Tag: Today programme

Listening to women for a change

To set our scene.  It is yesterday morning.  The Today programme is on.  There’s a debate about Mehdi Hasan’s article about the political left’s position on abortion.  I disagree vehemently with everything he says*, but the thing that makes me curse out loud into the washing up is the opening exchange:

Suzanne Moore: I find myself, yet again, discussing abortion with two men on a programme which is famously bad at representing women, but…

John Humphrys (outraged, interrupting): Sarah was on yesterday! She happens not to be on this morning! But anyway, go on..

And (I hope) a nation of women yelled in harmony – “Because we’re  obviously only allowed one!”

There is, famously, only one female presenter on the BBC’s flagship radio news programme.  On days when she isn’t on you can go from the 7 o’clock news via the sports report at 7.30 to Thought for the Day at quarter to 8 and hear almost no female voices.

Monday’s Women in Journalism report on the representation of women in the media graphically demonstrated that the male-dominance of Today is not unusual – 78% of bylines on front page stories are for men, 22% for women; 76% of experts quoted in stories are men, 24% are women (almost an exact inversion of the statistics for victims, of whom 79% quoted are women, 21% men).

I went to a Fawcett Society debate at the weekend about the lack of women’s voices in the media, the City and politics. It wasn’t much of a debate, frankly. I guess it’s hard to have a thrilling exchange of views on a subject where everyone is in heated agreement. It’s ludicrous that only 4% of CEOs of FTSE 100 companies are women; that there are more millionaires in the cabinet than women; that there is only one woman editor of a national daily newspaper. And I for one am sick of it and of the glacial rate of change.   So, I was cheered to see that the BBC is trying, in a very small way, to do something about increasing the range of voices it listens to.

BBC Academy Female Experts Training Day

findaTVexpert is working with the BBC Academy on a media training day for female experts in Science, History, Politics, Business & Engineering. It’s a fantastic opportunity for female experts who want to put themselves forwards for TV & Media opportunities. Read the below, sign up now – and help spread the word on twitter, Facebook, etc.
Here’s a link.  If you have any expertise in an area the media should be covering please sign up and get on out there.   The Today programme needs to hear from you.
* For anyone interested in why I’m on the other side of the abortion debate from Mehdi Hasan, I refer you here – it pretty much says it all.

The importance of ignoring economists

One of my already broken new year’s resolutions was to stop worrying about the economy.  This is on the grounds that I’m occupied pretty full-time worrying about things  in my own life that I can at least hope to change, without putting in extra hours fretting about things that  are beyond my control.

It’s quite hard not to worry about UKPlc’s GDP, though, especially if you’re woken every morning  by the massed doom-mongers of the Today programme (I loved  Chris Addison’s description of Today this weekend as: “Grumpy Old Men without jokes. If Today had a face it would look like Walter Matthau sucking a lemon”, and so it would)

So, when I am overwhelmed by the looming disasters and scary predictions about interest rates being peddled by Humphrys et al, I will try to remember this:

The future  performance of the economy, the passage from good times to recession or depression and back, cannot be foretold.  There are more than ample predictions but no firm knowledge.  All contend with a diverse combination of uncertain government action, unknown corporate and individual behaviour and, in the larger world, with peace or war.  Also with unforeseen technological and other innovations and consumer and investment responses.  There is the variable effect of exports, imports, capital movements and corporate, public and government reaction thereto.  Thus the all too evident fact: the combined result of the unknown cannot be known.

That’s JK Galbraith , who knew what he was talking about, on economists.   He seems to agree with my friend Philomene – although in rather more thoughtful language.  “Economics a science?” she once screeched at me in  disbelief.  “Witchcraft is more scientific!”

Stra’tegy (n) art of war: art of planning

Every so often I agree with something  in the Daily Telegraph.  It happened again today.  I had to mark it somehow.

In the wake of a strategic defence review  which has given us new aircraft carriers but no aircraft to launch from them, Philip Johnston has identified a lack of capacity to think strategically as a major failing of British government.   The Public Admin Select Committee has come to the same conclusion: “We have all but lost the capacity to think strategically,” it said yesterday. “We have simply fallen out of the habit, and have lost the culture of strategy making.”

Conservative MP Bernard Jenkin was on the Today programme yesterday making the same point “We seem to be operating under the imperative of deficit reduction, there’s very little in what is being done now that really reflects deep and sustained analysis of what kind of country we want to be in ten or twenty years time. “

Hang on a minute while I climb on my high horse…

I had to smile when Jenkin said that a strategy “isn’t a document the government publishes and then sticks on a shelf” – this is, of course,  exactly what a strategy is in many  departments.  When I was there, there was an almost mystical belief that the  act of publishing a strategy  absolved everyone from the burden of delivering it.  I agreed with much of what Jenkin had to say, though – and have said quite a lot of it here in the past.  Dangerous short-termism?  Check.   Cuts taking precedence over serious policy review?  Why, yes.  Lack of effective cross-departmental working in government? Yup,  although the structures of government make that hard and things are getting better.

