Though Cowards Flinch

Owen Jones is on ‘cracking’ (his term, not mine) polemic form in the Independent, telling us:

Until now, Britain’s anti-austerity movement has been fragmented and lacking in direction.  The new winds blowing in from the Continent could change all of that.

Fair enough.  

But this bit makes my blood boil*:

Those calling for a “No” in the upcoming Irish referendum on the EU Treaty – slammed as an “Austerity Treaty” by opponents – feel momentum is on their side, too. “The people of France, the people of Greece are against the policies of austerity and it is now the moment for Ireland to add our voice to that,” declared Mary Lou McDonald, a leading anti-Treaty politician.

It makes my blood boil because it gives the completely wrong impression to readers that a “No” to what Owen (justifiably) calls the Austerity Treaty will actually change anything.

It won’t.

This is because this Austerity Treaty – officially the Fiscal Compact – is little more than a show of political strength cooked up by Merkel and Sarkozy as a late desperate attempt to ward off Sarkozy’s defeat.

If, as looks likely, it is not ratified by all the 27 member states, it doesn’t matter one jot, because  (in Owen’s own terms), Keynesian fiscal expansion has already been made “illegal”.

Keynesianism was in fact made illegal on 16th November 2011, before Merkel and Sarkozy announced their grand new plan.  It was made illegal when the European Parliament signed into law the ‘six pack’ of regulations for the renewed implementation of the original Stability & Growth Pact, put together in the 1990s but broken by Germany itself in the wake of its reunification spending.

All the relevant details are here, and my formal submission to the Party of European Socialists on what the Left should do about it is here.  

It’s really, really, not that hard, and I simply can’t understand why the Left commentariat can’t get its head round the fact that the Merkozy Treaty is anything other than a diversion. 

Read the bleeding small print, you leftie commentators.  It’s what you’re paid to do (or it should be).

* Actually, it doesn’t make my blood boil at all.  Owen has written a quite legitimate piece aimed at wider concientization rather than specifics of what we need to do next, but I thought if I pretended to launch a personal attack on him, someone might read what I had to say. Still, I do hope he reads this and writes something based on the details I seek to get across.

As regular readers will know, TCF has followed the Regional Growth Fund (RGF) story from the start with revelations and analysis posted both here and by Sunny at Liberal Conspiracy. 

From the first announcement in June 2010, the whole RGF thing smacked more of Cameronesque PR than real regeneration substance.  It was through TCF’s and Liberal Conspiracy’s diggings (Labour HQ never acknowledges that kind of thing, but the Guardian did) that Ed Miliband first turned the heat on Cameron’s basic governmental competence, when he used an October 2011 PMQs to ask how many businesses had yet been funded (answer: two at that stage, versus 22 press releases). 

This was the very first conscious use by Miliband of Labour’s now markedly successful ‘omnishambles’ narrative, which has largely replaced its (unsuccessful and incorrect) attempts to portray Cameron as Thatcher Mk II, rather than arrogant posh boy who sees basic governmental competence as beneath him.

The National Audit Office (NAO) today published its review of the first two rounds of the Regional Growth Fund (RGF).  It reeks of the omnishambles odour now hanging heavily from the government, and I hope Miliband will refer to it at the next PMQs.* 

Some of the more striking findings in the report** are follows:

1)  The incoming government abolished Regional Development Agencies (RDAs), deriding them as “ineffective and inefficient”.  The RDAs created jobs at an average cost of £28,000 each.  by contrast, each RGF job is estimated to cost £33,000 each (fig 7, p. 24)***

2) As of March 16th 2012, only a third of all applicants had received a final offer letter.  The report notes that the pace has improved since December 2011, as more staff have been brought to the task. Labour might well want to argue that it has improved only because they brought the dire situation to light in October (with my and Sunny’s help).

3) Similarly, in December 2011, the projected underspend on the £470m earmarked for the 2011-12 financial year was £366m, 77 % of the total.   Unfortunately, the departments supposedly running the fund had failed to agree any financial year rollover provisions with the Treasury, so stood to lose all of that money. 

