist, writer and documentary maker who recently broke the story of the News of the World phone-taps. Last year, he published the bestselling Flat Earth News, an exposé of the systemic falsehood, distortion and propaganda current in the mainstream global media. The book won plaudits from critics across the political spectrum and is frequently referenced across the vast and nebulous blogosphere. We caught up with him to find out whether his views had changed in the last year, what he thinks of James Murdoch’s recent attack on the BBC and how he answers critics who feel, in attacking the media, he may be letting politicians off the hook.

The Third Estate: Could you tell us what you consider to be the essence of good news journalism? What are a journalist’s responsibilities?

Nick Davies: A journalist’s responsibility is to be honest, i.e. to attempt to tell the truth. He or she may fail: by simply not being able to find the truth with the time and resources available; or by making ‘an honest mistake’ and publishing in good faith something which turns out to be false or distorted. The unmovable responsibility is to attempt to tell the truth. And sometimes, with the wind behind us, we succeed.

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The Third Estate: Your book Flat Earth News ended with a very downbeat assessment of the state of the media in Britain, concluding:

‘I’m afraid that I think, in trying to expose the weakness of the media, I am taking a snapshot of a cancer. Maybe it helps a little to be able to see the illness… but I fear the illness is terminal.’

Since then we’ve seen the expenses scandal dominate the news for months. Was this an example of good of investigative journalism, and if so, has it made you any more optimistic for the future?

Nick Davies: The book argues that good journalism is very ill, not that it’s dead. There is a steady trickle of good stories still being constructed by journalists who manage to get the time and resources to do their jobs properly. The MPs expenses is an example, but there are others. As to the future, that depends on whether or not we can find a source of funding which will allow for a revival of the sick profession. At the moment, the business model is failing: circulations are falling and advertising income is plummeting. As and when the credit crisis passes, we will discover whether the business model picks up or whether, as I suspect, it will not. Even if it does pick up and starts to generate profit again, it will have to cope with the problem of its corporate owners extracting that profit for shareholders and executives instead of investing in journalism (which is the core of the problem described in Flat Earth News.) In the absence of effective funding from the traditional business model, ie from selling papers and carrying advertisements, the search is on for some new source of funding. Can we find a way to charge for online news? Can we find a way to divert advertising back to news sites? Will government step in with some politically safe form of funding, a kind of licence fee for news media? Or, or, or. If there is no solution to the funding problem, there is no future for good journalism.

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The Third Estate: James Murdoch is scarcely a darling of the left, but does he have a point about the dominance of the BBC – especially as regards online news? Is the BBC damaging newspapers or is it our last best hope for responsible journalism? Would it be a good thing if the BBC started funding local newspapers?

Nick Davies: Murdoch cares only for Murdoch. His attack on the BBC is something which his father has been engaged in for decades, long before the BBC had a website. He wants to kill off the competition. And he will grab at any available argument to try to justify it. We have to defend the BBC because it has a funding model (the licence fee) which works. In terms of journalism, we need the BBC in two different senses, first as a news organisation which, for all its failings, still has a culture of honesty; and, second, as a tool which tends to keep other, commercialised news organisations a little more honest.

It is breath-taking to hear a Murdoch blaming the BBC for damaging newspapers. Nobody in the history of journalism has done more damage to newspapers than Rupert Murdoch. He will say he has invested millions, but he has done that in the pursuit of profit and power and repeatedly, horribly at the expense of good journalism.

Compare the BBC as a source of honest journalism and for its impact on others, with the Sun as a source of repulsively dishonest journalism which has dragged the entire UK popular press down market. Look at the damage they have done to the Sunday Times, once arguably the best newspaper in the world.

If Murdoch has his way, television news in this country will be reduced to the level of Fox News in the US – poisoned by politics and riddled with commercial judgements, a genuine affront to decent journalism. Please don’t let’s get suckered into playing his game.

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The Third Estate: Your reports of the News of the World’s bad practice met with some mixed responses from people who would usually seem to be allies – I’m thinking particularly of Julian Assaunge’s (administrator of Wikileaks) email to his subscribers:

‘…the Guardian, in seeing an opportunity to attack a journalistic and class rival, has been doing its level best to castrate British Journalism by tut-tuting in article after article about the News’ alleged sourcing improprieties; a tabloid newspaper doing investigative journalism! Journalists skirting the law to expose the truth! The long suffering of British billionaires-and Royalty! And did we mention that the News’ is owned by Rupert Murdoch?-so, um… you know, the enemy of my enemy and all that! The Guardian’s coverage is disproportionate. It is moral opportunism. It is an excuse to mention tabloid stories in a broadsheet. And it is dangerous. The result be will a publishing climate and probably legislation aimed at keeping the British public in the dark… the real scandal is not that some British papers used private investigators to find out what the public wants to know. It is that more did not. It is that the News’ was extorted out of a million pounds because the relevant British legislation does not have an accessible public interest defence for the disclosure of telephone recordings. Until it does, despite the risks, journalists who take their forth [sic] estate role seriously are obligated not to take the legislation seriously.’

What would you say to this line of argument?

Nick Davies: I hadn’t seen this guy’s comment. I think he’s wrong, on at least two major points. First, the News of the World may claim to be acting in the public interest, but it certainly is not. It is acting in the commercial interest of its owner, drumming up sales. There is a massive spectrum of activity which needs to be covered by journalists working in the public interest – anything at all to do with policy, incompetence, fraud, waste or corruption in central govt, local govt, corporations, trade unions, NGOs, EU, Nato; tax avoidance and evasion; the arms trade; the environment; poverty and inequality; health and education and criminal justice. The list is huge. Ask yourself: why does the News of the World week after week fail to cover those areas but choose instead to define ‘public interest’ in terms of the private lives, especially the sexual aspect of the private lives, of celebrities? And I think you will see that this is commercial interest not public interest.

