Real men take responsibility

YASMIN ALIBHAI BROWN 

Friday 6 September 2013

Memo to our leaders: real men take responsibility

The people of Britain are heartily sick of macho posturing on the part of public figures

It is more electrifying and unedifying than really mean reality TV. The departed BBC Director-General Mark Thompson and current Trust chairChris Patten could be kids in Channel4’s fly-on-the-wall series Educating Yorkshire.  Come on you two, fess up. Stop this fighting AT ONCE. Oi, you, Markie – stop pulling Christopher’s nose. And you Christopher, don’t provoke him. You’re acting like big babies. Right, on Monday, to the head’s office, both of you. 

Real men, we are told, take it on the chin, do not shuffle off responsibility when bad things happen. Truth is they do.  The more powerful they are, the more likely they are to do a runner or impugn others without a smidgen of shame. Some masters of the universe, eh? 

Chris Patten, grandee and last colonial governor of Hong Kong, reproached everyone else but himself over the Newsnight Jimmy Savile debacle. He hired and fast fired George Entwhistle, a decent man and talented journalist who, new into the job, couldn’t handle the explosive revelations and failures of the corporation. Not the fault of the Guv, none of it.

This July, Patrician Patten insouciantly told the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) that he was kept in the dark by D-G Thompson about the immoral and unjustifiably high-pay offs to senior BBC executives. The Trust, he said, “would be as interested as you are about why we didn’t know”. Thompson, now the chief executive of the New York Times and a man not to be messed with,  has responded furiously in a detailed, long document.

He rebuffs Patten’s insinuations and accusations, claims the Trust was in on the deals, says he has emails to prove what really happened, and suggests the PAC has been misled by chairman Chris and some trustees. Patten calls Thompson’s assertions “bizarre” and denies any part in the huge payment made to Mark Byford, deputy D-G. Before his time, all that. The impression given is it was not his business. On Monday the two massive, combative male egos will be interrogated by the PAC again.

Other top dogs in our country are scrapping and rowing over the Syrian crisis, instead of coming together to help end one of the worst human disasters ever in modern history. Our Parliament was given the right to vote, a virtuous move by Cameron, whose own instincts have always been to go for military intervention. Parliament voted against such involvement. For being a good democrat and responding to public opinion, the PM was leapt upon by snarling party insiders and the implacable right-wing commentariat.

On cue, up popped warmonger Tony bloody Blair, looking for a fight with Ed Miliband for not backing action. Within days Cameron had turned on the Labour leader and his party and those dissenters or abstainers  in his own ranks – among them the erudite and personable Jesse Norman. The disgrace for Britain is not that we didn’t go for violence to quell violence, but that after the civilised process of sombre parliamentary debating and considered voting, our manly leaders can’t stop bickering.

The same male squabbles broke out in Iain Duncan Smith’s Department of Work and Pensions. His much heralded “welfare reforms” which promised to save millions of taxpayers’ pounds are badly managed, wasteful and thus far a chaotic mess. So says the National Audit Office (NAO). Does the Secretary of State accept the criticisms or apologise for personal or departmental failures? Is this a serious question?

When he talks incessantly like a manic preacher about the importance of taking responsibility, he means the little people, not the ruling elite. IDS, ex-soldier in Rhodesia and Northern Ireland, is never wrong, never weakened by self-doubts, never admits mistakes. His response to the NAO report is to dump on his officials, and in particular, Robert Devereux, the department’s most senior servant. Liam Byrne, his shadow, then lays into IDS with unseemly relish. The poor people squeezed to strangulation by benefit cuts must watch these combating gladiators and wonder how it helps them. 

It’s the same story with tax evasion, financial regulation, policing, risky banking, major failures in public services and government policies. The men in charge pass the buck, make fantabulous excuses, deny wrong doing, argue disagreeably, feel unappreciated and terribly let down by others, act up and never back down. Masculine success means never having to say sorry. (To be fair, a small number of women with power are just the same.) More serious perhaps is the predisposition of leading men to senseless rancour and aggression, even in our House of Commons, which should be a place of dignity, respect  and rational discourse.

On Monday, when Patten and Thompson face MPs, both sides need to think about their behaviour and responsibilities as public figures. The people of Britain – to whom they are all answerable – are heartily sick of their macho posturing and lack of humility. The PAC’s chair, tough and effective Margaret Hodge, knows that. Do the BBC bigwigs summoned by her committee begin to understand what the public now expects? We shall see. 

Those guilty of malpractice or wasting public money must not escape punishment.

From the BBC to RBS, we have to find a way to stop this injustice

Those guilty of malpractice or wasting public money must not escape punishment, even if criminality can't be proved

• 
• • John Kampfner
  • The Guardian, Thursday 5 September 2013 20.30 BST

'Occasionally businessmen are punished – think Bernie Madoff – but his case is totemic because it is so rare.' Photograph: Mario Tama/Getty Images

What do the following recent news stories have in common? IT failings over the introduction of new welfare payments; the never-ending saga of BBC executives paying each other silly money; defence procurements coming in billions of pounds over budget; the recklessness of the bankers? Throw in dozens of other cases from the private and public sectors and there emerges a clear pattern: of decisions taken by individuals or groups that constitute failure or dereliction of duty but which go unpunished.

The word "punishment" is enticingly loaded. In international relations it is in vogue. Should Bashar al-Assad be punished if it is clear his government used chemical weapons? From the former Yugoslavia to Rwanda, attempts are made to punish world leaders and their henchmen. Occasionally, businessmen are punished too – think Bernie Madoff and his Ponzi schemes. He received 150 years in jail. But his case is totemic because it is so rare.

Where there is incontrovertible evidence of fraud, courts usually convict. The individual has a criminal record. It is hard, although not impossible, for that person's career and reputation to recover. Justice is done.

But far more difficult are the many cases in which senior public figures are culpable in decisions that have led to huge financial loss, in some cases ruining peoples' lives, but criminality cannot be proven. The bar for a trial is necessarily set high and can be insurmountable.

So what possible punishments are left? Summary dismissal is used against a shopfloor worker for nicking a few products from the assembly line, or a middle manager for sexual harassment. The weapon is almost never deployed against top executives. Part of the reason is financial – companies would rather pay them off than endure the publicity of a tribunal. The more pernicious reason is cultural: as a member of the board or senior executive you never know when you might bump into that person. Why leave yourself susceptible to a quiet act of revenge in the future when you don't have to?

