Flights of fancy

A cuddly video viral has been doing the social media rounds, brought to you buy those chummy Flash Mob enthusiasts T-Mobile. About 4 friends have independently posted it to Facebook as an uplifting piece of work to general applause from others, leaving me genuinely bewildered at what I am missing. You probably need speakers for the full effect:



Of course this ad was never intended for broadcast but, instead, to be shared by friends across social media such as Facebook. As such it succeeds - it makes us feel warm, we share it with people we like who also feel warm. T-Mobile then prays it makes you feel warm towards them as the original sharer of this piece of feel-goodery, because Life Is For Sharing. So why does it leave me feeling utterly cold?

On one level, it's because it is the playing out of a nightmare. I cannot imagine anything worse, having gotten off a long-haul flight, jet-lagged and disoriented, staggered through customs and have someone come up to me singing songs in my face with imaginary instruments. In that situation I want to get out of the airport as quickly as possible, talking to as few people as possible. Contrary to what T-Mobile (and BA for that matter) would have us believe, airports are not places of high drama and emotion - they are large bus stations with better shops. Even if you are met by a long-missed friend, the whole atmosphere is weird and disorienting, too full of people you don't want to hang out with.

But as a piece of marketing, for me it also fails, by trying too hard. It is part of a very complex communications strategy to position T-Mobile as a social facilitator, presenting a piece of creative that is supposed to dovetail with the spontaneity of new media channels by choreographing a not-so-new product of the new digital age: the Flash Mob. This is supposed to look like User Generated Content, unleashing the spontaneous, touchy-feely-sharey person inside us in a situation where we don't communicate, on the heels of previous executions set in railways stations and outdoor public spaces, such as Trafalgar Square. It is utterly false, utterly contrived jolliness that sits ill with the British character, like TV Evangelism, public mourning and talking to strangers in a lift.

Beyond my personal squeamishness, it falls into that other classic trap of big-budget, high-concept advertising - it is in love with its own image. Creating something special, unique, beautiful, funny, frightening or exhilarating is not enough. I want you to give me a reason to use your product. Dramatise your uniqueness, your point of difference from the competition, make me give a shit about you. Life is not for sharing, Doritos are for sharing - you run a telephone network. What's it like? Good coverage? Value-for-money? Fast data-streaming? Flexible packages? Imaginative cross-platform linking or affiliate marketing programme? Do you sing to me in an airport? One of these things is not a USP - can you tell which one?

Worse, by losing sight of its proposition, it is setting up its customers for disappointment, lured by the myth of "Content". This is basically "stuff that makes people use your service" - content can be TV programmes, websites, downloads, updates, mash-ups, forums, anything that isn't a blank screen. By trying to align itself to what its customers do with each other via T-Mobile, rather than with T-Mobile, they lose sight of the most important thing to any mobile customer: good, reliable, fast network coverage. Have you ever tried to use a mobile phone at Heathrow airport? Or on a train? Or sometimes in the middle of central London outside the wrong building, and experienced "no signal"? Maybe if my message is that important, T-Mobile can organise a singing telegram to deliver it instead.

What's yours is mine

The word 'arrogate' is not one you hear used regularly and even then not correctly. But a supreme example of it in action happened a couple of weeks back during the government's Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR). Next to the distraction of proposed cuts to child benefit, the question of the budget of the BBC was always going to be an afterthought. But by freezing the licence fee for the next 6 years, the BBC is effectively being handed a 16% cut in real terms. In addition to these "stealth cuts", the corporation also agreed to absorb £340m that currently comes out of general taxation to pay for The World Service, S4C and BBC Monitoring.

Even at its double-counting best, the previous government never quite had the chutzpah to arrogate the BBC licence fee as part of Whitehall spending. But the licence fee that users like you and I pay has now been co-opted into deficit reduction, as part of Gideon's "you're all in this together" blitz spirit. At a time when more of us will be spending more time in front of the TV than ever, as the cuts and tax rises reduce our opportunities to go out, it's as though it's been decided that even programme quality must suffer its fair share too.

People outside the UK must look on with a sense of bafflement as to how the BBC is funded. A poll tax upon all owners of a television pays for 8 TV channels, 11 national radio stations, 24-hour rolling news coverage, a network of local radio and a comprehensive website. The breadth and depth, not to say quality, of its output is extraordinary by any standards, and the funding model, whose collectivism is a relic from a bygone era, confounds conventional thinking about the power of free markets to satisfy demands. Like the NHS, it is a national treasure whose idiosyncrasies should doom it to failure, yet as a representation of who we are as a nation, it is more emblematic, I would argue, than the Union flag itself.