They had in fact been able to reduce that underspend to £10m by March 2012, partly by piling in staff resources to do due diligence on outstanding bids – better late than never, I suppose - but also by “distributing some of the Fund via endowments managed by some of the programmes supported in the second bidding round” (para 3.15).  

As I set out here in my top 10 RGF tips, and in more detail here this simply adds another layer of decision making about who actually gets the money in the end; it is not actually genuine expenditure of the fund.

4)  “Work on agreeing terms and conditions with applicants progressed slowly. The Fund has no dedicated administration budget. Its small Secretariat struggled to manage the volume of work to conduct the appraisals for the second bidding round while also negotiating final project terms and conditions with companies offered funding in the first bidding round. Delays at this stage have a significant effect on the overall time taken to finalise offers, because due diligence cannot begin until the Secretariat and the bidder have agreed factors such as the precise activities that the Fund will support. The Secretariat was supported by up to 12 full-time-equivalent economists from other departments during the project appraisal phase, but all but one of these staff returned to their home departments, before the due diligence phase started.” (para 3.11)

Enough said.  It is clear that the government wildly underestimated what needed doing, apparently intent on learning absolutely nothing from the RDAs’ experience.  Vince Cable has already agreed to “making more administrative resources available“.  This will, of course, increase the cost per job above the £33,000 currently estimated by NAO.

I look forward to PMQs on Wednesday.

*You can tell how nervous the government is about it already,  from the fact that Vince Cable has been dragged out of hiding to defend it on the morning of its publication.  Note also that it now longer appears to be a joint Pickles/Cable department programme – Cable has been left as the human shield.

** It is beyond the remit of the report to cover the major expense of abolishing RDAs, only to find that creating jobs was cheaper through them.

 *** Oddly, the £33,000 per job figure doesn’t seem to follow from the £1.4bn expenditure divided by 41,000 jobs, which is actually £34,000 per job.  I can’t explain why.

In June 2014, the people of Europe will go the polls to elect its MEPs for a five-year term.  This will be the 8th time it’s happened, but – courtesy of the crisis and ensuing austerity - for many voters it will be the first European election about Europe, as opposed to a mid-term vote on the domestic government.

There is a big opportunity for the Left here. 

The mainly ignorant media focus is on whether Hollande can persuade Merkel to give way on the as yet unratified Fiscal Pact (aka. the Fiscal Compact) concocted in late 2011 by Merkel and Sarkozy (no, he can’t, is the simple answer).

But the actual opportunity to set the European Union on a different course lies in potential for radical amendment of the regulatory ‘six-pack’ (to be followed by a monitoring ‘two-pack’ this summer), designed to ensure the proper implementation of the original Stability and Growth Pact, and passed into law in November 2011.

If you’re confused by two apparently parallel (com)pacts, don’t worry.  You’re supposed to be. 

There are relatively few people (other than me) who do understand it. Charlemagne at the Economist appears to be one, as does Peter Spiegel at the FT, who says about the less-known six-pack:

Almost unnoticed by the public, the European Union has already begun transforming itself into an organisation with far more central power over national economic decision-making. The European Commission, the EU’s executive branch, has been given authority to demand spending cuts under threat of large fines….

Indeed, it is all so confusing that the European Commission has had to provide its own guide Six-pack? Two-pack? Fiscal compact? A short guide to the new EU fiscal governance, which states helpfully:

The Fiscal Compact, which is the fiscal part of the Treaty on Stability, Coordination and Governance (TSCG) – once it enters into force – and the six-pack will run in parallel.

It’s difficult to work out exactly why we have two parallel systems (other than the obvious explanation that the Compact was a late play by Sarkozy to stave off defeat by looking tough). 

My suspicion is that it’s part of a quiet power struggle between the European Parliament and its Executive, who have passed the six-pack into law (in November 2011), and the European Council (basically the heads of the 27 states), which only became a formal part of the EU structure in 2009 under the Lisbon Treaty. 

