The Obscurer

Wednesday 20th February 2008

Rah Rah For Randall

Last year I was going to write a post prompted by this Daily Telegraph article from Jeff Randall, the ex-Business Editor of the BBC, where he criticised his former employer for the profusion of useless timeservers at the corporation. Well he should know, I was going to say; how ironic that during his period at the BBC I found him to be such an utter waste of space. I could only imagine what talented journalists such as Evan Davis, Stephanie Flanders and Paul Mason must have thought working alongside someone so woeful. But with so much wrong in this world, and having already written one post slagging the man off, I decided a second was hardly required and so I binned it.

I’m still sure that decision was correct, but recently I have read a good number of posts and comments around the place that, when legitimately criticising the BBC’s business coverage, have spoken wistfully of the Jeff Randall era. Such instances are rare but still they haunt me (I’m easily spooked) and they are a disturbing development. For example take Guido (via Gracchii) who, in one of those posts that suggests he really should just stick to the gossip, criticises Newsnight and Stephanie Flanders because of what appears to be a simple transposing error when reporting the markets; he then finishes his post by pointedly noting that “Jeff Randall is on Sky…“, as is his style.

Well I read that as an invitation, so this week I decided to check out Jeff at his new televisual home, Jeff Randall Live on Sky News. Much water has gone under the bridge since I last clapped eyes on the fellow, and I wondered if perhaps I had been a bit harsh in my appraisal of his talents, that maybe Guido’s implication is right and that he and others have seen something I have not, and that Jeff is a far better journalist that I have hitherto given him credit for.

But oh dear no, it is all still there; Jeff still has the air of someone slightly puzzled, who is trying really hard but is not at all sure quite where he is. When he talks it seems less like he is speaking his brains than he is conducting someone else’s thoughts. Okay, but that’s just presentation, and while it doesn’t breed confidence or suggest Jeff has a mastery of his subject he may still know his stuff, even if he gives every impression that he doesn’t.

But there is more to it than that. In his BBC days Jeff’s role was to answer questions put to him by the presenter, whereupon he would typically appear clueless and flounder around for a bit, unquestioningly trotting out some received wisdom lacking in any supporting evidence, or drawing lazy and false conclusions; I particularly remember him trying to illustrate Leeds United’s financial problems by comparing its turnover against Manchester United’s, which is idiotic. Fortunately Jeff is now spared all that indignity, being both the presenter and interviewer for his own programme, and presumably fed his lines by autocue and earpiece; but still all is not well. He is a very poor interrogator for one thing, his technique apparantly being to lob the obvious and most contentious question first – the one the interviewee will be well rehearsed for – and to then fail to follow it up, plodding on to the next question regardless and making little attempt to react to and engage with whatever the other party has actually said. The result is that he allows the interviewee to speechify, to in effect be allowed to get away with delivering a PR monologue without any fear of being picked up on any of the specifics. In all it doesn’t feel like he is conducting an interview, he may as well be running through a questionnaire.

So yesterday we had David Greene of the law firm representing around 6000 of Northern Rock’s shareholders who reasoned that the government could recompense each shareholder to the value of £4 per share of their worthless stock, a statement that went entirely unchallenged by Jeff. His “interview” with Mike Turner of BAe Systems was even worse, allowing Turner to respond to the obligatory question about the company’s contentious links with Saudi Arabia by sighing, shrugging his shoulders and wondering aloud about what a cruel and unfair world we live in where people can’t just leave his great British company alone, as if concern about the Serious Fraud Office investigation into the Al Yamamah deal and the political interference that brought it to a halt was just an example of the tall poppy syndrome, sour grapes and a sadly regretable lack of patriotism. It was all pretty pathetic.

Now I have nothing against Jeff personally, he is only doing his best bless him, but had I read some of these recent criticisms of the BBC’s business coverage during his tenure I may have entirely agreed, but cited Jeff as a perfect example; so how can you explain his fine reputation among the same folk? Clearly I’ve not watched every report or read every article Jeff has ever produced, and it is possible, though barely plausible, that I have been uniquely unfortunate in my exposure to the bloke; this could merely be a difference of opinion between Jeff’s cheerleaders and myself and there’s no accounting for taste. Maybe it is all down to his supporters taking a dim view of Jeff’s replacement, Robert Peston, who is himself no great shakes; it may be a straightforward case of absence making the heart grow fonder. But just perhaps, could it be the very fact that Jeff has spent much of his post-BBC career regularly criticising the corporation he used to work for that has so endeared him to some? Not for me to say, but whatever the reason the solution is simple; should anyone praise Jeff’s journalistic abilities I will just point them in the direction of his Sky News show and leave it at that. Nothing more will be required, and I never need write about him again.