More baffling to me is everyone's apparent willingness to accept these cuts. The inherent weakness of the BBC's position is the fact it cannot set the licence fee itself, but rather must curry favour with the government of the day, in order to secure its future. The speed at which this deal was done caught many by surprise, and prompted a lot of use of the word "challenging", maybe before they had time to say "wait a minute...". Conscious of not wanting to be seen as being out of touch with the public mood, the BBC has grabbed the lifeline of another 6 years of licence fee, barely pausing to consider the political implications of the quid pro quo. They are Audley Harrison to the Chancellor's David Haye.

The FCO always funded the World Service, because it recognised the political nature of its work, and how ridiculous it would be to ask British TV viewers to pay for its outreach programme. But for all the good the World Service undoubtedly does, surely the next logical place to put its funding would be into the ring-fenced Overseas Development Budget. Why is it any more politically palatable for my licence fee to pay for this service now than it was 10 years ago? Especially at a time when its core operating budget is facing cuts that will affect output. Likewise, is there no part of the Welsh office that could pay for S4C? What could be more important to the people of Wales than a TV station in their own language? Or, if it isn't that important to them, then cut it adrift and see if it can attract any EU money for spurious cultural preservation programmes.

We will be forced to pay above inflation price increases for everything from train fares to toilet seats over the next few years, for no extra increase in quality. Yet the one area where an increase in quality would have a positive impact on people at all points on the socio-economic spectrum will be beggared by a government packed with a privatiser's ulterior motive. Today the same government announced they wanted to measure the success of their policies by taking a sample of people's happiness (story here). I'd suggest the first thing they could do would be let the BBC do what it does best with both hands free.

Hire Education

As the apologists from the coalition government reeled from the left hook of cutting Child Benefit, they were crunched across the nose, metaphorically speaking, by the right jab of unlimited University tuition fees. Not least because Lib Dems had made a pre-election song-and-dance about not increasing fees, in the unlikely event of them achieving government. Just another of the messy compromises made in fulfilling the coupling of government, and surely the biggest lesson in being careful what you wish for. Another notch on the bedposts of a hungover political party.

For those who may have missed the tuition fee hike proposal, it marks the latest attempt to open up education to everyone by making it affordable by no-one, except perhaps Chancellor Osborne’s personal trust fund. Parents can now enjoy the prospect of helping their children pay £10,000 a year not to attend lectures. Since this represents about the same cost of schooling at Osborne’s alma mater for one year, I’m sure Gideon considers this a perfectly reasonable sum to find. You don’t have to be heir to the 17^th Baronet Osborne to afford it, but it sure as heck helps.

The hoary old argument wheeled out every time this subject comes up is essentially reduced to money. Graduates, taken as an average, earn more than non-graduates, ergo they should pay for their golden ticket before they've even got a job. QED. Leaving aside the rather un-Thatcherite nature of this approach – where’s the incentive to earn more if the government will only take it off them in fees? – this argument seems to me to have two key flaws.

First, there is the paradox of wider university uptake. The reason we need to pay more is because more people are coming into the system. This is undoubtedly true, as more professions demand a degree as an entry requirement: social workers, nurses, teachers – all once could attain their chosen vocation through on-the-job training and night school qualifications. No more – it’s the full three years if you want to do any of those jobs. Before long English graduates will be competing for those jobs in McDonald’s with undergraduate BScs in Burger Rotation Management. As you widen the pool of potential professions that require a degree, you drag down the average earnings of graduates – for how long will the statement remain true that a degree is the meal ticket to top tax bracket earnings? Before long you’ll need one just to sign on.

Second, let’s assume it is true – graduates earn more money. What an outrage. Those selfish, self-bettering, hard-working, economy-powering bastards, who do they think they are? Doctors pushing themselves through 7 years of medical school to spend their days just making people better, and all to earn more money. Those sponging parasite engineers who build the technology that drives the economy – scumbags the lot of them. I’m shocked to think that while we train a new generation of minds to solve tomorrow’s problems and make our lives better, they might earn money doing so. They should do it for nothing and be grateful we let them get drunk for 3 years.

The one way of testing out a direct link between earnings and your degree, of course, would be a graduate tax, something the government has ruled out. While fees remain the financial driver, the best universities will charge the most, attracting those who can best pay in the short-term, not through their lifetime earnings, based upon their contribution to the common wheel. The new level playing fields of Eton.

Let them drink gin

The rumpus over Child Benefit that threatened to wake up the dozing pensioners at last week’s Conservative Party conference has proved what a tricky subject the issue of cuts can be. Far from dividing along the line of traditional political allegiance, Chancellor Gideon “George” Osborne found himself at odds with the Daily Mail, which lined up with the Labour party. The phrase "curious bedfellows" has not been applied so truly since Lyle Lovett married Julia Roberts.

