The Dangers of Dominance
In 1980, I brought my young family for the first time to New Zealand to visit my homeland for a holiday. At the time, I had recently lost my marginal seat in the House of Commons and was working in current affairs television.
One of my clearest memories of that enjoyable holiday was the shock of discovering how much New Zealand was in thrall to a powerful – not to say domineering – Prime Minister. Robert Muldoon was at the height of his powers – and, as a student of both politics and the media, I was amazed to observe the excessive deference with which he was treated by the New Zealand media.
I particularly remember seeing him being interviewed in a television studio. One camera showed the interviewer addressing a question to him, and a second focused on the Prime Minister who answered the question by speaking directly into the camera – and therefore directly to each individual viewer – thereby ignoring the interviewer altogether.
No self-respecting studio director would have allowed a politician to get away with this. A simple two-shot would have shown the Prime Minister looking ridiculous as he talked to an empty space – at right angles to the person with whom he was supposedly having a conversation.
Muldoon was of course unusual in his ability apparently to terrify colleagues and opponents alike. But, how do we fare in 2011, when we have a Prime Minister who is, by virtue of his constant presence in the media, in some ways equally dominant?
John Key is of course a very different personality from Robert Muldoon. He is by nature a conciliator and seeker of consensus. But – just because he is nicer – that does not mean that he does not in his own way pose an equally serious threat to a full reflection of what should be a serious political debate.
There are times when it seems that nothing can happen, either internationally or domestically, so far as our media are concerned, unless the Prime Minister is on hand to comment on it or otherwise certify by his presence that it is indeed news. He seems to serve the roles, variously, of national leader, moral guide, social commentator, sports journalist, pub drinking companion, comedian – and even politician. There is scarcely a television news bulletin which does not feature his appearance at some point in one or other of these roles.
New Zealand is of course a small country with nothing like the range of media enjoyed by a larger country like Britain. When I was a senior British politician, the number of media outlets was so large and their appetite for comment and interviews so voracious, that I would habitually do two or three significant interviews every day – and many more as an election approached.
We cannot hope to have the depth and coverage of news and analysis they provide. But New Zealand’s political media have compounded the problems arising from their small numbers and limited resources by treating the Prime Minister as virtually their sole determinant of what is news.
Surprisingly, it may seem, the Prime Minister’s own colleagues may be among those who share that concern. As the Herald pointed out last week, his Cabinet colleagues have difficulty in shining when the Prime Minister is constantly available to take over anything newsworthy from them.
The consequences for our political system are more extensive than may be thought. It is not just members of the government who suffer from being denied a voice in the media. In a properly functioning democracy, politicians from all sides need to feel that they have a well-tried and reliable way of getting heard.
If that access is available only occasionally, both sides of the transaction get used to doing without it. Expectations are lowered. Understandings of what might be newsworthy are adversely affected by both media and politicians. Those who find that they are not regarded as worth listening to give up trying.
My own experience in the year or two before a general election in Britain was that I would be involved almost daily in a press conference – not just commenting on the news but trying to set the agenda and make the news as well. Both media and politicians got used to this. The result was a rich and varied diet of political news and views that helped to promote a healthy political climate.
With three months to go before our own election, I look in vain for that kind of debate. The deficiency is likely to get worse during the World Cup. It is not good enough to say that opposition politicians are not heard because they have nothing to say. How do we know?
No one can blame John Key for using his charm and likeability to the best advantage. The concern is whether the media have become so used to it that they are now constrained by it as well.
No one needs persuading of John Key’s value to his party and government, and it is inevitable and right that he should play a major part. But a strong and effective government needs more than a single foundation stone. The Prime Minister’s dominance, paradoxically, weakens his government and – by constraining the scope of the political debate – diminishes our democracy as well.
Bryan Gould
27 August 2011
This article was published in the NZ Herald on 30 August.
Rupert and the Rioters
Rupert Murdoch and his News International have good reason to be grateful to the rioters. They were able to drop out of the headlines themselves, for a time at least, and to report on others making the news for a change.
But their respite was short-lived. The apparently incontrovertible and growing evidence of cover-up and dishonesty has compounded the outrage felt at the phone-hacking revelations. They now find themselves – with the publication of Clive Goodman’s letter – back in centre stage.
It is perhaps appropriate that they should share double billing at this point with the rioters. Perhaps the one issue is linked with the other? The search is on, after all, for an explanation of what may otherwise seem inexplicable – how could young people act with such an absence of any decent impulse? Without any thought for damage they were doing to the society in which they lived?
The Prime Minister, no less, opines that parts of English society are “broken” and has declared a social “fightback”; but fighting back will be ineffective if the enemy remains unidentified. Punishing individual rioters may be necessary and unavoidable, but that in itself will do little to drill down into the real causes of social breakdown.