It is only when the public bays for blood that extra measures are taken. The story of plain Fred Goodwin is brilliantly told in Iain Martin's new book, Making it Happen: Fred Goodwin, RBS and the Men Who Blew Up the British Economy. Aggressive, obsessed by the baubles of wealth, Fred the Shred is so determined for RBS to take over the banking world that he omits to find out what his wheeler-dealer teams are up to. At least as culpable are the board members who are quite happy to take the money for their non-exec non-labours and forget to ask questions.

Goodwin – friend of the royal family, prime ministers, chancellors and the Scottish political class – is stripped of his knighthood. He retains an enormous pension and is to be found polishing his vintage cars, the pantomime villain. It makes us feel better and the corporate and political worlds can "move on".

But the odd case of ritual humiliation is no substitute for better governance. That will not improve until proper systems of accountability for failure are introduced. In the private sector, when shareholders incur losses, it is up to them to complain – but almost invariably they don't, as institutional investors account for most holdings. Why would they want to rock the boat?

When public money is spent, the case for action is even clearer. It beggars belief that during the bank bailouts of 2007 to 2008, ministers did not – even as they took urgent decisions – do more to punish those whose hubristic decisions led to the crisis.

At the BBC, although the money lost has been tiny in comparison to the banks, the sense of injustice at the largesse shown by management towards its own is felt just as strongly. A few dozen people paid each other ridiculous sums as they moved from one job to another or began to enjoy lucrative early retirement. They did so believing (correctly) that they would get away with it, and convinced themselves they deserved it.

After inquiries by a Tory MP, the Crown Prosecution Service probed whether crimes had been committed and concluded that they hadn't. To prove criminal intent, if there had been, would have been too hard. To prove malpractice might have been easier, but there is no effective mechanism.

We need to devise a process whereby serious action can be taken against egregious acts of back-scratching, waste and lack of rigour in governance. It is surely a win-win for any political party with the courage and tenacity to introduce such a system. Some models already exist. Professional bodies for doctors, lawyers and accountants serve this purpose. Are they robust enough? A new public body could be created, perhaps including representatives of the CBI and TUC. Or if that's too cumbersome, maybe the Commons public accounts committee – which is good at haranguing and exposing but has little powers besides – could play a part.

Transparency is key. Legislation must be introduced to override confidentiality and data protection clauses in specific cases under investigation. Checks and balances would be needed to protect those who feel wrongfully accused. Those found to have played fast and loose with others' money could be put on a blacklist of public appointments for a specified number of years. There may be other ways too; but this is a debate which needs to be started.

Responsible executives, non-executives and civil servants have nothing to fear in exposing and punishing the bad apples. Bringing out the stocks serves little purpose. But, in order to begin the herculean task of improving confidence in public life, we need far smarter forms of redress.

The sun is at last setting on Britain's imperial myth

The atrocities in Kenya are the tip of a history of violence that reveals the repackaging of empire for the fantasy it is

• 
• • Pankaj Mishra
  • The Guardian, Wednesday 8 May 2013 21.30 BST

'Consider how Niall Ferguson deals with the Kenyan emergency: by suppressing it entirely in favour of a Kenyan idyll of 'our bungalow, our maid, our smattering of Swahili – and our sense of unshakeable security' in his book Empire.' Photograph: Popperfoto/Popperfoto/Getty Images

Scuttling away from India in 1947, after plunging the jewel in the crown into a catastrophic partition, "the British", the novelist Paul Scott famously wrote, "came to the end of themselves as they were". The legacy of British rule, and the manner of their departures – civil wars and impoverished nation states locked expensively into antagonism, whether in the Middle East, Africa or the Malay Peninsula – was clearer by the time Scott completed his Raj Quartet in the early 1970s. No more, he believed, could the British allow themselves any soothing illusions about the basis and consequences of their power.

Scott had clearly not anticipated the collective need to forget crimes and disasters. The Guardian reports that the British government is paying compensation to the nearly 10,000 Kenyans detained and tortured during the Mau Mau insurgency in the 1950s. In what has been described by the historian Caroline Elkins as Britain's own "Gulag", Africans resisting white settlers were roasted alive in addition to being hanged to death. Barack Obama's own grandfather had pins pushed into his fingers and his testicles squeezed between metal rods.

The British colonial government destroyed the evidence of its crimes. For a long time the Foreign and Commonwealth Office denied the existence of files pertaining to the abuse of tens of thousands of detainees. "It is an enduring feature of our democracy," the FCO now claims, "that we are willing to learn from our history."

But what kind of history? Consider how Niall Ferguson, the Conservative-led government's favourite historian, deals with the Kenyan "emergency" in his book Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World: by suppressing it entirely in favour of a Kenyan idyll of "our bungalow, our maid, our smattering of Swahili – and our sense of unshakeable security."

The British had slaughtered the Kikuyu a few years before. But for Ferguson "it was a magical time, which indelibly impressed on my consciousness the sight of the hunting cheetah, the sound of Kikuyu women singing, the smell of the first rains and the taste of ripe mango".

Clearly awed by this vision of the British empire, the current minister for education asked Ferguson to advise on the history syllabus. Schoolchildren may soon be informed that the British empire, as Dominic Sandbrook wrote in the Daily Mail, "stands out as a beacon of tolerance, decency and the rule of law".

Contrast this with the story of Albert Camus, who was ostracised by his intellectual peers when a sentimental attachment to the Algeria of his childhood turned him into a reluctant defender of French imperialism. Humiliated at Dien Bien Phu, and trapped in a vicious counter-insurgency in Algeria, the French couldn't really set themselves up as a beacon of tolerance and decency. Other French thinkers, from Roland Barthes to Michel Foucault, were already working to uncover the self-deceptions of their imperial culture, and recording the provincialism disguised by their mission civilisatrice. Visiting Japan in the late 1960s, Barthes warned that "someday we must write the history of our own obscurity – manifest the density of our narcissism".

Perhaps narcissism and despair about their creeping obscurity, or just plain madness explains why in the early 21st century many Britons, long after losing their empire, thought they had found a new role: as boosters to their rich English-speaking cousins across the Atlantic.

Astonishingly, British imperialism, seen for decades by western scholars and anticolonial leaders alike as a racist, illegitimate and often predatory despotism, came to be repackaged in our own time as a benediction that, in Ferguson's words, "undeniably pioneered free trade, free capital movements and, with the abolition of slavery, free labour". Andrew Roberts, a leading mid-Atlanticist, also made the British empire seem like an American neocon wet dream in its alleged boosting of "free trade, free mobility of capital … low domestic taxation and spending and 'gentlemanly' capitalism".

Never mind that free trade, introduced to Asia through gunboats, destroyed nascent industry in conquered countries, that "free" capital mostly went to the white settler states of Australia and Canada, that indentured rather than "free" labour replaced slavery, and that laissez faire capitalism, which condemned millions to early death in famines, was anything but gentlemanly.

