Has it really been fifty years?

"Jul 18  1969:
              Senator Edward Kennedy drives his car off of a bridge and into a
              tidal pool on Martha's Vineyard.  The 28 year old passenger Mary
              Jo Kopechne drowns in the car."

New president of the European Commission

Ursula von der Leyen, Angela Merkel's favoured candidate, scraped home in a 52%/48% (a familiar ratio!) secret ballot yesterday. On the face of it, this is another success for the EU in electing a person who had a life outside politics (she trained as a gynaecologist and also mothered seven children). Part of her education had been in London, at the LSE, where she is said to have enjoyed the more liberal atmosphere than in her native country. She had been plucked out of private life by Merkel in 2005 to head Germany's Ministry of Family Affairs. Both there and in a promotion to Labour and Social Affairs four years later she pushed an agenda of empowering women, and one can expect her to do the same in Brussels.

However, appearances can be deceptive. She spent "the first 13 years of her life in Brussels as the daughter of a high-level official at the European Union's predecessor institutions. Those formative years helped von der Leyen become fluent in English and French, in addition to her native German, and gave her confidence on the international stage. These were the characteristics the EU's 28 heads of state cited when they nominated her" (from Deutsche Welle's pen portrait). She also succumbed to "consultantitis" when she took her third government job, that of Minister of Defence. This was not her only shortcoming there, as DW points out.

My main concern is that she is an unapologetic advocate of a United States of Europe, an outdated concept in my opinion. Putting such a person in charge of the Commission will only encourage its centralising tendencies. Moreover, her record at the Ministry of Defence suggests that she will not keep a tight hold on the budget nor tackle the problem of tax avoidance left to her by Jean-Claude Juncker, the previous president who had arrived at his post via the finance ministry and then premiership of Luxembourg, which has benefited from being home to so many "brass-plate" companies. There are however checks built in to the EU constitution, the last two revisions of which gave more power to the European Parliament. The EP which has just been voted in shows signs of being the most lively yet - certainly much more liberal than the one it replaced - and I expect it to hold the Commission and its new president to account.

What governments have done to reduce greenhouse gases

On a Radio Wales phone-in programme this morning, I heard an apologist for the Welsh government declare that there was no need for the climate change demonstration in Cardiff because we in Wales were on the right track. Now, I am cynical enough to believe that these demos do nothing but enable a lot of ingenious young people to let off steam. In the current case, the aims are symbolic rather than practical: it costs nothing to make a declaration in parliament or to pass a law against the nebulous  ecocide. I also wonder how many travelled to the capital by car.

However, Labour in Wales are not blameless when it comes to perpetuating our addiction to fossil fuels. It is only six years since they weakened building regulations aimed at reducing carbon emissions by 40%. The Welsh NHS has continued to close local hospitals, increasing journey times for staff and patients alike. In spite of resistance from Education Secretary Kirsty Williams, small schools are going the same way. Parents, and more especially grandparents, need little enough excuse to drive children to school, adding to local pollution as well as to greenhouse gases. On top of this, this year there has been another round of cuts in bus services. Buses may rely on internal combustion engines (though there are promising hydrogen developments) but at least they reduce the fossil fuel consumption per person.

A small cheer for Transport for Wales, which is actually expanding public transport. There is also a programme for finally ridding ourselves of the inefficient Pacers by the end of this year. But don't get me started on Chris Grayling and the abandonment of electrification.

Trump trade policy counter-productive

Well, that worked well, didn't it? Part of President Trump's scheme to "make America great again" is applying trade sanctions to all and sundry, but especially China. The result has been not to reduce the deficit on trade with China, but to increase the trade gap. It has helped to dampen China's growth, though, with bad effects on the rest of the world. Does The Donald really want to go down in history as the US president who plunged the world into another Great Depression?

The UK will be the first nation to be dragged down, just as we were in the banking failures of 2007/8. The next prime minister will be closer to the current US administration than Mrs May. The only escape is via a general election, and soon.

Consumer protection: will there be compensation on top?

The European Parliament research service reports that:

Currently, consumer organisations or independent public bodies can bring actions in the name of consumers in courts or before administrative authorities to stop infringements of consumer legislation. According to the proposal, they would be able to demand compensation for consumers as well. While work on the proposal is ongoing in the Council, the European Parliament adopted its first-reading position on 26 March 2019. It added safeguards to protect companies against abusive litigation, and deleted a precondition that consumers should wait for a final injunction order establishing the existence of an infringement before being allowed to demand compensation.

