Bbc

Thursday

The Spectator

Spectator letters: VAT and sugar, Boris Johnson and cricket, whisky and bagpipes

From our UK edition

Sugar added tax Sir: Julia Pickles (Letters, 14 June) suggests a sugar tax to combat the obesity epidemic and discourage food manufacturers from adding sugar to everything from bread to baked beans. A more realistic alternative might be to simply adjust the VAT rules: currently, VAT is levied on essentials such as loo paper, toothpaste and washing powder, presumably because they’re considered luxuries. Items such as breakfast cereals, however, are VAT-exempt, even though many are more than 30 per cent sugar and should really be in the confectionery aisles. Levying VAT on products with, say, more than 20 per cent added sugar and removing it from others could form a revenue-neutral policy for better health.

Monday

Steerpike

Is Lord Coe the ‘suitable candidate’ for the BBC Trust?

From our UK edition

Applications to become Chairman of the BBC Trust close on Friday. Plenty of noise was made early on the race about the need for a totally committed successor, after Chris Patten stood accused of not giving the £110,000 a year job his full attention. The official job specification published by the Cabinet Office stated: ‘The time commitment for the Trust Chairman has been 3-4 days per week (or 12-16 days per month).’ Late in the day though, a source familiar with the selection process points out that an additional sentence has been added to the advert: ‘However, suitable candidates able to offer a lesser time commitment will also be considered.’ That wasn't there when the job first went up. Intriguingly, BBC insiders refer to it as the 'Seb line'.

Thursday

Melanie McDonagh

We need to know much more about ISIS’s ‘British’ jihadists

From our UK edition

The social media exchanges of British jihadis in Syria and Iraq, as just revealed, are perfectly riveting, don’t you think? Fancy worrying about things like where to leave your luggage and internet connections when you’re a jihadi. There’s scope here for TripAdviser. But when it comes to jihadists from Britain, I’d rather like a bit more pertinent information about them than their currency exchange problems.

Igor Toronyi-Lalic

Jeremy Paxman’s last Newsnight made me want to be sick

From our UK edition

Did you threaten to overrule him, Paxman? Did you threaten to overrule your editor when he told you that he was going to let you finish your career in such an embarrassing fashion? Did you? Answer the question. Did you threaten to overrule him? Did you? DID YOU? You should have. A friend of mine admitted that he wept – wept! – as the credits rolled last night. I was split on the matter; weep or vomit, weep or vomit. If this had been a regular episode of Newsnight, Paxman would surely have been fired. The problem with last night is that it presumed that someone who is a genius at one very specific thing must also be a genius at everything else.

Wednesday

Tuesday

Igor Toronyi-Lalic

The BBC’s music strategy is a shambles

From our UK edition

Tony Hall made some terrible music announcements yesterday. They come hot on the heels of some terrible arts announcements he made a few months ago. Among the most lousy is the proposal to set up a music awards ceremony - because we don’t have enough of those. The suggestion is that the ceremony would become a rival to the BRIT Awards, with a focus on younger musicians and better music, which in principle sounds good until you realise it’ll be the BBC deciding the music and the musicians. He also hopes to ‘surprise audiences’ with ‘unexpected performances’. To do that he’s gone and bagged the BBC Concert Orchestra! I know! Exciting, eh, to know that Britain’s least respected orchestra will be involved in this celebration of great music.

Sunday

Rod Liddle

World Cup diary: I can’t take much more of the BBC’s coverage

From our UK edition

It takes quite a lot for me to feel even mildly sympathetic towards the French, but they had my support against the semi-reformed death squad of Honduras. One should not put too much store by the character of a country’s football team – but watching the way in which the Central Americans set about France, much as they had previously set about England, it did not wholly surprise one that the benighted mosquito-ravaged country has the highest murder rate in the world. Yes, including Iraq. Its murder rate is not far off double the next contenders (all of whom come from the Caribbean, natch). I’m writing this before Argentina’s game against Bosnia and Herzegovina; I don’t think I could bear to contemplate the Argies and the French winning on the same day.

Monday

Rod Liddle

Pesto’s got it: the BBC is too right-wing, obviously

From our UK edition

At last, someone has put their finger on the problem, got right down to the real nub of the issue. In an interview, the BBC’s Economics Editor Robert Peston, in a flash of brilliance, defined exactly what is wrong with the corporation - it’s way too right wing. Yes, yes, I know, you’ve been saying the same thing for years and thought nobody was listening. Well, maybe Robert was. Here he is... "If we [the BBC] think the Mail and Telegraph will lead with this [a story], we should. It's part of the culture." Next week, David Cameron reveals: “The problem with the Conservative Party is that we have way too few public school-educated people in positions of authority. It’s got to change.