These fairytales about how Britain made the modern world weren't just aired at some furtive far-right conclave or hedge funders' retreat. The BBC and the broadsheets took the lead in making them seem intellectually respectable to a wide audience. Mainstream politicians as well as broadcasters deferred to their belligerent illogic. Looking for a more authoritative audience, the revanchists then crossed the Atlantic to provide intellectual armature to Americans trying to remake the modern world through military force.

Of course, like Camus – who never gave any speaking parts to Arabs when he deigned to include them in his novels set in Algeria – the new bards of empire almost entirely suppressed Asian and African voices. The omission didn't matter in a world where some crass psychologising about gay men triggers an instant mea culpa (as it did with Ferguson's Keynes apology), but no regret, let alone repentance, is deemed necessary for a counterfeit imperial history and minatory visions of hectically breeding Muslims – both enlisted in large-scale violence against voiceless peoples.

Such retro-style megalomania, however, cannot be sustained in a world where, for better and for worse, cultural as well as economic power is leaking away from the old Anglo-American establishment. An enlarged global public society, with its many dissenting and corrective voices, can quickly call the bluff of lavishly credentialled and smug intellectual elites. Furthermore, neo-imperialist assaults on Iraq and Afghanistan have served to highlight the actual legacy of British imperialism: tribal, ethnic and religious conflicts that stifled new nation states at birth, or doomed them to endless civil war punctuated by ruthless despotisms.

Defeat and humiliation have been compounded by the revelation that those charged with bringing civilisation from the west to the rest have indulged – yet again – in indiscriminate murder and torture. But then as Randolph Bourne pointed out a century ago: "It is only liberal naivete that is shocked at arbitrary coercion and suppression. Willing war means willing all the evils that are organically bound up with it."

This is as true for the Japanese, the self-appointed sentinel of Asia and then its main despoiler during the second world war, as it is for the British. Certainly, imperial power is never peaceably acquired or maintained. The grandson of a Kenyan once tortured by the British knows this too well as: having failed to close down Guantánamo, he resorts to random executions through drone strikes.

The victims of such everyday violence have always seen through its humanitarian disguises. They have long known western nations, as James Baldwin wrote, to be "caught in a lie, the lie of their pretended humanism". They know, too, how the colonialist habits of ideological deceit trickle down and turn into the mendacities of postcolonial regimes, such as in Zimbabwe and Syria, or of terrorists who kill and maim in the cause of anti-imperialism.

Fantasies of moral superiority and exceptionalism are not only a sign of intellectual vapidity and moral torpor, they are politically, economically and diplomatically damaging. Japan's insistence on glossing over its brutal invasions and occupations in the first half of the 20th century has isolated it within Asia and kept toxic nationalisms on the boil all around it. In contrast, Germany's clear-eyed reckoning and decisive break with its history of violence has helped it become Europe's pre-eminent country.

Britain's extended imperial hangover can only elicit cold indifference from the US, which is undergoing epochal demographic shifts, isolation within Europe, and derision from its former Asian and African subjects. The revelations of atrocities in Kenya are just the tip of an emerging global history of violence, dispossession and resistance. They provide a new opportunity for the British ruling class and intelligentsia to break with threadbare imperial myths – to come to the end of themselves as they were, and remake Britain for the modern world.

Beware of the rabid right, not the loony left

YASMIN ALIBHAI BROWN

Sunday 14 April 2013

In the wake of Thatcher's death it has been shown once again that the most intolerant, Stalinist and insistently PC forces are on the right

On January 30th 1978, the day my son was born, Margaret Thatcher charmingly told white TV viewers their country was in danger of being “swamped” by other cultures. Enoch Powell’s gory warnings about black and Asian immigration  were rebranded and detoxified by the wily, well groomed, Lady Tory and embedded in the nation’s psyche. Her words were calculated, and won her populist support and admirers within her party. Sixteen months later she became PM.

In the ceaseless cacophony following her death, scant attention has been paid to her supremacist views of Empire (Bruge Speech, 1992) or the race riots, or the many deaths in custody of black men, or government-sanctioned unfair policing, or her deep hostility to immigrants of colour or concomitant warmth towards white Zimbabweans and South Africans. As the blogger Jacqueline Scott writes: “Racism fattened under Thatcher”. Forgotten too is her vendetta against the GLC and ILEA, those London bodies that did not fall in line with her little-Englandism. The politically correct, radical right has silenced all such talk and much more besides.

Make no mistake, the most intolerant, Stalinist and insistently PC forces today are on the right, not on the so called “loony left”. Last week the right hysterically attacked the Diana Fund for supporting a pro-immigration organisation. Diana was a friend to the outsider and the despised; yet those she was close to are kicking off about this funding. The same reactionary battalions stopped the BBC from fully playing a song that legitimately got into the top of the charts, because it “insults” the hallowed Tory matriarch. Most of our newspapers are on the right and they push, and sometimes bully, broadcasters into that same ideological space. Fearful of bad headlines, the BBC meekly accommodates their propaganda – and so the right gets bolder and more demanding.

I was on Channel 5’s The Wright Stuff as a panellist all week and expressed unfashionably critical assessments of the Thatcher era. Some of the reactions I received made me wonder if I should better conceal or disguise my deeply-held socialist, anti-racist  views. Walking through Whiteleys, where the programmes are recorded, a group crowded and abused me. Some were racist, others insulting or filthy. It was horrible. Back home, onto my screen came more from the rabid-right PC brigade. They are offended by anyone who disagrees. Dissent, to them, is treason, an embodiment of the enemy within (Lady Thatcher’s term for striking miners).        

Every day we, the people, are instructed on what we should say, think and feel. To belong, we must not only praise Lady Thatcher for her greatness, but also be foolish, doting royalists, hate the poor, approve of welfare cuts, hate the unions, reject the principle of equality and proclaim immigration as a threat. Lady Thatcher, the Boudicca of the fanatical right, reclaimed the kingdom for them and they remain powerful, unbeatable and unbearable.

The educational charities that do PR for the rightwing ultra-rich

Billionaires control the political conversation by staying hidden and paying others to promote their brutal agendas

• 
• • George Monbiot
  • The Guardian, Monday 18 February 2013 20.30 GMT

David Koch, of Koch Industries, pictured here in his role as chairman of Americans for Prosperity at the Defending the American Dream Summit in November 2011. Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

 

Conspiracies against the public don't get much uglier than this. As the Guardian revealed last week, two secretive organisations working for US billionaires have spent $118m to ensure that no action is taken to prevent manmade climate change. While inflicting untold suffering on the world's people, their funders have used these opaque structures to ensure that their identities are never exposed.
The two organisations – the Donors' Trust and the Donors' Capital Fund – were set up as political funding channels for people handing over $1m or more. They have financed 102 organisations which either dismiss climate science or downplay the need to take action. The large number of recipients creates the impression of many independent voices challenging climate science. These groups, working through the media, mobilising gullible voters and lobbying politicians, helped to derail Obama's cap and trade bill and the climate talks at Copenhagen. Now they're seeking to prevent the US president from trying again.

