The other shoe drops
Following his dismissive comments about mere commercial considerations, reported here last week, it is ironic that Ashley Highfield, the BBC’s director of future media and technology, has moved on to head up a joint commercial venture among the UK’s two tax-paid TV channels and struggling ITV.
The video-on-demand platform due to pilot in August is aptly called Project Kangaroo. In the States, ‘kangaroo courts’ are judicial farces that precede pre-determined verdicts. In Britain, they are known as consultations, such as the one recently announced by the communications quango Ofcom.
The announcement of Kangaroo dissipates all doubt about how the public sector broadcasters (PSB) will try to preserve their near-monopoly of cultural patronage within the UK, whether or not the eighty year-old license fee model survives future scrutiny. It fits a well-established pattern.
The British model is to transfer monopolies from state to private hands. This boosts the price governments obtain from the sale of the privileged assets, while shedding political responsibility. New, unaccountable quangos-for-the-faithful can then be created to oversee the privatised entities.
The model has been outstandingly successful in increasing the share of gross domestic product appropriated by the state, while making it almost impossible to hold anyone to account. Throttled competition has aborted the benefits that might have accompanied honest privatisation, while making the officials who designed the public offerings very rich. Think British Rail.
Whether the same mechanism can work in the case of the PSB quangos if the anachronistic license fee is phased out remains to be seen. Ofcom’s parroting of the Brown regime’s belated discovery of ‘British values’ suggests that Kangaroo will pose as the national cultural champion.
As has happened in every protected industry, jobs for the ruling mediocracy will be preserved at vast public expense, for a while. And enterprising Britons will continue to emigrate in their thousands to seek less suffocating environments in which to develop their talents.