At first glance it is easy to see why there was agitation in the ranks. A primary school class of children could point out the iniquities in a proposal that posited a household with one income of £44,000 might merit no support, whilst another couple earning £86k could claim full benefit entitlement.

An interesting debate raged across the various media platforms that was far more complex than the usual name calling; many recognise the daftness of paying child benefit to someone earning, say, £100,000 a year, but how far down the cutoff point should be largely depends on how far south you live, how much your mortgage payments are, and whether you judge a foreign holiday to be a luxury or human right. Still more, the culture secretary, of all people, perhaps unwisely mused that there should be a cap on benefits paid to large families who continue to reproduce, though no mention of how this would be enforced. In turn, childless couples would then vent that, in fact, they were the biggest victims of a taxation system that seeks to rob them in order to pay to raise the offspring of the sexually incontinent.

Given that only 15% of the country pays the top rate of tax (the point at which Giddy proposes to cut off the award), it is possible that the issue excites more attention from journalists personally affected, rather than an accurate spread of their constituency. Nevertheless, speaking as a parent, I would say the government should look on child benefit as an expression of good manners. A tip, or the equivalent of taking a bottle around to someone’s house for dinner. It’s not something that would cover the costs of child rearing and nor is it intended to be. Consider, for example, if I were to abandon my children, throw them upon the mercy of the state. No matter the punishment levied upon me for doing so, the cost burden would fall squarely on the shoulders of the taxpayer, and for a lot more than 20 quid a week. Child benefit is like the state shoving a score in my top pocket and saying “go on, get yourself something nice in town, you deserve it”. It is tacit recognition that, as lovely as children often are, they are also a responsibility paid for, in large part, by the parents for the ultimate fiscal reward of the state – as they grow into tax-paying citizens (we hope).

It is surely no coincidence that the amount of Child Benefit has always roughly been the monetary equivalent of a bottle of gin (I’d argue it should be index linked to it). Because after a trying weekend of childcare, it’s surely every parent’s right to a gin and tonic on the government. Cheap at half the price.

Let them eat dinosaurs

As the public sector cuts start to bite, David Cameron took a mouthful out of one of the juiciest pieces of political pork this week: the quangoes. Or at least according to the leaked memo that appeared in the Daily Telegraph. As pieces of political calculation go, it was a no-brainer: many of these bodies are completely unknown to the wider general public, and will be mourned by even fewer. After all, who will miss the Union Modernisation Advisory Board?

As the cuts go deeper, this issue of the perception of their importance, rather than actual importance, becomes more, well, important, in order to sell the idea of austerity to those footing the bill. The Advisory Committee of Organic Standards probably does a lot of important work that will now need to be done by someone else. But it doesn't seem as bad as putting a red line through, say, the Civil Aviation Authority, whose job it is to keep planes in the sky.

But not all quangoes are damned or saved in David's Dantesque underworld; 94 bodies still sit in limbo, neither safe from oblivion nor doomed to disbandment. The government must pick through this collection of committees and panels to decide which ones are still worthy of the public purse and which can go swing. One of those organisations still awaiting news of its fate is something called National Museums & Galleries. Not something that would rank highly in people's minds as of great importance, at least not at the expense of NHS funding. Yet I think it's bodies such as NMG that are the key to the whole acceptance of cuts by the electorate. Or, more specifically, the non tax-avoiding, law-abiding, always-voting middle class.

One of the things the NMG's funding does is pay for free entry into public museums, one of the few great socialist legacies of the Blair years. For the 'squeezed middle'. who will pay the most for the follies of bankers in terms of money (rather than in cut services), the free entry to museums is something to cling to. For a trip up to London with children, just existing seems to cost a lot of money, but free entry into museums makes the trip financially viable, stimulates the economy and reassures people that they still get something back for their taxes. It's proof, however small, that taxation is not a massive black hole that they throw an increasing percentage of their earnings into. It's one of the few times that people who will never trouble social services can actually see money moving in the opposite direction.

It also illustrates one of the differences between household budgeting and national budgeting. When I was unemployed, I took a look at those expenses I could do without and those areas where I could reduce expenditure, and made the adjustments accordingly. For governments the task is, instead, to reduce expenditure where it impacts the least upon those people most likely to vote for them, which doesn't always make for common sense. I'd suggest that for the present Prime Minister cutting the NMG might be the sort of tipping point that makes or breaks his government. I'm off to the British Museum on Friday, and I am pretty confident that I won't have to pay to get in. At least not directly.