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Monday 18th February 2008

Kosovo Rocks!

PRISTINA AND BELGRADE [Reuters] – As word spread of the momentous event that had occurred, the streets of Serbia and its would-be independent province of Kosovo thronged with people, many anxious to speak of their reaction to the news. While opinions diverged greatly, numerous Serbs and ethnic-Albanians collared any foreign journalist they could find, desperate for others to know how they felt about the historic decision.

In Belgrade, Nebojsa Pejovic, a 43-year-old Serbian accountant spoke for many when he said, “After what seems like an age of dither and delay we have ended up with this dreadful, catastrophic decision. This really is the worst of all possible outcomes. We now have the situation where the government will be making decisions on whether or not to foreclose on people’s loans in a falling housing market, and the taxpayer will bear the full risk of lending 100 billion pounds of mortgages in an uncertain housing market. This is the day when Labour’s reputation for economic competence died.”

Meanwhile in Pristina the view was more upbeat. “It has been a long, long road”, beamed a jubilant Beqir Ademi, a 21-year-old ethnic-Albanian student, “but belatedly the government has made the right decision. The first priority must be to work out the seriousness of the problems at the bank with an independent audit of its loan book. This must be conducted under the auspices of the Bank of England, not the FSA. Then the bank must stop irresponsible lending at more than the value of property, and aggressive deposit-taking. Finally, there will be difficult times ahead, especially for the employees, as the bank is downsized. However, there is now real hope for the long-term future of the bank when it is eventually sold in more satisfactory conditions.”

Fellow Kosovo Albanian Besmir Peci, a 38-year-old council worker, was typically delighted at the news but did have concerns for the future. “Nationalisation is better than the bank going to a consortium such as Virgin, which would make huge profits on the back of taxpayers, but the people I am really sorry for are all the bank’s original savers and all those who looked at their shares as some kind of nest egg, when they will be worth nothing now. But hopefully Northern Rock will now cease to be of quite such general interest and can move forward into a more stable and calmer environment than that which we’ve had for the last few weeks or months. I hope it’s nationalisation with a purpose and what we will need to see over a fairly short period of time is a plan of how to run the bank for the time being and also a plan for its future.”

While fireworks greeted the news in Pristina the mood was more downbeat in Belgrade, but there were few of the ugly scenes many had feared and predicted. In one isolated incident a stone-throwing mob of a few hundred, angry at what they saw as the weak regulatory regime that had allowed the original bank run to take place in September, set about attacking the nearest office of the FSA, but mistakenly targeted the embassy of the USA instead. The error was probably down to some confusion over the Cyrillic alphabet or something, I reckon.

Wednesday 13th February 2008

Silence Kid

Prior to Sunday’s derby match there were a number of people who were certain that the minute’s silence in memory of the Munich air disaster would pass off uninterrupted. Whether this belief was out of genuine optimism or just wishful thinking I cannot say, but what I can say is that they were right and I was wrong. I was always of the pessimistic “it takes one idiot” school of thought; or rather it takes one to shout “Munich”, a second to respond with “show some fucking respect”, and a third to continue the snowball from there. I didn’t fancy the look of the law of averages on this one, and so while I could appreciate why United believed so strongly that a minute’s silence was the most appropriate way to mark the tragedy I was just as certain they simply weren’t going to get it, and that some sort of compromise should have been worked out; but I was wonderfully mistaken, and the silence was indeed a suitable and fitting memorial.

In the event such was my concern that I even absented myself from the country during the match, but I still watched it unfold on the TV while sat in the Blue Bell Inn, Conwy, in the shadows of the castle (and literally in the shadows, thanks to the gloriously unseasonal blazing sunshine) as my wife and I shushed the children and I waited nervously for the first numbskull to pipe up and break the silence; but it never happened and after the minute was up I heaved a sigh of relief.