Witness, as evidence, how Olli Rehn, Commssioner for Finance (and working through the Parliament,  referred only to the Growth & stability Pact provisions in his speech at the weekend, while Merkel’s Finance Minister prefers to reference the intergovernmental aspects of the Fiscal Compact in the wake of Hollande’s victory.

It is also difficult to know which precise version of  austerity legislation will win out in time.  On balance, though, the fact that the six-pack is in place, while the Fiscal Compact still awaits ratification (notably in Ireland, which may vote ‘no’), means that the real political opportunities for the left probably lie within the Parliament, rather than (via Hollande) the European Council.  Hollande’s team probably knows this, which is why it is content to soft-soap Merkel for the moment.

Of course, the drawback is that the European Parliament will remain under the control of the Right until June 2014.  That’s a long time for Hollande to wait before he can deliver, via the European Socialist Party (PES) MEPs, a radical change in direction, if it gains a majority (although even the prospect of post-election change may be enough to slow up its implementation pre-election).

Nevertheless, the opportunity for PES is to put together a legislative manifesto which has as its centre-point precisely such a change in direction, through a ‘Keynesian’ amendment to the six/two pack regulations.  Such amendments might, for example, include a requirement on the EIB (or individual countries) to fund large-scale investment works when the economic cycle requires it.

The result could be a European election campaign like no other: a central manifesto commitment to sensible anti-austerity macro-economic management, circulated across 27 countries in countless leaflets, seeking a socialist, pan-European mandate.  

Perhaps we might even, by then, be seeing British campaigners on porte-a-porte campaigns in Cergy-Pontoise, while our French comrades hit the streets of Skelmersdale (the towns are twinned).

I’m a geek, but even I thought it was a bit geeky for the PES to launch a two year manifesto development programme, in which socialist activists across Europe are invited to put forward policy proposals (the next stage is a forum in June to collate and assess ideas).  

Now though, I understand absolutely where they were coming from, and will be forwarding a version of this post under both the ‘Fair Economy’ and the ‘Active Democracy’ themes.  There is a real chance, I contend, to put what happens in Strasbourg at the heart of our campaigning in the UK, (probably) one year before a general election, in a way which both creates a route for anti-austerity that not even Merkel can scupper AND shows up just how murky and undemocratic the European Union has been to date.

I like Michael Meacher MP, and I agree with the general tenor of his article on the growing wealth of the Sunday Times rich list people.

But this bit by Michael really doesn’t help the credibility of the article:

[T]he 1,000 richest persons in the UK have increased their wealth by so much in the last 3 years – £155bn – that they themselves alone could pay off the entire UK budget deficit and still leave themselves with £30bn to spare which should be enough to keep the wolf from the door.  

Yes, the deficit may well be £185 billion or so, but that’s the flow – the annual gap between national income and expenditure.  The debt, which is the stock that is actually “paid off”, is in the region of £1.3 trillion the last time I looked.

We have, of course been here before, with both Johann Hari and even the SWP making the same elementary error (the SWP denied it, to be fair).

As Kalecki once warned:

I have found what economics is; it is the science of confusing stocks with flows.

The Left has a good argument for wealth redistribution.  Let’s not muck it up by getting the basics wrong.  Let’s leave the economic illiteracy to the Right.

Of course I’m delighted that Hollande has won, and that Sarkozy is gone.  But I’m also worried what the next year will bring. 

Marine Le Pen’s refusal to support her natural ally, despite the lengths he was prepared to go to in order to garner Front National votes, really only means one thing.  By consigning Sarkozy to defeat, she has kick-started the UMP infighting, and her very successful one year campaign detoxification campaign now puts her in prime position to pick up a large percentage of UMP votes in June’s parliamentary elections.  That campaign started in earnest a couple of days ago.*

The complacency surrounding her Round 1 vote percentage -  the idea that she’s not that much of a threat – is likely to be washed away within a 50 days, as the parliamentary seats in all areas of France start to flow her way.  She may not be the official opposition by the end of that 50 days, but to many French people she will look and sound like it. 