The second point flows from that – that for the first time in human history we have an industry whose primary purpose is to harvest the private lives of people in order to generate profit. This is an industry which thinks nothing of planting a hidden camera to record a man having sex with prostitutes; of breaking into confidential data bases, tapping telephones, hacking voice messages, snatching photographs to grab the private material which it can sell. If the organs of the democratic state try to engage in that sort of activity, we insist that it is a) regulated by legal procedure, and b) supervised by bodies who can ensure that those regulations are adhered to and can handle complaints. And yet the media – which submits itself to no kind of popular vote – considers it has the right to proceed without regulation or supervision, simply pushing aside the law as though our privacy meant nothing. Our friend from Wikileaks is confusing the invasion of personal privacy (illegitimate) with the penetration of official secrecy (legitimate).

Underlying his misunderstanding, there is a good point, which is that the British media is trapped by all kinds of legal restrictions which, compounded with its commercial obsessions, mean that it frequently fails to penetrate official secrecy. By all means, let us reform the laws to allow more real journalism in the public interest. But don’t confuse that with the News of the World’s obsessive searching through the dirty underwear of its targets. To put this whole argument another way: I’ve been a reporter for 33 years and never before have I written stories which have provoked complete strangers into coming up to me in the street to shake my hand and say well done.

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Our time with Nick Davies was limited and clearly further questions could be asked (not least regarding internet journalism and the place of blogs like The Third Estate in the new mediascape).

The real significance of Nick’s ongoing work seems to me to lie in a passage he himself quotes in Flat Earth News. It’s taken from It’s the Media Stupid, John Nichols and Robert McChesney (Open Media 2000).

‘The type of political culture that accompanies the rise of the corporate media system worldwide looks to be increasingly like that found in the United States; in the place of informed debate or political parties organising along the full spectrum of opinion there will be vacuous journalism and elections dominated by public relations, big money, moronic political advertising and limited debate on tangible issues. It is a world where the market and commercial values overwhelm notions of democracy and civic culture, a world where depoliticization runs rampant, and a world where the wealthy few face fewer and fewer threats of political challenge.’

Is this true? Tell us what you think.

For more information on Nick’s work go to www.flatearthnews.net

Guest post by Thom Harrison

‘Suddenly I viddied what I had to do and what I had wanted to do, and that was to do myself in; to snuff it, to blast off forever out of this wicked cruel world. One moment of pain, perhaps, and then sleep forever and ever and ever.’

- Anthony Burgess: A Clockwork Orange

I must be the only one reduced to the wretched fatalism of Burgess’s mind-fucked anti-hero every time a contented plebeian flicks on the wireless. Surely the opposite must be the case? Buried somewhere deep within the BBC vaults there must be some sacred propagandist text which reads: “Thou shalt not play anything remotely interesting, lest thy wish them all go a bit mental.” Heaven forbid a record should inspire more than a tap of the steering wheel and a cathartic ooh I love you baby on some greying weekday afternoon. People-carriers across the country would no doubt begin veering into traffic under the sheer existential strain of it all. “I bloody hate the school-run. Goodbye cruel world!”

Some would argue that it’s all about supply and demand. Well no, not quite – and herein lies the problem. The BBC, as we’re all aware, is a unique institution. Even the passing ease with which it can be described as such says a lot. No sane person could bestow the mantle of ‘institution’ upon something like BskyB. No: The Beeb’s Royal Charter requires it to inform, educate, and entertain – and in that order, thankyouverymuch. And, in everything from polemical journalism to kitchen-sink drama, it’s an ascetic which shines through time and time again. Why, then, should its two premier music stations generally sound as trite and as cliché-ridden as any other?

Chances are the powers-that-be are simply out of touch. Fewer and fewer people actually go out and buy music nowadays, yet the age of the legal internet download remains in its infancy. Former gospels, such as the NME, have become too financially desperate to put their weight behind anything but the most frivolous of teenage fads. Rather than having disappeared, the glib boy bands of the late 90s now seem to have been sneakily assimilated into ‘alternative culture’ to form some sort of irksome pseudo-indie hybrid. These bands don’t rise to fame out of artistic merit; mundanity itself seeks them out to satisfy as many consumer groups as possible in one numbing, tedious sweep.

BBC radio playlists often seem governed by such a tactic. One could be forgiven for assuming that the only reason the prime-time DJ collective turned up to the funeral of the late, great John Peel was to lament the loss of some cuddly old uncle figure. How else do they demonstrate their respect for the man and his achievements? With all the emotional integrity of a green energy advert by Shell, briefly sweet-talking us only to continue pumping out the same noxious sludge with reckless abandon. Every time a record by The Feeling is played, the apocalypse draws closer.

Could this simply be the inevitable echo of a mediocre music scene, or even – dare I say it – the apt reflection of rampant poor taste? With Lady Gaga, McFly and The Ting Tings having descended on to the main V Festival stages last weekend, one might imagine so (though at least these staple Radio 1 artists prove the station is daring enough to be obnoxious). The point, if true, should only heighten the need for superior public service. My complaint isn’t meant as some Daily Mail diatribe over the cost to the bleedin’ taxpayer. The problem is the apparent tacit consent between a supposedly non-commercial entity and the shameless Simon Cowell’s of this world.

The BBC should be striving to justify the renewal of the license-fee in 2013 rather than yielding to the disinterested norms of moneymaking. More than this, we urgently need to start conceiving of popular music as bone fide art – not mere ‘distraction’. Nobody should smother the cultural kernel from which truly great new music could emerge. Only the BBC, it seems sad but true, has carte blanche to be so idealistic.