Society Matters

A Dalek has a better chance of appearing on the cover of the Radio Times than a black TV star does, writes David Herman, so who is representing non-white Britain on our screens?

What do Doctor Who, Sherlock and the team captains of Have I Got News for You have in common? Here’s a clue: they have the same thing in common with the ITV FA Cup Final panel, all the presenters on Newsnight and the commentators on Test Match Special. They are all white.

Lenny Henry recently attacked the whiteness of this year’s Baftas. The awards, he said, were a disgrace for not celebrating black talent. “There weren’t any black people at the Baftas; there was no black talent,” Henry told the Daily Telegraph. “In 200 years’ time, our children are going to look back to now and say: ‘Remember that really weird period when there weren’t any black people in any programmes?’ It’s unthinkable, but now we’re having to live through it.” He is absolutely right. Out of 31 nominations or special awards for individual categories, 31 went to white actors and performers.

The Baftas are by no means exceptional. Take the peak-time programmes on a recent Friday. On BBC1 was The One Show (two white presenters), followed by A Question of Sport (white presenter and six white panellists), Would I Lie to You? (white presenter and six white panellists), Have I Got News for You (white presenter and four white panellists) and The Graham Norton Show (white host and four white guests). On BBC2 it was Gardeners’ World (two white presenters) and QI (white presenter and four white comedians), followed by Newsnight (white presenter).

It’s the same story wherever you look. From Call the Midwife to Broadchurch, Top Gear to Match of the Day, the presenters, guests and main leads are white. Do you like arts programmes? Whether it’s Melvyn Bragg or Alan Yentob, Andrew Graham-Dixon or Howard Goodall, Mark Kermode or Jools Holland, the presenter is white. Every major sports presenter and commentator is white, though there are one or two black football and athletics pundits, and the occasional black cricket commentator if the West Indies are touring. Chat-show hosts and quiz presenters are white. So are the people who appear on the cover of the Radio Times – the Doctor’s assistant last week, Robert Peston the week before that. There’s a better chance of a Dalek appearing on the cover than a non-white TV star.

The most serious example is in news and current affairs. All the presenters on Newsnight and the three main Radio 4 news programmes, nearly all the TV newsreaders and nearly all of the editors and main reporters are white.

Why does this matter? First, how can the experiences and realities of non-white viewers be represented properly when nearly every major personality in television is white? The situation is especially worrying when all the figures of cultural authority – newsreaders, current affairs presenters, people who run all the TV and radio networks – are white.

Second, what about non-white talent? Surely they must feel discouraged about their chances of breaking into television or radio when there are so few role models and when what they see and hear is, in the immortal words of Greg Dyke, “hideously white”?

Finally, what kind of society do we think we live in? Is it as white as the 1950s and 1960s or is it properly multiracial? If we think we live in a diverse society, why are there so few non-white faces on TV or behind the scenes, in charge of networks? As the media run endless stories about Asian grooming gangs, immigrants sponging off the welfare state and alleged terrorists such as Abu Qatada, where are the positive images of non-white Britain? Lenny Henry started out in the mid-1970s. Who would have thought that, almost 40 years on, things would have changed so little?
© David Herman

Posted 26 June 2013

This article appeared originally in the New Statesman, 24-30 May 2013.

Reprinted with kind permission from the author.

Cartoon by Gary Edwards

The stock market is currently confounding doom-laden forecasts. But Alan Shipman advises caution.

From Ronnie O’Sullivan on green baize to Rafael Nadal on Parisian clay, it’s been a season of remarkable sporting comebacks. But an even more improbable turnaround is now unfolding on the financial pages. UK share prices rose above their pre-crisis peak in May. And on present trends, house prices will have done the same before next summer despite negative forecasts immediately after the crash of 2008 that they’d need a decade or more to make up the lost ground.

Then bounceback might be woefully premature, given that the economy has been static or shrinking for two years and unemployment is rising again. But these days, a recovery in asset prices can contribute to economic revival as well as signalling that investors are expecting one. Many households had to tighten their belts after 2008 because the value of their assets (mainly homes and shareholdings) had fallen perilously close to (or sometimes below) the value of their debts. Because they had to save more and spend less, others found their incomes falling and jobs disappearing. The government then decided it had to curb its own expenditures to match its shrinking tax revenue, unleashing a wave of benefit cuts and state-sector job loss which gave the spiral another downward push.

When share and property prices pick up, the squeeze on household and business budgets is reduced, and the private sector can start spending its way to recovery. That seemed to be happening in the second quarter, with surveys indicating strong growth in service-sector activity, including the markets where those trending trades take place.

The BLASH backlash
So if falling asset prices were what made the recession so long and deep, why isn’t their rebound prompting wider celebration? It’s partly because, for every grateful seller, there’s a would-be buyer who’s now been priced out of the market. If you want to live in London (or anywhere in the south-east) and don’t already own something there, the new surge in asking prices is hardly reassuring.

Still more worrying is the probable reason for house and share price indices jumping so quickly from floor to roof. It began not with a revival of the activity that creates new assets, but with an injection of credit that bids up the value of existing ones. The Bank of England’s retention of a record low interest rate backed up by quantitative easing since 2009, and extra Treasury help for banks to make cheap loans via schemes like ‘funding for lending’ and ‘help to buy’, have allowed the lucky recipients a one-way bet – to Buy Low And Sell High, revving the markets as they do so.