Unlike her father, Marine Le Pen has – by force of circumstance – a coherent sounding argument on the economy, which touches a chord with many: ‘leave the Euro’ is a simple, effective message.   This, mixed with the message that the UMP betrayed the French people on immigration and security (especially in the wake of the Toulouse killings), will have a powerful effect on a wide group of people. 

After 2002,  Le Pen père faded away for want of this.  In 2012, Le Pen fille will not do so.

So what can British Labour and other European political parties concerned at the rise of neo-Nazism in a major European country do about it other than wring their hands?

Perhaps the only productive thing Labour can do is to support Hollande when he does his best to take on the European austerity machine, based in Brussels, with orders given in Berlin.

We know that Olli Rehn is already moving to fob off Hollande with vague reassurances, when the latter comes calling about his commitment to the French people to renegotiate the Merkozy Fiscal Treaty. 

If the “grands travaux” public investment promised by Hollande does not flow, because it becomes stuck in the bureaucratic nightmare that is the ‘six pack’ Stablility and Growth Pact legislation, Le Pen will be quick to pounce: “Hollande is as bad as all the others” will be her claim. “Only I stand aside from the Eurocrat crowd”.

Labour must step in to help Hollande here, as best it can.  It must argue, long and loud, that the Fiscal Treaty Hollande is seeking to renegotiate must take precedence over the legislation which was quietly – almost secretly – signed off last year. 

The initial signs are good.  Mandelson is no fool when it comes to Europe, and his call for a radical reconstruction on the way Europe runs its finances (this is overshadowed in the UK press by the idea of a referendum), he knows exactly what he’s doing: helping to open the way to a new agreement in Europe which sidesteps the machinations of Olli Rehn and his unelected cabale in Brussels. 

It’s a good start.  I just hope Miliband is watching and learning.

* Even in their moment of triumph, wise heads on the French left  (@Sarkofrance via (@Barsacq) are calling on the mainstream French Right (the UMP) to keep it together [awkward translation mine]:

Nous l’avons viré, ton faux mentor. Nicolas Sarkozy n’a rien à faire à droite. Il a abîmé la droite républicaine. Il faut la reconstruire, et vite. [We've seen off your false mentor.  Nicolas Sarkozy is not one of you.  He has destroyed the Republican Right. It has to be reconstructed, and quickly.]

Comme plein d’autres à gauche, je ne tire aucun plaisir d’être face à Marine Le Pen. Nicolas Sarkozy et ses sbires ont cru que la France était si à droite qu’il fallait singer Marine pour conserver son siège. Je n’ai aucune rancune. [Like lots on the Left, I take no pleasure in being faced now with Marine Le Pen. Sarkozy and his henchmen thought that France was so far to the right that they must ape Marine in order to keep his seat. I have no rancour towards you.]

Marine n’a rien perdu, Nicolas a tout perdu. Cet échec est d’abord le sien. Il ne méritait pas la République. Ami de droite, je pense à toi. Redresse-toi. [Marine lost nothing. Nicolas lost everything. He didn't deserve the Republic. Friend on the right, I'm thinking of you.  Stand proud.]

They know what’s coming.

Yesterday’s speech in Brussels by Olli Rehn, EU Commissioner for Economic Affairs is  a quite astonishing abuse of power, and a major affront to democracy.  No surprise there.

The press commentary to date suggests that Rehn’s speech signals an end to the Merkozy austerity approach, and highlights the following statement as a move towards a new stage in the context of a possible/likely win for Hollande in France:

Contrary to the misleading impression promoted by some politicians and pundits that the EU fiscal framework forces all member states into a ‘one-size-fits-all’ consolidation straightjacket, the Stability and Growth Pact is not stupid. Yes, the EU fiscal framework is rules-based, with clear reference values for public deficit and debt for triggering the excessive deficit procedure and, if needed, sanctions. But, at the same time, the Pact entails considerable scope for judgement, based on economic analysis and its legal provisions, when it comes to its application.

I think the press is interpreting the speech entirely wrongly.

It is NOT an acceptance of change in direction if Hollande comes to power, but an attempt to scupper Hollande before he even becomes President.

I say this for two reasons.