Jenkin was concerned that the strategic thinking module in the civil service training programme has been shrunk to one week.  I’d argue that that hardly matters if we continue to  cut the service to the bone  – more short-term thinking.  Oh, and one way of getting people to think strategically is to fund higher education  so that  subjects which teach people how to think  (not just  how to make money) survive.  We need far more historians and Classicists in government!  At least one of the Telegraph’s commenters seems to agree – almost.  “What’s lacking in modern Britain IMHO is a professional, well-trained and remunerated civil service formulating long-term options” he said, adding  ” and selling them to the government of the day” .  Well, it is the  Telegraph.

Demonstrating value

I’ve been thinking again about how public services demonstrate their worth.  As the cull of quangos continues apace, more organisations are looking to see how to prove their value to government before it’s too late.  I’ve a presentation to write about this today, so I was interested in an item on the Today programme this morning on the subject.

The gist of the piece was that  although quango-cutting may be currently popular and demonstrate a macho approach to saving money, government should think about what’s worth keeping and be careful before it embarks on wholesale cuts.  The evidence shows high costs connected with cuts but often little in the way of added efficiency or long-term cost savings.  Jobs still need to be done, they’re just done by other agencies or bought back into government, leading to  a lack of focus and  reduced accountability.

I sympathise with my mate Menthol Dan’s theory that over the next few months we will see a mass cull of NDPBs, a slow disintegration of services, a realisation that something needs to be put back in place and then a process of re-assembling the pieces again.

I’ve said here before that the lack of hard evidence of achievement is a major problem for lots of quangos who don’t have the evidence up their sleeves to show how valuable they are.    It’s an issue for lots of voluntary sector bodies too – especially those who receive direct grants from government.   NCVO have been looking at the issue as part of their Measuring Outcomes for Public Service Users (MOPSU) programme – there’s a useful summary of the arguments here

The programme is starting to identify possible principles for voluntary sector bodies to use when they’re trying to manage the notoriously difficult job of measuring outcomes – maybe these could be transferred to NDPBs too ?

  • Any assessment must be based upon the experience of users rather than the interests of commissioners or providers.
  • Outcomes should be directly attributable to the intervention
  • The service should be assessed across different ‘domains’, which in turn are weighted to ensure that the service is making a demonstrable difference to the user, and that any difference reflects the different dimensions of any service
  • Any measures should carry as low a burden as possible, which in practice leads to the usage of regulatory data collected for existing purposes, if possible.

Bigotry and outrage

Turned the Today programme off, violently, at ten past eight this morning, but not before shouting things at James Naughtie that, had they been picked up on Sky, I would certainly have had to apologise for.

I lost it when Naughtie said that, by agreeing to the leaders’ debates, Gordon Brown made the election camapaign into a personality contest so must accept it when his personality becomes the story of the day.  The idea that the media have been diligently following policy issues for years until being forced to talk about personalities by the sight of politicians debating in public is as hilarious as it’s infuriating.  The papers have been desperate for something like this to happen to liven things up. They’ve finally got the gaffe they’ve been waiting for.  Watch them make the most of it.

MPs (huh!) what are they good for?

On this morning’s Today programme, Geoff Hoon was trying to excuse his involvement in the  lobbying scandal by saying he was just looking for a job for when he stops being an MP.  Apparently for many of his former colleagues this has proved difficult because “the skills, the experience of a  member of parliament are not readily translatable into other walks of life”.   Really?  Off the top of my head I’ve come up with a starter list of transferable skills that any half-way decent MP should have built up over, say, the course of his or her first  term:

  • public speaking
  • public relations, media relations
  • issue-related campaigning, fundraising
  • running a small business
  • understanding the workings of central and local government
  • understanding the local structures which run the health, education, police and courts systems, social services, local planning regulations and the benefits system
  • ability to analyse and understand complex legislation
  • mediation between local interest groups
  • understanding  complex membership organisations

not to mention an extensive personal network of contacts and probably a pretty high national profile.  And that’s just MPs, Ministers have a whole different set of experiences to draw on. Now, I appreciate that it can be hard to change direction in middle-age, but lots of us have to do it and  I’d suggest that anyone with that little lot under their belt is probably a couple of steps ahead of your average job seeker.