So to the match, and I followed it as best I could while eating my own lunch and trying to cajole two children into eating theirs. I was one of the few to cheer when Vassell and Benjani scored, but I have no idea how the pub reacted to Carrick’s consolation goal. I left at half-time to explore the castle, strangely confident that our defence would be able to withstand United for a further 45 minutes, and so it proved. As the minutes ticked by and my mobile failed to buzz with a goal flash I began bounding around the turrets and ramparts until word came of the final whistle. What a perfect day.

We shouldn’t get carried away though; there will have been some in the crowd at Old Trafford who will have sung Munich songs before, and no doubt will do again. I can take a certain pride in the behaviour of the City fans on the day, but if a few had let the majority down that wouldn’t have been a reason to tar all Blues with the same brush, and so let’s not go overboard with praise either. For whatever reason, be it because of the threats from the club, the desire to show themselves in a good light, or because they wanted to commemorate the passing of Frank Swift, the morons kept their heads down. None of these incentives should have been required, all that was needed under the circumstances was for people to act like decent human being; but not everybody is, and anything that helped contribute to the silence being so successfully observed I am very grateful for.

Of course it is never enough for some; my erstwhile colleague Danny Pugsley pointed me in the direction of the Red Issue forum, which along with this report and no doubt the 6-0-6 message-board shows some Reds remarking that while “they” may have managed to shut up for sixty seconds, “they” have otherwise been singing about Munich for fifty years. “They”, as far as many of the commentators on the forum are concerned, are all City fans, variously known as knobheads, scum, fuckers, vermin, cunts, twats and so on. A curious bunch those forum members are to be sure, to act so indignantly and to assume the moral high ground, to accuse others of being bitter; certainly they seem wholly unsuited for the role. But whatever they may say and whatever they may call themselves they have nothing in common with the many reasonable United fans I know; the forum lot are merely nincompoops, representative only of that cretinous minority of football supporters that all clubs attract to some degree, and just the sort of fans who would happily join in with the Munich chants were it not for the fact that they consider themselves to be Reds.

Wednesday 13th February 2008

Pump It Up (When You Don't Really Need It?)

The BBC managed to get awfully excited by yesterday’s inflation figures; both Five Live and Newsnight led on the news that the Consumer Price Index had risen, from 2.1% to 2.2%, while the more widely trusted Retail Price Index had also gone up, from 4% to 4.1%. Cue doom and gloom all round.

But is that it? Inflation up by 0.1%, leaving the CPI at just 0.2% over the government’s target? If the inflation rate had risen by any less it wouldn’t have risen at all. Jackie Long on Newsnight preceded her report by stating, “in some ways, today’s official inflation figure could have been read as a bit of good news”. “But we decided to run with the story anyway”, I interjected, finishing her sentence for her. And fair enough; no doubt the guests were booked in the studio, the bulk of the report had been filmed, and we don’t want to be wasteful when there are some potentially straitened times ahead.

I don’t want to sound complacent, I appreciate that the economy is in a tricky position just now, and that while inflation, unemployment and interest rates are still historically very low there are storm clouds on the horizon, with concerns over commodity prices, the knock-on effect of the slowdown in the US, and the amount of personal debt in the UK economy; but still, talk about talking ourselves into a recession before it has even happened.

There are a couple of things I could do with being answered, though, by anyone out there with the requisite knowledge. Whilst I acknowledge that the state of the public finances is a concern in itself, what is all this talk bemoaning the way it is restricting our ability to use fiscal policy? For years monetarists have told us that we shouldn’t use fiscal policy at all, even if we are in a position to do so. That always seemed a bit daft to me; after all, changes in taxation have a fiscal effect even if you don’t want them to. Now, however, not only is fiscal policy seen as desirable but almost magical, as if any tax cuts or increases in public spending will only have the wished for effect in stimulating demand without adding to the inflationary pressures that are already a worry and inherent in the world economy. So what’s going on there?