First, it allows the Commission (and Merkel) to pat Monsieur Flanby on the head when/if he comes calling, and fob him off the reassurance that everything is being taken care of, and that he need not worry. 

Second, the speech deliberately refers, NOT to the Merkozy Fiscal Treaty that Hollande has committed to renegotiating in his manifesto, but to the legal changes to the Growth & Stability Pact which were quietly signed into law on 16th November 2011 .

As I set out in detail here:

These six regulations (if you’re short of time, 2011/1176 and 2011/1174 are the crucial ones) mean that the [Fiscal] treaty is little more than the political icing on the cake.  The regulations passed in November, with no oversight from national parliaments and no news coverage to speak of,  already enshrine in law the way in which governments must run their economies, the measures by which they will be judged and (in the Eurozone) how and to what level fines will be levied on countries with “macroeconomic imbalances”. 

Gavin Hewitt now reports that the German Finance minister is promising a growth element in the Fiscal Treaty that Hollande has committed to renegotiating, but this will be for show only.

Under the arrangements quietly put in place even before Merkozy mentioned the Fiscal Pact, the real power will remain with the unelected European Commission.

It is to be hoped that Hollande’s team, if it does come to power this evening, has done its homework (frankly, it didn’t when they drafted this bit of the manifesto), and that the challenge to the Olli Rehn Brussels oligarchy comes quickly.

In this context, Mandelson’s call for a fundamental review of how Europe is governed financially (and a UK referendum to boot) couldn’t have come at a better time (and I assume Mandelson knows this).  Miliband, on this one occasion, would do well to listen to Mandelson, and get behind Hollande.

Yesterday, Ed Miliband was egged. 

The press has gone wild with praise for his calm under fire, and the Independent carries a special article on politicians reacting to struck by projectile foodstuff, with Ed right up there in the rankings. Judge for yourself with my new found Youtube embedding skills:

 I agree it’s a decent display.  Solid, if not brilliant, laughing off technique, but more impressive is both the strategic planning and the presence of mind to have an aide with him who knew that it was his job to take the leader’s jacket, and then recognise that this is what his aide was doing. 

Sadly though, the Eurosceptics at the Indie fail to report how Miliband has learnt from the master. 

Forget Prescott’s casual violence, ignore Cameron’s clever but overly class-based use of one of the lower orders to avoid a full egging.  Here is the (we hope) next President of France, enfariné by a vicious enfarineuse that it takes about a dozen security types to subdue.   What can you say?  He even tries to keep on reading the document through totally enfarinated specs:

As Chris Dillow has repeatedly pointed out, a key reason for the continued economic slump is that the capitalists are on strike:

Last year, non-financial firms capital spending was equivalent to just 65.7% of their retained profits – the lowest share ever. To put this another way, firms’ desire to build up cash and/or reduce debt is at a record high – despite negative real interest rates…..  [Moreover], capital spending as a share of retained profits was trending downwards before the recession. This suggests the reluctance to invest is a longish-term problem, reflecting the dearth of investment opportunities, and not just a cyclical one.

And it’s not just Marxist Chris saying this. The Ernst and Young Item Club says much the same:

The corporate sector is accumulating cash at an astonishing and accelerating pace and acting as a major drag on the rest of the economy, keeping it close to stall speed. It is hard to see any strong revival in the economy until companies start to release this cash by spending more on acquisitions, investment or dividends.

Even the Bank of England seems to agree:

Private domestic demand growth could be boosted if more of the historically large corporate financial surpluses were spent on capital investment or transferred to households in the form of higher wages or dividends (May 2011 inflation report, quoted by Frances Coppola).

So what to do about it?  After all, we’re talking about very large sums here.  The EY Item club estimate that there’ is £754bn held in cash by the corporate sector may be up the wall (it seems likely that they’ve included overseas cash holdings in this figure, which is a bit thick),  but Frances’ estimate of £251bn (from BoE’s figure for M$ sterling liabilities for non-financial firms) is still a pretty hefty sum.   Even releasing 10% of that into the real economy would make for a pretty decent economic push.

