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Showing posts with label Big Brother. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Big Brother. Show all posts

Tuesday 19 November 2013

Police are cracking down on students

Police are cracking down on students – but what threat to law and order is an over-articulate history graduate?

For most of my life student politics has been little more than a joke. Suddenly it's become both serious and admirable
Student protest
A protester against the proposed closure of the ULU student union last week. Photograph: Paul Davey/Demotix/Corbis
Why are some of the most powerful people in Britain so terrified of a bunch of students? If that sounds a ridiculous question, consider a few recent news stories. As reported in this paper last week, Cambridge police are looking for spies to inform on undergraduate protests against spending cuts and other "student-union type stuff". Meanwhile, in London last Thursday, a student union leader, Michael Chessum, was arrested after a small and routine demo. Officers hauled him off to Holborn police station for not informing them of the precise route of the protest – even though it was on campus.
The 24-year-old has since been freed – on the strict condition that he doesn't "engage in protest on any University Campus and not within half a mile boundary of any university". Even with a copy of the bail grant in front of me, I cannot make out whether that applies to any London college, any British university – or just any institute of higher education anywhere in the world. As full-time head of the University of London's student union, Chessum's job is partly to protest: the police are blocking him from doing his work. But I suppose there's no telling just what threat to law and order might be posed by an over-articulate history graduate.
While we're trawling for the ridiculous, let us remember another incident this summer at the University of London, when a 25-year-old woman was arrested for the crime of chalking a slogan on a wall. That's right: dragged off by the police for writing in water-soluble chalk. Presumably, there would have been no bother had she used PowerPoint.
It all sounds farcical – it is farcical – until you delve into the details. Take the London demo that landed Chessum in such bother: university staff were filming their own students from a balcony of Senate House (the building that inspired the Ministry of Truth in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, appropriately enough). Such surveillance is a recent tradition, the nice man in the University press office explains to me – and if the police wanted the footage that would be no problem.
That link with the police is becoming increasingly important across more and more of our universities. London students allege that officers and university security guards co-ordinate their attempts to rein in demonstrations while staff comment on the increased police presence around campus. At Sussex, student protests against outsourcing services were broken up this April, when the university called in the police – who duly turned up with riot vans and dogs. A similar thing happened at Royal Holloway university, Surrey in 2011: a small number of students occupied one measly corridor to demonstrate against course closures and redundancies; the management barely bothered to negotiate, but cited "health and safety" and called in the police to clear away the young people paying their salaries.
For most of my life, student politics has been little more than a joke – the stuff of Neil off the Young Ones, or apprentice Blairites. But in the past few years it has suddenly become both serious and admirable, most notably with the protests of 2010 against £9,000 tuition fees and the university occupations that followed. And at just that point, both the police and university management have become very jumpy.
For the police, this is part of the age-old work of clamping down on possible sources of civil disobedience. But the motivation for the universities is much more complicated. Their historic role has been to foster intellectual inquiry and host debate. Yet in the brave new market of higher education, when universities are competing with each other to be both conveyor belts to the jobs market and vehicles for private investment, such dissent is not only awkward – it's dangerously uncommercial. As Andrew McGettigan, author of The Great University Gamble, puts it: "Anything too disruptive gets in the way of the business plan."
Last month it appeared that Edinburgh University had forced its student union to sign a gagging clause (now withdrawn). No union officer is allowed to make any public criticism of the university without giving at least 48 hours' notice. University managers reportedly made that a deal-breaker if the student union was to get any funds.
The managers of the University of London want to shut down the student union at the end of this academic year. The plan – which is why Chessum and co were marching last week – is to keep the swimming pool and the various sports clubs, but to quash all university-wide student representation. After all, the students are only the people paying the salary of the university vice-chancellor, Adrian Smith – why should they get a say? The plan, it may not surprise you to learn, was drawn up by a panel that didn't number a single student. What with sky-high fees and rocketing rents in the capital, you might think that the need for a pan-London student body had never been higher. But then, you're not a university manager on a six-figure salary.
Where universities were historically places of free expression, now they are having to sacrifice that role for the sake of the free market. For students, that comes in the form of a crackdown on dissent. Yet the twentysomethings at university now will end up running our politics, our businesses and our media. You might want these future leaders to be questioning and concerned about society. Or you might wonder whether sending in the police to arrest a woman chalking a wall is proportionate. Either way, you should be troubled.