Secondly, if part of the concern at the moment is the high level of personal debt and the bubble in the housing market, themselves a consequence of the low interest rates we have enjoyed for so long, is it really a good idea to cut interest rates still further in response? Isn’t that a bit like reacting to the sight of an over-inflated tyre that is leaking air and looks as if it is about to burst by pumping in even more air, when really we should be looking at releasing some of the pressure through the valve? In other words, rather than calling for a frantic cutting of interest rates and considering fiscal stimulus packages, shouldn’t we just accept that a slowdown will have to happen at some time, that it may well be happening now, and that rather than strive to prevent it or delay it just so it can wreak even more havoc another day we should prepare for a downturn, perhaps even for some sort of recession, and we should be putting our efforts into engineering as soft a landing as possible?

Or have I just demonstrated why my career in economics stalled abruptly on my graduation day?

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Friday 8th February 2008

A Penny For The Old Guy

A couple of years ago, when talking about Guido Fawkes and his role (or lack of it) in Mark Oaten’s withdrawal from that month’s Lib Dem leadership race, I signed off by saying that “with luck our paths won’t cross again”. Well, no such luck unfortunately, and while I would love to take DonaldS’s advice and “just ignore him”, that is easier said than done if you read many of the blogs I do. It can be just as hard to escape Guido elsewhere, be it making a tit of himself on Newsnight, or being credited by Dianne Abbot on This Week with breaking the story that brought down Peter Hain (true, if by “breaking a story” you mean adding a footnote to something the media had been running with for days.)

Guido is at best a knob, someone who ruthlessly hunts down political scandal by regularly checking his in box and tossing his newfound trivia and hearsay the way of the world wide web, all the while dressing up his gossip-mongering as some sort of libertarian master plan to bring down the political class. Well, he had to do something when the serious projects where he masqueraded under his real name such as Global Growth went nowhere. Alongside his failure to break the Hain story, Guido’s successes include the aforementioned erroneous claim regarding Oaten (which only works if you equate paedophilia with homosexuality), something about a love-child triangle amongst some journalists that is of no interest to anyone other than the individuals involved, and his revelation that John Prescott shags around a bit. If that latter story were an attempt to undermine politicians and show them as a separate class of “others” then I would consider it a failure, adultery being a fairly common human fallibility. Certainly Guido’s muckraking doesn’t have the desired effect on me; reading his blog and the comments therein usually makes me sympathise with a group of people I otherwise have little time for. Far from destroying the political class he is merely an echo chamber for the already disaffected; I doubt he has changed anyone’s mind on the matter of our public servants.

So why am I wittering on about him, then? Good question. I have recently been following this story regarding Tim Ireland who made some allegation about Guido on his Bloggerheads site; I’m not bothering to repeat them here because they are the least interesting facet of the affair. Tim gets criticised by his opponents sometimes as being obsessive, and worse; I prefer dogged myself, although I admit he can take things a bit far at times. Anyway, the allegations were straight forward enough, so it would have been a simple matter for Guido to have just refuted them; so why didn’t he? Instead he reached for his lawyer, a tactic he has used before.

Fair enough you may say, and perhaps this shows that Tim’s attack was the straw that broke the camel’s back, a consequence of the running sore that is his and Guido’s relationship. But then Sunny Hundal at Liberal Conspiracy revealed that he too had had the frighteners put on him, in his case simply because his site had linked to Tim’s original post. Sounds as if someone is getting a little out of hand. All this is reminiscent of the sort of tactics employed by Schillings, with the libel laws being used not to put a stop to lies, but to silence free speech, and coming from someone who once complained that “the libel laws in Britain have long been overly restrictive and frustrated Guido’s efforts…Guido has a few things he has been itching to write about some very rich people.”

Perhaps he just meant richer people. We are all hypocrites to a greater or lesser extent, but even so it is still rare to find such a cut and dried example of the art. I have a lot of time for the more thoughtful libertarians out there who are dedicated to their high ideals of freedom and liberty, but by his actions Guido seems more the instinctive, knee-jerk sort, who dreams of ending state coercion not so it can guide us from the world of the dead hand to that of the invisible hand, but just to ensure that he can pay less tax while power resides with those with the deepest pockets. Or perhaps I am showing my ignorance of what libertarians really stand for.

All of which is a long and roundabout way of saying that, for what it’s worth, should Tim and Sunny require the support of a blog that hardly anybody reads, they’ve got it.

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