Two of John Birt's former corporate strategists --who both became political advisers to Tony Blair -- are now working on plans to top-slice the BBC's licence fee as a way of financing other public service broadcasters. Ofcom is reviewing the future of broadcasting following the digital switchover and convergence of tv and the internet. Its chief executive officer Ed Richards has called for the "contestability" on the licence fee. His former colleague, James Purnell, now Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, who has his doubts as to whether it is sustainable for the licence fee to continue going to a single provider, has promised to be "bold". Nicholas Jones is to chair a session on the future of the BBC at a conference, New Threats to Media Freedom, organised by the National Union of Journalists (26.1.2008). Jones says defending the licence fee would be an essential part of any fight back:

January 9, 2008 

All the lofty rhetoric about Gordon Brown restoring traditional civil service values has finally been dissipated with the appointment of Stephen Carter as chief political organiser in Downing Street.

Quick fixes aimed at driving the media agenda became the hallmark of Tony Blair’s decade in Downing Street and the cumulative damage which they inflicted on both the authority of Parliament and the standing of the civil service caused widespread unease within the Labour Party.

Early last summer, as he outlined a vision for his Premiership, Brown and his aides did much to promote the idea that the new administration would rein in unaccountable political advisers and put the levers of power back in the hands of civil servants.

If ever there was a harbinger of an imminent demolition job it has to be Rupert Murdoch’s demand for an easing of the rules which require radio and television services to be politically impartial in their news and current affairs output.

Murdoch knows he is pushing at an open door: newspaper websites are already free to be as partisan as they like in what they report and now that the broadcasting regulator Ofcom has thrown in the towel, the same goes for the burgeoning audio-visual output of press proprietors.

Internet television will soon be available at the flick of a remote control and my fear is that political parties struggling for support will rue the day that the Blair government failed to ensure action was taken to protect balanced reporting on television and radio during general election campaigns.

Depending on who you believe, Gordon Brown is now in his fifth or is it his sixth worst week as Prime Minister. It doesn’t matter who is right: what is so damaging to the Labour government is that in the eyes of the news media the Brown Premiership is now in crisis mode, in the same kind of downward spiral which ended with John Major’s humiliating defeat a decade ago.

However hard ministers might try to regain the initiative, most journalists are now judging events simply on the basis of whether or not they constitute yet another disaster for an accident-prone administration.

Major was depicted by the cartoonists as a wimp who tucked his shirt into his underpants just as Brown is now being ridiculed un-mercilessly and has progressed from a brooding bear-like grump into a bumbling and incompetent Mr Bean.

Struggling to find stories when their Parliament is being boycotted by the opposition is just one of the problems facing the political journalists of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus.

Lack of effective recognition by the European Union and isolation from the international community has already made life tough for the local news media so a political stalemate in the legislative assembly has only added to the difficulties for reporters.

Despite hard times for the local economy, the 200,000-strong population of Northern Cyprus is served by as many as ten daily newspapers. Most are subsidised by the competing political parties so this does ensure a wide spread of views and opinion.

But much of the parliamentary coverage is limited to reproducing the copy provided by the Turkish news agency TAK and the aim of a seminar, held in Nicosia (November 20-21, 2007), was to encourage more investigative and campaigning journalism.

Tony Blair ended his decade in power as badly damaged by the word "spin" as John Major was by "sleaze". How, after a mere one hundred days in office, could Gordon Brown have finished up with the same dreaded label "spin" hanging just as firmly around his own neck?

What the new Prime Minister became a victim of was uncontrolled spinning which is not only eroding the credibility of his government but is also destabilising his party and eating away at trust and friendship within the wider labour and trade union movement.

In place of the control freakery of the early Blair years, we are witnessing a new phenomenon. By uncontrolled spin I mean the unstoppable trade in anonymous quotes, leaks and tip-offs which, for example, did so much damage within the party during the final years of the Blair-Brown feud and which is still causing just as much mischief.

Guest lecture by Nicholas Jones at Loughborough University, 7.11.2007

Tony Blair finished his decade in power as badly damaged by the word "spin" as John Major was by "sleaze". How, after a mere one hundred days in office, could Gordon Brown have ended up with the same dreaded label "spin" hanging just as firmly around his own neck? What the new Prime Minister has become a victim of is the uncontrolled spinning which is not only eroding the credibility of the government but is also destabilising his party and eating away at trust and friendship within the wider Labour and trade union movement.

From its inception New Labour encouraged a culture of spin which is now more deeply embedded within Britain than other comparable countries. The relationship between our politicians and the news media is much closer, more manipulative and poses a far greater threat to the democratic process. But in place of the control freakery of the early Blair years, what we are witnessing is a new phenomenon. By uncontrolled spin I mean the unstoppable trade in anonymous quotes, leaks and tip-offs which, for example, did so much damage within the party during the final years of the Blair-Brown feud and which is still causing just as much mischief.

It is the same runaway spin which fuelled so much speculation about a snap general election that the hype developed a momentum of its own, with the result that Brown found he had boxed himself in.

Having been a beneficiary of a roller-coaster ride of continuous expansion during my thirty-year career as a BBC industrial and political correspondent, I can only look on in horror from the sidelines as the Corporation prepares to implement a slash-and-burn retreat into an uncertain future.

Since leaving the BBC in 2002 I have argued consistently that what the management needs to do is define and defend what is best in the BBC’s public service broadcasting.

Even now, on the eve of negotiations with the joint unions over a another massive round of job losses, there has still been no audit to identify the news and current affairs programming which must be protected at all cost. I consider that a dereliction of duty on the part of the management and the new BBC Trust.

Nicholas Jones, 18 October 2007 

Iain Dale is to be congratulated for highlighting the woeful failure of the left of centre in British politics to exploit the blogosphere. Of the top twenty political blogs featured in the Guide to Political Blogging 2007-8 , fourteen are from the right of centre and only two from the left.

Of even greater concern is the absence of any defining figures on the mainstream left to bridge the gap between "blogging and the traditional media".

Dale’s guide ranks the top 500 political blogs and as he observes with some justification, the "right of centre blogosphere" is in "a rude state of health" with not a single left wing blog having a mass readership anything like the size of the top seven or eight on the right.

A succession of disastrous newspaper headlines for Prime Minister Gordon Brown provided an ideal illustration for the political reporters of Kazakhstan of the robust relationship which exists between the British press and the government of the United Kingdom.

No wonder the journalists of this former Soviet republic are in dire need of inspiration: they are having to try to report the activities of a Parliament which since August has turned Kazakhstan into a one-party state.