The Bewilderness

Whistling the 'Fig Leaf Tune'

Blair can forget a budget deal in the British presidency unless he wishes to give up the rebate and holler a hollow victory. Chirac and Schroeder, the 'negative Thatcher band', are dancing around their handbags chanting No to reform, No to changes in the Common Agricultural Policy and No to the Doha round.

In unscripted remarks, Mr Chirac told the summit he would veto EU proposals on agricultural reforms at world trade talks if it threatened French farm subsidies.

Amid French fears that Brussels will attempt to force through EU farm reforms by the back door in the World Trade Organisation talks in Hong Kong in December, Mr Chirac said: "We have a position that is simple and clear: the common agricultural policy must be respected in its entirety after it was modified in 2003 with the intention to open up to the world."

Mr Chirac's remarks show that Mr Blair faces a gruelling two months of negotiations on the budget because Paris will not countenance further cuts in farm subsidies after giving ground in the 2003 round.

Will Blair give ground to the rest of Europe like he usually does, or will he 'redline' the rebate? No doubt some figleaf fudge will be written to allow Blair to pay for his political defeat with our money, cementing the EU's stagnation.

BBC Marketing

Wonderful rationale for wasting our tax money on a new BBC Arabic television channel:

LONDON The BBC's decision to start an Arabic-language television news channel and to end many of its radio broadcasts in Eastern Europe reflects a shift in the front lines of the East-West ideological divide from the former Iron Curtain to the banks of the Euphrates.

 

The moves announced Tuesday, part of the biggest revamp of the BBC World Service since World War II, come amid a rapid development of the Middle Eastern television market. The Arabic-language TV service will compete for viewers with commercial satellite broadcasters like Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya, as well as the U.S. government-funded Al Hurra.

 

The service, called BBC Arabic Television, is set for introduction in 2007. It will be the first TV channel of the World Service, a government-funded international arm of the British public broadcaster that has relied mostly on radio and the Internet for distribution until now.

 

Nigel Chapman, director of the World Service, said that despite the increase in television news and information outlets in the Middle East in recent years, including the growth of the headline-grabbing Qatar-based network Al Jazeera, there was room for "high ground in this area" for the BBC channel.

 

"I think it's going to command a very special position in this mix," he said at a news conference in London.

 

Chapman said the decision to start a BBC Arabic TV channel was supported by market research showing that many people in the Middle East trust the BBC as an independent provider of news.

 

One competitor said, however, that the new channel might be met with skepticism from some Arab viewers, given the British decision to go to war in Iraq.

 

"Traditionally, the BBC has a certain credibility in the region, but in the last few years the British government's involvement might raise some eyebrows," said Mohamed Chebaro, London bureau chief of Al Arabiya, which is based in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and is financed in part by Saudi businesses.

 

Chapman said the decision to create the channel was not influenced by British foreign policy. "Even if there was no British foreign policy, the market you'd be most concerned about reaching is the Middle East," he said, because English-language television news is not widely available or understood.

 

The BBC briefly had an Arabic-language television news channel from 1994 to 1996, but it was a commercial operation, broadcast in partnership with a Rome-based company linked to the Saudi royal family, Orbit Communications. The service was canceled because of disputes over the editorial content.

 

The World Service is financed entirely by the British Foreign Office. Because the Foreign Office had previously turned down a request for additional funding for the Arabic channel, the World Service had to scrap other services in order to come up with the budget of £19 million, or $34 million, a year. The cuts fall most heavily on Eastern Europe, where radio broadcasts in Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Greek, Hungarian, Kazakh, Polish, Slovak and Slovene will end by March 2006. A Thai service will also be canceled.

 

Eastern Europe has become a less vital region for the World Service, along with U.S. government-funded broadcasters like Radio Free Europe, as independent media have proliferated since the end of the Cold War. With several former Soviet-bloc countries now in the European Union, the World Service radio channels being cut "have contributed to building freedom and liberty in those countries and we hope those are their lasting legacies," Chapman said.

 

 

LONDON The BBC's decision to start an Arabic-language television news channel and to end many of its radio broadcasts in Eastern Europe reflects a shift in the front lines of the East-West ideological divide from the former Iron Curtain to the banks of the Euphrates.

 

The moves announced Tuesday, part of the biggest revamp of the BBC World Service since World War II, come amid a rapid development of the Middle Eastern television market. The Arabic-language TV service will compete for viewers with commercial satellite broadcasters like Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya, as well as the U.S. government-funded Al Hurra.