This covers only part of the funding. In total, between 2002 and 2010 the two identity-laundering groups paid $311m to 480 organisations, most of which take positions of interest to the ultra-rich and the corporations they run: less tax, less regulation, a smaller public sector. Around a quarter of the money received by the rightwing opinion swarm comes from the two foundations. If this funding were not effective, it wouldn't exist: the ultra-rich didn't get that way by throwing their money around randomly. The organisations they support are those that advance their interests.

A small number of the funders have been exposed by researchers trawling through tax records. They include the billionaire Koch brothers (paying into the two groups through their Knowledge and Progress Fund) and the DeVos family (the billionaire owners of Amway). More significantly, we now know a little more about the recipients. Many describe themselves as free-market or conservative thinktanks.

Among them are the American Enterprise Institute, American Legislative Exchange Council, Hudson Institute, Competitive Enterprise Institute, Reason Foundation, Heritage Foundation, Americans for Prosperity, Mont Pelerin Society and Discovery Institute. All pose as learned societies, earnestly trying to determine the best interests of the public. The exposure of this funding reinforces the claim by David Frum, formerly a fellow of the American Enterprise Institute, that such groups "increasingly function as public relations agencies".

One name in particular jumped out at me: American Friends of the IEA. The Institute of Economic Affairs is a British group that, like all the others, calls itself a free-market thinktank. Scarcely a day goes by when its staff aren't interviewed in the broadcast media, promoting the dreary old billionaires' agenda: less tax for the rich, less help for the poor, less spending by the state, less regulation for business. In the first 13 days of February, its people were on the BBC 10 times.

Never have I heard its claim to be an independent thinktank challenged by the BBC. When, in 2007, I called the institute a business lobby group, its then director-general responded, in a letter to the Guardian, that "we are independent of all business interests". Oh yes?

The database published by the Canadian site desmogblog.com shows that American Friends of the IEA has (up to 2010) received $215,000 from the two secretive funds. When I spoke to the IEA's fundraising manager, she confirmed that the sole purpose of American Friends is to channel money to the organisation in London. She agreed that the IEA has never disclosed the Donors' Trust money it has received. She denied that the institute is a sockpuppet organisation: purporting to be independent while working for some very powerful US interests.

Would the BBC allow someone from Bell Pottinger to discuss an issue of concern to its sponsors without revealing the sponsors' identity? No. So what's the difference? What distinguishes an acknowledged public relations company taking money channelled by a corporation or a billionaire from a so-called thinktank, funded by the same source to promote the same agenda?

The IEA is registered with the Charity Commission as an educational charity. The same goes for Nigel Lawson's climate misinformation campaign (the Global Warming Policy Foundation) and a host of other dubious "thinktanks". I've said it before and I'll say it again: it is outrageous that the Charity Commission allows organisations that engage in political lobbying and refuse to reveal their major funders to claim charitable status.

This is the new political frontier. Corporations and their owners have learned not to show their hands. They tend to avoid the media, aware that they will damage their brands by being seen to promote the brutal agenda that furthers their interests. So they have learned from the tobacco companies: stay hidden and pay others to do it for you.

They need a network of independent-looking organisations that can produce plausible arguments in defence of their positions. Once the arguments have been developed, projecting them is easy. Most of the media is owned by billionaires, who are happy to promote the work of people funded by the same class. One of the few outlets they don't own – the BBC – has been disgracefully incurious about the identity of those to whom it gives a platform.

By these means the ultra-rich come to dominate the political conversation, without declaring themselves. Those they employ are clever and well-trained, with money their opponents can only dream of. They are skilled at rechannelling public anger that might otherwise be directed at their funders: the people who tanked the economy, who use the living planet as their dustbin, who won't pay taxes and demand that the poor must pay for the mistakes of the rich. Anger, thanks to the work of these hired hands, is instead aimed at the victims or opponents of the billionaires: people on benefits, trade unions, Greenpeace, the American Civil Liberties Union.

The answer, as ever, is transparency. As the so-called thinktanks come to play an ever more important role in politics, we need to know who they are working for. Any group – whether the IEA or Friends of the Earth – that attempts to influence public life should declare all donations greater than £1,000. 

 We've had a glimpse of who's paying. Now we need to see the rest of the story.

Just how wrong is the BCCI?

The Indian board is easily - often deservedly - painted as a villain, but often it is all too convenient to do so

Rob Steen

October 31, 2012

 

	Such is the frequency with which the BCCI flexes its muscles, it has become almost too exhausting to criticise the board for it every time © AFP Enlarge
Related Links News : BBC joins Sky in BCCI broadcast wrangle News : BCCI holds firm on broadcaster fees Series/Tournaments: England tour of India Teams: India

Contradicting Ian Chappell during his days as baggy green 'un-in-chief was never a terribly wise idea, and it remains ever thus. As he asserted recently on this site, given that it can hardly be held responsible for all of cricket's ills, bashing the BCCI for every chink, kink and ruffle serves as a deterrent to deeper thought and as an alibi for inaction.

Besides, bashing the BCCI is now akin to criticising the Kremlin 30 years ago or the USA ever since, especially while the Bush boys were calling the shots. Indeed, such is the frequency with which the BCCI flexes its muscles like the proverbial playground bully, it has almost become too exhausting, not to say frustrating, to bother. If it isn't the refusal to back the DRS, it's the reluctance to invite Bangladesh over for an ODI, let alone a Test. To relent, though, is to concede defeat, which is what all bullies want. Eventually the Kremlin caved.

What, for instance, are we to make of the decision to demand that Sky Sports and the BBC cough up £500,000 and £50,000 respectively to cover England's impending set-to with India? While this might not necessarily be an over-estimate for 2000 sq ft of additional space at four Test venues, even if the air-conditioning does function properly, the short notice smacks of brinkmanship at best, at worst naked exploitation. Not that the idea of the ever-pompous BBC and the never knowingly satisfied Murdoch empire both being taken for a ride doesn't have considerable allure.