At this point, step forward Rupert Murdoch and News international. Here, after all, are those who –through their power in the media – have arguably done more than any others to shape our society over recent decades.
We now have a fairly accurate idea of the values and principles they have brought to that task – the evidence provided by what we now know about their own disreputable business practices. We know that they have little regard for legality or honesty, that they feel contempt for those they report on, and that they will use their power to threaten or cajole when challenged.
They purport to hold up a mirror to society, to show people how they and others – their neighbours, their workmates – actually behave. But the mirror has been distorted. They have, in an effort to shock and titillate so as to sell more of their product, pushed back the boundaries of what is regarded as acceptable. They show, not what most people think or do, but what those at margins of society get up to – and the more outrageous the better.
Underpinning this distortion of what is normal and responsible is the cult of celebrity. The constantly repeated and largely subliminal message is that, however despicable the behaviour, it is to be excused and even celebrated if the perpetrator is featured in the headlines. Celebrity cures all. Fame and money are all that matter.
The result is that young people in particular are left without a moral compass. Sexuality is a commodity and selling agent. Money is the greatest desideratum, however it is acquired. Those who deserve to be admired and emulated are those whose success is measured by how much they have been able to grab, even – and especially – when it is at the expense of others. In all of this, the personal mantra of the News International proprietors is faithfully reflected.
The Murdoch media have been major influences in creating a debased popular culture. The old social virtues of mutual support, helping one’s neighbour, have been supplanted. Little wonder that young people, with little life experience and nothing much by way of role-models to emulate or moral guidance to follow, have been especially susceptible to the message delivered to them unremittingly by the Murdoch media.
There are of course other contenders to shoulder the major responsibility for social breakdown. Among the leading candidates would have to be the development in a recessionary climate of an economy in which unskilled labour no longer has a part to play.
Give or take the odd millionaire’s daughter who popped up like manna from heaven for the headline writers, the young people who took their chance in the riots (manipulated no doubt by social media-savvy fomenters of trouble) saw no future for themselves because they knew they had been dismissed as worthless by the rest of society. They reasoned that grabbing what they could when the moment arrived was just the kind of behaviour that would be rewarded not just with material gain but with a brief and local celebrity.
So, when David Cameron launches his fightback, why not look for starters at the role of Murdoch media which have been allowed – by exploiting their power with the benevolent connivance of successive governments – to exercise a disproportionate and malign influence on our young people?
Bryan Gould
18 August 2011
England’s HaKa – the HoKey-CoKey
The England rugby team are on track to complete their preparations for the Rugby World Cup according to the plan laid down by coach, Martin Johnson.
England’s warm–up games have not so far shown the sort of form that suggests that they are real contenders for the title, but Johnson declares himself satisfied with where they are.
“We are what we are, and we must work with what we have,” Johnson says. But he acknowledges that a change of identity is an important part of the plan.
“The first step in the plan has been achieved,” he says. “The players are getting used to the black uniform, and no longer cringe with embarrassment when they put on the black jersey. We have encouraged the team to wear the black jersey in a wide range of situations – in bed, going to the supermarket, joining in riots, so that they cease to think of it as anything out of the ordinary. They now have some sense of what it feels like to be in a team with a better than 75% win rate over 106 years.”
Johnson agrees that many members of his squad were World Cup winners eight years ago. “Advancing age is an insidious condition, though,” he says, “and memories have faded over the years. Most of those players remember nothing other than that the way to win is to do nothing until the last minute and then give the ball to Johnny to drop a goal. We needed some way of reviving memories for the players who have difficulty remembering 2003 of what it means to be in a world-class team.”
England have worked hard to change the composition of the team – again with a view to updating its identity. “We have to move on from 2003,” he says, “and we need to introduce new – that is to say, non-English elements – into the team.”
“We have worked hard to ensure that a high proportion of the players introduced since 2003 are not English. This seems to us to be our best bet for matching what overseas teams are able to achieve.”
“In particular, I have been keen to put anyone with a vaguely Polynesian name and/or appearance straight into the team. It all helps to create the illusion for the players that might be able to play as well as Samoa.”
Johnson revealed that there are still some tricks up his sleeve. “We will require team members, including the non-Polynesian minority, to acquire tattoos before the World Cup.” He rejected suggestions that being tattooed was a long, arduous, and exhausting process. “In line with our approach that it is perception rather than reality that matters, we have purchased a high-quality range of transfers that players can choose from the night before a match. Players can choose from a wide range of options, including “Kiss me quick” and “My old man’s a dustman.”