 

The service, called BBC Arabic Television, is set for introduction in 2007. It will be the first TV channel of the World Service, a government-funded international arm of the British public broadcaster that has relied mostly on radio and the Internet for distribution until now.

 

Nigel Chapman, director of the World Service, said that despite the increase in television news and information outlets in the Middle East in recent years, including the growth of the headline-grabbing Qatar-based network Al Jazeera, there was room for "high ground in this area" for the BBC channel.

 

"I think it's going to command a very special position in this mix," he said at a news conference in London.

 

Chapman said the decision to start a BBC Arabic TV channel was supported by market research showing that many people in the Middle East trust the BBC as an independent provider of news.

 

One competitor said, however, that the new channel might be met with skepticism from some Arab viewers, given the British decision to go to war in Iraq.

 

"Traditionally, the BBC has a certain credibility in the region, but in the last few years the British government's involvement might raise some eyebrows," said Mohamed Chebaro, London bureau chief of Al Arabiya, which is based in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and is financed in part by Saudi businesses.

 

Chapman said the decision to create the channel was not influenced by British foreign policy. "Even if there was no British foreign policy, the market you'd be most concerned about reaching is the Middle East," he said, because English-language television news is not widely available or understood.

 

The BBC briefly had an Arabic-language television news channel from 1994 to 1996, but it was a commercial operation, broadcast in partnership with a Rome-based company linked to the Saudi royal family, Orbit Communications. The service was canceled because of disputes over the editorial content.

 

The World Service is financed entirely by the British Foreign Office. Because the Foreign Office had previously turned down a request for additional funding for the Arabic channel, the World Service had to scrap other services in order to come up with the budget of £19 million, or $34 million, a year. The cuts fall most heavily on Eastern Europe, where radio broadcasts in Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Greek, Hungarian, Kazakh, Polish, Slovak and Slovene will end by March 2006. A Thai service will also be canceled.

 

Eastern Europe has become a less vital region for the World Service, along with U.S. government-funded broadcasters like Radio Free Europe, as independent media have proliferated since the end of the Cold War. With several former Soviet-bloc countries now in the European Union, the World Service radio channels being cut "have contributed to building freedom and liberty in those countries and we hope those are their lasting legacies," Chapman said.

 

 

Chapman said the decision to create the channel was not influenced by British foreign policy. "Even if there was no British foreign policy, the market you'd be most concerned about reaching was the Middle East", he said, because English-language television news is not widely available or understood.

Or you might wish to encourage a region with dynamic economies, where English is becoming more common, like the Eastern Europe.

Out of Office

Halloween Break. Back in second week of November, with possible interludes.

People without phones vote too!

The folks over at Politicalbetting have often examined the drawbacks of telephone polling since this method favours Labour over Tory voters. At every election, the Tory vote is usually underestimated, despite adjustments untaken by the polling firms.

The same malaise appears to have afflicted the Polish polls where the conservative 'Law and Justice' party appeared to trail Donald Tusk's 'Civic Platform'. This was due to the  use of telephone polls  that overestimated the votes of the urban, liberalised electorate. The right-wing conspiracists did consider a post-communist plot but the poll firms just do not appear to have considered that people without phones are capable of voting. Peter Gentle at the beetroot has the details:

The head of the company that did best in the general and presidential elections, PGB, has said that one of things they don’t do, that some of the other companies who got it so badly wrong do, is use telephone polling. Telephone polling is usually the least accurate, and in Poland, especially so. Pollsters must get a representative sample of the population they are studying, and with only 3 out of 4 Poles having access to a fixed line phone, this is not the way to find that accurate sample. PGB also said that they never do surveys in people’s homes, but always on the street.

The polish pollsters just met their '92.

The Death Ray

Science in Fiction picks up a story from Technovelgy about the use of active electronically scanned array lasers (AESA) with a weapons component. Listing the fictional references to death rays, Bill Christensen points out that the fears of Wellsian death rays were one of the factors behind the investigation of radio direction finding in the 1930s. Such radars could be used to focus a pulse of energy on a target's radar or targeting systems.

This is more prosaic than the death rays from War of the Worlds. On a separate note, examine the Borg cell. More here at the igargoyle site: a blog on wearables, robotics and cyborgisation.