As with the refusal to field a frontline spinner in the India A XI, are we simply witnessing yet another skirmish in yet another pre-series, charm-free offensive ("C'mon lads, let's see if we can wind up Iron Bottom and all those snotty BBC types - should do MS and the boys a power of good")? Could it be a dastardly plot to cut Test Match Special out of the loop and do a back-door deal with those excitable folk at TalkSPORT? Or might it be something far more disreputable? Regardless of your vantage point, or even the efficiency of your blinkers, the words "fair", "proportionate" and "appropriate" are marginally less likely to spring to mind than "grasping", "provocative" or "here we go again".

We could be kind, magnanimous, even generous. We could interpret this unseemly kerfuffle as nothing more than a show of patriotic faith in native expertise and charisma, however misguided. It's India v England after all, in India, so why on earth shouldn't the world watch while armed with the guidance of Ravi, Sanjay and Harsha, who plainly know a great deal more about local conditions than Nasser, Sir Ian and Bumble? In any event, even if you really would rather hear "Got 'im!" or "Dropped 'im" exclaimed with a Lancastrian burr or an Essex twang, didn't Indian viewers in the fifties and sixties have to put up with haughty Jim Swanton and plummy Peter West?

But let's consider the other plausibility. Namely, that the BCCI believes the world beyond India should not be exposed to waspish condemnations of the board's DRS-phobia whenever a wicket is unjustly lost or falsely won. Those objections may have been documented ad nauseam but the bottom line remains as galling as ever: nine for, one against.

Such a blatant subversion of the democratic process need not, of course, be a guarantee of bad faith, 

or even downright wrongness. After all, the vast majority of the developed world was profoundly, almost religiously, racist for centuries. In any event, not even the DRS's most hardened and vehement advocates would strenuously challenge the observation that the fine-tuning prompted by the BCCI's prodding has enhanced the implementation of justice. I'm one and I certainly wouldn't. But still. Nine for, one against.

 

EMPATHY TIME. As a North London Jew, devoutly irreligious but fiercely proud of my race, I like to think I am not unfamiliar with what it feels like right now, what it means in 2012, to be an Indian cricket lover - as opposed, that is, to a lover of Indian cricket, a weakness to which, given that Indian cricket embodies the game's passions and subtleties like no other, I am only too happy to confess. I am also humbly and undyingly grateful for the Indian passion for cricket, without which the game might well not have a significant future. Or any future.

I too know what it is like to read an article about fellow members of my tribe - for the BCCI, read just about every Israeli government in recent memory - and shudder. Just because something shameful is done purportedly, in "our" name doesn't mean the rest of the world should view this as proof of consent, (im)morality or even fraternal forgiveness. Similarly, criticism of Israel shouldn't automatically brand the critic as anti-semitic.

Thus, more or less, did I begin my contribution to the annual Oxford Indian Society Symposium two weekends ago. There were 30 or so souls in the lecture theatre at St Antony's College, the rump of them students, all thoroughly immersed in the topic under discussion, "Are the BCCI's burgeoning finances harming world cricket?" - if only because it doubtless came as welcome light relief in the wake of sessions such as "What do the recent politics of protest in India and elsewhere imply for the principle of representation in parliamentary democracy?", "What is the future of India as a welfare state?" and "Can India's aggressive drive for nuclear energy ensure energy security in an environmentally responsible and internationally acceptable manner?"

	Those ills for which the BCCI is responsible - selfishness, undemocracy, irresponsible use of power, blind allegiance to the almighty crore - are hard to ignore because they affect everyone who truly cares about this precious, precariously perched obsession of ours

In common with the organisers, I had hoped that my fellow panelists would number that world-renowned twit… sorry, Tweeter, Lalit Modi. Sadly, despite having confirmed his attendance, he'd cried off. A huge pity on a personal front, for two reasons: a) I had prepared what I was going to say with him very much in mind; b) his response would have been intriguing at the very least, at best, eminently newsworthy.

After Andrew Miller, the other panelist, had offered an erudite analysis of the ECB's economic and diplomatic strategy (if "strategy" isn't too flattering a word to describe some of its more harebrained actions), we took questions from the floor. What struck me most forcefully was the depth of embarrassment at some of the BCCI's less admirable policies. Some were genuinely shocked to learn that Bangladesh had yet to play a Test in India. Others recoiled at the image of India as filtered through the IPL: insular, superficial, brash, crass. Scepticism abounded, cynicism too. If anyone took issue with what I'd said - and, while suitably polite and anti-inflammatory of adjective, I can't say I pulled many punches - they kept it firmly to themselves. Sure, you could dismiss such reactions as either politeness or the predictable reactions of the privileged, but from where I was sitting, that would mean doubting their manifest sincerity.

All that said, few, surely, will quibble with the notion that, however long overdue, the racial shift in the balance of power at the game's top table, one unprecedented in any other major sport, has brought out the worst in many, particularly those stuffy Old Worldsters who would rather live in some sepia-drenched imperial past where the English Way is the Only Way; who would rather badmouth an accomplished younger brother for a minor misdemeanour than cheer his triumphs.

No matter what one feels about him, it was inevitable that Modi would clash with Giles Clarke, another chap accustomed to getting his own way. When new money meets new money, historical baggage is the barrier. "Be placatory," advised Rosie, a measured and terrifyingly eloquent hitman in Donald Cammell and Nic Roeg's ageless psychedelic-rock 'n' roll-gangster movie Performance: had Clarke been even semi-placatory, accepting the way cricket's axis had shifted, the ECB's desultory and delusory marriage of convenience to Allen Stanford would almost certainly never have got beyond a first date.

Empathy, however, has its limits. Those ills for which the BCCI is responsible - selfishness, undemocracy, irresponsible use of power, blind allegiance to the almighty crore - are hard to ignore because they affect everyone who truly cares about this precious, precariously perched obsession of ours. The impression, sadly, is that those we entrust to administer it are simply not up to snuff (there's no "I" in "run" but there is one in "ruin"). CLR James' immortal question needs updating: "What do they know who only money know?"

Which brings us back to what may one day be remembered, with much mirth, as "Skygate". Or better yet, "Bumblegate". To pretend that it's all about the dosh, given that the BCCI's most recent balance sheet showed a hearty profit, is plainly preposterous. And yet… last week, auditors, for the second year running, felt unable to approve the BCCI's accounts. Perhaps "Bumblegate" is indicative of a genuine recognition, after the years of wine and plenty, that, from now on, every pleasure must be earned and every rupee treasured?

And so to this week's quick quiz:

1) Would the honourable BCCI officials (and even the dishonourable ones) support slapping a surcharge on a ticket-holding spectator just as they clicked through the Eden Gardens turnstiles?
 

2) Do those officials give a toss if forcing Bumble and Co to commentate on happenings in Kolkata from West London rouses even more vigorous vilification?
 