Other central banks and finance ministries around the world have indulged in similar credit easing since 2008. Economists have long preached that low interest rates lead to high asset prices. Anyone with money, and anyone without it who can borrow, rushes to invest in things that yield a durable income flow – and whose rate of return is likely to stay above the inflation that long waves of cheap credit can also unleash. So market-watchers can see ‘bubbles’ going well beyond the major stock exchanges and estate-agents’ windows. Recent surges in American university tuition fees, Damien Hirst auction prices and debt issued by financially fragile governments like Ukraine and Hungary are also signs of a speculative frenzy caused by low-cost funds seeking improbably high returns.

There are three reasons for caution about this euphoria, even among those who were first in the market and now enjoying generous capital gains. Firstly, low-interest lending was intended to promote real investment in new production capacity. But many businesses are still having problems getting the loans they need to expand. Private investment shows few signs of sustainable recovery; and the supply of new housing isn’t rising to meet the new demand, which is why prices (especially in London) have rallied so quickly.

Secondly, this lack of real expansion means that the price rise for assets – which are claims on the income from future production – isn’t supported by actual trends in future production. Markets that climb in defiance of fundamental value inevitably fall back down to earth. Thirdly, when the inevitable price ‘correction’ occurs, many households and businesses (and banks) will be left holding assets that are worth less than their debts. The conditions for slump could then return with added force.

That bursting of the new bubbles needn’t happen this year, or anytime before the 2015 general election. The turning-point is generally expected to come when central banks are forced to start raising interest rates, either because inflation takes off or because they can’t keep swelling their own balance sheets with yield-free government debt. It’s to avert any fear of this happening in the near future that US Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke has been giving reassurances that interest rates will stay at their present low level for several more years. Mark Carney, the newly arriving Bank of England governor, won’t want to buck this trend, given that the first to raise rates will inevitably be blamed for any price crash that follows.

If their strategy works, cheap credit will by then have revived the economy’s supply side as well, justifying the higher price of assets and ensuring that they avoid another drop. But the unbalanced sources of this year’s growth – driven by public and private consumption, with little revival of fixed investment cast doubt on the strength of its foundations. As government and business start to celebrate a return to GDP growth over the next year, there’s a risk that their boardroom champagne could fall suddenly flat.

Alan Shipman 21 June 2013

The views expressed in this post, as in all posts on Society Matters, are the views of the author, not The Open University.

Alan Shipman is a lecturer in Economics at The Open University. He is responsible for the modules You and your money:personal finance in context and Personal investment in an uncertain world, part of the foundation degree in Financial Services.

Cartoon by Catherine Pain
 

Recent scandals have had a damaging impact on our participatory democracy, argues Dick Skellington

The rise of UKIP and the decline in ratings for the other main political parties in England and Wales are worrying for our participatory democracy. The turnout in the May local elections suggests the trend of declining political participation in recent years looks set to continue with turnouts as low as 15 per cent in some wards.

Even the participation of UKIP could not disguise the apathy and disaffection with our political parties. Although the Electoral Commission report on the outcome is still awaited the projected turn out looks likely to fall below the turnout in May 2012.

The historic trend in voter participation during the last 100 years shows a gradual decline. It seems we vote in television reality programmes with greater enthusiasm than we do in political elections. In 2010, for example, 15,466,019 votes were cast for The X Factor but when it comes to choosing our political representatives we vote with our feet. In the recent elections for Police Commissioners the turn-out was as low as 18 per cent.

A report from The Economic Intelligence Unit (EIU), published in March, casts further disturbing light on just how low our opinion of our institutions has sunk.

According to the EIU faith and trust in British institutions has reached an ‘all time low’. Britain now possesses one of the lowest political participation rates in the developed world. We are, in the words of the EIU, in the midst of ‘a deep institutional crisis’, and in a study of 167 countries we sit behind Iraq and Palestine in political participation rates. Even in recent by-elections turn-out has fallen to below 50 per cent.

Britain, according to the EIU, is not only below all the major European powers, but also lags behind some nations that were not considered political democracies until very recently. These include the Lebanon, Tunisia, and Namibia. The EIU did score us highly on having a system of free and open elections, but we scored only six out of 10 when it came to participation. The ERIU democracy index looked at several other factors in producing their latest index, but even then Britain was ranked 16th out of 167 countries, placing it in the lower rungs of the top 25 major democracies in the world.

The EIU report concluded that in Britain: ‘Problems are reflected across many elements – voter turn-out, political party membership, the willingness of citizens to engage in politics and their attitudes towards it. Trust in government, parliament and politicians is at an all-time low’ (my emphasis).

The crisis in trust in our key institutions has been exacerbated by recent scandals involving the police, the church, our financial systems, the BBC, and the media (phone hacking).

The EIU report specifically signalled out the Libor rate rigging scandal as a key factor in recent low political participation, while disillusionment with our political systems has been further damaged by the MPs' expenses scandal and ‘cash for questions’ controversies.

The EIU argue that the British public remain disaffected with politicians who they believe have not sufficiently cleaned up their own act, and have failed to call the bankers to account for triggering the financial crash that precipitated the severe austerity measures now being imposed on the British people. It even suggests that the 2011 riots were a response to a loss of confidence in our political and ruling elite.

It ends with a chilling warning to the Coalition in its final two years in office: ‘There is a clear risk of escalating resentment among affected groups, particularly if further state support is offered to the deeply unpopular financial services sector.’ It's worrying too for Labour, as they look unlikely to be able to offer anything more radical than a similar raft of cuts and welfare squeezes that will make it difficult for them to charm new voters.

These are disturbing times for our democracy, and the more our elite institutions are exposed, the greater the risk to our democratic future. Greater accountability may do something to alleviate the fall from grace.

Find out more:

• Full EIU data
  

Dick Skellington 17 June 2013

The views expressed in this post, as in all posts on Society Matters, are the views of the author, not The Open University.

Cartoon by Gary Edwards