Johnson was unwilling, however, to say much about what we understand is regarded by England’s management as potentially the coup de grace. We are led to believe that England are concerned at the advantage that they see the All Blacks as gaining from the haka. Work is well advanced on an English equivalent – something that will intimidate opponents and gain a psychological advantage for England.
Johnson was dismissive of earlier efforts made by other teams to match the haka. In particular, he poked fun at the Australian use of Waltzing Matilda in trans-Tasman matches. “No one is going to be too terrified of a single guy strumming a guitar and singing a song about a dancing sheila,” he scoffed.
We understand that the first effort at an English haka focused on the Morris dance. After several practices in secret, however, this idea was junked. “The tinkling bells, pretty ribbons, and skipping steps didn’t quite do it,” according to one well-placed observer (thought to be Steve Thompson who, it is reported, didn’t feel that it was quite him), “and it took us twenty minutes to change out of our gear when we had finished and into the black uniform.”
We understand on good authority that the current plan is to do the hokey-cokey. “Performed by large men, singing loudly and scowling, it will, we think, produce the right effect,” says the same well-placed authority. “Putting your left leg in and then your left leg out in unison can seem very impressive and intimidating. And, like the haka, it has a cultural history that makes it a real statement of English resolve.”
More work is needed however. It seems that the front-row are having difficulty in distinguishing their left legs from their right legs. Martin Johnson, though, is not deterred. “If the team can get this difficult technical exercise right, then the World Cup should be a piece of cake.”
Bryan Gould
16 August 2011
Austerity or Jobs?
Two issues – the turmoil on world stock markets, and the riots in English cities – have dominated news bulletins over recent days. Each is a significant news story in its own right, but the interesting question is whether they are in any way linked.
What looks suspiciously like the global financial crisis, Part II, is widely reported as a problem of government debt. Those many governments that have identified debt reduction as their top priority have seen the renewed crisis as vindicating their analysis. In reality, however, what it demonstrates is that they have got it completely wrong.
No one doubts that government debt in the US, the UK and the eurozone is higher than it should be and is a drag on economic recovery. Debt arises, however, because spending has outpaced revenue. As a matter of logic, therefore, there are two (and not necessarily mutually exclusive) ways of remedying the situation.
Governments can choose to focus on cutting spending, or they can try to increase revenue. These further economic shocks show that, in focusing exclusively on cutting spending, they have made the wrong choice.
The problem is that the level of debt is a function of the level of economic activity; the higher the level of economic activity, the more buoyant the government’s tax revenue. A government that has trouble in balancing its books in a recession, and that seeks to deal with that issue exclusively by cutting its spending, necessarily reduces the level of economic activity and – by depressing its tax revenue – makes the debt problem more difficult to resolve.
Sadly, we have seen, in the economies that have spawned the current crisis, extreme examples of this error. In the US, the Republican majority in the House of Representatives has been wagged by the Tea Party tail, with the result that the usually technical issue of raising the government’s debt ceiling became an issue of moral probity.
The Republicans not only resisted any increase in the government’s ability to borrow but refused to countenance any reversal of the tax concessions that George W. Bush made to the super-rich. A refusal to allow any tax increase, and an insistence on massive spending cuts in the short term – while the economy is still in recession – have rightly been seen by the credit rating agencies as a cause for concern.
In Europe, the problems are more structural. The eurozone lured into its membership smaller and weaker economies – and some not so small – that could not hope to live with monetary conditions established to suit the interests of the dominant German economy. Those countries were lulled into a false sense of security when money and credit were plentiful; but – come the recession – they are now denied the usual remedy of devaluing their currencies. The only course open to them is savage cuts and austerity.
The problem with austerity as a supposed remedy is that closing economies down in an effort to cut spending means that they cannot hope to repay the massive further borrowing they need just to keep their heads above water. Little wonder that European banks look nervously at the probably worthless securities they hold from deficit countries, that bank failures are now seen as a grim possibility, and that contagion threatens to spread not only throughout the eurozone but across the global economy.
The problem is less stark in the UK, which sensibly stayed out of the eurozone. In the British case, however, the damage is self-inflicted. The coalition government, elected last year, has insisted that giving priority to savage cuts in spending will give confidence to the money markets, a view thoroughly discredited by the US and eurozone experience, and – as the “confidence fairy” fails to materialise – by the increasingly obvious failure of the British economy to recover from recession.
The only fairy that has made its presence felt has been a very wicked one indeed. The recession – and, in particular, rising levels of poverty, high levels of youth unemployment, severe reductions in post-compulsory educational opportunities, and sharp increases in public sector rents – has certainly played its part in creating the conditions for last week’s shameful riots.
Each of the many thousands of individual acts of criminality should of course be condemned and punished. But it is pointless and wrong to ignore the fact that riots on this scale are a social phenomenon. Many of us will have been bewildered by the absence – in the television pictures broadcast around the world – of any decent impulse, any sense of social responsibility.