3) Are those officials so convinced of their own invulnerability and so oblivious to the bigger picture that a gracious u-turn cannot be countenanced?

And the correct answers are:

1) Exceedingly doubtful.
 

2) Evidently not.
 

3) Let's bloody well hope not.

Rob Steen is a sportswriter and senior lecturer in sports journalism at the University of Brighton

Feeds: Rob Steen

© ESPN EMEA Ltd.

Reclaim the BBC – starting with the Today programme

The Today programme's old boys' club style reveals just how out of touch the BBC is with its licence-fee payers

• Elinor Davies for our Beeb, part of the Guardian Comment Network
• guardian.co.uk, Friday 1 June 2012 11.39 BST

'Despite its veneer of neutrality [Radio 4's] Today programme gives us a very specific take on the world.' Photograph: Graeme Robertson

1. ourBeeb is a new website hosted by openDemocracy's OurKingdom section, which will debate the future of the UK's most important cultural institution

Like many people, I tune into the Today programme most weekday mornings before I go to work. It's a form of masochism, really, as I don't enjoy it much and I know full well I will end up swearing at the radio. But it covers the main stories of the day and makes me feel vaguely plugged into what's going on in the world. So why the expletives?

Despite its veneer of neutrality (a problematic concept anyway, of course) the Today programme gives us a very specific take on the world. It's a world in which the views of the establishment are unquestionable facts, and a needlessly aggressive interview style masquerades as incisive journalistic scrutiny.

In the programme's daily review of the newspapers the entrenched prejudices of the mainstream media regularly go unchallenged. The presenters read out quotes from a selection of the daily rags on a range of the day's stories. But who decides which papers, which quotes, which stories? Last Tuesday they covered the revelation by the Department for Work and Pensions that thousands of people on sickness benefit "had been discovered to be fit for work". This is a complicated news story – who decided they were fit for work? According to what measures? But not for Today. We get the illusion of bias-free reporting – they're only reading out what the papers say, after all. But what the presenters gave us were two very similar angles on the story, from the Daily Mail and the Sun, both of which unquestioningly used these statistics to bolster the editorial line that these scroungers should get back to work. Why quote from two papers with the exact same viewpoint?

Often, in an effort to provide two sides of a debate there is that familiar, pointlessly adversarial interview style that the Today programme specialises in. Last June, the writer Graham Linehan wrote this searing critique of the "squabbling that passes for debate" on Today. Linehan was writing after his experience on the programme, in which he had been invited on to discuss his stage adaptation of The Ladykillers, only to discover he was expected to provide one side in an "argument" about the value of adapting films for theatre. Of course, as Linehan admits, confrontational interviews sometimes make sense – we need them sometimes to get to the truth. But more often it is not the best way to get to the heart of a story. Such interviews have the air of a university debating society, where notions are challenged and argued merely for the fun of it. (They remind me a little too much of Chris Morris interviewing the organiser of the London Jam Festival on The Day Today.)

Paradoxically, when the Today presenters are confronted with the genuinely powerful, the interviews can be surprisingly lightweight, a case in point being John Humphrys' recent interview with David Cameron. Humphrys spent a tiresome five or so minutes haranguing him about Abu Qatada (and admittedly gave him a bit of a hard time about tax dodgers in government), but failed to challenge any of the Tory tropes that Cameron trotted out repeatedly throughout the interview, about being on the side of "hardworking people who do the right thing", making the country more "pro get up and go" and even "making sure our children aren't burdened with debt". Is it not Humphrys' job to pick apart such cliches and enquire what they actually mean? The interview descended into an infuriating kind of mateyness, in which the two men laughingly discussed Cameron's relaxed demeanour and his "date nights" with his wife. As if this wasn't nauseating enough, when the interview finished, the BBC's political editor, Nick Robinson, (known for his long-standing Tory associations) joined Humphrys for a nice cosy chat about the PM and the interview that had just finished. There was no mention, in either conversation, of NHS reform, of unemployment, or of the double-dip recession. It was all just one big jolly jape.

It is this lofty, old boys' club approach to the news – as if nothing really matters beyond the Today studios – that I find so irksome. There was a discussion on the programme a few weeks ago about the effect of the housing benefit cap on low-paid Londoners, between Grainia Long from the Chartered Institute of Housing and Mark Easton, the BBC's home editor. Both Long and Easton quoted statistics demonstrating rising rents and the massive financial pressure the cap places on people in the capital. But the discussion quickly became focused on the effect the cap would have on the flow of cheap labour into London. Easton speculated whether the government had really thought through the impact of this policy and wondered aloud just who was going to do these low-paid jobs in London if people couldn't afford to pay the rent.

It's a valid point of course, but Easton's observation did have a touch of the Today loftiness about it. Running through it seemed to be the assumption that listeners really only care about this issue because it means that there will be no poor people left to sweep the streets or serve coffees or empty the bins in their offices. The low-paid workers are not the participants in this discussion – they are merely objects, being talked about in so far as they are useful. Today does not belong to these people.

As Dave Boyle points out in his article for ourBeeb, the BBC is astonishingly unaccountable to its licence-payers and boy does it show. For me, nothing expresses the need to reclaim the BBC better than those smug exchanges between rich, powerful men on Today. We deserve better than this.

Rupert Murdoch at the Leveson Inquiry

Rupert Murdoch gives away more than planned at Leveson inquiry

The denials never shifted but, under careful questioning from Robert Jay QC, the tycoon made some serious concessions

• 
• • Nick Davies
  • guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 25 April 2012 19.36 BST

Rupert Murdoch often departed from the script in his evidence at the Leveson inquiry. Photograph: Reuters

 

At one point in his evidence, when he was trying to explain how he dealt with politicians, Rupert Murdoch volunteered: "I'm not good at holding my tongue." It must drive his advisers crazy.
The plan clearly was for Castle Murdoch to be defended with well-constructed walls of obdurate denial, reinforced by occasional bouts of forgetfulness. Certainly, the denials never shifted – and these were big, tough denials: "I've never asked a prime minister for anything in my life … We have never pushed our commercial interests in our papers … I don't know many politicians."

However, in the event, Robert Jay QC kept piercing small gaps in Murdoch's defences. This was partly because Jay had gathered up a prodigious supply of facts, which he fired like slingshot at the castle walls – and partly because the old mogul likes to talk. Jay didn't break in and ransack the place, but he did some damage.

Sometimes the wounds were nothing more than dents in Murdoch's standing, as he acknowledged that it might well be true that he had once listened to Ken Livingstone on television denouncing the "lies and smears of the media" and that he had then declared drunkenly to a roomful of people, "That's me!" Or that he might well have qualified his early approval for Tony Blair by adding that they were not yet ready to take their pants down together.