Sunday 22 September 2013

Big Brother BCCI's Watching!

Sharda Ugra in Economics and Political Weekly
In May and June this year, when the Indian Premier League (IPL) was, much to its self-regarding outrage, being hauled away for questioning, N Srinivasan, president of the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), found himself trailed by reporters, cameras and mikes. Distinctly displeased, as he headed for his car on one occasion, Srinivasan (Srini, to friends) barked out: “Why are you hounding me?” The simple answer? His son-in-law, Gurunath Meiyappan, “high official/team principal” of the Chennai Super Kings, Srinivasan’s beloved IPL team, had been arrested by the Mumbai police for placing bets during the IPL. On the day in question, Srinivasan was three stories on two legs – BCCI chief, IPL team owner, father-in-law. The most powerful man in cricket tripped up by a black sheep in the family who had toppled his business. What’s not to hound? A simple answer to that question: because Srini was in the dock, because the media are hounds, because they – we – can.
It was a twisted, ironic turning of the tables on the man under whose regime BCCI has become not only enormously richer but also enormously in control of the messages around Indian cricket. During the IPL corruption scandal, those messages, for perhaps the first time in his reign, had gone out of Srinivasan’s control. His otherwise glacial disdain for a notoriously fickle 24×7 media was suddenly put under unrelenting headlights and left unprotected by either his position or influence.
BCCI’s relationship with the independent, mainstream media has gone from general chumminess to a teeth-gritting tolerance on either side. During the last five years, the time when Srinivasan rose from BCCI treasurer to secretary to president, the Board has become more determined to tighten an iron-fisted grip over the media, starting with the medium that generates the bulk of its revenues and reaches an audience of millions – television.
In 2008, BCCI put Sunil Gavaskar and Ravi Shastri on its payroll with gargantuan price tags. “Sunny & Ravi” Inc became mandatory mascots, required to be on commentary duty wherever India played, regardless of who owned the TV rights. The two most influential Indian voices on cricket television were safely co-opted. Their signing coincided with the advent of the IPL and the rise of BCCI’s Midas-like monetiser, Lalit Modi. The Gavaskar-Shastri duopoly was a beginning. As revenues skyrocketed through the IPL, BCCI set up its own independent TV production unit. This new team (partly cannibalised from Neo Sports/Nimbus who owned the TV rights to cricket in India until 2012) even purchased its own outside broadcast vans. Ownership over Indian cricket was to be established at every level.
Much of this could be put down to Lalit Modi’s desire to commercialise every inch of the Indian cricket “property”. But when the first round of IPL sleaze excised Modi from the system in 2010, his philosophy was kept alive. India’s wealth had earned it the right to become cricket’s Big Brother. When, during the 2011 tour of England, former England captain Nasser Hussain criticised BCCI’s obduracy over the Decision Review System (DRS), Shastri’s rebuttal was slightly petulant:
England are jealous about the way IPL is going, jealous that India is No.1 in world cricket, jealous that India are world champions. They are jealous because of too much money being made by BCCI.
The repercussions of that skirmish went deep when England toured India a year later. Star Sports won “media rights” for all cricket played in India but BCCI retained its hold over production rights. Through production came the full force of Big Brother’s thought police. Commentators on the home networks were told that three topics were taboo, never to be brought up on air: selection, administration and DRS.
Then followed a bitter battle over the cost of providing space and access to Sky TV and BBC radio in the broadcast areas at grounds. Sky had paid Star for the world feed, but a BCCI official huffily asked why the Sky commentary team should be given access in Indian grounds without a cost: “So that Hussain and others can come here and criticise India?” The inability to accept criticism was turned into a national project. Sky’s expert team worked out of studios in west London.
BCCI then refused accreditation to photo agency Getty Images for its use of Indian cricket pictures for commercial gain rather than editorial purposes. A media coalition made of wire services like Reuters, Associated Press (AP) and Agence France-Presse (AFP) boycotted the matches in protest.
Most certainly, there are commercial constraints at work in each of these incidents. In the past, overseas broadcasters have talked through requirements and arrived at agreeable fees or quid pro quo arrangements. Even in the case of the England tour, solutions could have been worked out, but BCCI chose to bring in the heavies. Sanjay Manjrekar, who did studio work for the England series for Star had tweeted “Fans like Boycott. Only guy who is free from BCCI shackles on our show”, before pulling it off his Twitter account. The kerfuffle with Getty continues; when Australia toured India in early 2013, Ian Chappell refused to be a part of the commentary team because of BCCI’s unwritten three-point don’t-do list. Commentary during the series sounded programmed and tinny: catches that went down after hitting Virat Kohli on the chest and M S Dhoni on his wrist were called “half-chances”.
In the IPL that followed, commentators Danny Morrison and H D Ackerman, in their high-volume excitement, introduced Virat Kohli, talking of him as a possible “future captain of India”. That happened to be the last IPL game both worked on. Big Brother was watching and listening.
Since the IPL’s second round of sleaze hit the headlines (but not on IPLTV, where the game’s greats made no reference to it), there came one final squeeze – this time, on the players. “Quiet words” have been had with Virat Kohli, Cheteshwar Pujara and Rohit Sharma for giving interviews to newspapers. Sharma called up one reporter, requesting him to spike the interview. This, after the players had produced the best news around Indian cricket in months – by winning the Champions Trophy.
On 19 July, 35 contracted players were sent an email which read:
Dear All, Trust you are well. You are requested to refrain from giving interviews to the media, without the prior, written permission of the BCCI. Regards, Sanjay Patel, Hony. Secretary, BCCI.
Never let it be said the BCCI’s Ministry of Truth doesn’t fill in its paperwork.