To date, the main leftist argument has simply been for a retention of corporation tax, on the basis that:

The corporation tax cut will…. simply add to the cash pile of large companies, giving them more than £400 million (page 50) this year to tuck away, and much bigger sums in years to come. This increases the wealth gap in the UK by giving away a wholly unnecessary tax cut to big business.

That might simply stop the problem of non-investment getting worse, but it doesn’t resolve it.

Perhaps the best way is introduce a ‘non-investment tax’, whereby corporations are taxed at a certain rate on retained profits if they fail to release a certain percentage of those profits - whether through capital reinvestment, dividends, acquisitions, pay rises or new jobs.

This mirrors Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), which sets out how governments can simply use the advantages of fiat currency to stimulate aggregate demand when the economy needs it.  Indeed, to the extent that taxing non-investment in this way might simply lead to corporations keeping their retained profits in gilts, it might in any case create a ‘secondary MMT’, as lower demand for gilts leads to governments buying their own gilts (the same as printing money).

But the advantages over normal MMT are clear.  First, it gives corporations the opportunity to invest in the way they wish, with government coming in to do it for them (through taxation) if they choose not to abide by their ‘ social responsibilities’. 

Second, and related to this, it moves away from the disturbing logic of some MMT advocates, that anyone unemployed at the time of the MMT release would be forced to work on the government payroll at the minimum wage created under it.

Of course, any such move towards a non-investment tax would have fierce opponents, wielding two main arguments. 

First, there would be the argument that corporates would simply leave Britain and head for countries where such a draconian tax regime does not exist. 

This is the same argument used against all higher tax countries, of course, and is based largely on myth.  Moreover, the move towards a Financial Transaction Tax does show that international agreement can win out over fears of freeloading, if one or two countries are brave enough to lead the way.

Second, there will be the argument that such a tax system, which would depend on increased transparency from firms and good auditing, would be very difficult to administer, given the need to use some kind of MMT-style sliding scale for the non-investment tax rates in ‘good’  and bad times’ (when a reduction of the non-investment tax to 0% might be appropriate).

Certainly, the introduction of such a tax wouldn’t be for a faint-hearted government.   There may well be a need for a Made In Dagenham Barbara Castle figure to stand up to the corporate sector and effectively announce ‘It’s a risk we’re going to take’.

Even so, an incoming socialist government might want to give some serious consideration to how we might, through a progressive but malleable tax regime, create a more stable economy more resilient to capitalist boom and bust as a result of some enforced ‘corporate social responsibility’. 

It might be an approach that will find support from across the channel if May 6th goes well.  Come to think of it – I might just translate this into French and get tweeting @fhollande.

During this afternoon’s relatively brief Tottenham Court Road siege,  Nick Griffin apparently sent the following tweet:

If hostage taker angry coz refused HGV licence then won’t be a Muslim bomber. They don’t work!

Now, given recent controversies over people sending tweet messages and ending up in court/prison, the obvious question arises: should Nick Griffin be prosecuted?

The most obvious charge that might be laid would be under Public Order Act 1986 (c.64, paras. 18-19):

A person who uses threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour, or displays any written material which is threatening, abusive or insulting, is guilty of an offence if:

(a) he intends thereby to stir up racial hatred, or

(b) having regard to all the circumstances racial hatred is likely to be stirred up thereby.

Prima facie, there would seem to be a case for Griffin to answer;  it looks and feels like an absolutely gratuitous insult to Muslims, and his background might suggest that he intended, in sending the tweet, to do some hatred-stirring. 

There are, I think, three technicalities which might make it difficult to secure aa conviction:

 i) hatred towards those of a particular religion does not necessarily indicate racial hatred (though I would contend we might make the assumption in this case);

ii) it might be argued that Griffin was making the point that it is Muslim bombers, as opposed to Muslims in general, who do not work;

iii) The statement that somebody doesn’t work is not, per se, an insult, and can only be construed as one in the context of the tweet.

Nevertheless, it’s arguable that the CPS, if asked by the police to consider this case, might feel that there is sufficient change of securing a conviction for it to pass the first stage of its Full Test Code, the Evidential Stage.