But sometimes, in the detail behind the denial, he conceded substantial ground. His underlying problem was that he was not listening to Jay and failed to see the subtlety of the allegation that faced him.

Murdoch kept denying that he made deals with politicians, ie, that he simply offered them the support of his paper in return for favours to his business. But Jay suggested: "It operates at a far more sophisticated level, doesn't it?" and went on to quote the reported words of the former Australian prime minister Paul Keating: "You can do a deal with him without ever saying a deal is done."
In the case of Murdoch's relationship with Blair, Jay quoted Murdoch's former editor, Andrew Neil, that there had been "an implicit understanding – never openly talked about between the two men – but an understanding nevertheless".

Murdoch duly put up his well-rehearsed denial – "I never asked Mr Blair for anything, nor did I receive any favour" – and then proceeded to volunteer that he had been in the habit of seeing Blair two or three times a year, as though that were an annual average for most voters to see a national leader.

He described how he had once spent an afternoon at Chequers, telling Blair how much he opposed Britain joining the euro, as though the prime minister had nothing better to do.

To this extraordinary degree of access, he boldly added that he does indeed direct the editorial line of the Sun on major issues, including questions about Europe. And, once again failing to hold his tongue, he went right ahead and admitted what this would mean to a man like Blair: "If any politician wanted my views on major issues, they only had to read the Sun." The Sun relentlessly reinforced the anti-EU message.

Murdoch continued to deny that Blair had ever done anything for him, but then conceded that Blair had "gone the extra mile for him" over European policy, to the point where he had acceded to the Sun's demand that the government should agree to hold a referendum before accepting the new EU constitution.

And Blair had done something very similar by ensuring Britain maintained tough anti-union laws and then underlined the point with an article in the Sun, following which the two men had enjoyed dinner together. Murdoch agreed it was possible he had congratulated Blair on his position.

Similarly, Jay quoted Murdoch's former confidant, Woodrow Wyatt, who was close to Margaret Thatcher and who recorded in his diary that he had once told Murdoch: "Margaret is very keen on preserving your position. She knows how much she depends on your support. Likewise, you depend on her." Murdoch produced his standard denial – "I didn't expect any help from her, nor did I ask for any" – and then found himself accepting that, while the Sun supported her, she had delivered a series of decisions which looked really very helpful indeed, including allowing him to buy the Times and the Sunday Times without referring his bid to the Monopolies and Mergers Commission. She also exempted BSkyB from the regulations in the 1990 Broadcasting Act.

With Gordon Brown and David Cameron, he kept closer to the script but, even so, he caused unnecessary trouble.

He denied discussing the BBC licence fee with Cameron. Enough said. Talking to a prime minister about the licence fee might suggest he had some commercial motive. But then his tongue added: "I wasn't interested in the BBC licence fee. I had been through that with previous prime ministers, and it didn't matter. They all hated the BBC, and they all gave it whatever it wanted."

He set the record straight on Kelvin MacKenzie's claim that Brown had reacted to the Sun's endorsement of the Tories in September 2009 by phoning him and roaring down the phone for 20 minutes. That was "a very colourful exaggeration", he said. Enough? No. He went on to quote a version of the call which was highly likely to provoke a response from Brown, who duly issued a statement saying that Murdoch was wholly wrong and should have the good grace to correct his account.

As he left the inquiry for a break, his tongue was still rolling. Dan Sabbagh, the Guardian's head of media, heard him grumble to his advisers about Lord Justice Leveson: "Let's get him to get this fucking thing over with today." If only they could. Murdoch resumes his evidence on Thursday morning.

Bankers are the dictators of the West

Robert Fisk in The Independent

Saturday, 10 December 2011

Writing from the very region that produces more clichés per square foot than any other "story" – the Middle East – I should perhaps pause before I say I have never read so much garbage, so much utter drivel, as I have about the world financial crisis.

But I will not hold my fire. It seems to me that the reporting of the collapse of capitalism has reached a new low which even the Middle East cannot surpass for sheer unadulterated obedience to the very institutions and Harvard "experts" who have helped to bring about the whole criminal disaster.

Let's kick off with the "Arab Spring" – in itself a grotesque verbal distortion of the great Arab/Muslim awakening which is shaking the Middle East – and the trashy parallels with the social protests in Western capitals. We've been deluged with reports of how the poor or the disadvantaged in the West have "taken a leaf" out of the "Arab spring" book, how demonstrators in America, Canada, Britain, Spain and Greece have been "inspired" by the huge demonstrations that brought down the regimes in Egypt, Tunisia and – up to a point – Libya. But this is nonsense.

The real comparison, needless to say, has been dodged by Western reporters, so keen to extol the anti-dictator rebellions of the Arabs, so anxious to ignore protests against "democratic" Western governments, so desperate to disparage these demonstrations, to suggest that they are merely picking up on the latest fad in the Arab world. The truth is somewhat different. What drove the Arabs in their tens of thousands and then their millions on to the streets of Middle East capitals was a demand for dignity and a refusal to accept that the local family-ruled dictators actually owned their countries. The Mubaraks and the Ben Alis and the Gaddafis and the kings and emirs of the Gulf (and Jordan) and the Assads all believed that they had property rights to their entire nations. Egypt belonged to Mubarak Inc, Tunisia to Ben Ali Inc (and the Traboulsi family), Libya to Gaddafi Inc. And so on. The Arab martyrs against dictatorship died to prove that their countries belonged to their own people.

And that is the true parallel in the West. The protest movements are indeed against Big Business – a perfectly justified cause – and against "governments". What they have really divined, however, albeit a bit late in the day, is that they have for decades bought into a fraudulent democracy: they dutifully vote for political parties – which then hand their democratic mandate and people's power to the banks and the derivative traders and the rating agencies, all three backed up by the slovenly and dishonest coterie of "experts" from America's top universities and "think tanks", who maintain the fiction that this is a crisis of globalisation rather than a massive financial con trick foisted on the voters.

The banks and the rating agencies have become the dictators of the West. Like the Mubaraks and Ben Alis, the banks believed – and still believe – they are owners of their countries. The elections which give them power have – through the gutlessness and collusion of governments – become as false as the polls to which the Arabs were forced to troop decade after decade to anoint their own national property owners. Goldman Sachs and the Royal Bank of Scotland became the Mubaraks and Ben Alis of the US and the UK, each gobbling up the people's wealth in bogus rewards and bonuses for their vicious bosses on a scale infinitely more rapacious than their greedy Arab dictator-brothers could imagine.