Wednesday 31 January 2007

Detox for the soul



Famous? Done something you regret? Not sure how to salvage your reputation? Just check into rehab, says Zoe Williams

Wednesday January 31, 2007
The Guardian


Jade Goody has gone into rehab, admitted for "depression and stress". "Jade has struggled since leaving the [Big Brother] house a week ago and learning that she has become the most hated figure in Britain," a friend told the Sun. I wish I had a friend who formed such succinct sentences. It makes you realise how much your own friends blether on. Here's the sequence of events, as I understand it: Jade calls Shilpa Shetty "Shilpa Poppadom" and "Shilpa Fuckawallah" and tells her she should spend time in "the slums"; she exits house; defends own reputation; realises she's on a sticky wicket; "collapses" with stress; is "told by GP that he was going to refer her to the Priory", but seems to have entered said institution under her own steam; is "now being monitored by doctors, while they decide what treatment to give her".This is a funny old business, isn't it? The stress-induced collapse is always so fishy. It's such an unusual response, when most people, under stress, just absent-mindedly eat ginger biscuits. In cases of rehab for addiction, where a person has got themselves into a fix from which they must, for their own wellbeing, be rescued and rehabilitated, doctors pretty much know what to do. "A heroin addict, you say? Let's monitor her while we decide whether or not to take away her heroin . . . Oh, depressive? You watch her pacing up and down, I'll just go and Google Prozac, see if that might work."
I hate to call anyone a fraud. It seems such a petty accusation, set against existing tabloid charges of "racist", "bully" and "fat". Celebrity stress is not exactly the most serious of medical conditions. It doesn't even sound that medical. You might just as well refer yourself to a creche.
I do not, however, think this is self-indulgence on Jade's part. Rehab, in this instance, is being used as a one-stop redemption shop. It's a neat mea culpa previously used by Mel Gibson, after his antisemitic outburst last August, when he asked a police officer if he was a "fucking Jew" and shouted "the Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world". Mel, of course, wasn't the first star ever to enter rehab - indeed, going into rehab on the advice of a doctor, or a judge, with handcuffs on is as old as the Hollywood hills - but Gibson illustrates neatly the more modern variant of self-referral. It is a way of atoning that you can do really very fast, and of course, it's not that much of a hardship either. You were never medically referred, so when you get there, doctors don't know what to do with you except watch you. And a lot of these people are actors. They are used to being watched. Mel said, after his curious explosion, "I am not a bigot; hatred of any kind goes against my faith." But naturally, this was not sufficient - words have never been quite vast enough to convey atonement, which is why in the olden days they used to make up Songs of Atonement.
It seems to be particularly in misdemeanours of bigotry that only residential self-flagellation will do - to complete the prejudice triptych, along with Jade's racism and Mel's antisemitism, Isaiah Washington, star of Grey's Anatomy, rehabbed himself for his anti-gay remarks (he called one of his fellow actors a "faggot".) He said, "I regard this as a necessary step toward understanding why I did what I did and making sure it never happens again."
The only thing that comes close to (actually, thinking about it, probably surpasses) bigotry for hot social shame is sexual harassment, for which Mark Foley institutionalised himself last year. The Republican congressman, who sent sexually inappropriate emails and messages to teenage boys, explained: "I strongly believe that I am an alcoholic and have accepted the need for immediate treatment for alcoholism and other behavioural problems." It's rather American, isn't it, blaming alcohol for the fact that he couldn't stop badgering his staff for sex? In England, one might be tempted to respond, "Matey, we all like a drink, but I certainly don't employ 16-year-olds and then spend the day sexy-mailing them, even when I've had an absolute skinful."
So where did this come from, this self- disciplining (in the most literal sense)? I've seen the seeds of it in children; a friend of mine's kid will do a running commentary on his own naughtiness, finishing off with suggestions for an appropriate punishment, so that when he has really pushed it, and upset everyone, and ruined everybody's day, he'll shout, "Now I've been really bad! Oh, lock me in the car!" I don't, however, think Mel Gibson got the idea from my friend's naughty kid; on the contrary, it comes from the judicial system, in which - far more frequently in America, it must be said - stars are exempted from custodial sentencing by agreeing to a spell in Betty Ford.
There's a distinctly different tang to that kind of offence, though: Winona Ryder did rehab instead of prison for her shoplifting. She would never have had to redeem herself with us, her public, for such an offence, since a) nobody really minds a shoplifter - it feels like a nice, of-the-people crime, and b) she had already redeemed herself with her lovely Marc Jacobs court outfits.
Andy Dick (you know Andy Dick! You will find him in the not-very-famous-but-makes-lists-of-famous-people-with-addiction-problems-look-longer section of the library), Charlie Sheen, Nicole Richie . . . oh, there are tons of them. They were mainly addicted to painkillers. What this really rams home to me is how much better American painkillers are than ours.
The question remains: how much of an atonement is it when you admit yourself and you're not even really addicted to anything? What happens when you get to the Priory? Do they still go through your luggage and make you go to the group therapy, or are you allowed to just sit about looking glum? Doesn't that drive the proper addicts crazy? Is it like AA - do you still have to go round all your family and friends when you get out, apologising for the time you arrived at their wedding/ bar mitzvah [not that] drunk, [really not at all] whacked out on drugs, [no more] unreliable and flaky [than the next man]? And if it is rehab lite, must one go residential? Couldn't Jade have said sorry with a detox? Couldn't she just have given up wheat, then put out a press release? "I may be guilty of racism, but I've eschewed doughnuts in penitence and, by the by, beaten my bloat!" ·