That Ol' Time Robot Religion

An interesting article notes that robotics has improved over the last decade with an increase in speed and the introduction of effective machine vision systems. This has demonstrated the flexibility of robotics for a wider range of industries including food and pharmeceuticals where there are shortened cycle times. The greater adaptability of robots is coupled with a move towards more automation in British industry:

Tony Jones, managing director of systems integrator, TEC Manufacturing, believes the flood of manufacturing from Britain to low-cost economies is slowing and may be even reversing, with more UK companies turning to automation to reduce their costs.

The exodus of manufacturing from Britain was at its height two or three years ago and many people were predicting the total demise of manufacturing in Britain. Jones said: “We noted, however, that the most switched-on companies were not so enamoured with the idea of trying to co-ordinate operations halfway around the world.

“They had the same cost pressures as everyone else but preferred to invest in on-site automation to keep all their activities close together. Now, we are definitely seeing people bringing their manufacturing back to Britain and automating as they do so.”

This increase in business has encouraged TEC to become distributors for the Mitsubishi Electric range of robots, and Jones says that there is a level of interest in robotics solutions that has never been apparent in the UK before.

“Outside of volume automotive assembly and a few other key sectors, the robot population has been very low and there are three reasons for this,” said Jones. “Until recently, the cost of a robot was such that you could build a bespoke mechanical handling system for the same money. There was the chicken-and-egg lack for confidence in which potential users would not commit to robots because not enough other people had done so before them. The technocratic reason was that manufacturing lines did not previously need the flexibility offered by robots, but with short-run production now the norm, they are now often the best, if not only, solution.”

There is also another trend promoting automation: the increasing price on jobs caused by greater regulation. Perhaps we are seeing a vicious curve for New labour in manufacturing: increased robotic adaptability replacing low skilled labour.

Producer Flak

The new White Paper on education is flawed in its proposals. Nevertheless, these mild reforms have not convinced a public that is aware of the need for change and sceptical that the government will ever meet its own goals.

Even more have been the critics from the educational sector, tired out by constant managerial change and yet, unable or unwilling to combat the decline in standards:

The general secretary of the Secondary Heads Association, John Dunford, said the government was getting it wrong. "It's very disappointing that the government has moved from its agenda of improving standards and has begun to fiddle around with school structure again.

"These reforms will be widely ignored by the vast majority of headteachers who are far too busy raising standards and dealing with the huge agenda already on their desks."...

Andrew Haldenby, the Director of Reform, was also sceptical of the potential changes:

However, the director of Reform, Andrew Haldenby, backed an overhaul of the state system, arguing that the government's preferred model is right. "If the forthcoming white paper meets the benchmark of real reform - that taxpayers' resources will pay for children's education whether in the state or independent sector - it will be the biggest advance in education policy for a generation.

"If it does not, the best that can be expected is marginal improvement little different from the current trend."

Blair will run into criticism from producer lobbies in Cabinet and Parliament as they favour continued control of schools by local education authorities. The Local Government Association has already accepted that schools will acquire more independence and have responded by demanding greater powers over admissions policy and otheraspects of education, to avoid "cherry picking" or parental choice. The Liberal Democrats proved themselves the champions of the town hall bureaucracy, the enemy of the aspirant parent. Similar to this is the response of Louis Berk, socialist teacher. It is quite revealing, in his defence of local planning, allied to a contempt for parents.

Firstly, if attendance at parents evenings, in my experience, is anything to go by, I would not hold my breath in anticipating of a wave of enthusiastic parents champing at the bit to help define the nature and purpose of their local school.

Perhaps the structure of schooling today does not allow parents much choice or power over the  education of their children within state schooling. Hardly a recipe for enthusiasm.

A Globalised Economy, A European Defence

Jackie Ashley in The Guardian argued that the division within the Labour adminbstration lies between the globalisers and the old Left who seek reassurance within 'social Europe'. This is one split, which lies within the economic and social concerns of the Labour party.

On the one side is the familiar centre-left case that the EU exists to protect its citizens against the pain of globalisation. It's the case Robin Cook made so eloquently for years. On the other is the claim that the old vision of an integrated social Europe is now bust, and the challenge is to embrace open markets, not raise walls. It is the case coming from the Brownites as much as Downing Street. People have been slow to spot it, maybe, because they are unused to divisions in Labour to be anything except Blair-Brown. But there is nothing abstract about this one; it will affect millions of ordinary working lives.

