The Secretary of State for Delay
Raymond Snoddy: Jeremy Hunt has truly understood the benefits of delay in the political world – sometimes the most intractable problems can go away if you just leave them long enough. Time to take advantage & refer BSkyB/Murdoch to the Competition Commission; and as for the great local television project, endless delay would not be too long…
As time goes by there is an increasing danger that Jeremy Hunt will become known as the Secretary of State for Delay.
Wasn’t there something about the Murdoch-BSkyB decision coming in late April?
And shouldn’t we have heard just a little bit more by now about the great Hunt master plan for local television, with the licensing of the new national network “spine” due sometime this month.
Sorry that was last month’s idea. The thinking is now moving away from a national spine to prop up all those local services and towards a “bottom up” approach.
Actually Hunt is quite right not to set himself artificial deadlines and instead concentrate on finding the right solution to two very tricky issues.
Making bad choices work
The problem may not be so much the delay – although the silence of the dogs that are not barking is getting very noticeable.
The real problem is that the considerable brainpower of the DCMS is being trained on somehow finding a way to, against all the odds, make bad choices work.
There are those who say that spinning off and floating Sky News, as suggested by Ofcom, was a neat solution to the great Murdoch problem – how do you protect plurality of television news provision? Some are still saying it. Nothing could be further from the truth.
It is a solution to a problem that does not exist. There is not a shred of evidence that Sky News has ever been Rupert Murdoch’s plaything or that the channel has done his bidding. A touch populist and prone to jump the gun perhaps, but that offers viewers a choice compared to BBC News.
His main involvement has been signing off the £20 million or so losses a year mainly because of a belief, certainly in the early days, that a news channel was a benefit to the overall Sky subscription package.
It is difficult to argue that the minute Murdoch got his hands on all of BSkyB his attitude to Sky News would suddenly change for the worse. Why would it?
Sky morphing into a UK version of Fox News would be seriously bad business – and anyway would fall foul of current impartiality rules, which are not going to be dropped.
Window dressing
So the Sky News manoeuvre is merely window dressing then? It could be much worse than that. It will create an unloved orphan instead of a channel that has been protected and even cherished.
How can anyone think that the City investors, who would by then be former BSkyB shareholders, would have the slightest interest in near worthless shares in a break-even AIM-listed news channel?
The shares will be dumped and before long a Murdoch ally will begin to accumulate. Would there be anything to stop Murdoch’s joint venture partner in Sky Arabia, the Abu Dhabi Investment Corporation, becoming the majority owner of Sky News?
Obviously all those involved in the Abu Dhabi investment business have a perfect understanding of the concept of editorial independence and impartiality, but it would be difficult to imagine why so much effort was put into achieving such an artificial outcome, which would leave Murdoch firmly in control once again.
If the coalition government can think again, and possibly even scrap, the deeply damaging “reforms” planned for the NHS, then Jeremy Hunt can make a virtue of delay and refer the entire mess to the Competition Commission for further scrutiny.
There were obvious, legal, reasons why the culture secretary did not go with the grain of common sense and refer immediately. He would have faced an inevitable judicial review if he had not considered seriously all the possible remedies of any potential abuse. He has now done that.
The delay suggests there are real difficulties with making the rather ludicrous Sky News “remedy” work in practice.
Time to refer
Time to take advantage of the merits of delay and refer. Independent economic analysis will disclose whether a Murdoch-owned BSkyB would really work against the public interest and media plurality – or most likely not.
As for the great local television project, delay is an even more creative process. Endless delay would not be too long.
At least here the thinking is taking Hunt, at least, modestly in the right direction.
A national spine to support the outlying local stations seemed like the only small hope for the impractical project.
The disadvantages of the Channel 6 concept were obvious. It would attract the wrong sort – those mainly interested in a prime slot on the EPG for a national channel and the subsidies extracted from the BBC.
Even then advertising specialists such as Prof. Paddy Barwise of London Business School are convinced that the revenue to support such a free-to-air “national” channel are simply not there.
Hunt’s views on the matter appear more purist. It is the local vision thing that attracts him and a national spine would pollute the aspirations of all those local enthusiasts.
Let a thousand flowers bloom – or at least 70 or 80 – and if they can find a way of making it work when others so far have failed then the best of British.
Local democracy in action
There are two rather unfortunate social costs that flow from Hunt’s unreasonable enthusiasm for local television. Taking around £40 million from the licence fee to subsidise Hunt’s folly could end up damaging BBC local radio services as part of the 20% cost savings the Corporation must now find
How about halving the subsidy to local television? Conservatives should after all believe in reducing waste and the condition could be that the money saved would be used to boost much-valued BBC local radio services.
They are examples of the very thing Hunt most wants to achieve – local democracy in action.
The second potential cost could be borne by another medium that manifestly serves local communities and local democracy – the local newspaper industry – an industry that faces hard times.
Georgina Harvey, Newspaper Society president and managing director of Trinity Mirror Regionals, is beside herself with fury at Hunt’s suggestion that there is a local democracy deficit in the media.
What, she asks, does he think local newspapers have been doing for hundreds of years?
And to the extent that local television stations take any advertising revenue at all it will come from local newspapers.
The benefits of delay
So the best hope is that Jeremy Hunt has truly understood the benefits of delay in the political world. Sometimes the most intractable problems can go away if you just leave them long enough.
Refer BSkyB ownership to the Competition Commission and the share price of such a well-run business could keep on rising, so that the purchase price could become eye-watering, even for Rupert Murdoch.
As for local television that’s the other sort of delay. As in lost in the long grass delay.