Next in this Full Test Code comes the decision on whether it is in the public interest to make the charge.  As set out here, this is always a matter of judgment, but one factor set out in the code weighing in favour of proceeding to prosecution might be considered in this case:

the suspect was in a position of authority or trust and he or she took advantage of this;

In Griffin’s case, his status as an MEP and leader of a registered political party might therefore count against him.

So should Griffin be prosecuted?

Of course not.  It is decidedly not in the public interest to give someone like Griffin the opportunity to peddle his ‘victim status’ myth.  Nor does it do any of us any favours if the CPS continues prosecuting people for silly tweets, however insulting and offensive they are.

The reason I write all this is simply to show that people like Griffin (and before him Rod Liddle) are utterly wrong when they peddle the myth that the establishment is against them.

Yesterday morning on the Radio 4 Today programme (from 2hrs 25mins 15secs), the BBC aired an apology and correction for comments made 48 hours previously about Philip Green, the retail multi-millionaire, and his wife.

That is, a correction and on-air apology was issued in 48 hours. 

By contrast, it took the BBC 50 days to send me a written apology for its false headlines about the government’s ‘Youth Contract’, and the BBC refused to consider an on-air correction, despite my explicit demand for this.

This does not seem fair to me, so I have complained again to the BBC:

Dear sir/madam

I am writing to complain about the inequitable treatment I have received from the BBC in respect of my complaint, in comparison to the treatment afforded to another, higher profile complaint.

Facts

The facts are these.

1)  On 28th November 2011 I made a formal complaint to the BBC about its incorrect news bulletin of Friday November 26th 2011.  This concerned the launch of the government’s ‘Youth Contract’.   

I received a formal letter of apology on 19th January 2012 (your ref: CAS 1162493-MG3CQ7), in which you accepted that the information provided was incorrect, and should not have been given.

I had suggested in my letter of complaint that, by way of redress, a correction should be made on the same programme during which the incorrect news information had been delivered, namely the Stephen Nolan show. No mention of this was made in your letter of apology, and to my knowledge no such correction has ever been made.

2)  On the Today programme of Wednesday 25th April 2012, an apology and correction was provided, at around 8.25am, in respect of comments made about the tax affairs of Philip Green, the well-known retail businessman, and his wife.  These comments had been made just two days previously, on the Today programme.

Contention

It is my contention that the two courses of action taken by the BBC, in respect of the two separate events set out above, together constitute an act of discrimination against myself, and potentially other complainants.

Clearly, I am not in a position to know whether the on-air apology to Mr Green and his wife was made in response to a formal complaint, or whether there was some other reason that led the BBC to react so quickly, and in this manner.

Whatever the reasons for the BBC’s course of action, however, it seems clear that the BBC undertook a very different process of investigation and apology in the two cases.  

Specifically, the reply to my letter took 50 days, with no on-air redress, whereas the BBC sought to resolve the matter with Mr Green and his wife within 48 hours, with on-air redress.

I contend that there is no valid reason for this difference in response time and mode of redress.

It is surely unacceptable to argue that Mr Green and his wife’s case merited a swifter response, with an on-air apology, simply because they have a higher public profile than I do. 

Moreover, I contend that the public interest implications of the misleading ‘Youth Contract’ news headline are far greater than they are in respect of any misleading information about two people’s personal tax affairs.

Proposed redress

I suggest that my current complaint might be resolved through the following forms of redress:

• An on-air apology and correction for the incorrect news information provided during the Radio 5 Live Stephen Nolan show of ???, to be made during a Stephen Nolan show and with an explanation as to why the apology and correction comes so long after the event;
• An explanation on the Radio 4 Today programme, at around the same time as the apology made on Weds 25th April, of the editorial decision making process and factors which led to that apology, how this differed from the complaints process followed in the case of my complaint, and what the BBC is doing to ensure that such editorial discrimination in respect of complaints and apologies does not happen again.

I look forward to hearing from you in due course.  For this complaint I would want to see adherence to the time limits stipulated within the BBC’s Stage 1 complaints process.

Best regards

Yours sincerely