Ashley argues that this is a shift back towards the nation state. Yet, Labour makes little secret of its attempt to reorient British defences towards European needs. This approach is designed to maintain national power over those systems such as education, welfare and labour laws which ensure competitive advantage, increasing living standards and electoral success. Even Labour will not allow European incompetence to cost them seats at Westminster.

This is an argument for removing the dead hand of Brussels from all areas of national life in every European country.

Tying Majorism in Knots

The government's new white paper on education shows how Blairite development has shifted away from a managerial and auditing approach towards the micro-management of individual stakeholders within a system. Thus, a recognition of educational independence with the recognition of Majorism (who got there first and did it better) is accompanied by pressures to force parental conformity with the state.

The combination of an attempt to break local education authorities with greater emphasis on the need to  engineer admissions policy through 'ability banding' :

Blairites see the white paper as the critical test of the government's radicalism, as well as Ms Kelly's readiness to introduce a diversity of suppliers into education. Ministers want to shift away from top-down, target-driven improvement to a more dynamic system in which a range of providers in effect compete for pupils, and offer a range of specialisms. The white paper has been coming under attack from traditionalists worried that local government is losing its role as an education provider, and from modernisers concerned that insufficiently clear mechanisms will exist to expand popular secondary schools. There are also political fears that proposals to ensure working class children gain access to popular schools populated by the middle class will prove unpopular and bureaucratic.

Schools would admit equal proportions of children from each band, ensuring an equal range of ability, and so encouraging greater social mobility. That in turn, Downing Street hopes, would ensure that choice becomes a reality for working class parents. The white paper is also expected to look at popular schools randomly allocating places through a ballot system. Working class parents will also be given advice on how to apply for popular schools, as well as some help with transport costs, in view of evidence that middle class parents are prepared to spend more to transport their children to good schools. Ministers hope the transformation of schools into those with specialisms in relatively poorer areas will make them more attractive to middle class parents.

Reports in the Sunday Telegraph portrayed this  as a half-hearted response, since certain reforms on the admissions policy were rejected by the Cabinet. Compared to the overall package of reforms, moving the date on admissions does not appear to be a central plank of the white paper. It is easier to portray this as a recognition that Majorite reform of the public services was more appropriate and better implemented than this government.

Whilst the schools may acquire greater independence, this is counteracted by an overweening admissions policy geared to reduce the influence of middle-class parents through the policy of 'ability banding'. Admissions will allow local education authorities, now commissioning education, to maintain a stronger hold on the schools than the  white paper anticipates.  Their systematic failures will only demonstrate that the independence of schools works in tandem with the freedom of parental choice: vouchers. 

Blair's Bench: By appointment only

Martin Kettle, in the Guardian draws together some of the threads from Bush's uninspiring choice of SCOTUS judge, Harriet Myers, and draws a similar conclusion in the United Kingdon, over Falconer's ability to appoint judges:

In its annual report this week the commission accused Lord Falconer of acting "inappropriately" in the appointment of a chancery circuit judge whom the commission thought unqualified. As a result of Falconer's involvement, they added, the proportion of Oxbridge-educated appointments had also risen. To readers of Bleak House, the suggestion of dirty work in the chancery courts will come as no surprise. But the charges drew a blistering retort from Falconer - in a letter almost worthy of Dickens himself, crackling with words such as inaccurate, damaging, unfair, wrong and offensive - that barely attempted to remain inside the touchline of formality.

Compared with the Miers battle, this little local spat over the appointment of Wyn Williams as a chancery circuit judge in Cardiff hardly rates as a great constitutional battle. But Falconer's steely approachgoes further. This government's determination to change the judicial culture should not be underestimated. In particular, it is serious about shaking up the white-male hegemony on the bench and appointing many more women and members of ethnic minorities at all levels of the judiciary.

This is not an improper aim. On the contrary. But it is naive not to see how controversial it will be in practice, however noble the intentions. Whether this occurs on Falconer's watch or when someone else becomes lord chancellor is hard to predict. What is predictable is that Labour is up for it, heading inexorably towards an extended confrontation with the judges and the appointments system over positive discrimination.

Falconer was accused of 'political interference' in a judicial report and attempting to bury the report of the appointments committee.  So, Martin Kettle views executive dominance over the appointment of judges as a good, if the intentions, such as positive discrimination, are sound. Given New Labour's reputation for cronyism and political expediency, is this reduction of the judiciary to be welcomed. Of course not.