Perry at the bar

As if in answer to my unspoken wish, the CBS Justice channel is reshowing the original Perry Mason series. This is what rescued Canadian Raymond Burr from playing heavies in films noirs, most notably in Hitchcock's Rear Window, launching him on a distinguished TV career which also took in Ironside. My recollection is of seeing Perry Mason over here on ABC-TV, one of the original commercial franchisees, in the late 1950s, though the show was later picked up by BBC.

CBS seems to have started the re-runs at series 6, when the producers (including Gardner himself) had long since run out of the Erle Stanley Gardner stories with which they started. The quality of the scripts is mixed and acting and production values are clearly compromised by a tight shooting schedule. On the other hand, the images and sound from the original 35mm film are amazingly sharp and clear. One wonders whether the film quality of series 1 to 5 is as good.

By this time also Ray Collins, a veteran from Orson Welles' Mercury Theater company who played police lieutenant Tragg, must have been ailing (he was to die in 1965) because he appears only briefly in one or two episodes but in the spirit of generosity which characterised productions with which Burr was involved, he continued to be credited throughout. The police leg-work was carried out by a new character, Lt. Andy Anderson, played by Wesley Lau. 

I am looking forward to the rest of the re-runs, if only to spot actors in bit parts who would later make their name in more starry rôles.

Make do and mend

I am grateful to CAT's Clean Slate magazine for the following excerpts from an article by the Rapid Transition Alliance.

In 2009 a Dutch journalist called Martine Postma ran an experiment in her home town of Amsterdam. She brought together a group of handy friends and ran what she called a 'Repair Café' - a free event where people could bring their broken belongings and volunteers would help to try and fix them. Following the huge popularity of the events in Amsterdam, Martine set up the Repair Café Foundation and published guidance to help other volunteers do the same in other places.

A decade later, there are 1,700 repair cafés offering their services in 35 countries around the world.

It has also inspired a BBC TV programme.

Will there be a real debate about BBC bias?

I recently received an email from the petitions office of the UK parliament:

Dear Frank Little,

You recently signed the petition _Public inquiry into the bias in the BBC_:

https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/234797

We want to hear about your experiences and views before petitions about the BBC are debated in Parliament on Monday 15 July at 4.30pm.

We learnt a lot from a recent online discussion about what petitioners think, and we'd now like to ask a few survey questions before the debate.  Your responses to this very short survey will also help to inform the debate. Click on this link to complete the survey:

https://www.smartsurvey.co.uk/s/A3Z54/

Unfortunately, the description of the survey was all too true. It asked two questions about the need for an independent high-quality source of news and a final yes/no query about retaining the licence fee.

It did not ask why I wanted to do away with the licence fee (answer: because it is in effect a regressive tax) nor what I would replace it with (a continental-style household levy linked to council tax and therefore more closely aligned with ability to pay).

I have been one of those critical of the boost to the referendum Leave vote which the BBC gave. To summarise my arguments: the BBC has never given the coverage to EU affairs which it has accorded to domestic politics, therefore leaving its viewers and listeners in ignorance about the benefits of membership; it has been obsessed with "personalities", in particular Nigel Farage, who have overwhelmingly mouthed a simplistic anti-EU message; and the only reports from the parliament on its main evening news bulletins have been those of confrontations, led more often than not by Farage. Satire programmes like Have I Got News For You provide no real counter-balance.

Other critics have suggested that there are direct (through the board of governors) and indirect (well-endowed lobbyists) conservative influences on the top of the BBC. I would give the BBC the benefit of the doubt and say that the trouble is that its news and current affairs set-up is too geared to tabloid journalistic standards. In my view, current affairs - rather than strict news-gathering - soaks up too much of the licence-payer's contribution. The recent publication of highest BBC salaries attests to this - and that list excludes "independent" providers like Andrew Neil's company. If programmes of commentary and analysis were done away with, it would go a long way to reducing the  accusations - from all colours of the political spectrum - of BBC bias. The trouble is that politicians like anything that gives them publicity and therefore are susceptible to the BBC's arguments for maintaining them.

There are signs that BBC News is reporting more and speculating less. Could it be anything to do with the fact that al-Jazeera has returned to non-HD Freeview? With the possible exception of US-based broadcasters, these must be the world's best media for news coverage and it is good that the average viewer is again learning about what is going on outside the M25 periphery. BBC has licence fee income and money from selling on its reports to support its worldwide network. Al-Jazeera is bankrolled by Qatar. Channel 4 News is good (even if its interviewers hector) but it can only highlight so many situations round the world.  It is a good time for the news junkie prepared to do a bit of channnel-switching. All three face threats. Let us hope they are kept at bay.