Friday

Jacob Willer

Was Kenneth Clark wrong not to ‘understand’ the value of abstract art?

From our UK edition

Kenneth Clark's view of culture may by now be 'outmoded', but I was surprised to read that it was also 'narrow'. An exhibition at Tate Britain about Clark’s influence, Looking for Civilisation, and the BBC's threatening to remake the Civilisation TV series, have given rise to some depressing comment. Much mention is made of Clark's 'stiff' presenting style; he mostly stood in front of the camera, rather than walking to and from it as one must now. I assume we are being encouraged to take this as the sign of regrettably rigid thinking. But Clark knew where he stood. And that is at the root of the problem. 'I believe that order is better than chaos, creation is better than destruction. I prefer gentleness to violence.

Thursday

Matthew Stadlen

Nicola Benedetti interview: Bruch, boyfriends and Scottish independence

From our UK edition

On  18 September, the Scots will decide whether they want to become independent. But it is only a coincidence that Scotland’s most celebrated violinist is launching an album that brings together Scottish folk music, the tunes of Robert Burns and Max Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy. Nonetheless, I want to know where Nicola Benedetti stands on the most fundamental question the Scots have asked of themselves since the Act of Union in 1707. I’m  sitting opposite her in the west London flat she shares with her German cellist boyfriend Leonard Elschenbroich. The late morning light from the window is catching her rich brown hair and turning it blonde. Is she, I ask, excited about the Referendum? ‘No. Terrified. I’m terrified either way.

Thursday

Rod Liddle

Farzana Iqbal was murdered by Muslims applying ‘sharia’. Why does the BBC not report these facts?

From our UK edition

Farzana Iqbal, aged 25, was stoned to death by members of her family in broad daylight on the steps of a courthouse in Lahore, Pakistan, because she had married a man with whom she was in love. This was an “honour killing” and perpetrators use sharia law to justify their murders. Some 1,000 women are killed in this manner in Pakistan each year and an overwhelming majority of the population seems to be in favour of them. Some 91 per cent of honour killings worldwide are “Muslim on Muslim” crimes. In Pakistan, laws introduced in the 1970s, by Zia-ul-Haq, and based on punishments recommended in the Koran and Sunnah, mean that women have almost no recourse in law and the male members of the family can do with them as they will.

Jonathan Dimbleby

Jonathan Dimbleby’s notebook: In defence of Chris Patten

From our UK edition

I usually spend most of the week at home in South Devon in front of my computer. But for the past five days I have been on the rampage. Or to be precise, I’ve been in London. It is an easy journey by train when the track at Dawlish doesn’t fall into the sea. Some of my fellow travellers wonder why High Speed 2 warrants £50 billion when the whole of the West Country can be cut off so easily. They are unimpressed by the line that this investment won’t stop Network Rail giving Devonians and the newly free Cornish the best rail service in the world. But then they weren’t born yesterday. I was at the Chelsea Flower Show, where I can report that Middle England is alive and well and living in dreams.

Sunday

Melanie McDonagh

Now the BBC is censoring the word ‘girl’ – it really is in a different world

From our UK edition

It’s beyond parody, isn’t it? Mark Beaumont, a BBC presenter, has made a documentary about the Commonwealth Games and during the course of it he was filmed grappling with a judo champion. After he was sent crashing to the floor he said: 'I am not sure I can live that down - being beaten by a 19-year-old girl.' Mr Beaumont is 31. So inflammatory was the remark that though it was broadcast in full when the programme was broadcast in April, it was removed for the repeat, presumably lest, as the broadcaster Mariella Frostrup observed, the word might come across as 'dismissive'. I think we can assume that Mariella speaks for received opinion on these matters when she says 'the BBC has to consider the sensitivities of everyone who might be watching'.

Thursday

The Spectator

Spectator letters: America as a genetic experiment, and a gypsy reply to Rod Liddle

From our UK edition

The American experiment Sir: One can test Nicholas Wade’s hypothesis that social and political life is genetically determined (‘The genome of history’, 17 May) by constituting a nation along European lines, admitting immigrants from all over the world, and measuring the extent to which these immigrants assimilate to the dominant culture. That experiment is called the USA, and the evidence from that country suggests that within a generation or two these immigrants hold social opinions more like those of other Americans than natives of their ancestral countries. Cultural inheritance therefore outweighs genetic inheritance in the political sphere, and historians may rest easy.

