Honi Soit Qui Mal Y Pense

Recently a Gfk NOP survey of a thousand people commissioned by the historian Peter Hennessy on behalf of the BBC’s Radio 4 Today programme suggested that almost eighty percent of British people still believe in our Monarchy.

As with all opinion polls, exactly which questions are asked and how they are presented (in this case by telephone) is of paramount importance in ascertaining whether a survey is of any justifiable significance.

Unfortunately however, it would appear that the data for this latest poll on the Monarchy commissioned for the BBC seems to still be held privately with no indication of whether it will become publicly available in the future.

In any case, at face value I think we can safely presume that this survey confirms what most people already knew; that the Monarchy is still popular in Britain among the general public - though certainly not among our governing elites, grandees and the liberal media.

The poll comes, not by accident, at a time when Her Majesty recently made history by surpassing Queen Victoria as the longest serving British Monarch, and also coincides with the annual release of the Royal accounts officially detailing precisely how much the Monarchy has cost the taxpayer.

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War Weariness

Does public opinion affect the focus and judgement of media coverage, or ultimately is it the other way around and do the newspapers largely influence what people believe?

It is an interesting question, and personally I am more inclined to believe that it’s the latter – that the print and broadcast media can and do often sway the beliefs of the general populace.

Take the report delivered by US General David Petraeus in Washington this morning on the effectiveness of the military troop surge implemented by President Bush. In his report General Petraeus commented that the objectives of the surge were largely being fulfilled, though further time would be needed for a better analysis.

I must say, in depth the report did not particularly interest me, as is no doubt the case for many other people. What was of interest was not necessarily facts and figures, but the overall picture that was painted. Was the surge working: yes or no? The answer seemed to be yes, it was.

Yet, as I watched the broadcast media’s coverage on General Petraeus’ report; that of Sky, ITV and the BBC, I was left with the distinct impression that even before it had been delivered, the journalists had set out to find fault with it from the beginning and to claim that it ‘did not represent the situation on the ground’, as one ITV reporter put it, because it did not fit their world view.

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When Asylum Seekers Escape

I was listening to Five Live radio in the car this afternoon. They were reporting on how a total of twenty six asylum seekers had escaped from a detention centre in Oxfordshire.

I cannot imagine that the government centre puts much effort into keeping its occupants under lock and key, and the fact that so many have escaped from that centre in recent months is testament to that.

Five Live interviewed a local man who lived close by to the centre over the phone about how he had apprehended one of the escapees in his back garden. The man went on to tell them that this was the third time it had happened recently, and said he would not be surprised if it happened again.

The man then expressed the view that those in the Asylum centre should be sent back to where they came from if their application had been failed, and that in not doing so the Government was costing taxpayers in this country a large sum of money to pay for the Asylum seeker’s constant upkeep in a centre which they continued to trash.

Needless to say, he was cut off very quickly by the BBC after those honest comments.

We’ve Heard It All Before

Director General of the BBC, Mark Thompson, was interviewed yesterday by ITV News and asked why he would not resign over revelations that the BBC had actively deceived the public in faked competition phone-ins.

His response stated that he would not be standing down because he wished to help re-establish the BBC’s code of conduct throughout the whole corporation, and that he had the full confidence of the BBC Board in this undertaking.

Where have we heard something similar to this before? Ah yes, that’s right, it’s exactly the same type of response elicited from Labour Ministers Charles Clarke and John Reid after successive Home Office scandals. They created or had a hand in the scandal and then claimed to be the solution to fix it. How convenient.

Well, it didn’t work out in the end for either Charles Clarke or John Reid, and I hope that it doesn’t for Mark Thompson either. However, if Thompson goes, the BBC Board will only bring in another equally inept individual who won’t do anything but persist with the biased status-quo of a corporation who continue to take the license fee far too much for granted, and with little regard for those who pay it.

Mark Thompson said that the BBC’s latest problem was down to only a small number of individual staff who did not take fairness, integrity and honesty to heart. But, in reality the BBC itself is the problem – not just any one part of it. The whole corporation is an unaccountable and uncontrollable mess, and until it is abolished or privatised the problems will only grow.