I didn't need Charles Ferguson's Inside Job on BBC2 this week – though it helped – to teach me that the ratings agencies and the US banks are interchangeable, that their personnel move seamlessly between agency, bank and US government. The ratings lads (almost always lads, of course) who AAA-rated sub-prime loans and derivatives in America are now – via their poisonous influence on the markets – clawing down the people of Europe by threatening to lower or withdraw the very same ratings from European nations which they lavished upon criminals before the financial crash in the US. I believe that understatement tends to win arguments. But, forgive me, who are these creatures whose ratings agencies now put more fear into the French than Rommel did in 1940?

Why don't my journalist mates in Wall Street tell me? How come the BBC and CNN and – oh, dear, even al-Jazeera – treat these criminal communities as unquestionable institutions of power? Why no investigations – Inside Job started along the path – into these scandalous double-dealers? It reminds me so much of the equally craven way that so many American reporters cover the Middle East, eerily avoiding any direct criticism of Israel, abetted by an army of pro-Likud lobbyists to explain to viewers why American "peacemaking" in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can be trusted, why the good guys are "moderates", the bad guys "terrorists".

The Arabs have at least begun to shrug off this nonsense. But when the Wall Street protesters do the same, they become "anarchists", the social "terrorists" of American streets who dare to demand that the Bernankes and Geithners should face the same kind of trial as Hosni Mubarak. We in the West – our governments – have created our dictators. But, unlike the Arabs, we can't touch them.

The Irish Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, solemnly informed his people this week that they were not responsible for the crisis in which they found themselves. They already knew that, of course. What he did not tell them was who was to blame. Isn't it time he and his fellow EU prime ministers did tell us? And our reporters, too?

BBC's TOP GEAR and Creative Truth

Top Gear's electric car shows pour petrol over the BBC's standards

Why is Top Gear apparently exempt from the BBC's editorial guidelines and the duty not to fake the facts?

Jeremy Clarkson test drives the Leaf electric car Photograph: BBC

 

What distinguishes the BBC from the rest of this country's media? There's the lack of advertising, and the lack of a proprietor with specific business interests to defend. But perhaps the most important factor is its editorial guidelines, which are supposed to ensure that the corporation achieves "the highest standards of due accuracy and impartiality and strive[s] to avoid knowingly and materially misleading our audiences."
Here's a few of the things they say:

"Trust is the foundation of the BBC: we are independent, impartial and honest."
"We will be rigorous in establishing the truth of the story and well informed when explaining it. Our specialist expertise will bring authority and analysis to the complex world in which we live."
"We will be open in acknowledging mistakes when they are made and encourage a culture of willingness to learn from them."

Woe betide the producer or presenter who breaches these guidelines. Unless, that is, they work for Top Gear. If so, they are permitted to drive a coach and horses – or a Hummer H3 - through them whenever they please.

Take, for example, Top Gear's line on electric cars. Casting aside any pretence of impartiality or rigour, it has set out to show that electric cars are useless. If the facts don't fit, it bends them until they do.

It's currently being sued by electric car maker Tesla after claiming, among other allegations, that the Roadster's true range is only 55 miles per charge (rather than 211), and that it unexpectedly ran out of charge. Tesla says "the breakdowns were staged and the statements are untrue". But the BBC keeps syndicating the episode to other networks. So much for "acknowledging mistakes when they are made".

Now it's been caught red-handed faking another trial, in this case of the Nissan LEAF.
Last Sunday, an episode of Top Gear showed Jeremy Clarkson and James May setting off for Cleethorpes in Lincolnshire, 60 miles away. The car unexpectedly ran out of charge when they got to Lincoln, and had to be pushed. They concluded that "electric cars are not the future".

But it wasn't unexpected: Nissan has a monitoring device in the car which transmits information on the state of the battery. This shows that, while the company delivered the car to Top Gear fully charged, the programme-makers ran the battery down before Clarkson and May set off, until only 40% of the charge was left. Moreover, they must have known this, as the electronic display tells the driver how many miles' worth of electricity they have, and the sat-nav tells them if they don't have enough charge to reach their destination. In this case it told them – before they set out on their 60-mile journey – that they had 30 miles' worth of electricity. But, as Ben Webster of the Times reported earlier this week, "at no point were viewers told that the battery had been more than half empty at the start of the trip."

It gets worse. As Webster points out, in order to stage a breakdown in Lincoln, "it appeared that the Leaf was driven in loops for more than 10 miles in Lincoln until the battery was flat."

When Jeremy Clarkson was challenged about this, he admitted that he knew the car had only a small charge before he set out. But, he said: "That's how TV works". Not on the BBC it isn't, or not unless your programme is called Top Gear.

Top Gear's response, by its executive producer Andy Wilman, is a masterpiece of distraction and obfuscation. He insists that the programme wasn't testing the range claims of the vehicles, and nor did it state that the vehicles wouldn't achieve their claimed range. But the point is that it creates the strong impression that the car ran out of juice unexpectedly, leaving the presenters stranded in Lincoln, a city with no public charging points.

Yes, this is an entertainment programme, yes it's larking about, and sometimes it's very funny. But none of this exempts it from the BBC's guidelines and the duty not to fake the facts.

The issue is made all the more potent by the fact that Top Gear has a political agenda. It's a mouthpiece for an extreme form of libertarianism and individualism. It derides attempts to protect the environment, and promotes the kind of driving that threatens other people's peace and other people's lives. It often creates the impression that the rules and restraints which seek to protect us from each other are there to be broken.

This is dangerous territory. Boy racers, in many parts of the countryside, are among the greatest hazards to local people's lives. Where I live, in rural mid-Wales, the roads are treated as race tracks. Many of the young lads who use them compete to see who can clock up the fastest speeds on a given stretch. The consequences are terrible: a series of hideous crashes involving young men and women driving too fast, which kill other people or maim them for life. In the latest horror, just down the road from where I live, a young man bumped another car through a fence and into a reservoir. Four of the five passengers drowned.

Of course I'm not blaming only Top Gear for this, but it plays a major role in creating a comfort zone within which edgy driving is considered acceptable, even admirable. Top Gear's political agenda also persists in stark contradiction to BBC rules on impartiality.

So how does it get away with it? It's simple. It makes the BBC a fortune. Both the 15th and 16th series of Top Gear were among the top five TV programmes sold internationally by BBC Worldwide over the last financial year. Another section of the editorial guidelines tells us that "our audiences should be confident that our decisions are not influenced by outside interests, political or commercial pressures". But in this case we can't be. I suggest that it is purely because of commercial pressures that Top Gear is allowed to rig the evidence, fake its trials, pour petrol over the BBC's standards and put a match to them. The money drives all before it. 

• guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2011