Rod Liddle

I’ve had it with the insufferable London elite. Have you?

From our UK edition

'I’ve had it with these people. They are so smug; they think they know everything and they know nothing. They want a good kick in the face.' So said a close friend of mine, more usually a Labour voter, before she went out to vote for Ukip earlier today. I think it was the Jasmine Lawrence thing which tipped her over the edge. Jasmine is, improbably enough, the boss of the BBC’s News Channel. She had 'tweeted' that Ukip was a sexist and racist party - yesterday. Of course, she should be sacked. Right now. The BBC’s News Channel is supposedly impartial – that’s what we pay for, an impartial service. Either that or the BBC should accept that all of its employees possess political views and there is no problem in having them aired.

Steerpike

Why should the licence fee payer fund the BBC’s cultural imperialism?

From our UK edition

Picture the scene. BBC executives convene in a glass think pod in Salford to consider the latest expensive external report commissioned by Director of News James Harding. The report states that Auntie, despite its vast budget and massive staff, is ‘punching well below its weight in the digital world.’ That was what Sir Howard Stringer’s report, published today, found. The fact that Buzzfeed gets 10 million more pageviews than the Beeb every month seems to be a particularly sore point: ‘Given Buzzfeed, for example, was only founded in 2006, this raises the question of why the BBC’s global digital reach is not more significant. It is impossible to escape the conclusion that the BBC is punching well below its weight in the digital world.

Thursday

Martin Gayford

Why the BBC will never match Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation

From our UK edition

One afternoon in 1942, Kenneth Clark and his wife Jane called on two young painters for tea. The artists were John Craxton and Lucian Freud, then both around 20 and sharing a house in St John’s Wood. The visit was a success, as Craxton told me many years later, but not without its awkward moments. Jane Clark had to be headed off from helping in the kitchen, since the oven contained dead monkeys that were currently serving as models, placed there to restrict the smell. After consuming a flan cooked by Lucian’s mother and viewing the artists’ work, the Clarks decided to return to what Craxton described as ‘the Olympian heights of Upper Terrace House, Hampstead’, where they lived.

Rod Liddle

My application to be chairman of the BBC

From our UK edition

To: Karen Moran, HR Director, BBC Dear Ms Moran, I have decided to give up on the gardening this year, after a number of dispiriting setbacks. Last year I invested a fairly large amount of money, and about four hours per week, in trying to grow vegetables. But despite the fence and the pellets and the presence of a large plastic falcon called ‘Mr Roberts’, almost all of my crop was eaten by wild things. Woodpigeons, rabbits, caterpillars, slugs etc. I once saw a woodpigeon eating some of my kale while perched on Mr Roberts’s head, a terrible indignity for such a proud and fierce bird. In the end I had about 20 courgettes, and nobody in my family is fond of courgettes. So henceforth I will go to Morrisons for my vegetables, like I used to do.

Saturday

Camilla Swift

If you’re after equality, don’t show women’s football. Show Badminton.

From our UK edition

Over the next two days, one of the most important events in the British sporting calendar takes place. No, not the final day of the Premier League season. Badminton Horse Trials, obviously. This is one of only two annual horse trials in the UK (and six in the world) at which eventers compete at the top level. Oh, and one of the favourites to win is British. So of course the BBC is broadcasting it on one of their main channels, right? Wrong. During the London Olympics, equestrianism was one of the most popular sports on the BBC red button channel, with the freestyle musical dressage (aka horse dancing) in particular attracting a wide audience.

Thursday

Rod Liddle

Without Paxman, the BBC will have just one interrogator: John Humphrys

From our UK edition

In a double blow for the beleaguered BBC, the corporation has lost three of its most compelling attractions in little more than a month: the Newsnight presenter Jeremy Paxman, and Susanna Reid’s legs. Paxman has said he has had enough and announced his retirement from the thinly viewed current affairs programme. Susanna Reid’s legs have made their way over to ITV for its even more thinly viewed breakfast show called ‘Phwoar, Wake Up and Have a Look At This’ or whatever. The legs have attracted criticism for spending a substantial proportion of the show hidden from view under a desk while the rest of Susanna Reid jabbered about something with a slight smirk on her face in full view of the camera.