But the young people who behaved like a feral rat pack feel that they owe very little to a society that has banished them to its extreme margins and that treats them as worthless. This is not a question of making excuses, but an attempt to find an explanation for what is otherwise inexplicable to most people.
And before we bless our own good fortune in New Zealand, let us recognise that many of these conditions apply here as well. We have a government that talks of nothing but deficit reduction while the developed world’s worst youth unemployment is allowed to fester. Like misguided governments overseas, given the choice between austerity and jobs, we have made the wrong choice.
Bryan Gould
This article was published in the NZ Herald on 15 August.
GFC Part II
The collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 ushered in the global financial crisis, and seemed to bring an era to an end. The orthodoxy that had prevailed for thirty years crumbled overnight. Markets, it was realised, are not infallible and self-correcting; private business skills and disciplines are quite different from those needed to run a whole economy; governments are not obstacles to economic development but its indispensable guarantor.
Suddenly, lifelong sceptics sought salvation in Keynesian prescriptions, for fear that the crisis would turn into full-scale depression. The taxpayer shelled out billions to save the global economy from total collapse.
The prescriptions worked. The depression was averted. The banking system was shored up. We lived to fight another day.
But the stimulus to make good the sudden collapse in global liquidity took us only so far. It was enough to steady the ship but not enough to prevent the vessel from foundering in the longer term.
Most of the taxpayers’ money went directly to the banking sector where it was used to re-build balance sheets and resume the payment of large bonuses. Surprisingly little went to re-build the economy, with the result that employment, investment and production continue to languish. But it was not only the banks that were keen to return to business as usual.
The global establishment quickly – and without waiting for the recession to be over – put Keynes’ General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money back on the shelf. In a surprisingly short time, the old orthodoxies were re-asserted.
Paradoxically, the main lesson drawn from a crisis that had been created by private sector failure and averted only by government intervention was that the role of government should be wound back. It was constantly asserted that governments should behave like private individuals or companies and must cut back their spending, irrespective of the deflationary impact on economies still struggling with recession.
The Keynesian lesson that governments have a responsibility for the economy as a whole and not just for their own finances was quickly forgotten. While some economies – like China and, on the back of a mineral commodity boom, Australia – continued to prosper, most others plunged willingly into austerity programmes that, in effect, closed down their economies.
The theory was that austerity was needed in order to preserve credit ratings and to reduce the need to borrow. The money markets, it was calculated – the same money markets that had created the crisis in the first place – had to be placated. If they did not have confidence that deficits would be reduced, they would be less willing to lend.
But, like most fairies, the “confidence fairy” has failed to materialise. Despite doing what the money markets are assumed to want, economies continue to languish. Austerity continues to do its depressing work and remains the order of the day.
In Europe, countries like the UK press headlong on into austerity programmes, even while the economy is stalling and less ideologically committed commentators look in vain for anything that might bring the recession to an end.
The financial crisis in Europe is of course exacerbated by the disaster that is the eurozone – a project that subjects weaker economies to monetary conditions that are dictated by much stronger economies, that denies to them the usual escape route of devaluing the currency, and therefore requires them to deflate savagely so that they are less and less able to afford – let alone repay – the huge borrowings that are needed simply to keep them afloat.
How is debt to be repaid and deficits reduced by economies that are going backwards? Can we be surprised that the world economy is increasingly threatened as the contagion spreads from Greece, Portugal, Ireland, and Spain to a growing group that includes Italy, Belgium and possibly others?
The picture is equally depressing in the United States. An expensive but only partial stimulus programme slowed down but did not solve the crisis. Unemployment continues at a high level and the recession persists, yet – reflecting an almost religious zeal – a minority of legislators has ignored those pressing problems and artificially elevated the raising of the government’s debt ceiling into the USA’s number one economic problem. The consequent US credit downgrade leaves the real problems more intractable than ever.
Almost everywhere we look, in other words, policy-makers seem determined to ensure that the conditions for recovery are displaced by the requirements of a failed ideology. Can we wonder that even the architects of these errors, as they survey the results of their handiwork, have lost confidence in the outcomes, and that another round of crisis is threatened?
We in New Zealand will of course be directly affected if the global financial crisis is given a new lease of life. It may be thought that there is little we can do to influence the situation. But we cannot escape responsibility for making our own small contribution to the general malaise.
We have – like so many others – treated unemployment, investment and productivity levels as of little importance and denied that government has any responsibility for them. We have eschewed intervention and treated the reduction in a modest government deficit as our over-riding priority. By placing ideology above common sense, we have played our own small part in prolonging an avoidable disaster.
Bryan Gould
7 August 2011